Imagine you suddenly discovered part of your umbilical cord was still attached.Scientists just did that for the planet Earth. What’s been found is a clear sign that beneath the crust in northern Canada there is a chunk of pristine, undisturbed rock from the time when Earth was nothing but molten rock.
The evidence comes in the form of lava rocks that, themselves, are a mere 60 million years old. But these rocks contain an early Earth mixture of helium, lead and neodymium isotopes which suggest the mantle rock beneath the crust that yielded them is a virgin pocket of Earth’s original material.
That pocket had survived for 4.5 billion years under Baffin Island without being mixed by plate tectonics or erupted onto the surface.
“I was surprised that any of the (original) mantle survived,” said geoscientist Matthew Jackson of Boston University.
He is the lead author on a paper announcing the discovery in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.
”Finding a piece of the original mantle has been a holy grail. The original Earth was a big ball of magma. That’s our (planet’s) original composition.”
Archive for the ‘Weird Science’ Category
Remants of Eath’s ‘umbilical cord’ found in Canada
Saturday, August 14th, 2010Heads! Heads! Heads!
Thursday, June 17th, 2010Southwest Finds Shipment of Heads on a Plane
A Southwest Airlines employee called police after finding 40 to 60 human heads in a package set to be transported to a Fort Worth medical research company, the airline said.“It wasn’t labeled or packaged properly,” said Ashley Rogers, a Southwest spokeswoman. “They called the local authorities.”
The incident happened in Little Rock, Ark., last Wednesday, she said.
Little Rock police turned the heads over to the county coroner, who questions where they came from and if they were properly obtained.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that there is a black market out there for human body parts for research or for whatever reason,” said Pulaski County coroner Garland Camper. “We just want to make sure these specimens here aren’t a part of that black market and underground trade.”
Now we’re really in trouble!
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Scientists 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.
Vegetarians are bad for the environment
Friday, February 12th, 2010Tofu can harm environment more than meat, finds WWF study:
Becoming a vegetarian can do more harm to the environment than continuing to eat red meat, according to a study of the impacts of meat substitutes such as tofu.The findings undermine claims by vegetarians that giving up meat automatically results in lower emissions and that less land is needed to produce food.
The study by Cranfield University, commissioned by the environmental group WWF, found that many meat substitutes were produced from soy, chickpeas and lentils that were grown overseas and imported into Britain.
It found that switching from beef and lamb reared in Britain to meat substitutes would result in more foreign land being cultivated and raise the risk of forests being destroyed to create farmland.
Meat substitutes also tended to be highly processed and involved energy-intensive production methods.
The mathematics of pizza slicing
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009The perfect way to slice a pizza – physics-math
LUNCH with a colleague from work should be a time to unwind – the most taxing task being to decide what to eat, drink and choose for dessert. For Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann it has never been that simple. They can’t think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up.“We went to lunch together at least once a week,” says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. “One of us would bring a notebook, and we’d draw pictures while our food was getting cold.”
The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?
Of course you could estimate the area of each slice, tot them all up and work out each person’s total from that. But these guys are mathematicians, and so that wouldn’t quite do. They wanted to be able to distil the problem down to a few general, provable rules that avoid exact calculations, and that work every time for any circular pizza.
As with many mathematical conundrums, the answer has arrived in stages – each looking at different possible cases of the problem. The easiest example to consider is when at least one cut passes plumb through the centre of the pizza. A quick sketch shows that the pieces then pair up on either side of the cut through the centre, and so can be divided evenly between the two diners, no matter how many cuts there are.
So far so good, but what if none of the cuts passes through the centre? For a pizza cut once, the answer is obvious by inspection: whoever eats the centre eats more. The case of a pizza cut twice, yielding four slices, shows the same result: the person who eats the slice that contains the centre gets the bigger portion. That turns out to be an anomaly to the three general rules that deal with greater numbers of cuts, which would emerge over subsequent years to form the complete pizza theorem.
Copenhagen to Global Warmers: please don’t use our hookers
Saturday, December 5th, 2009Copenhagen’s Lord Mayor has written to all 500 climate change delegates pleading with them to abstain from using services of the city’s ‘unsustainable’ prostitutes.
The city council contacted 160 hotels asking them not to arrange prostitutes for guests attending the conference. Enlarge Copenhagen’s Ritt Bjerregaard said: ‘I think it’s deplorable that you can buy a woman for sex’
Together with the anti-trafficking organisation, The Nest International, and tourism group Wonderful Copenhagen, it issued postcards featuring the slogan, ‘Be sustainable – don’t buy sex’, which been distributed to hotels.
A sex workers interest organisation, SIO, has hit out at claims that sex tourism increases during high-level summits.
Yet another triumph for Russian science
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009Professor Creates Alcohol in a Pill:
A Russian professor has evolved a technique that turns alcohol into powder for packaging in pill form.Evgeny Moskalev of Saint Petersburg Technological University created the pills, which allow people to consume their favorite drinks just like any other solid food, the Times of India reports .
The new technique can solidify any kind of alcohol. People would be able to measure the amount of alcohol they consume by taking the pills.
“We have developed a technology that allowed us to turn any liquid solution into powder,” Moskalev said.
The technology has been tested on liquor containing as much as 96% alcohol content.
Mmmm, meat from the laboratory
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Artificial 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.”
Our ancestors, the rocks
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
PETER MITCHELL was an eccentric figure. For much of his career he worked in his own lab in a restored manor house in Cornwall in the UK, his research funded in part by a herd of dairy cows. His ideas about the most basic process of life – how it gets energy – seemed ridiculous to his fellow biologists.“I remember thinking to myself that I would bet anything that [it] didn’t work that way,” biochemist Leslie Orgel wrote of his meeting with Mitchell half a century ago. “Not since Darwin and Wallace has biology come up with an idea as counter-intuitive as those of, say, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger.”
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The picture painted by Russell and Martin is striking indeed. The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions. Powered by hydrogen and proton gradients, this natural flow reactor filled up with organic chemicals, giving rise to proto-life that eventually broke out as the first living cells – not once but twice, giving rise to the bacteria and the archaea.
Practical levitation coming soon
Thursday, September 10th, 2009Nasa scientists levitate mice with magnet
Nasa-backed scientists have successfully levitated mice, as part of research into the conditions endured by astronauts in space.The mice were made to float using a superconducting magnet that produces a field strong enough to rival the pull of gravity.
After initial tests on baby mice left them frantically spinning in the air, the scientists decided to sedate the rodents to make their weightless ordeals less disturbing.
Describing the first test on a three-week-old baby mouse, researcher Yuanming Liu of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said: “It actually kicked around and started to spin.
Male breastfeeding experiment in Sweden
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009Swedish dad in bid for breast milk
Swedish father Ragnar Bengtsson, 26, has entered into an experiment that he hopes will help him breastfeed his future children.
On Tuesday, the Stockholm family man began stimulating his breasts with a pump in a bid to produce milk.
“Anything that doesn’t do any harm is worth trying out. And if it works it could prove very important for men’s ability to get much closer to their children at an early stage,” Bengtsson told The Local.
His efforts are to be documented by Swedish TV8, with the first instalment scheduled to air at 9pm on Wednesday on the Aschberg show. Bengtsson also maintains a blog on the station’s website, the title of which translates as: ‘The Milkman – One Drop at a Time’.
Bengtsson is preparing to pump his breasts at three-hour intervals every day until the beginning of December. As a full time economics student at Stockholm University, he is not always going to be in a position to pump in private.
Yet another supervolcano in the USA
Sunday, June 14th, 2009Scientists Say ‘Super Volcano’ May Be Brewing Beneath Mount St. Helens
A team of scientists say they have evidence that a “super volcano” may be brewing underneath Mount St. Helens, NewScientist.com reports.
Researchers say indicators suggest Mount St. Helens and other northwest volcanoes are plugged into a huge subterranean pool of magma that could one day burst to the surface in a “super” eruption.
If what they believe is true, the structure beneath the mountain would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.
Scientist Graham Hill led a team of researchers that set up magnetotelluric sensors around Mount St Helens.
The measurements revealed a column of conductive material that extends downward from the volcano which they found to connect to a much bigger zone of conductive material.
Who needs scientists when robots can do the job just fine?
Saturday, April 4th, 2009Robot achieves scientific first:
A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.
The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.
Who needs academics when software can do the job just fine?
Friday, April 3rd, 2009Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics:
In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry. The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind. (See Wired magazine’s July 2008 cover story on “The End of Science.”)
“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. “I think this is going to be an important tool.”
Sonar cloaking device on the way
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Drug smugglers, terrorists and nuclear players rejoice! Practical underwater invisibility is almost here!
Acoustic superlens could cloak objects from sonar:
Researchers have been messing about with optical metamaterials and invisibility cloaks for a few years now. And while progress has been rapid, nobody’s going to be fooling Voldemort any time soon. But the same exotic tricks that apply to light can equally be applied to sound. And potentially more easily too because sound has a longer wavelength. The business parts of acoustic metamaterials should therefore be significantly easier to build than their optical counterparts. And that’s just what Nicholas Fang and buddies from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign have done: create a flat slab of acoustic metamaterial that focuses sound with a negative refractive index. They’ve even fashioned a design that works as a “superlens” that focuses the so-called evanescent sound waves that form within a single wavelength of the source– a world first apparently. Fang and co have created an acoustic metamaterial by carving an array of holes into an aluminium sheet and filling the holes with water. The holes then resonate when water moves over them, like wind over the mouth of a bottle.
Yet another reason to keep your bodily fluids to yourself
Monday, February 16th, 2009DNA left at crime scene could be used to create picture of criminal’s FACE, say scientists
Forensic experts will soon be able to reconstruct facial features and skin just by reading DNA, U.S. scientists said.‘Forensic molecular photofitting’ maps the genes that are linked to skin pigmentation and facial structure which means a person’s face could emerge from the analysis, Dr Mark Shriver from Pennsylvania State University said.
The process has already been used to help identify and convict serial killer Derek Todd Lee who murdered seven women in Louisiana.
Witness statements said the offender was white but genetic testing of DNA at the crime scenes showed he was African American – which helped lead to his arrest.
Scotch Tape X-Rays
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008Tape measure: X-rays detected from Scotch tape
Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers. Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says. “We were very surprised,” said Juan Escobar. “The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous.” Escobar, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports the work with UCLA colleagues in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
Trapped in a cosmic bubble
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008Scientists: Earth May Exist in Giant Cosmic Bubble
If the notion of dark energy sounds improbable, get ready for an even more outlandish suggestion. Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly devoid of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
Practical invisibility on the way
Sunday, August 10th, 2008Science close to unveiling invisible man
INVISIBILITY devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.
The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.
It follows earlier work at Imperial College London that achieved similar results with microwaves. Like light, these are a form of electromagnetic radiation but their longer wave-length makes them far easier to manipulate. Achieving the same effect with visible light is a big advance.
Underlying the work is the idea that bending visible light around an object will hide it.
Physicists Promise Their New Toy Won’t Destroy the World
Friday, August 8th, 2008Black 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.”
Diamonds are life’s best friend
Sunday, July 27th, 2008Diamonds May Have Jump-started Life on Earth
One of the greatest mysteries in science is how life began. Now one group of researchers says diamonds may have been life’s best friend.
Scientists have long theorized that life on Earth got going in a primordial soup of precursor chemicals. But nobody knows how these simple amino acids, known to be the building blocks of life, were assembled into complex polymers needed as a platform for genesis.
Diamonds are crystallized forms of carbon that predate the oldest known life on the planet. In lab experiments aimed to confirm work done more than three decades ago, researchers found that when treated with hydrogen, natural diamonds formed crystalline layers of water on the surface. Water is essential for life as we know it. Also, the tests found electrical conductivity that could have been key to forcing chemical reactions needed to generate the first birth.
So much for that “scientific consensus”
Thursday, July 17th, 2008Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
Ice Age Diamond Rain
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008Diamonds Rained Down During Ice Age
Diamonds and precious metals found in the eastern United States might have rained down during the last Ice Age after a comet shattered over Canada and set North America ablaze, all leading to a mass die-off of animals and humans.
New chemical analyses of diamond, gold and silver found in Ohio and Indiana reveal the minerals were transported there from Canada several thousand years ago. The question is, how?
“There are no gold mines or silver mines in Ohio that anyone knows of, but there are plenty of them in Canada,” said retired geophysicist Allen West, who was involved in the study.
The discovery is consistent with a theory proposed by West and colleagues that a 3-mile-wide comet splintered over glaciers and ice sheets in eastern Canada about 12,900 years ago and wiped out man and beast.
Worms are good for us
Friday, July 4th, 2008The Worm Turns – Curing Diseases With Parasites?
In the early 1990s, Joel Weinstock, a gastroenterologist, encountered a puzzle. The prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease (I.B.D.) across North America increased markedly during the 20th century. Many thought that “bad” genes would eventually explain the spike, but Weinstock didn’t buy it. In areas where fewer than two generations ago the I.B.D. incidence might have been as low as 1 in 10,000, it was now 1 in 250. A defective gene couldn’t spread that quickly, he reasoned. It had to be something in the environment. But what? Stumped, Weinstock tried turning the question around. Instead of asking what triggered I.B.D., he asked what, before the 20th century, protected against it?
At the time, Weinstock, then at the University of Iowa, was editing a book on parasitic worms. These worms, or helminths, have a paradoxical effect on the host. Rather than induce inflammation, which is the body’s typical response to invasion, the intruders calm the host immune system. They force a peace, scientists think, to avoid eviction and keep the host — their home and food source — as healthy as possible. As Weinstock considered the I.B.D. puzzle, he wondered if immune manipulation by worms could incidentally protect against other diseases.
Comparison of the prevalence of I.B.D. and surveys of worm-infestation rates revealed a telling pattern. About 10 years after improved hygiene and deworming efforts reduced worms in a given population, I.B.D. rates jumped. Weinstock had his hypothesis: after a long coevolution, the human immune system came to depend on the worms for proper functioning. When cleaner conditions and new medicines evicted the worms from our bodies, the immune system went out of kilter. “Hygiene has made our lives better,” says Weinstock, now at Tufts University. “But in the process of eliminating exposure to the 10 or 20 things that can make us sick, we’re also eliminating exposure to things that make us well.”
Yes Folks, We’re ALL Aliens!
Saturday, June 14th, 2008We may be extraterrestrials after all
Scientists from the Imperial College of London claim to have found evidence that life on our planet did not originate from Earth itself. For the first time, the scientists say, it is confirmed that an important component of early genetic material found in meteorite fragments is of extraterrestrial origin.
We had a lot of space and alien stories lately, with one particular interesting making even the Larry King show. But any of that material could be considered insignificant, if Zita Martins’ claims, a research associate at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering of the Imperial College, are in fact correct. According to the researcher, at least parts of the raw material that are believed to have been required to create the first molecules of DNA and RNA may be of extraterrestrial origin.
Martins and her colleagues said they discovered uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA and are known as nucleobases in rock fragments of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in Australia in 1969. She explained that “early life may have adopted nucleobases from meteoritic fragments for use in genetic coding which enabled them to pass on their successful features to subsequent generations.”
Oil from microbes!
Saturday, June 14th, 2008Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
2000 year old seed successfully grows into tree
Friday, June 13th, 2008Tree Grown From Ancient Seed Found in Jewish Fortress
Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated.
The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders.
Dubbed the “Methuselah Tree” after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four feet (1.2 meters) tall.
The species of tree, called the Judean date, (Phoenix dactylifera L.), is now extinct in Israel, but researchers are hoping that by reviving the plant they may be able to study its medicinal uses.
Acoustic Cloaking Device Unveiled
Friday, June 13th, 2008Experts unveil ‘cloak of silence’
Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbours blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past.
Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an “acoustic cloak”, which could make objects impervious to sound waves.
The technology, outlined in the New Journal of Physics, could be used to build sound-proof homes, advanced concert halls or stealth warships.
Microbial Computing Has Arrived!
Monday, June 9th, 2008DNA Computer Puts Microbes to Work as Number Crunchers
It’s not your normal, electronic silicon-based machine, but scientists have made a computer from a small, circular piece of DNA, then inserted it into a living bacterial cell and unleashed the microbe to solve a mathematical sorting problem.
“A computer is any system that can read some input and give some readable output,” says Karmella Haynes, a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina and co-author of a new study appearing in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Haynes and her team looked to harness the power of DNA recombination to solve the so-called “burnt pancake problem”: a puzzle about how to stack different-size flapjacks that are burned on one side and perfectly cooked on the other using the fewest number of flips to arrange them so the largest are on the bottom and all are golden side up.
“This work is the first work I’ve encountered which uses living cells in order to solve a specific computer science problem,” says Tom Ran, a graduate student in the lab of computer scientist Ehud Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
Thought control is here
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Monkeys control a robot arm with their thoughts
Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.
The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.
In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand, a robot on a treadmill or a small vehicle.
In space sometimes they can hear you scream
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008Black Hole Rips Apart Screaming Star
In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy. Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated.
This scenario is no bit of science fiction – a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December. Their observations are detailed in the May issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The team is still monitoring the “light echo,” and for the first time, one of these events can be observed in great detail, allowing astronomers “to probe different regions of the galaxy,” said study leader Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics.
The light echo currently coursing through galaxy SDSSJ0952 2143 likely originated as in the scenario above, with the following details: One of the stars orbiting the galaxy’s central black hole likely strayed off course (perhaps after being nudged into “a fatal orbit,” as Komossa called it, after interacting with another star). Eventually the pull of the black hole would rip the star apart, but before the stellar material was pulled into the accretion disk, it emitted a burst of high-energy radiation.
Who Needs Element 115 When You Can Have Element 122?
Monday, April 28th, 2008Possible New Element Could Rewrite Textbooks
An international team of researchers may, just may, have made a radical breakthrough that could rewrite physics and chemistry textbooks.
They claim to have discovered a naturally occurring element with an atomic number (number of protons) of 122 — 30 notches on the periodic table ahead of uranium, long considered the heaviest naturally occurring element.
For decades, physicists have been making artificial elements in supercolliders, only to see most of their creations disintegrate within a short time.
Most elements above atomic number 100 are inherently unstable and get progressively more usntable as you travel upward. The highest discovered one, ununoctium or atomic number 118, has a half-life of 89 milliseconds.
But according to theory, there exists an “island of stability” further out along the periodic table where certain configurations of protons and neutrons would create superheavy but also superstable elements.
Ruthless dictators are just born bad
Saturday, April 5th, 2008‘Ruthlessness gene’ discovered
Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the money-grabbing tendencies of those with a Machiavellian streak — from national dictators down to ‘little Hitlers’ found in workplaces the world over.
Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found a link between a gene called AVPR1a and ruthless behaviour in an economic exercise called the ‘Dictator Game’. The exercise allows players to behave selflessly, or like money-grabbing dictators such as former Zaire President Mobutu, who plundered the mineral wealth of his country to become one of the world’s richest men while its citizens suffered in poverty.
Solar tsunami caught on video
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008First movie of ‘tsunami’ on Sun
Astronomers have captured the first footage of a solar “tsunami” hurtling through the Sun’s atmosphere at over a million kilometres per hour.
The event was captured by Nasa’s twin Stereo spacecraft designed to make 3D images of our parent star.
Naturally, this type of tsunami does not involve water; instead, it is a wave of pressure that travels across the Sun very fast.
Details are to be presented at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast.
In a solar tsunami, a huge explosion near the Sun, such as a coronal mass ejection or flare, causes a pressure pulse to propagate outwards in a circular pattern.
Last year’s solar tsunami, which took place on 19 May 2007, lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds around 20 minutes after the initial blast.
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“In half an hour, we saw the tsunami cover almost the full disc of the Sun, nearly a million kilometres away from the epicentre.”
Lawsuit may be last chance to save the world
Monday, March 31st, 2008Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.
None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.
Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
“No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance”
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008A Stellar Explosion You Could See on Earth!
Astronomers are familiar with seeing amazing things through their telescopes. But nothing prepared them for an incredible explosion detected early Wednesday morning by NASA’s Swift satellite. At 2:12 a.m. EDT, Swift detected an explosion from deep space that was so powerful that its afterglow was briefly visible to the naked eye. Even more astonishing, the explosion itself took place halfway across the visible universe!
Never before has anything so far away come even close to naked-eye visibility. The explosion was so far away that it took its light 7,500,000,000 (7.5 billion) years to reach Earth! In fact, the explosion took place so long ago that Earth had not yet come into existence.
Telepathic chat necklace is here
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008Nerve-tapping neckband allows ‘telepathic’ chat
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.
With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.
A video (right) shows the system being used to place the first public voiceless phone call on stage at a recent conference held by microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, which developed the neckband, demonstrates the device, called the Audeo.
Users needn’t worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires “a level above thinking”. Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.
“There is something very strange going on with spacecraft motions.”
Saturday, March 1st, 2008NASA Baffled by Unexplained Force Acting on Space Probes
Mysteriously, five spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions.
These newfound enigmas join the so-called “Pioneer anomaly” as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft.
A decade ago, after rigorous analyses, anomalies were seen with the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft as they hurtled out of the solar system. Both seemed to experience a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun.
A host of explanations have been bandied about for the Pioneer anomaly. At times these are rooted in conventional science — perhaps leaks from the spacecraft have affected their trajectories. At times these are rooted in more speculative physics — maybe the law of gravity itself needs to be modified.
Now Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer John Anderson and his colleagues — who originally helped uncover the Pioneer anomaly — have discovered that five spacecraft each raced either a tiny bit faster or slower than expected when they flew past the Earth en route to other parts of the solar system.
A tooth in the eye can cure the blind
Friday, February 29th, 2008Blind 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.
Who cares about global warming when you’ve got rapid global cooling
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
7.6 Billion Years until the End of the World
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Scientists Predict When World Will End
Scientist have nailed down how and when the Earth will cease to exist.
The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth farther out into space, but not far enough.
Our home planet will be snagged by the sun’s outer atmosphere, gradually plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace.
“The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the sun,” explains astronomer Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in southern England.
Yet another scientific consensus bites the dust
Thursday, February 21st, 2008The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was
It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.
Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy – a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across – is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.
Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.
“We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn’t find any mistakes.”
Blackest Black Blacker Than Ever
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Their Deepest, Darkest Discovery
Black is getting blacker.
Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black.
The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons — light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.
Blue-Eyed Inbred Mutants
Friday, February 1st, 2008Scientist: All Blue-Eyed People Are Related
If you’ve got blue eyes, shake the hand of the nearest person who shares your azure irises: He or she may be a distant cousin.
Danish researchers have concluded that all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor, presumably someone who lived 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
“Originally, we all had brown eyes,” Professor Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen said in a press release. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a ’switch,’ which literally ‘turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes.”
New hope for smokers
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Breakthroughs in artificial lungs could assist in transplants
When the lungs fail, doctors have woefully few tools in their arsenal to help people breathe.
That may change soon, say scientists who believe they are within sprinting distance of offering patients with acute lung failure an artificial lung — at least one that can be used short-term while they await transplants or for their damaged lungs to heal.
Researchers from academic institutions across the country who are developing and testing prototypes believe artificial lung clinical trials in humans, similar to studies already underway in Canada and Europe, may begin as early as this spring.
Ancient meteor poisons Canadians today
Sunday, January 27th, 2008Well water of the tiny Canadian town of Gypsumville, Manitoba (population 65) has been poisoned by an extraterrestrial.
The invader: A meteorite which struck down almost a quarter-billion years ago, creating the 25-mile-wide (40-kilometer) Lake Martin impact crater.
The ancient impact shattered the granitic ground so that extraordinary amounts of fluoride now taint the well water. Slightly higher than recommended amounts of fluoride can cause mottled teeth, while even higher concentrations can lead to neurological problems and softened bones.
More proof mobile phones are bad for you
Saturday, January 19th, 2008Mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep
Radiation from mobile phones delays and reduces sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to a new study.
The research, sponsored by the mobile phone companies themselves, shows that using the handsets before bed causes people to take longer to reach the deeper stages of sleep and to spend less time in them, interfering with the body’s ability to repair damage suffered during the day.
The findings are especially alarming for children and teenagers, most of whom – surveys suggest – use their phones late at night and who especially need sleep. Their failure to get enough can lead to mood and personality changes, ADHD-like symptoms, depression, lack of concentration and poor academic performance.
The study – carried out by scientists from the blue-chip Karolinska Institute and Uppsala University in Sweden and from Wayne State University in Michigan, USA – is thought to be the most comprehensive of its kind.
Black hole on the attack in nearby galaxy
Monday, December 17th, 2007Black hole ‘bully’ blasts galaxy
A powerful jet of particles from a “supermassive” black hole has been seen blasting a nearby galaxy, according to findings from the US space agency.
Galaxies have been seen colliding before, but it is the first time this form of galactic violence has been witnessed by astronomers.
This could have a profound effect on any planets in the jet’s path and could also trigger a burst of star formation.
The findings are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
…
The larger of the two galaxies in 3C321 – dubbed the “death star galaxy” by the astronomers – has a jet emanating from the vicinity of the black hole at its centre. The unfortunate smaller galaxy has apparently swung into the jet’s line of fire.A bright spot in some images shows where the jet has slammed into the side of the companion galaxy, dissipating some of its energy. After striking it, the jet has become disrupted and deflected.
Genetic Engineering Creates Fearless Mice
Monday, December 17th, 2007Japanese 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.
Our Robot Overlords Are About To Take Our Jobs
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Honda Robots Pair Up to Lend a Hand
As if the idea of having one robot to serve you wasn’t unusual enough, Honda says its humanoids are now ready to work in pairs — and they can even serve drinks.
At a demonstration Tuesday at its Tokyo headquarters, automaker Honda Motor Co. showed off two of the child-sized Asimo robots serving tea and performing other tasks in coordination with one another.
The bubble-headed robots seemed to pick their steps carefully as they made their way around the room, picking up and putting down drink trays and pushing around a refreshments cart.
The solar system is ‘dented’
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007Voyager 2 finds solar system’s shape is ‘dented’
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that our solar system is not round but is “dented” by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said on Monday.The data was gathered by the craft on its 30-year journey into the edge of the solar system when it crossed into a sweeping region called the termination shock, they said.
It showed that the southern hemisphere of the solar system’s heliosphere is being pushed in or “dented.”
Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter this region of the solar system behind Voyager 1, which entered the northern region of the heliosheath in December 2004.
We’re evolving away from each other
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007Why the human race is growing apart
Races have evolved away from each other over the past 10,000 years, according to new research that challenges standard ideas about the biological significance of ethnicity.
A genetic analysis of human evolution has shown that rather than slowing to a standstill it has speeded up, with different pressures on different populations pushing racial groups further apart. Scientists behind the findings suggest that European, African and Asian populations grew genetically more distinct from each other over several thousand years, as their environments took them down different evolutionary paths.
This would call into question the popular scientific view that race has little or no biological meaning, as the genetic similarities between ethnic groups greatly outweigh differences.
They transplant feces too
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007Grandmother saved by daughter’s poo
It must be one of the most stomach-churning medical treatments ever devised.
A grandmother who contracted a potentially fatal superbug in Scotland has been saved after a hospital fed her daughter’s faeces to her.
advertisementEthel McEwan, an 83-year-old from Guardbridge, Fife, was near death after contracting Clostridium Difficile, the Daily Record reported.
But she was saved after receiving a “faecal transplant” from her daughter, Winnifred.
Who needs a sail when you can have a giant kite?
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007Football field-sized kite powers latest heavy freight ship
A kite the size of a football field will provide most of the power for a German heavy freight ship set to launch in December.
The Beluga shipping company that owns the 460-foot Beluga said it expects the kites to decrease fuel consumption by up to 50% in optimal cases as well as a cutback of the emission of greenhouse gases on sea by 10 to 20%. Interestingly, the ship will be hauling windmills from Esbjerg, Denmark to Houston, Texas.
The company that makes the kite for the German transport, SkySails, has made kites for large yachts but is targeting commercial ships with new, larger kites. And it has the ambitious goal of equipping 1,500 ships with kites by 2015.
YOU Are Responsible for the End of the Universe
Saturday, November 24th, 2007Mankind ’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.
Good News for Stoners
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007Marijuana Cuts Lung Cancer Tumor Growth In Half, Study Shows
The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies.
Most Powerful Antimatter Ray Ever
Friday, October 26th, 2007Scientists Generate Powerful Antimatter Ray
Researchers at North Carolina State University have produced the world’s most powerful antimatter beam.
“There is a reactor in Munich, Germany, that has been generating those types of radiation beams for some time now, and our analysis of the data shows that we have exceeded what they have reported,” Dr. Ayman Hawari, director of the Nuclear Reactor Program at North Carolina State, told the university’s Web site.
The beam, consisting of an intense burst of positrons, was generated at the school’s PULSTAR campus nuclear reactor, which first went online in 1972.
Morlock / Eloi Update
Friday, October 26th, 2007Human race will ’split into two different species’
The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.
100,000 years into the future, sexual selection will mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.
The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000.
Flying Saucers Going to War
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007U.S., British Militaries May Deploy Flying Saucers
Researchers in England have developed their own flying saucer — and it might be going to work for the U.S. and British militaries.
GFS Projects’ unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can soar high in the air, hover, bank and fly over any terrain, making it ideal for military surveillance.
Dr. Moreau Update
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007…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.
Terminator Update: Robo-bugs terrorize leftists
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.
Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”
Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.
“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ “
Never underestimate birds
Sunday, October 7th, 2007Alaska Bird Makes Longest Nonstop Flight Ever Measured
A female shorebird was recently found to have flown 7,145 miles (11,500 kilometers) nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand—without taking a break for food or drink.
It’s the longest nonstop bird migration ever measured, according to biologists who tracked the flight using satellite tags.
The bird, a wader called a bar-tailed godwit, completed the journey in nine days.
In addition to demonstrating the bird’s surprising endurance, the trek confirms that godwits make the southbound trip of their annual migration directly across the vast Pacific rather than along the East Asian coast, scientists said.
“This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science.”
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007Parallel 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.
Yet another reason not to let them do an autopsy on you!
Saturday, September 15th, 2007Dead man wakes up under autopsy knife
A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy.
Carlos Camejo, 33, was declared dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue, where examiners began an autopsy only to realize something was amiss when he started bleeding. They quickly sought to stitch up the incision on his face.
Our kilograms are drifting
Friday, September 14th, 2007Kilo prototype mysteriously loses weight
The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.
“The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart,” he said. “We don’t really have a good hypothesis for it.”
Humans still evolving
Sunday, September 9th, 2007Time changes modern human’s face
Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years.
Modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors.
Writing in the British Dental Journal, the team took careful measurements of groups of skulls spanning across 30 generations.
The scientists said the differences between past and present skull shapes were “striking”.
Eight million years old and growing
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007Eight-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.
“It’s tobacco! It’s one of the healthiest things for your body!”
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007Study finds smoking wards off Parkinson’s disease
There is more evidence to back up a long-standing theory that smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than people who do not use tobacco products, researchers reported on Monday.
The apparent protective effect of tobacco against the degenerative nerve disease has been observed for years but a University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health report said a new review of existing studies seems to confirm it, with long-term and current smokers at the lowest risk.
The review also found that the effect seems to extend beyond cigarettes to pipes and cigars, and possibly to chewing tobacco, and that it persisted among those who had stopped smoking years earlier.
Full moon makes you crazy and violent
Thursday, June 7th, 2007It’s criminal what the full moon does to folk, police claim
EXTRA police are to be deployed on Britain’s streets over the next two months after research showed a direct link between the full moon and violence.
Analysts at Sussex police in southern England investigating the factors that influence people’s behaviour found a rise in unruly incidents at full moon.
Together with paydays, the full moon was identified as a time when aggressive behaviour rose, particularly among drinkers in pubs and nightclubs.
Quantum beat drives photosynthesis
Sunday, April 15th, 2007Quantum secrets of photosynthesis revealed:
Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. Speed is the key – the transfer of the solar energy takes place almost instantaneously so little energy is wasted as heat. How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved.A study led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley reports that the answer lies in quantum mechanical effects. Results of the study are presented in the April 12, 2007 issue of the journal Nature.
“We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis,” said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. “This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one.”
