from Spiegel
Ever since American scientists grafted ear-shaped cartilage onto a mouse, Heike Walles has dreamed of cultivating human flesh--and transforming the world of medicine. Though her lab has finally succeeded, EU laws are delaying the introduction of synthetic skin into clinical practice.
...A soft whirring is the only sound in this laboratory at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB) in the southwestern German city of Stuttgart. Sterile and sealed behind glass, these machines have just begun to produce an unusual product: human skin.
Each month, this skin factory will produce 5,000 discs of tissue about the size of a one-cent coin, with a projected price of €50 ($72) per unit. The product is a whitish color, almost transparent, though project director Heike Walles says it can also come in shades of brown.
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from Scientific American
Asthma rates have been surging around the globe over the past three decades, and for a long time researchers thought they had a good idea of what might be fueling the increase: the world we live in is just a little too clean. According to this notion--known as the hygiene hypothesis--exposure in early childhood to infectious agents programs the immune system to mount differing highly effective defenses against disease-causing viruses, bacteria and parasites.
Better sanitary conditions deprive the immune system of this training, so that for reasons that are still unclear, the body pounces on harmless particles--such as dust and ragweed--as if they were deadly threats. The resulting allergic reaction leads to the classic signs of asthma: chronic inflammation or swelling of the airways and acute spasms of those passageways.
Or so the thinking went. Although a lot of data support the hygiene hypothesis for allergies, the same cannot be said for asthma. Contrary to expectations, asthma rates have skyrocketed in urban areas in the U.S. that are not particularly clean. Moreover, the big increase in asthma rates in developed countries did not kick off until the 1980s--well after general sanitary conditions in the richer parts of the world had improved. And some studies are beginning to show that far from protecting children from asthma, respiratory infections in early childhood may actually be a risk factor for it.
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from National Geographic News
In the shadow of Mount Ararat, the beloved and sorrowful national symbol of Armenia, stands a 31-year-old nuclear plant that is no less an emblem of the country's resolve and its woe.
The Metsamor power station is one of a mere handful of remaining nuclear reactors of its kind that were built without primary containment structures. All five of these first-generation water-moderated Soviet units are past or near their original retirement ages, but one salient fact sets Armenia's reactor apart from the four in Russia.
Metsamor lies on some of Earth's most earthquake-prone terrain. In the wake of Japan's quake-and-tsunami-triggered Fukushima Daiichi crisis, Armenia's government faces renewed questions from those who say the fateful combination of design and location make Metsamor among the most dangerous nuclear plants in the world.
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from Nature News
Beginning in late 2004, a flurry of massive, tsunami-spawning earthquakes have rocked the world, first slamming Indonesia, then Chile and most recently Japan. Temblors that size are rare indeed: only seven quakes as large or larger than 8.8--the magnitude of last February's Chilean event--have occurred since 1900.
So what does it mean that three of those seven shocks have happened almost within the span of six years? While some scientists argue that these 'megaquakes' could be the vanguard of an extended outburst of strong seismic events, many others suggest that the apparent cluster of recent temblors is nothing more than a statistical fluke.
The recent spate of far-flung quakes is remarkably similar to a cluster that occurred in the middle of the last century, says Charles Bufe, a seismologist retired from the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Denver, Colorado. The seismic events in that supposed grouping, consisting of three magnitude 9 or higher temblors, struck Kamchatka, then Chile and then Alaska within a 12-year interval. The odds of quakes that large occurring randomly within such a short time span is only four per cent, Bufe noted today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Memphis, Tennessee.
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from the Economist
Around the world, courthouses are adorned with a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales and a sword: Justice personified. Her sword stands for the power of the court, her scales for the competing claims of the petitioners. The blindfold (a 15th-century innovation) represents the principle that justice should be blind....
Lawyers, though, have long suspected that such lofty ideals are not always achieved in practice, even in well run judicial systems free from political meddling. Justice, say the cynics, is what the judge had for breakfast. Now they have proof.
A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes how Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and his colleagues followed eight Israeli judges for ten months as they ruled on over 1,000 applications made by prisoners to parole boards. The plaintiffs were asking either to be allowed out on parole or to have the conditions of their incarceration changed. The team found that, at the start of the day, the judges granted around two-thirds of the applications before them. As the hours passed, that number fell sharply, eventually reaching zero. But clemency returned after each of two daily breaks, during which the judges retired for food. The approval rate shot back up to near its original value, before falling again as the day wore on.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.
Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.
The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig's impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a "toxin" or a "poison," terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely "evil." And by "sugar," Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal--technically known as sucrose--but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig's help what he calls "the most demonized additive known to man."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Reporting from Washington -- Two drugs used against kidney cancer won the endorsement of a federal advisory panel Tuesday to treat a form of pancreatic cancer that strikes several hundred Americans each year.
The panel found that the benefits of Novartis Pharmaceuticals' Afinitor and Pfizer's Sutent outweighed their toxic side effects, increasing the likelihood that the Food and Drug Administration would approve their use for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. The drugs provide significant new treatment options with the potential to extend the lives of patients diagnosed with the tumors.
Although the FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of its advisory panels, it often does. Neuroendocrine tumors, which are diagnosed in about 600 Americans annually, or just over 1% of new cases of pancreatic cancer, are considerably less deadly than the more common adenocarcinomas of the pancreas. But beyond chemotherapy, which has limited effectiveness, there are few treatments if neuroendocrine tumors recur.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Natural gas, with its reputation as a linchpin in the effort to wean the nation off dirtier fossil fuels and reduce global warming, may not be as clean over all as its proponents say.
Even as natural gas production in the United States increases and Washington gives it a warm embrace as a crucial component of America's energy future, two coming studies try to poke holes in the clean-and-green reputation of natural gas. They suggest that the rush to develop the nation's vast, unconventional sources of natural gas is logistically impractical and likely to do more to heat up the planet than mining and burning coal.
The problem, the studies suggest, is that planet-warming methane, the chief component of natural gas, is escaping into the atmosphere in far larger quantities than previously thought, with as much as 7.9 percent of it puffing out from shale gas wells, intentionally vented or flared, or seeping from loose pipe fittings along gas distribution lines. This offsets natural gas's most important advantage as an energy source: it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels and releases lower carbon dioxide emissions.
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from Nature News
Before committing suicide at the age of 22, an anonymous man with schizophrenia donated a biopsy of his skin cells to research. Reborn as neurons, these cells may help neuroscientists to unpick the disease he struggled with from early childhood.
Experiments on these cells, as well as those of several other patients, are reported today in Nature. They represent the first of what are sure to be many mental illnesses 'in a dish', made by reprogramming patients' skin cells to an embryonic-like state from which they can form any tissue type.
Recreating neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using such cells represents a daunting challenge: scientists do not know the underlying biological basis of mental illnesses; symptoms vary between patients; and although psychiatric illnesses are strongly influenced by genes, it has proved devilishly hard to identify many that explain more than a fraction of a person's risk.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
They call Port Arthur gasoline alley, cancer alley, and the armpit of Texas. For most of his life, Hilton Kelley has called it home. The city has had the same distinctive odor since he was a boy, Kelley said. Adults jokingly called it the smell of money, because the nearby oil refineries and petrochemical plants did most of the hiring. But after the cancer rate grew, the childhood asthma rate rose and the population plummeted, Kelley, now 50, stopped laughing.
Kelley's decade-long fight to lower the city's air pollution earned him this year's Goldman Environmental Prize for the North America category, being awarded Monday in San Francisco.
The annual prize and a $150,000 stipend is routinely awarded to six grass-roots environmentalists from different parts of the world. Since the award was established in 1990, a total of $13.2 million has been awarded to 139 recipients from 79 countries, as of 2010, according to a spokeswoman.
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from BBC News Online
The underground volcanic plume at Yellowstone in the US may be bigger than previously thought, according to a new study by geologists. The volcanic hotspot below Yellowstone feeds the hot springs, mud pots and geysers that bring millions of visitors to the US national park each year.
But the Yellowstone "supervolcano" has erupted violently in the distant past and could do so again at some point. The new study is set to be published in Geophysical Research Letters journal.
In 2009, researchers used seismic waves from earthquakes to build up an image of the hotspot beneath Yellowstone, which straddles the US states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The authors of the latest work used variations in the electrical conductivity of rocks to produce a new picture of the plume. This conductivity is a property of the molten silicate rocks and the hot briny water that is naturally present in them.
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from the Seattle Times
PORTLAND, Maine (Associated Press) -- Kindergarten classes are supplementing crayons, finger paints and flash cards with iPads, a development that excites supporters but that detractors worry is wasted on pupils too young to appreciate the expense.
Next fall, nearly 300 kindergartners in the central Maine city of Auburn will become the latest batch of youngsters around the country to get iPad2 touchpad tablets to learn the basics about ABCs, 1-2-3s, drawing and even music.
"I'm looking forward to seeing where this can take us and our students," said Auburn kindergarten teacher Amy Heimerl, who received an iPad on Tuesday before full deployment in the fall. But the $200,000 that Superintendent Tom Morrill is proposing to spend on iPads--which retail for around $500--might be better spent on some other school program, said Sue Millard of Auburn, who has children in the fourth grade and high school. "I understand you have to keep up with technology, but I think a 5-year old is a little too young to understand," she said.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
As Sri Lankan infantry cornered the last of the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, another plot was unfolding 9,000 miles away. Lars Bromley was pulling 15-hour days as he watched the conflict unfold from a different perspective: that of satellites peering down from 450 miles above.
In a Washington, D.C., lab he scrolled through digital satellite photos measuring 16 feet by 16 feet as part of the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Mr. Bromley, a geographer, hoped to determine whether the Sri Lankan Army was attacking a civilian safety zone.
Each pixel on the photos represented 20 inches, so the photos weren't sufficiently fine-grain to reveal corpses. But Bromley and his co-workers spied other damage: buildings shattered by artillery shells, and mortar craters pocking the sand in places where refugees had previously gathered. Elsewhere, the rectangular grids of Tamil Tiger cemeteries grew from one day's photo to the next, revealing dozens of new graves.
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from Nature News
Ranching cod off the coast of Iceland is far more financially sensible than conventional fishing methods or keeping the fish in cages, according to a new analysis.
Fish ranching--where the animals are free to roam but trained to return to a certain point so they can be caught--could one day become a significant part of global fisheries, fitting between traditional catching and aquaculture, says Björn Björnsson, the lead author of the study, published in Marine Policy on 1 April. It could even reduce the catching of fish that are not the target species or are undersized, says Björnsson, a fisheries scientist at the Marine Research Institute in Reykjavik.
'Ranching' allows fish to roam free but attempts to condition their behaviour so they can be rounded up for feeding and eventual capture. Some researchers are experimenting with sound signals that condition the fish to return to feeding stations. But Björnsson's economic analysis is based on a simpler method, by which otherwise wild fish are conditioned by regular feeding at specific feed stations.
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from Science News
There's a patent war pending over the invention of the cyanide bomb.
Zygaena caterpillars, which deter hungry birds by storing the poison in their flesh, make cyanide using the exact same cellular machinery as their host plants, scientists report April 12 in Nature Communications. It still isn't clear which came up with the recipe first, but the discovery is the first known example of organisms from entirely different kingdoms evolving the same biochemical treachery.
Some plants, such as bird's-foot trefoil, concoct cyanide bombs that are trip-wired to blow up in the mouths of nibbling animals. When a slug or insect chews a leaf, ingredients that are kept in different compartments in the plant's cells combine to form cyanide, poisoning the animal.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the year since the wellhead beneath the Deepwater Horizon rig began spewing rust-colored crude into the northern Gulf of Mexico, scientists have been working frantically to figure out what environmental harm really came of the largest oil spill in American history.
What has emerged in studies so far is not a final tally of damage, but a new window on the complexities of the gulf, and the vulnerabilities and capacities of biological systems in the face of environmental insults.
There is no doubt that gulf water, wildlife and wetlands sustained injury when, beginning on April 20 last year, some 4.9 million barrels of oil and 1.84 million gallons of dispersants poured into the waters off Louisiana. But the ecosystem was not passive in the face of this assault. The gulf, which experiences a natural seepage of millions of gallons of oil a year, had the innate capacity to digest some of crude and the methane gas mixed with it. Almost as soon as the well was capped, the deep became cleaner to the eye. By the same token, dozens of miles of marsh still remain blackened by heavy oil, government crews are still grooming away tar balls that wash up ceaselessly on beaches and traces of the dispersants are still found floating in the currents.
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from Science News
It will be the largest telescope ever launched into space, with a mirror that has about six times the light collecting area of Hubble's. When the James Webb Space Telescope flies later this decade, its unparalleled infrared vision will record the flickers of the first stars and galaxies to light up the universe, in a mission that promises to rewrite astronomy textbooks. But for now, the 6.5-ton observatory has become a financial albatross for NASA.
An independent investigative panel reported in November that the telescope, known by the acronym JWST, is running a minimum of $1.4 billion over budget. That overrun, which would bring the total cost of building the telescope to at least $6.5 billion, may lead to the cancellation of another highly touted NASA mission to probe the nature of dark energy and extrasolar planets.
Convened at the request of U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the panel found that managers for the James Webb project, based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., consistently underestimated the cost of the telescope. Lack of money in one year forced scheduled work to be deferred to the next, a practice that kept contractors on the payroll longer and ended up doubling or tripling the cost of their labor. Poor cost management and reporting practices went unchallenged by NASA staff in Washington, D.C., reflecting "the lack of an effective cost and programmatic analysis capability at headquarters," the panel concluded.
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from BBC News Online
A number of penguin species found in western Antarctica are declining as a result of a fall in the availability of krill, a study has suggested. Researchers, examining 30 years of data, said chinstrap and Adelie penguin numbers had been falling since 1986.
Warming waters, less sea-ice cover and more whale and seal numbers were cited as reducing the abundance of krill, the main food source for the penguins. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) is a shrimp-like creature that reaches lengths of about 6cm (2in) and is considered to be one of the most abundant species on the planet, being found in densities of up to 30,000 creatures in a cubic-metre of seawater. It is also one of the key species in the ecosystems in and around Antarctica, as it is the dominant prey of nearly all vertebrates in the region, including chinstrap and Adelie penguins.
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from Popular Science
It all began so hopefully. Al Gore proposed the satellite in 1998, at the National Innovation Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gazing skyward from the podium, the vice president described a spacecraft that would travel a full million miles from Earth to a gravity-neutral spot known as the L1 Lagrangian point, where it would remain fixed in place, facing the sunlit half of our planet. It would stream back to NASA video of our spherical home, and the footage would be broadcast continuously over the Web.
Not only would the satellite provide "a clearer view of our world," Gore promised, but it would also offer "tremendous scientific value" by carrying into space two instruments built to study climate change: EPIC, a polychromatic imaging camera made to measure cloud reflectivity and atmospheric levels of aerosols, ozone and water vapor; and NISTAR, a radiometer. NISTAR was especially important. Out in deep space, it would do something that scientists are still unable to do today: Directly and continuously monitor the Earth's albedo, or the amount of solar energy that our planet reflects into space versus the amount it absorbs.
We know some things about the Earth's albedo. We know that solar radiation is both absorbed and reflected everywhere on Earth, by granite mountaintops in New Hampshire and desert dunes in Saudi Arabia. We know that cloud cover also reflects some of it. We also know that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are currently causing the planet to retain more solar energy than it once did. But there is much we don't know, because we don't have a way to directly and constantly monitor albedo on a global scale--that is, to directly observe a key indicator of global warming.
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from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
For years doctors have known that pregnant women with a short cervix face a higher risk of delivering their babies prematurely, a problem that costs the United States an estimated $26.2 billion a year and leads to the deaths of many infants. In Milwaukee, a city with one of America's highest rates of infant mortality, premature delivery is the No. 1 reason babies die before reaching their first birthday.
Up to now, though, doctors could do little to prevent early labor in women with a short cervix. Although some physicians have stitched the cervix in an attempt to prevent premature birth, others in the field say evidence that this helps is far from compelling.
But last week brought news that doctors could soon have an effective tool at their disposal that could lead to a significant reduction in preterm labor among this group of high-risk women.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
In 1688, an Irish polymath named William Molyneux wrote the English philosopher John Locke a letter in which he posed a vexing question: Could a blind person, upon suddenly gaining the ability to see, recognize an object by sight that he'd previously known by feel? The answer has potentially important implications for philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Now, researchers working with a medical charity that provides surgery to restore vision in blind children say they've found the answer to Molyneux's question. It's "no" but with a twist.
Molyneux posed his question in the midst of a philosophical debate about how we comprehend the world around us. An affirmative answer to the question would support the argument that we possess innate (and presumably God-given) concepts that are independent of the senses--for example, that we possess a concept of a sphere, regardless of whether we have only seen one, only felt one, or both. A negative answer to Molyneux's question would support the alternative argument that any concept of a sphere or other object must be tied to sensory experience. In that view, a blind person would have only a tactile concept of a sphere that would be of no use in recognizing the shape by sight.
For modern neuroscientists, Molyneux's question raises issues about how the brain integrates information from the different senses, says Richard Held, a professor emeritus of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. In search of the elusive answer, Held teamed up with MIT colleague Pawan Sinha, who founded an organization in 2003 to help blind children in India. Called Project Prakash, after the Sanskrit word for "light," the group collaborates with Indian surgeons who operate to restore sight in children who've been blind from cataracts or other curable causes.
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from Scientific American
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin did something no human had done before. On board the Vostok 1 spacecraft, Gagarin became the first person in space after rocketing into the sky from a launch site in Kazakhstan for a nearly two-hour flight. What is more, Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, a feat that the U.S. would not achieve until its third manned spaceflight, John Glenn's three-orbit flight on Friendship 7, February 20, 1962.
Fifty years later, both the space race--and the Cold War of which it was a part--have come to an end. The Soviet Union is no longer, but the Russian space program has become an invaluable partner to NASA's human spaceflight program. Over the past decade more than a dozen countries, including Russia and the U.S., have sent astronauts to the International Space Station, the longest-serving continuously manned orbital outpost in history. Meanwhile, China has built up a formidable program of its own, sending three manned missions into space since 2003.
But human exploration of the solar system has contracted in scope since 1972, when the last set of Apollo astronauts to visit the moon returned to Earth. Whereas the first 10 years following Gagarin's flight were peppered with firsts--notably the pioneering moon missions Apollo 8 and Apollo 11--the last four decades have witnessed little else but trips to and from low Earth orbit.
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from the Orlando Sentinel
CAPE CANAVERAL -- When space shuttle Atlantis returns from its final mission in July, it's coming home to stay at Kennedy Space Center. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made the announcement that the Visitors Center here will get to keep and display Atlantis for visitors and for the thousands of KSC workers who spent their careers launching the shuttles into orbit over the past three decades.
As expected, KSC won a nationwide sweepstakes to keep one of the three remaining active shuttles that have been the backbone of America's space program since 1981. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Brevard County, had pushed hard to keep Atlantis.
Bolden brought the good news to more than 500 cheering NASA officials and rank-and-file employees gathered outside KSC's orbiter maintenance facility--where Atlantis is being prepared for its final mission--for a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle launch. The announcement was preceded by a 15-minute video about the shuttle, the most complex machine ever built, narrated by William Shatner, and congratulations from the six crew members aboard the International Space Station.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Using a computer-controlled cadaver to simulate a pitcher on the mound, Boston researchers are gaining insights into the causes of baseball shoulder problems--which derail more major leaguers than just about any other injury.
In the study, the reanimated bodies duplicate the throwing motions of actual pitchers, but the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center scientists say their findings reach beyond professional baseball and may help countless weekend warriors, as well as high school and college athletes, recover from similar injuries or prevent them altogether.
Working in the shadow of Fenway Park, and with a grant from Major League Baseball, the researchers have found a common denominator that, they say, is a likely culprit in some of the most common shoulder injuries among pitchers--a misaligned scapula, better known as the shoulder blade.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
If Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson are right, here is what's in store for you and your avatar very soon, probably within the next five years:
1) Without leaving your living room or office, you'll sit at three-dimensional virtual meetings and classes, looking around the table or the lecture hall at your colleagues' avatars. 2) Your avatar will be programmed to make a better impression than you could ever manage.
3) While your avatar sits there at the conference table gazing alertly and taking notes, you can do something more important: sleep. Does this sound like future hype? Your first instinct may be to classify it with the old predictions--see World's Fair, 1964--that there would soon be a picturephone in every kitchen. It took half a century for video phone calls to become affordable and usable. But in their new book, Infinite Reality, Dr. Blascovich and Dr. Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in their virtual-reality laboratories in academia.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
TOKYO -- Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, meanwhile, called on the country to rebuild. While acknowledging the decision to raise the severity of the nuclear accident at Fukushima to the highest level, he took pains in a nationally televised speech on Tuesday evening to say that the reactors were being stabilized and to emphasize that radiation releases are declining.
The prime minister said he had ordered Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of Fukushima Daiichi, to present its plans and expectations for the stricken nuclear power plant. He also expressed concern about the economic consequences of the accident, calling on people across Japan to continue buying products from the affected areas of northeast Japan. Mr. Kan defended the government's record in releasing information.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Looking for a reason to not give up your coffee habit? Here's one possibility: heart health. Numerous studies in recent years have reported that drinking coffee may be good for the cardiovascular system and might even help prevent strokes. Just last month, Swedish researchers announced results of a large study showing that coffee seemed to reduce the risk of stroke in women by up to 25%.
Not long ago, researchers thought quite the opposite about coffee and the heart, says Dr. Thomas Hemmen, director of the UC San Diego Stroke Center: "Coffee is fun and it tastes good, so people assumed for many years that it would be bad for you."
Studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s offered little in the way of confirmation or refutation. Several suggested an increased risk of heart attack among coffee drinkers. Others showed a lowered risk of heart attack and stroke. Still others found no connection at all.
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from the Economist
Almost as soon as radios were invented, people speculated about using them to listen to--and maybe even talk to--extraterrestrial civilisations. Since the 1960s attempts have been made to do so by sifting through signals from outer space in search of alien chit-chat. More recently, the use of lasers in telecommunications has suggested to some that they might be a better way to communicate across vast distances, so searching for telltale flashes from the sky is now in vogue.
But techniques that work well on Earth are not necessarily ideal for talking across the vast chasms that separate stars. And for several years John Learned of the University of Hawaii and Anthony Zee of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been promulgating what they believe is a better idea.
They suggest that any alien civilisation worth its salt would alight not on the photons of the electromagnetic spectrum--whether optical or radio-frequency--to send messages to other solar systems. Rather, it would focus its attention on a different fundamental particle, one that is rather neglected by human technologists. That particle is the neutrino.
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from Nature News
Call it a flash of inspiration. A US Army team of pyrotechnics experts has discovered that a compound long dismissed as inert could replace the toxic metal currently used in green-coloured fireworks.
Chemist Jesse Sabatini and his colleagues at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, found that boron carbide matches the green-light-emitting performance of the barium-based compounds used in today's fireworks.
Replacing the barium with boron would cut the amount of toxic material released by fireworks. This is particularly important in places where displays take place every day, such as at theme parks, where the compounds can accumulate. However, it is army personnel who look set to benefit the most from the discovery. Pyrotechnics are used heavily by the military, in signal flares on the battlefield as well as on the training ground to simulate the explosions and gunfire of combat.
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from New Scientist
Psychedelic drug users throughout the ages have described their experiences as mind-expanding. They might be surprised, therefore, to hear that psilocybin--the active ingredient in magic mushrooms--actually decreases blood flow as well as connectivity between important areas of the brain that control perception and cognition.
The same areas can be overactive in people who suffer from depression, making the drug a potential treatment option for the condition.
The study is the first time that psilocybin's effects have been measured with fMRI, and the first experiment involving a hallucinogenic drug and human participants in the UK for decades.
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