Archive for the ‘Mad Scientists’ Category
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Man Infects Himself with Computer Virus
University of Reading researcher Mark Gasson has become the first human known to be infected by a computer virus.
The virus, infecting a chip implanted in Gasson’s hand, passed into a laboratory computer.
From there, the infection could have spread into other computer chips found in building access cards.
All this was intentional, in an experiment to see how simple radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips like those used for tracking animals can host and spread technological diseases.
The research shows that as implantable bionic devices such as pacemakers get more sophisticated in the years ahead, their security and the safety of the patients whose lives depend on them will become increasingly important, said Gasson.
”We should start to think of these devices as miniature computers,” Gasson said.
And just like everyday computers, they can get sick.
Down with disease Gasson had a relatively simple chip implanted in the top of his left hand near his thumb last year.
It emits a signal that is read by external sensors, allowing him access to the Reading laboratory and for his cell phone to operate.
He and his colleagues created a malicious code for the chip. When the lab’s sensors read the code, the code inserted itself into the building computer database that governs who has access to the premises.
“The virus replicates itself through the database and potentially could copy itself onto the access cards that people use,” Gasson said.
Posted in End of the World Update, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
‘Artificial life’ breakthrough announced by scientists:
Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first synthetic living cell.
The researchers constructed a bacterium’s “genetic software” and transplanted it into a host cell.
The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species “dictated” by the synthetic DNA.
The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.
The researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.
The team was led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California.
He and his colleagues had previously made a synthetic bacterial genome, and transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another.
Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a “synthetic cell”, although only its genome is truly synthetic.
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Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Scientists Successfully Embed Silicon Chips Inside Human Cells
Scientists have already created mini-cyborgs out of living cells and semiconductor materials, but now biological cells can also contain tiny silicon chips.
Those silicon chips could become future intracellular sensors that monitor microscopic activities, deliver drugs to target cells or even repair cell structures, according to Nanowerk.
Experiments found that living human cells can ingest or receive injections of silicon chips and continue functioning as usual for the most part.
More than 90 percent of chip-containing HeLa cells — the first immortal human cell line derived from a poor, cancer-stricken woman – still survived a week after receiving their silicon loads.R
Other studies have tested nanoparticles inside living cells. But silicon chips allow for much easier integration of electronics and mechanical parts, say scientists at the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona in Spain.
The study published in the aptly-named journal Small opens the doors for possibly putting microprocessors and other silicon-based devices inside cells. That could lead to promising developments for both micro-computing and medicine.
Posted in Mad Scientists, Weird Science | No Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Israeli army admits stealing organs:
ISRAEL has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without their families’ permission.
The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, Jehuda Hiss.
The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians to harvest their organs.
Israel hotly denied the charge. Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 TV over the weekend.
In it, Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”
The Channel 2 report said in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed the practice took place. “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,” the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.
Posted in Mad Scientists, War | No Comments »
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
Geologist stands trial for triggering earthquakes in Switzerland
A geologist has gone on trial in Switzerland for allegedly causing earthquakes while drilling for hot rocks to produce clean energy.
Markus Haering, who designed the geothermal project, rejected allegations that he deliberately damaged properties and said local people knew the risks. The deep drilling underground caused a series of earthquakes in 2006, including one of 3.4 magnitude, rattling residents of the north-western city of Basel.
Geopower Basel, the project leader, has already paid around 9 million Swiss francs (£5.3 million) in compensation for cracked walls and other damage on properties near the experiment.
The project was suspended at the time and shut down last week after a risk analysis concluded that more quakes could follow if the drilling continued.
The experiment aimed to be the world’s first to generate power commercially by boiling water on naturally occurring rocks 3 miles underground.
The Swiss efforts are being closely watched in the United States, where the energy department is sponsoring more than 120 geothermal energy projects in several states.
A leading US company, AltaRock Energy, in September stopped drilling at one key development site north of San Francisco, citing drilling difficulties, but said quake fears were not a factor.
“We had very little knowledge of seismicity” before starting to drill, Mr Haering testified. He called the resulting quakes “a learning process for everyone involved”.
Posted in Career Limiting Move, Mad Scientists, Oops | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Signs of Life Detected on the Moon?
A website based in India has reported researchers with the Chandrayaan-1 mission may have found “signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.” DNAIndia.com quoted Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre as saying that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. “The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,” Pal said.
At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea but said, “It is an intriguing suggestion, and we are certainly very interested in learning more of their results.”
Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe, or MIP impacted the within the Shackleton Crater on the Moon’s south pole on Nov. 14, 2008. An anonymous Chandrayaan-1 scientist said MIP’s mass spectrometer detected chemical signatures of organic matter in the soil kicked up by the impact.
“Certain atomic numbers were observed that indicated the presence of carbon components. This indicates the possibility of the presence of organic matter (on the Moon),” a senior scientist told DNAIndia.
Posted in Mad Scientists, Most Mysterious, Space | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Artificial meat grown in laboratory:
Meat has been grown in a laboratory for the first time, Dutch researchers say.
Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, told The Sunday Times that he and colleagues have succeeded in growing what he described as soggy pork in a lab and are now investigating ways of improving it enough to pass potential consumers’ taste tests.
“What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue,” Post told the newspaper. “We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.”
Posted in Mad Scientists, Weird Science | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Time Magazine Falls for Rocket Launch Hoax – Names Ares “Invention of the Year” Based on Launch of Dummy Vehicle
Citing Time magazine’s selection of NASA’s proposed Ares rockets “The Best Invention of the Year” based on a single purported “test flight” of the vehicle on October 28th, the Space Frontier Foundation congratulated NASA on its propaganda triumph.
The Foundation pointed out that the rocket launched by NASA was not an Ares 1 at all, but a dummy vehicle cobbled together from pieces of other space systems, an elaborate mock-up shaped and painted to look like the actual vehicle, which isn’t even scheduled to fly for another 6 years.
“While many reporters know that Ares 1 is far behind schedule and likely to be canceled as an unnecessary and expensive distraction from real exploration missions, apparently Time magazine fell for this publicity hoax. There was no boy in the balloon and there most definitely was no Ares rocket launched in Florida last month,” said the Foundation’s Rick Tumlinson.
“If anyone at Time had bothered to go beyond the NASA and contractor flacks, they would have found out what most people in the space community already knew. This was a marketing ploy designed to save a program threatened with imminent cancellation.”
Time’s assertion that the Ares 1 rocket is “The best and smartest and coolest thing built in 2009″ is a simple error of fact and should be immediately retracted. There was no Ares 1 vehicle built in 2009.
“Even if a real Ares 1 launch vehicle were ever built and launched, it would still be an obscenely wasteful duplication of existing commercial and military rockets, which doesn’t seem too smart or cool during our federal budget meltdown,” Tumlinson added.
Writing last week in the Huffington Post, Apollo Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin put into words what is common knowledge in the space launch community: “Turns out the solid booster was – literally – bought from the Space Shuttle program, since a five-segment booster being designed for Ares wasn’t ready. So they put a fake can on top of the four-segmented motor to look like the real thing. Since the real Ares’ upper stage rocket engine, called the J-2X wasn’t ready either, they mounted a fake upper stage. No Orion capsule was ready, so – you guessed it – they mounted a fake capsule with a real-looking but fake escape rocket that wouldn’t have worked if the booster had failed. Since the guidance system for Ares wasn’t ready either they went and bought a unit from the Atlas rocket program and used it instead. Oh yes, the parachutes to recover the booster were the real thing — and one of the three failed, causing the booster to slam into the ocean too fast and banging the thing up. So, why you might ask, if the whole machine was a bit of slight-of-hand rocketry did NASA bother to spend almost half a billion dollars (that’s billion with a “b”) in developing and launching the Ares 1-X? The answer: politics.”
Posted in Greed is Good, Idiot Authorities, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
Man ‘ripped in half’ in motorbike crash given remote controlled bionic bottom
A man whose bowel was damaged in a motorcycle crash has been fitted with a bionic bottom that enables him to go to the toilet using a remote control.
Ged Galvin was given just hours to live by doctors when he was ‘ripped in half’ by his motorcycle fuel tank after a car pulled out in front of him at 45mph.
The 55-year-old suffered massive internal injuries and had to be fitted with a colostomy bag until surgeons performed a complex operation to rebuild his bottom.
They took a muscle from above his knee, wrapped it around his sphincter and attached electrodes to the nerves which are operated by remote control.
He carries the palm-sized device in his pocket and simply presses a button to open his bowls when he wants to go to the toilet.
Posted in Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Plan to pierce heart of urban monster volcano
TO ANCIENT Romans the Phlegraean Fields hosted the entrance to Hades.
In modern times it is better known as the site of a “supercolossal” volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago. Will we see the next disaster coming?
That’s one of the questions an ambitious drilling project hopes to answer by sinking boreholes into Campi Flegrei, as the giant collapsed volcanic crater is now called.
Starting as early as next month, the Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project is planning to drill seven holes in the region.
Though the researchers on this particular project point out that any risk is small, it will begin amid debate about whether such endeavours are safe, given the unknowns of a volcano’s interior.
A few say drilling might even trigger a major eruption. Though the caldera has no visible volcanic cone, it dwarfs nearby Vesuvius.
”Most of the metropolitan area of Naples is located within the caldera,” says Giuseppe De Natale of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology’s (INGV) Vesuvius Observatory in Naples, who is leading the project.
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine:
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB.
He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly. “The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again. Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.”
Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one. The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it.
When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.
Posted in Crazy is as Crazy Does, End of the World Update, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
A Sonic Boom In The World Of Lasers:
It was an idea born out of curiosity in the physics lab, but now a new type of ‘laser’ for generating ultra-high frequency sound waves instead of light has taken a major step towards becoming a unique and highly useful 21st century technology.
Microwave Scientists at The University of Nottingham, in collaboration with colleagues in the Ukraine, have produced a new type of acoustic laser device called a Saser. It’s a sonic equivalent to the laser and produces an intense beam of uniform sound waves on a nano scale.
The new device could have significant and useful applications in the worlds of computing, imaging, and even anti-terrorist security screening. Where a ‘laser’,(Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), uses packets of electromagnetic vibrations called ‘photons’, the ‘Saser’ uses sound waves composed of sonic vibrations called ‘phonons’.
In a laser, the photon beam is produced by stimulating electrons with an external power source so they release energy when they collide with other photons in a highly reflective optical cavity. This produces a coherent and controllable shining beam of laser light in which all the photons have the same frequency and rate of oscillation. From supermarket scanners to DVD players, surgery, manufacturing and the defence industry, the application of laser technology is widespread.
The Saser mimics this technology but using sound, to produce a sonic beam of ‘phonons’ which travels, not through an optical cavity like a laser, but through a tiny manmade structure called a ‘superlattice’. This is made out of around 50 super-thin sheets of two alternating semiconductor materials, Gallium Arsenide and Aluminium Arsenide, each layer just a few atoms thick. When stimulated by a power source (a light beam), the phonons multiply, bouncing back and forth between the layers of the lattice, until they escape out of the structure in the form of an ultra-high frequency phonon beam.
Posted in End of the World Update, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
SKorean experts claim to have cloned glowing dogs:
South Korean scientists say they have engineered four beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that could help develop cures for human diseases. The four dogs, all named “Ruppy” — a combination of the words “ruby” and “puppy” — look like typical beagles by daylight.
But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and the dogs’ nails and abdomens, which have thin skins, look red even to the naked eye.
Seoul National University professor Lee Byeong-chun, head of the research team, called them the world’s first transgenic dogs carrying fluorescent genes, an achievement that goes beyond just the glowing novelty.
“What’s significant in this work is not the dogs expressing red colors but that we planted genes into them,” Lee told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Posted in Animal Weirdness, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Scientists a step closer to ‘reading minds’:
A machine to read the mind came a step closer on Thursday, when scientists at University College London released the results of an experiment in which brain scans revealed the location of people moving around a virtual reality environment. Demis Hassabis, co-author of the study, said it was “a small step towards the idea of mind reading, because just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”.
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele ‘created twin town in Brazil’
The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small Brazilian town, an Argentine historian has claimed.
The steely hearted “Angel of Death”, whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945.
His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.
Now, a historian claims, Mengele’s notorious experiments may have borne fruit.
For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.
Posted in Mad Scientists, Nazis | No Comments »
Thursday, December 25th, 2008
Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home:
The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.
Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.
In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.
“People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process,” she said.
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Thursday, December 25th, 2008
Fill ‘Er Up With Human Fat
How a Beverly Hills doctor powered his SUV using his patients’ spare tires. Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them. For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend’s Lincoln Navigator.
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Friday, August 8th, 2008
Black Hole Worries: Physicists Allay Fears of the End of the World
There are some who think that the new particle accelerator built outside of Geneva in Switzerland might create tiny black holes — which could grow big enough to suck up the Earth. Balderdash, say physicists.
The video looks a bit like a scene from a low-budget sci-fi horror film. A tiny hole slowly begins sucking in bits of the Earth in Switzerland with mountains, lakes and cities quickly falling into the growing gap. And it just keeps on growing — and growing. By the end of the 38 second movie, the entire planet has been swallowed up — and all that’s left is a shimmering ring in the inky blackness of outer space.
Absurd, perhaps. But a brief look around Internet blogs, and especially YouTube, makes it clear that there are a number of people out there who believe it is a very real possibility. The gigantic particle accelerator just now being completed outside Geneva at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — known as CERN — is set to be switched on soon. And some are concerned that, once the research facility begins bashing subatomic particles together at 99.999991 percent of the speed of light, dangerous black holes could be created and spread out of control.
The fear has spread fast and far in cyberspace. In addition, a scientist at the University of Tübingen, Dr. Otto E. Rössler, has lent a certain amount of academic weight to the skepticism. So much so that a group of German physicists has now published an open letter carrying assurances that the particle accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is in fact safe.
“There is no way that the LHC will produce black holes capable of swallowing up the Earth,” reads the letter from the Committee for Elementary Particle Physics (KET), a group of leading quantum physicists in Germany. “This claim is based on extremely well tested theories of physics and on observations of the cosmos.”
The head of KET, Dr. Peter Mättig, a particle physicist with the University of Wuppertal, concedes that disaster theories have not made much headway in the general public. “I don’t think there are many who believe it,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “But it is notable how often we have been asked about the problem. And we especially want to refute those, like Dr. Rössler, who try to use science to back up their claims.”
Posted in End of the World Update, Mad Scientists, Weird Science | Comments Off
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Brother: Man Hospitalized in Vegas Says He Was Sickened by Ricin
A man who has been hospitalized since Valentine’s Day with respiratory ailments and failing kidneys told his brother he believes he was contaminated by the deadly ricin poison found in his Las Vegas motel room.
Roger Bergendorff regained consciousness on Wednesday but remains in critical condition at a Las Vegas medical center.
His younger brother, Erich Bergendorff, told The Associated Press that they spoke briefly on the telephone Sunday for the first time since the ricin was found, and said Roger claimed he had never had any intention of endangering anyone with the toxin.
“He did mention that he would have never done anything to anybody,” said Erich Bergendorff. “He himself is under the impression he was contaminated by it — he did mention the ricin and seemed to say something like, ‘Gee, it sure worked on me.”‘
Erich Bergendorff said his brother told him the ricin was easy to make. But he added that his brother, who was on a ventilator until last week, still had a hard time speaking clearly, so it was not clear whether Roger Bergendorff made it himself or watched someone else manufacture the powder.
Posted in Concentrated Criminality, Concentrated Stupidity, Crazy is as Crazy Does, Mad Scientists, Medical Monstrosities | Comments Off
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Blind Man Regains Sight After Doctors Implant Son’s Tooth in His Eye
Bob McNichol has been fighting to get his sight back, tooth and … eye?
The 57-year-old Irishman was blinded two years ago after an aluminum explosion at a recycling plant, AFP reported Thursday. His sight has been miraculously restored after doctors inserted his son’s tooth in his eye.
“I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life,” McNichol told RTE state radio, AFP reported.
After doctors told McNichol there was nothing more they could do for him, he heard about an offbeat operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed in England.
OOKP, first performed in Italy in the 1960s, involves creating an artificial cornea by using the patient’s tooth and surrounding bone as a support, AFP reported.
McNichol’s son Robert, 23, donated a tooth, its root and part of his jaw for his father’s surgery. McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, and a lens was inserted into a hole drilled in Robert’s tooth. The procedure required two surgeries lasting a total of 15 hours.
Posted in Mad Scientists, Medical Monstrosities, Weird Science | Comments Off
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Robot wars ‘will be a reality within 10 years’
The world is sleepwalking into an international robot arms race, an expert will warn today.
The Foster-Miller Armed TALON Robot, used by the US army
US forces recently deployed remote-controlled robots equipped with automatic weapons in Iraq
Prof Noel Sharkey fears increased research by countries including America, Russia, China and Israel will lead to the use of battlefield robots that can decide when to kill within 10 years.
He will also predict that it is only a matter of time before robots become a standard terrorist weapon, replacing suicide bombers.
Prof Sharkey, of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, will outline his concerns in a speech at a conference in Whitehall, London, on the ethics of unmanned military systems organised by the Royal United Services Institute, a respected defence think tank.
Posted in End of the World Update, Mad Scientists, Technological Travesties | Comments Off
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
Monkey Boiled Alive At Research Lab
A monkey, slotted to be used in a drug-product research experiment, was instead boiled alive inside an Everett laboratory, a KIRO Team 7 Investigation found.
It’s a deadly error, but not the first one KIRO Team 7 Investigators uncovered at SNBL USA.
That company is near the Boeing Plant off Merrill Creek Parkway in Everett. It houses around 2,000 primates and represents clients like Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly and Seattle Genetics.
Using hidden camera footage, Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne shows you inside a facility that’s no stranger to federal animal care violations.
When it comes to scientific experiments, often the Cynomolgus Macaque monkey is the primate of choice. They weigh anywhere from about 3 to 25 pounds and make lots of barking noises. It’s hard to image how anyone could miss one sitting inside a small cage.
In early November, SNBL employees set out to clean pens full of monkeys and, at times, their babies.
Our hidden camera footage, taken inside SNBL headquarters, shows just how obvious it is to see and hear these animals jumping around in their enclosures.
Despite that, KIRO Team 7 Investigators confirmed someone placed a wire kennel, with a healthy female macaque monkey still inside, into a giant rack-washer.
The 180-degree water, caustic foam and detergent killed the primate at some point during the 20-minute cycle.
Posted in Career Limiting Move, Concentrated Criminality, Mad Scientists | Comments Off
Monday, December 17th, 2007
GM mice don’t fear cats
Japanese scientists have created a genetically modified mouse that is not afraid of cats.
Researchers at Tokyo University managed to turn off the receptors in a mouse’s brain that react to the scent of its main predator.
They wanted to prove that fear is genetically programmed and not, as is commonly believed, the product of experience.
Instead of scurrying away or playing dead, the GM rodents were able to carry on as usual when coming face-to-face with a cat.
Posted in Animal Rebellion Update, End of the World Update, Mad Scientists, Weird Science | Comments Off
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
SKoreans clone cats that glow in the dark: officials
South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday.
In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.
A team of scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, the Ministry of Science and Technology said.
“It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans,” it added.
Posted in Animal Weirdness, Mad Scientists, Toys! | Comments Off
Saturday, November 24th, 2007
Mankind ’shortening the universe’s life’
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too.
The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.
But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.
Posted in End of the World Update, Mad Scientists, Weird Science | No Comments »
Monday, November 19th, 2007
Pioneering ‘heat wave’ gun may be used in Iraq
American commanders in Iraq are urging Pentagon chiefs to authorise the deployment of newly-developed heat wave guns to disperse angry crowds or violent rioters.
But the plea for what senior army officers believe could prove a valuable alternative to traditional firepower in dangerous trouble-spots has so far gone unanswered.
Washington fears a barrage of adverse publicity in the suspicious Muslim world and is concerned that critics will claim the invisible beam weapons were being used for torture
Posted in Mad Scientists, War | Comments Off
Friday, November 16th, 2007
Led by Robots, Roaches Abandon Instincts
Many a mother has said, with a sigh, “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?”
The answer, for cockroaches at least, may well be yes. Researchers using robotic roaches were able to persuade real cockroaches to do things that their instincts told them were not the best idea.
This experiment in bug peer pressure combined entomology, robotics and the study of ways that complex and even intelligent patterns can arise from simple behavior. Animal behavior research shows that swarms working together can prosper where individuals might fail, and robotics researchers have been experimenting with simple robots that, together, act a little like a swarm.
“We decided to join the two approaches,” said José Halloy, a biology researcher at the Free University of Brussels and lead author of a paper describing the research in today’s issue of the journal Science.
Posted in End of the World Update, Mad Scientists | Comments Off
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
The mouse that shook the world
It can run for hours at 20 metres per minute without getting tired. It lives longer, has more sex, and eats more without gaining weight. Could the science that created this supermouse be applied to humans?
Scientists have been astounded by the creation of a genetically modified “supermouse” with extraordinary physical abilities – comparable to the performance of the very best athletes – raising the prospect that the discovery may one day be used to transform people’s capacities.
The mouse can run up to six kilometres (3.7 miles) at a speed of 20 metres per minute for five hours or more without stopping. Scientists said that this was equivalent of a man cycling at speed up an Alpine mountain without a break. Although it eats up to 60 per cent more food than an ordinary mouse, the modified mouse does not put on weight. It also lives longer and enjoys an active sex life well into old age – being capable of breeding at three times the normal maximum age.
Posted in Animal Weirdness, Mad Scientists | Comments Off
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
Neither man nor beast
…On Sept. 5, a government agency (called the Human Fertilization and Embryology Agency or HFEA) decided to let scientists, mad or otherwise, create human/animal hybrids. Let me repeat: Science fiction will become science fact very soon; and man and beast will be combined into one.
A bill will be introduced in the British Parliament this fall to make this a positive right under English law, rather than simply the consequence of an administrative interpretation (which the HFEA issued). It is likely to pass, but even if it does not, the administrative interpretation of the HFEA will permit creation of human/animal hybrids to go forward. And go forward it will, for this is no hypothetical possibility — two teams of scientists have already applied to the HFEA to create human/animal hybrids.
Posted in Crazy is as Crazy Does, Mad Scientists, Weird Science | Comments Off
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
Hiroshima scientists create transparent frogs
A research team led by professor Masayuki Sumida at Hiroshima University’s Institute for Amphibian Biology has created a type of transparent frog whose internal organs are visible through its skin. The researchers say the see-through frogs can help in the study of diseases and in the development of medical treatments by allowing laboratory scientists to check the status of internal organs and blood vessels while the frogs are alive and without having to dissect them.
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
Parallel universes exist – study
Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as “one of the most important developments in the history of science”.
The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.
In Everett’s “many worlds” universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out – in its own universe.
A motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. Yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.
It is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful by many experts. But the new research from Oxford shows that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly – and suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was on the right track.
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Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water
An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the “most remarkable” water science discovery in a century.
John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.
The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.
Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations.
The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.
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Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
Did Life Begin In Space? New Evidence From Comets
Recent probes inside comets show it is overwhelmingly likely that life began in space, according to a new paper by Cardiff University scientists.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues at the University’s Centre for Astrobiology have long argued the case for panspermia – the theory that life began inside comets and then spread to habitable planets across the galaxy. A recent BBC Horizon documentary traced the development of the theory.
Now the team claims that findings from space probes sent to investigate passing comets reveal how the first organisms could have formed.
The 2005 Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel 1 discovered a mixture of organic and clay particles inside the comet. One theory for the origins of life proposes that clay particles acted as a catalyst, converting simple organic molecules into more complex structures. The 2004 Stardust Mission to Comet Wild 2 found a range of complex hydrocarbon molecules – potential building blocks for life.
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Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing
An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers.
If confirmed, this means ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life as ice melts due to global warming. This is nothing to worry about, say experts, because the process has been going on for billions of years and the bugs are unlikely to cause human disease.
Kay Bidle of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, and his colleagues extracted DNA and bacteria from ice found between 3 and 5 metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. The ice gets older as it flows down the valleys and the researchers took five samples that were between 100,000 and 8 million years old.
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Saturday, August 4th, 2007
‘Radioactive Boy Scout’ Charged in Smoke Detector Theft
A man who became the subject of a book called “The Radioactive Boy Scout” after trying to build a nuclear reactor in a shed as a teenager has been charged with stealing 16 smoke detectors. Police say it was a possible effort to experiment with radioactive materials.
David Hahn, 31, was being held Friday on a $5,000 bond in the Macomb County Jail after he was arraigned Thursday on felony larceny charges. Clinton Township police Capt. Richard Maierle said Hahn denied the charges.
From the mugshot, it looks like he is suffering from radiation poisoning.
Posted in Concentrated Criminality, Crazy is as Crazy Does, Mad Scientists, Suicidal Tendencies | No Comments »
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
British body backs inter-species clones
Making human-animal embryos for scientific experiments should be allowed because of the benefits to science and medicine, British experts said in a report released for Sunday.
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Such embryos should never, however, be implanted into either a woman or an animal, said the Academy of Medical Sciences.
The combinations would include animal eggs and the nucleus, containing the genetic material, of a human being, or human embryos that carry the genetic material of an animal, the independent advisory body said.
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Thursday, May 24th, 2007
When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One
You might not want to do it, but removing half of your brain will not significantly impact who you are
The operation known as hemispherectomy—where half the brain is removed—sounds too radical to ever consider, much less perform. In the last century, however, surgeons have performed it hundreds of times for disorders uncontrollable in any other way. Unbelievably, the surgery has no apparent effect on personality or memory.
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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
German authorities use scent tracking to keep tabs on G-8 protesters
German authorities are using scent tracking to keep tabs on possibly violent protesters against next month’s Group of Eight summit – a tactic that is drawing comparisons with the methods of former East Germany’s secret police.
Scent samples have been taken from an undisclosed number of people believed to be a possible danger to the upcoming summit so that police dogs can pick out the perpetrators if there is violence, the Hamburger Morgenpost reported Tuesday.
Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, confirmed the report but would give no further details.
Posted in Anarchy, Idiot Activists, Idiot Authorities, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Monday, May 7th, 2007
Navy Heats Up Cold Fusion Hopes:
New proof that cold fusion works could fuel additional interest in generating power from low energy nuclear reactions
Cold fusion, the ability to generate nuclear power at room temperatures, has proven to be a highly elusive feat. In fact, it is considered by many experts to be a mere pipe dream — a potentially unlimited source of clean energy that remains tantalizing, but so far unattainable.
However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein among its distinguished authors, the article claims that Spawar scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community.
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Saturday, April 28th, 2007
Mouse brain simulated on computer:
US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer. The scientists ran a “cortical simulator” that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains. Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.
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Sunday, April 15th, 2007
Important Medical News . . .
I am right now on the phone, on hold, waiting to talk to Dr. Johannes Aas, a prominent gastroenterologist from Duluth, Minn. Dr. Aas has been paged. I am calling him because I have just received a copy of a medical paper he has written, and as a serious journalist I consider it my duty to bring this matter to the attention of the public.
Dr. Aas is a busy man, and this is taking a while, so I’ll use the time to warn you that if you are currently having breakfast, or contemplating having breakfast, or ever plan on eating again, you might wish to skip over the remainder of this column. Ah, here we go.
Posted in Mad Scientists, Medical Monstrosities | No Comments »
Monday, April 9th, 2007
Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong
A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations.The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.
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It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.
Last week an apparently furious and embarrassed Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, wrote to his staff saying they had caused “a pratfall on the world stage”. He said: “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”
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Thursday, April 5th, 2007
Scientists Directly Control Brain Cell Activity With Light:
New Stanford-led research published in the April 5 issue of Nature describes a technique to directly control brain cell activity with light. It is a novel means for experimenting with neural circuits and could eventually lead to therapies for some disorders.
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Karl Deisseroth, an assistant professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry who led the research group that authored the paper, received the NIH award in 2005. “This research provides a tool that we didn’t have before, which is precise on-or-off control over specific neural cells in living creatures and intact circuits,” says Deisseroth, whose Stanford research group collaborated with researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the University of Würzburg in Germany. “This gives us the power to ask what the causal role of specific cell types is in neural circuit function.”
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To selectively take control of neurons, the researchers used a virus to insert genes for producing light-sensitive proteins into cells of interest. The gene ChR2 is derived from an algae that makes affected neurons more active when exposed to blue light. Deisseroth and collaborators first showed this in a paper in Nature Neuroscience in 2005. In this week’s paper, they demonstrate that another gene, NpHR, which is borrowed from a microbe called an archaebacterium, can make neurons less active in the presence of yellow light. Combined, the two genes can now make neurons obey pulses of light like drivers obey a traffic signal: Blue means “go” (emit a signal), and yellow means “stop” (don’t emit).
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Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
Womb transplant pregnancy success:
Four sheep have become pregnant after having their wombs removed and then reconnected, Swedish scientists say. It is an important step towards successful womb transplants in humans. Professor Mats Brannstrom and colleagues carried out an autologous transplant in the sheep – where the same womb is removed and reconnected.
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Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
Microwave plan for colossal squid:
An industrial-scale microwave oven may have to be used to defrost a colossal squid caught in the Antarctic last month, scientists say. They are pondering how to thaw out the half-tonne squid in a way that makes sure none of it rots before other parts have defrosted. The squid has been kept frozen since it was caught by New Zealand fisherman in deep Antarctic waters in February.
Posted in Animal Weirdness, Mad Scientists | No Comments »
Sunday, March 4th, 2007
USDA Backs Production of Rice With Human Genes
The Agriculture Department has given a preliminary green light for the first commercial production of a food crop engineered to contain human genes, reigniting fears that biomedically potent substances in high-tech plants could escape and turn up in other foods. The plan, confirmed yesterday by the California biotechnology company leading the effort, calls for large-scale cultivation in Kansas of rice that produces human immune system proteins in its seeds.
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Thursday, March 1st, 2007
Scientists: Data-storing bacteria could last thousands of years:
A Japanese university announced scientists there have developed a new technology that uses bacteria DNA as a medium for storing data long-term, even for thousands of years.
Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire.
The universities said they successfully encoded “e= mc2 1905!” — Einstein’s theory of relativity and the year he enunciated it — on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis.
While the technology would most likely first be used to track medication, it could also be used to store text and images for many millennia, thwarting the longevity issues associated with today’s disk and tape storage systems — which only store data for up to 100 years in most cases.
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Thursday, March 1st, 2007
Go-ahead signalled for animal-human embryos
British scientists will be allowed to create part-human, part-animal embryos for research into potentially life-saving medical treatments, the Government signalled yesterday.
How to make a human cybrid Caroline Flint, the health minister, is considering removing a ban on such work from a draft bill that will form the basis for new laws on fertility treatment and embryo research.
Two teams of British researchers have applied for permission to create “cybrid” embryos that would be around 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, cow, pig, sheep or goat to produce embryonic stem cells – the body’s building blocks that grow into all other types of cells.
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Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
New Mouse Teeth, Whiskers Grown From Handful of Cells:
Someday soon dentists may not just pull teeth and fill cavities. They could also stick entirely new teeth back in your mouth—perhaps by dabbing just a couple of cells in an empty tooth socket. That is, if recent research pans out. New mouse teeth, whiskers photos
Scientists in Japan have come up with a controversial method for growing teeth in the lab—and even in adult mice—using a couple of cells from an embryo.
The researchers did the same with mouse whiskers, regenerating them from a single cell. These teeth and whiskers were implanted into other mice, where they took root and seemed to function normally.
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Monday, February 19th, 2007
Traumatized US soldiers being treated in ‘virtual Iraq’:
Traumatized US soldiers are being treated for post-war psychological disorders by going out on patrol in a computer-generated “virtual Iraq,” experts told a conference.
Skip Rizzo, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, has helped create a program that simulates life in the war zone for Iraq veterans suffering from conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The ground-breaking treatment allows soldiers to experience the sights, sounds and even the smells of a war-zone, courtesy of wrap-around goggles linked to a startlingly realistic virtual world.
The idea is to re-introduce veterans to the experiences that have inflicted mental scars until gradually they are no longer haunted by the memories, a long-established therapeutic technique known as “exposure therapy.”
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Friday, February 16th, 2007
Bionic eye ‘on market in two years’
A bionic eye that can restore sight to the blind could be on the market within two years, according to scientists.The first six patients to try the revolutionary devices have learnt how to detect light, distinguish between objects and perceive direction of motion.
American scientists were this week given approval to test a more advanced version of the electronic retinal implant on up to 75 subjects.
The breakthrough offers new hope to millions of people around the world who have lost their vision to degenerative eye diseases, particularly those with macular degeneration – the most common cause of blindness in western countries. Up to 15pc of over-75s are affected by the condition.
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Thursday, February 15th, 2007
Swiss officials may build giant mirror to give light to sunless village
Local officials said Monday they are considering the construction of a giant mirror to light up this mountain village with 198 residents who are deprived of sunlight for three months each year.The project would help illuminate parts of the southeastern Swiss town of Bondo that lie so deep in the Bregaglia Valley they do not receive any sunlight between December and February, said mayor Renzo Giovanoli, confirming a report in the daily Suedostschweiz.
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Sunday, February 11th, 2007
Physicists Unite Light And Matter
Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.
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In the experiment, a light pulse was slowed to bicycle speed by beaming it into a cold cloud of atoms. The light made a “fingerprint” of itself in the atoms before the experimenters turned it off. Then Hau and her assistants guided that fingerprint into a second clump of cold atoms. And get this – the clumps were not touching and no light passed between them.
“The two atom clouds were separated and had never seen each other before,” Hau notes. They were eight-thousandths of an inch apart, a relatively huge distance on the scale of atoms.
The experimenters then nudged the second cloud of atoms with a laser beam, and the atomic imprint was revived as a light pulse. The revived light had all the characteristics present when it entered the first cloud of atomic matter, the same shape and wavelength. The restored light exited the cloud slowly then quickly sped up to its normal 186,000 miles a second.
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Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
Stem-Cell Fast Food – From NASA to Nourishment
It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it’s for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York’s Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn’t.)
Hat tip to Instapundit!
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Saturday, December 30th, 2006
Science told: hands off gay sheep
SCIENTISTS are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of “gay” sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans. The technique being developed by American researchers adjusts the hormonal balance in the brains of homosexual rams so that they are more inclined to mate with ewes.
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Friday, December 15th, 2006
Researchers demonstrate direct brain control of humanoid robot:
A classic science-fiction scene shows a person wearing a metal skullcap with electrodes sticking out to detect the person’s thoughts. Another sci-fi movie standard depicts robots doing humans’ bidding. Now the two are combined, and in real life: University of Washington researchers can control the movement of a humanoid robot with signals from a human brain.
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