Science

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  • Prevalence of Consensual Male–Male Sex and Sexual Violence, and Associations with HIV in South Africa: A Population-Based Cross-Sectional Study

    PLOS Medicine: New Articles
    Kristin L. Dunkle et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Kristin L. Dunkle, Rachel K. Jewkes, Daniel W. Murdock, Yandisa Sikweyiya, Robert Morrell Background In sub-Saharan Africa the population prevalence of men who have sex with men (MSM) is unknown, as is the population prevalence of male-on-male sexual violence, and whether male-on-male sexual violence may relate to HIV risk. This paper describes lifetime prevalence of consensual male–male sexual behavior and male-on-male sexual violence (victimization and perpetration) in two South African provinces, socio-demographic factors associated with these experiences, and associations with HIV…

  • Statistics and Magnetic Socks Shape Modern Tae Kwon Do

    Scientific American
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:30 am
    This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service . [More]

  • Capturing music from the stars

    ZME Science
    Tibi Puiu
    14 Jun 2013 | 8:01 am
    Musica Universalis or Music of the Spheres is an philosophical concept which portrays the proportions in the movement of the celestial bodies – the sun, planets, stars and so on – as a form of music. These observable patterns aren’t quite musical, since they lack harmony, but the idea itself has influenced a great of artists, namely musicians in this case. However, is it possible to take this concept literally? Can stars create music? The short answer would be yes, and a fantastic project initiated by Gerhard Sonnert, a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center…

  • How to fit 1,000 terabytes on a DVD

    ScienceAlert - Latest Stories
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:00 am
    A new technique will allow a single DVD to store around 10.6 years of high definition video.

  • Image Influence: Placing Pictures for Maximum Impact

    Neuromarketing
    John Carvalho
    11 Jun 2013 | 5:14 am
    There’s an idea from cognitive psychology called cognitive fluency that has been making the rounds in the business world lately. The idea is simple enough: as human beings, we prefer that which is easy for us to understand and process.
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    Scientific American

  • D-Wave's Quantum Computer Courts Controversy

    19 Jun 2013 | 10:00 am
    “I've been doing combative stuff since I was born,” says Geordie Rose, leaning back in a chair in his small, windowless office in Burnaby, Canada, as he describes how he has spent most of his life making things difficult for himself. Until his early 20s, that meant an obsession with wrestling -- the sport that, he claims, provides the least reward for the most work. More recently, says Rose, now 41, “that's been D-Wave in a nutshell: an unbearable amount of pain and very little recognition”. [More]

  • Particle Containing 4 Quarks Is Confirmed for First Time

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:45 am
    Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Z c (3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter. [More]

  • Channel Surfing: Are Dry Ice Sleds Carving the Surface of Mars?

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:30 am
    Some things are uniquely Martian. And dry ice hovercraft may be one of them. [More]

  • California Set to Lift Restrictions on Egg Donation

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:30 am
    California is set to pass a bill that would allow payments over and above 'direct expenses' to be made to women who donate eggs for research. The bill promises to increase the supply of eggs to scientists studying reproduction, but will not eliminate restrictions on research supported by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San Francisco, a major funder of stem-cell research in the state.  [More]

  • Statistics and Magnetic Socks Shape Modern Tae Kwon Do

    19 Jun 2013 | 8:30 am
    This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service . [More]
 
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    Popular Science

  • Counterpoint: The U.S. Could Totally Kill Edward Snowden With A Drone Strike

    David Hambling
    19 Jun 2013 | 10:00 am
    A panoramic view of the Hong Kong skyline taken from a path around Victoria Peak Photo by David Iliff via Wikimedia Commons Here's how In a recent PopularScience.com post, contributing writer Kelsey Atherton suggests that Edward Snowden is at no risk from a U.S. drone strike in Hong Kong because of Chinese air defenses and the risk of collateral damage in the densely populated city. It's true that a strike by a Predator or Reaper drone, which can't penetrate air defenses and cause significant collateral damage with standard weapons, could be ruled out-but the military and the CIA have plenty…

  • A Cocktail Scientist Debunks Myths About Ice Cubes

    Paul Adams
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:30 am
    Ice Cubes Nattu The cold, hard facts True or false?: Ice cubes get cloudy because of mineral impurities. True or false?: Larger ice cubes melt more slowly than small ones. True or false?: Shaking a martini "bruises the gin." Many of us use ice every day, and soon we start to think we know all there is to know about it. When to shake, when to stir, the difference between one big cube in a drink versus lots of little ones, and so forth. But Kevin Liu, who is one fifth of Science Fare, has published a very fine guide to how we don't know as much as we think we do. Liu's article goes into the…

  • How Surveillance Has Evolved In The United States [Timeline]

    Joey Carmichael, additional reporting by Pavithra Mohan
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:00 am
    History of Wiretapping President George W. Bush signs the Patriot Act. Wikimedia Commons With PRISM, the tradition of surveillance in America only grows. Here is an interactive timeline. Americans have been spying on each other since the earliest days of the republic. This interactive timeline is an attempt to highlight some of the most important events in that history, though it is by no means comprehensive: each event, in turn, has its own string of relevant events, nearly ad infinitum. Still, one spin through this timeline demonstrates that the most recent NSA scandal is far from unheard…

  • What Makes You Want To Click This?

    Shaunacy Ferro
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:30 am
    News.com.au Reader Preferences Courtesy University of Bristol A University of Bristol study tells us the biggest rule of clickbait: No one wants to read about finance. It's the holy grail of Internet journalism: The click. How can I persuade you, in a few capitalized words, that this article will be worth the load time? According to a new study from researchers at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory, the answer lies in using "sentimentally charged language" and skewing toward entertainment and crime. The study looked at which stories were placed in the "Top Stories" and…

  • A Brief History Of The Demise Of Battle Bots

    Kelsey D. Atherton
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:00 am
    Razer, a modern day wedge-scorpion hybrid Alex Healing, via Wikimedia Commons Blame the wedges! Robot battling was poised to become a true sport of the future. It had all the right elements: mad science, gladiatorial combat, plucky garage inventors, and televised action. So what killed it? A brutally effective, utterly simple machine called the wedge bot. The wedge-style bot killed robot wars because it was invincible, which in the end made it boring. Yesterday SB Nation published a fascinating full history of BattleBots, which is a great, though giant, read. But the mechanical evil that is…
 
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    Futurity.org

  • Dyslexia: Not the only reading disorder

    Joan Brasher-Vanderbilt
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:06 am
    VANDERBILT (US) — A lesser-known but common reading comprehension disorder, S-RCD, can easily be missed in early readers, experts warn. Dyslexia, a reading disorder in which a child confuses letters and struggles with sounding out words, has been the focus of much reading research. But that’s not the case with the lesser known disorder Specific Reading Comprehension Deficits (S-RCD), in which a child reads successfully but does not sufficiently comprehend the meaning of the words, according to lead investigator Laurie Cutting of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of…

  • After lung transplant, diabetes ups death risk

    Emily Walker-Monash
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:00 am
    MONASH U. (AUS) — Lung transplant patients without diabetes live twice as long as those with the disease, according to new research. The findings suggest that better management of diabetes could dramatically improve outcomes for lung transplant patients.

  • How fruit flies say no to extra-salty food

    George Foulsham-UC Santa Barbara
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:57 am
    UC SANTA BARBARA (US) — New research explains how an animal chooses low salt over high salt, and unravels the mechanism for how their gustatory receptor neurons get activated. Craig Montell, professor of molecular, cellular, and development biology and neuroscience, and his team have been studying the mechanisms underlying salt taste coding of Drosophila (fruit flies).

  • Why protestors in Taksim Square turned to Twitter

    James Devitt-NYU
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:54 am
    NYU (US) — As anti-government protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square intensified in May, demonstrators turned heavily to social media to draw attention to their cause, but in a markedly different way than the Arab Spring protests of 2011.A new study found that over a 24-hour period in late May “at least 2 million tweets mentioning hashtags related to the protest, such as #direngeziparkı (950,000 tweets), #occupygezi (170,000 tweets) or #geziparki (50,000 tweets) have been sent.” “What is unique about this particular case is how Twitter is being used to spread information…

  • Lemur personalities vary from shy to ‘mean as sin’

    Robin Smith-Duke
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:07 am
    DUKE (US) — Scientists have found distinct personalities in grey mouse lemurs, the saucer-eyed primates native to Madagascar.Anyone who has ever owned a pet will tell you that it has a unique personality. Yet only in the last 10 years has the study of animal personality started to gain ground with behavioral ecologists, says Jennifer Verdolin of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. In a study published in the journal Primates, Verdolin gave fourteen gray mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) living at the Duke University Lemur Center a personality test.
 
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    Science 2.0

  • Sugar Molecule, You Have A Long-Distance Call

    News Account
    19 Jun 2013 | 10:01 am
    Glycoproteins are sugar-protein hybrid molecules that the protective mucus that lines our lungs and stomach and are also part of the fluid that lubricates our joints, the synovial fluid, and cover all our cells, with the sugar parts, the glycans, sticking out like a tiny forest of antennae.  Researchers at ETH Zurich and Empa have also identified a surprising effect that glycans have on the water molecules that surround them. read more

  • The Contribution Of Particulate Matter To Forest Decline

    News Account
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:30 am
    Air pollution is related to forest decline and also appears to attack the protecting wax on tree leaves and needles, say scientists who have now discovered a responsible mechanism: particulate matter salt compounds that become deliquescent because of humidity and form a wick-like structure that removes water from leaves and promotes dehydration.  Wax helps to protect leaves and needles from water loss. read more

  • No Danger Of Cancer Through Gene Therapy Virus AAV-LPL S447X

    News Account
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:00 am
    In the fall of 2012, the European Medicines Agency approved the modified adeno-associated virus AAV-LPL S447X as the first ever gene therapy for clinical use in the Western world. AAV-LPL S447X was developed for the treatment of a rare inherited metabolic disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency which affects approximately 1-2 out of 1,000,000 people. Though incredibly rare, the disease causes severe, life-threatening inflammations of the pancreas. Afflicted individuals carry a defect in the gene coding for the lipoprotein lipase enzyme which is necessary for breakdown of fatty acids.

  • Unusual Supernova SN 2011fe - Move Along, Nothing To See Here

    News Account
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:22 am
    In August of 2011, astronomers witnessed the dazzling appearance of the closest and brightest Type Ia supernova since Type Ia's were established as the "standard candles" for measuring the expansion of the universe. The visual of SN 2011fe was caught by the Palomar Transient Factory less than 12 hours after it exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in the Big Dipper. Because it was to see through binoculars, 2011fe was soon dubbed the Backyard Supernova. Major astronomical studies from the ground and from space followed close on its heels, recording its luminosity and colors as it rapidly brightened…

  • The Elusive H7N9 Virus: Chinese Researchers Predict Future Pandemic

    jenwong
    18 Jun 2013 | 5:38 pm
    Since February 2013, China experienced an outbreak of the novel H7N9 avian flu, causing 131 cases of infection, and a death toll of 39. This particular H7N9 strain is considered to be one of the most worrisome pathogens since the H5N1 pandemic in 1997; a reputation based on the virus’ ability to spread easily across species and to infect humans. According to the May 23, 2013 Science paper published by the Joint Influenza Research Centre (State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Shantou PR, China), Drs. Y. Guan and Y. Shu reported that H7N9 infects the upper respiratory tract of…
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    Sciencebase Science Blog

  • Guiding pledge 2.0 dismisses God and the Queen

    David Bradley
    19 Jun 2013 | 12:35 am
    Apparently, the Guiding Movement is to upgrade its pledge that all members must make when they join. Currently they vow to: "to love my God, to serve my Queen and my country" That obviously only applies to people of faith and those with a female monarch…and indeed compromises the integrity of those girls without fixed national domicile. So, after consultation the century-old organisation is planning a bit of a rewording, dropping references to both spiritual and earthly autocrats as well as geography it seems. The pledge will now contain the line: "be true to myself and…

  • Life on the rocks

    David Bradley
    18 Jun 2013 | 3:17 am
    Life on the rocks, unlike love on the rocks, is a surprise… In the beginning… …there was a barren spinning ball of rock, with a hot, molten core, hurtling through space around a distant, but warming fusion reactor. But the spinning ball was not alone on its journey – there were countless misshapen chunks of rock and ice and frozen gases in its vicinity, many with eccentric orbits around the central fusion reactor. These comets and other solar debris could skim past or shift in their orbits at the whim of great balls of gas and rock, although always ruled by the laws of the…

  • What do you do if you’ve got osteoarthritis of the knee?

    David Bradley
    11 Jun 2013 | 3:49 am
    Film director Baz Luhrmann made a spoof graduation speech famous with his hit “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” back in 1999. At the time, I wasn’t particularly worried about the line in that track: “Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.” But, you get older, knees become more of a focus, so what are you to do if you suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee (thankfully, I don’t…yet). According to SBM, here’s what a massive scientific review of the various possible treatments has to say: Exercise – strong…

  • Say my name, say my name

    David Bradley
    9 Jun 2013 | 1:12 pm
    Successful companies have solid brand names we recognise wherever we are in the world and they rarely change them – Coca Cola, Microsoft, Apple, Gap. Of course, there are successful companies that do re-brand, although usually when bigger companies subsume and split them up, think Imperial Chemical Industries, which was commonly known as ICI, which eventually became AstraZeneca and various other firms. Then, there was the ludicrous attempt by Britain’s state-owned “Royal Mail” to rebrand itself for the “modern” age as “Consignia. And, who could forget…

  • Dietary DMAA, dimethylamylamine, death

    David Bradley
    7 Jun 2013 | 2:58 am
    DMAA was originally a decongestant but has been marketed as a “dietary supplement”. It’s dodgy, it seems, to say the least, and the US Food & Drug Administration does not allow its legal sale as a food supplement. Here’s what Andrey Pavlov doggedly had to say about DMAA in a recent Science-based Medicine post: “…there is no reasonable way that DMAA can be considered a natural or safe product for sale as a supplement under the DSHEA (US Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act). And even if it did meet DSHEA requirements, this is an excellent example…
 
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    Newswise: SciNews

  • Structure from Disorder

    Scripps Research Institute
    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    In this week's issue of Nature, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute report their discovery of an important trick that a well-known intrinsically disordered protein uses to expand and control its functionality.

  • Scientists Reach Milestone for Quantum Networks

    Georgia Institute of Technology
    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    Using clouds of ultra-cold atoms and a pair of lasers operating at optical wavelengths, researchers have reached a quantum network milestone: entangling light with an optical atomic coherence composed of interacting atoms in two different states.

  • Validating Maps of the Brain's Resting State

    Vanderbilt University
    19 Jun 2013 | 10:00 am
    A team of Vanderbilt researchers has provided important validation of maps of the brain at rest that may offer insights into changes in the brain that occur in neurological and psychiatric disorders.

  • Experts Needed: 1) SCOTUS Decisions on DOMA and Prop 8 Imminent 2) Uprising in Turkey 3) G8 Summit 4) NSA Surveillance Debate

    Newswise
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:35 am

  • ASU Professor Named Ecological Society of America Fellow

    Arizona State University
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:35 am
    The Ecological Society of America has named Osvaldo Sala, an Arizona State University professor of life sciences and sustainability, as a 2013 Fellow. Sala is also a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, where he researches human-environment interactions. He is an expert in biodiversity scenarios and his work appears in more than 180 peer-reviewed publications.
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    Neuromarketing

  • German & Japanese Brainfluence

    Roger Dooley
    18 Jun 2013 | 6:50 am
    The global reach of Brainfluence is getting a boost. Japanese rights have been sold by Wiley, joining the Korean and Simplified Chinese versions in the Asian marketplace. Publication dates for the Japanese and Chinese versions aren’t yet known (at least by me) – if any Neuromarketing readers spots one of these in the wild, please [...]

  • Image Influence: Placing Pictures for Maximum Impact

    John Carvalho
    11 Jun 2013 | 5:14 am
    There’s an idea from cognitive psychology called cognitive fluency that has been making the rounds in the business world lately. The idea is simple enough: as human beings, we prefer that which is easy for us to understand and process.

  • Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff

    Roger Dooley
    27 May 2013 | 10:34 am
    Book Review: Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal by Oren Klaff Oren Klaff is an investment banker and deal-maker who, by his own account, has spent more than ten thousand hours developing a “neurofinance” approach to presentations and deal-making. Klaff uses a variety of brain-based techniques to control the [...]

  • Brilliant Billboard Traps 230,000 Real Bugs

    Roger Dooley
    14 May 2013 | 5:32 am
    How do you promote a new outdoor insect spray, Orphea, on a billboard in Milan? This clever effort turned the portion of the corresponding to the “spray” from a pictured can into a giant piece of fly paper. Over a period of days, the sticky trap captured hundreds of thousands of real insects. Watch the [...]

  • Neuromarketing Meets Conversion Optimization: Free Webinar

    Roger Dooley
    9 May 2013 | 6:20 am
    Next week, conversion optimization expert Chris Goward and I will be doing a joint webinar: Neuromarketing Meets Conversion Optimization: Brainy Profit Boosters. I was excited to set this up with Chris, who’s the author of You Should Test That. Testing is critical. In nearly every speech I give, I include a quote from ad legend [...]
 
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    Games with Words

  • Keeping up to date

    GamesWithWords
    18 Jun 2013 | 7:00 am
    Recently, we've added several methods of keeping up to date on GamesWithWords.org projects (finding out when results of old studies are available, when new studies are posted, etc.). In addition to following this blog, that is. 1. Join the GamesWithWords.org Google Group for occasional (5x/year) email updates. 2. Follow @gameswithwords on Twitter. 3. Like our Facebook page.

  • Citizen Science: Rinse & Repeat

    GamesWithWords
    13 Jun 2013 | 6:00 am
    One of the funny things about language is that everybody has their own. There is no "English" out there, existing independently of all its speakers. Instead, there are about one billion people out there, all of whom speak their own idiolect. Most likely, no two people share exactly the same vocabulary (I know some words you might not, possibly including idiolect, and you know some words I don't). Reasonable people can disagree about grammar rules, particularly if one is from Florida and the other from Northern Ireland. This is one of the reasons we decided to ask people to create usernames in…

  • What makes a sentence ungrammatical?

    GamesWithWords
    11 Jun 2013 | 7:31 am
    This is the latest in a series of posts explaining the scientific motivations for the VerbCorner project. There are many sentences that are grammatical but don't make much sense, including Chomsky's famous “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” and sentences which seemed perfectly interpretable but are grammatical, such as “John fell the vase” or “Sally laughed Mary” (where the first sentence means that John caused the vase to fall, and the second sentence means that Sally made Mary laugh). You can hit at a window or kick at a window but not shatter at a window or break at a…

  • Bad Evolutionary Arguments

    GamesWithWords
    31 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    The introductory psychology course I teach for is very heavy on evolutionary psychology. The danger with evolutionary explanations is that it's pretty easy to come up with bad ones. Here's the best illustration I've seen, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: How do you tell a good evolutionary argument from a bad one? It's hard to test them with experiments, but that doesn't mean you can't get data. Nice supporting evidence would be finding another species that does the same thing. This hypothesis makes the clear -- and almost certainly false -- prediction that people are likely to adopt…

  • Citizen Science Project: Likely Events

    GamesWithWords
    29 May 2013 | 7:11 am
    VerbCorner was our first step towards opening up the rest of the process. I have just opened up a new good to segment of the website called “Experiment Creator”, which is our second endeavor. Experiment Creator One of the most important parts of language experiments is choosing the stimuli. For many types of research, such as in many low level or mid-level vision projects, the experimenter has free reign to design essentially what ever stimuli they like. Language researchers are constrained by the fact that someone suggest other words don't, and each word that has the properties you want…
 
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    Mind Hacks

  • Is social psychology really in crisis?

    tomstafford
    18 Jun 2013 | 7:13 am
    My latest ‘behind the headlines’ column for The Conversation. Probably all old news for you wised-up mindhacks.com readers, but here you go: The headlines Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology Replication studies: Bad copy The story Controversy is simmering in the world of psychology research over claims that many famous effects reported in the literature aren’t reliable, or may even not exist at all. The latest headlines follow the publication of experiments which failed to replicate a landmark study by Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis. These experiments are…

  • An unrecognised revolution in street drug design

    vaughanbell
    16 Jun 2013 | 4:31 am
    I’ve got an article in The Observer about the ongoing but little recognised revolution in street drug design being pushed forward by the ‘legal high’ market. Since 2008 we’ve seen the first genuine wave of ‘designer drugs’ that are being produced by science-savvy professional labs that are deliberately producing substances to avoid drug laws. New substances are appearing at a rate of more than one-a-week and some are completely new to science. The article looks at how the clandestine labs are creating these new highs and what this almost impossible to…

  • A radio guide to global mental health

    vaughanbell
    16 Jun 2013 | 3:56 am
    The BBC World Service is in the midst of an excellent series on global mental health – called The Truth About Mental Health. It is currently half-way through and is remarkably well done, looking at everything from the war in Syria, to the effects of solitary confinement, to treatment in developing countries. The programme also takes a considered look at the important question of whether mental illness is universal or whether it is tightly bound to the culture in which we live. You can get the episode guide and streaming audio from this page but because the BBC is a bit rubbish at the…

  • Protect your head – the world is complex

    vaughanbell
    13 Jun 2013 | 10:42 am
    The British Medical Journal has a fascinating editorial on the behavioural complexities behind the question of whether cycling helmets prevent head injuries. You would think that testing whether helmets prevent bikers from head injury would be a fairly straightforward affair. Maybe putting a bike helmet on a crash test dummy and throwing rocks at its head. Or counting how many cyclists with head injuries were wearing head protection – but it turns out to be far more complicated. The piece by epidemiologist Ben Goldacre and risk scientist David Spiegelhalter examines why the social and…

  • When giving reasons leads to worse decisions

    tomstafford
    11 Jun 2013 | 1:37 am
    We’re taught from childhood how important it is to explain how we feel and to always justify our actions. But does giving reasons always make things clearer, or could it sometimes distract us from our true feelings? One answer came from a study led by psychology professor Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, which asked university students to report their feelings, either with or without being asked to provide reasons. What they found revealed just how difficult it can be to reliably discern our feelings when justifying our decisions. Participants were asked to evaluate five…
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    ScienceBlogs

  • Student guest post: Are parasites causing a rise in the global HIV epidemic? [Aetiology]

    Tara C. Smith
    18 Jun 2013 | 10:49 am
    Student guest post by Carrie Ellsworth During the summer of 2010 I spent two months in Ghana studying a parasite called schistosomiasis. We worked in a small town called Adasawase to determine prevalence and treat the schoolchildren who were infected. We were told that schistosomiasis was not a major health concern for the people in the town because they were often faced with other diseases that had more immediate and severe health consequences than a parasitic infection. It became apparent that if we wanted the people of this small town to take this health threat seriously, we needed to…

  • What do flies, fish, mice and worms have to do with biomedical science? [Life Lines]

    Dr. Dolittle
    18 Jun 2013 | 10:15 am
      Image of common model organisms from European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). A recent article posted in the BBC News provided a good explanation of why scientists commonly study these organisms as models for human diseases and conditions. Model organisms are chosen because their physiology is similar to other animals, including humans, in addition to other reasons: Visit the BBC News to see why researchers most often use flies, fish, mice and worms to understand the mechanisms of disease and health. Did you know that ~70% of the genes in a fruit fly are homologous to…

  • How high can the sea level rise if all the glacial ice melted? [Greg Laden's Blog]

    Greg Laden
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:24 am
    There have been times in the past when there was very little ice trapped in glaciers. During this time, sea levels were higher because that water was in the ocean (most of it, anyway). It has been a long time since then. However, with global warming, more and more glacial ice is returning to the sea and this contributes to sea level rise. The amount of fossil carbon that needs to be released into the atmosphere to cause most of the glacial ice to melt is not known. We can’t directly use ancient time periods to assess modern sea level rise by measuring the sea levels from those periods…

  • Do the creationist shuffle and twist! [Pharyngula]

    PZ Myers
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:20 am
    Don’t you hate it when you get up in the morning and the first thing you read on the internet is that the news that your entire career has been a waste of time, your whole field of study has collapsed, and you’re going to have to rethink your entire future? Happens to me all the time. But then, I read the creationist news, so I’ve become desensitized to the whole idea of intellectual catastrophes. Today’s fresh demolition of the whole of evolutionary theory comes via Christian News, which reports on a paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution which…

  • Quasi Poll: Most Needed Pop-Science Biography? [Uncertain Principles]

    Chad Orzel
    18 Jun 2013 | 8:33 am
    I’ve got a ton of stuff that needs to get done this week, but I don’t want the blog to be completely devoid of new content, so here’s a quasi-poll question for my wise and worldly readers: What scientist is most in need of a good popular biography? By “popular biography,” I mean things like Norton’s Great Discoveries books, several of which Ive reviewed here, including Krauss on Feynman and Reeves on Rutherford, two books that I keep coming back to for useful tidbits. These aren’t deep works of historical scholarship, and don’t necessarily…
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    NPR

  • The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, Of A Beetle For A Beer Bottle

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:21 am
    What's that beetle doing to that beer bottle? The beetle dropped down from the sky, grabbed the bottle's bottom, keeps hugging and hugging it, even when being attacked by ants, and it won't — refuses to — let go. It can't be the beer it's after. The beer is at the other end. What's going on?» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

  • Animal CSI: Inside The Smithsonian's Feather Forensics Lab

    19 Jun 2013 | 12:16 am
    A keen eye and extensive knowledge of feathers allows forensic ornithologist Carla Dove (yes, that's her name) figure out from feather and bone fragments which type of bird crashed into a plane or was eaten by a snake. But the expertise has an uncertain future.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

  • How To Make Museums More Inviting For Kids With Autism

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:58 am
    A day at a museum promises fun for parents and kids alike. But for children who are on the autism spectrum, a seemingly simple museum exhibit may be too overwhelming to enjoy. Now, museums are coming up with ways to accommodate these visitors.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

  • Isn't That King David? Nope, It's Just Dave

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:32 am
    Take something old, familiar and classical, add denim, polyester and glasses, and watch what happens! Two French artists create a new form of time travel.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

  • How Men's Choice Of Mates May Have Led To Menopause

    18 Jun 2013 | 6:37 am
    Conventional wisdom holds that men prefer younger women as mates because they're more fertile than older women. But a mathematical analysis suggests that this preference may be the cause of menopause rather than a consequence of it.» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us
 
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    EE Times

  • The heart of responsible e-waste recycling

    19 Jun 2013 | 5:30 pm
    Electronic equipment can represent a serious threat to the environment, and the population, if disposed of incorrectly. View the full article HERE.

  • Imagination profit drops on R&D spend

    19 Jun 2013 | 3:16 pm
    Despite strong growth in customers' units shipped and revenues, profit declined at processor licensor Imagination in the 2013 financial year as it spent on R&D. View the full article HERE.

  • Hollywood, Silicon Valley quarrel over digital media

    19 Jun 2013 | 1:06 pm
    Old arguments simmered and sometimes erupted in the latest meeting of this odd married couple with its long, unsettled spats over copy protection and formats.View the full article HERE.

  • Nvidia to license graphics IP to other chip vendors

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:25 pm
    Offerings include the current Kepler GPU product family as well as the modem technology Nvidia acquired from Icera a few years back. View the full article HERE.

  • IoT will be next silver screen, says media exec

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:42 pm
    The Internet of Things could become the next big entertainment platform, said a media exec at a conference with Silicon Valley techies at Stanford.View the full article HERE.
 
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    PLOS Biology: New Articles

  • Watching Genes Loop the Loop

    Roland G. Roberts
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Roland G. Roberts

  • Transcription-Factor-Mediated DNA Looping Probed by High-Resolution, Single-Molecule Imaging in Live E. coli Cells

    Zach Hensel et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Zach Hensel, Xiaoli Weng, Arvin Cesar Lagda, Jie Xiao DNA looping mediated by transcription factors plays critical roles in prokaryotic gene regulation. The “genetic switch” of bacteriophage λ determines whether a prophage stays incorporated in the E. coli chromosome or enters the lytic cycle of phage propagation and cell lysis. Past studies have shown that long-range DNA interactions between the operator sequences OR and OL (separated by 2.3 kb), mediated by the λ repressor CI (accession number P03034), play key roles in regulating the λ switch. In vitro, it was demonstrated that…

  • Transdifferentiation of Fast Skeletal Muscle Into Functional Endothelium in Vivo by Transcription Factor Etv2

    Matthew B. Veldman et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Matthew B. Veldman, Chengjian Zhao, Gustavo A. Gomez, Anne G. Lindgren, Haigen Huang, Hanshuo Yang, Shaohua Yao, Benjamin L. Martin, David Kimelman, Shuo Lin Etsrp/Etv2 (Etv2) is an evolutionarily conserved master regulator of vascular development in vertebrates. Etv2 deficiency prevents the proper specification of the endothelial cell lineage, while its overexpression causes expansion of the endothelial cell lineage in the early embryo or in embryonic stem cells. We hypothesized that Etv2 alone is capable of transdifferentiating later somatic cells into endothelial cells. Using heat shock…

  • NKT Cell-TCR Expression Activates Conventional T Cells in Vivo, but Is Largely Dispensable for Mature NKT Cell Biology

    J. Christoph Vahl et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by J. Christoph Vahl, Klaus Heger, Nathalie Knies, Marco Y. Hein, Louis Boon, Hideo Yagita, Bojan Polic, Marc Schmidt-Supprian Natural killer T (NKT) cell development depends on recognition of self-glycolipids via their semi-invariant Vα14i-TCR. However, to what extent TCR-mediated signals determine identity and function of mature NKT cells remains incompletely understood. To address this issue, we developed a mouse strain allowing conditional Vα14i-TCR expression from within the endogenous Tcrα locus. We demonstrate that naïve T cells are activated upon replacement of their endogenous…

  • Parasites Affect Food Web Structure Primarily through Increased Diversity and Complexity

    Jennifer A. Dunne et al.
    11 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Jennifer A. Dunne, Kevin D. Lafferty, Andrew P. Dobson, Ryan F. Hechinger, Armand M. Kuris, Neo D. Martinez, John P. McLaughlin, Kim N. Mouritsen, Robert Poulin, Karsten Reise, Daniel B. Stouffer, David W. Thieltges, Richard J. Williams, Claus Dieter Zander Comparative research on food web structure has revealed generalities in trophic organization, produced simple models, and allowed assessment of robustness to species loss. These studies have mostly focused on free-living species. Recent research has suggested that inclusion of parasites alters structure. We assess whether such changes…
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    PLOS Computational Biology: New Articles

  • International Society for Computational Biology Honors David Eisenberg with 2013 Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award

    Christiana N. Fogg et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Christiana N. Fogg, Diane E. Kovats

  • Exploring Volatile General Anesthetic Binding to a Closed Membrane-Bound Bacterial Voltage-Gated Sodium Channel via Computation

    S. G. Raju et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by S. G. Raju, Annika F. Barber, David N. LeBard, Michael L. Klein, Vincenzo Carnevale Despite the clinical ubiquity of anesthesia, the molecular basis of anesthetic action is poorly understood. Amongst the many molecular targets proposed to contribute to anesthetic effects, the voltage gated sodium channels (VGSCs) should also be considered relevant, as they have been shown to be sensitive to all general anesthetics tested thus far. However, binding sites for VGSCs have not been identified. Moreover, the mechanism of inhibition is still largely unknown. The recently reported atomic…

  • Modelling Co-Infection with Malaria and Lymphatic Filariasis

    Hannah C. Slater et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Hannah C. Slater, Manoj Gambhir, Paul E. Parham, Edwin Michael Malaria and lymphatic filariasis (LF) continue to cause a considerable public health burden globally and are co-endemic in many regions of sub-Saharan Africa. These infections are transmitted by the same mosquito species which raises important questions about optimal vector control strategies in co-endemic regions, as well as the effect of the presence of each infection on endemicity of the other; there is currently little consensus on the latter. The need for comprehensive modelling studies to address such questions is…

  • Bioinformatics Goes to School—New Avenues for Teaching Contemporary Biology

    Louisa Wood et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Louisa Wood, Philipp Gebhardt Since 2010, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's (EMBL) Heidelberg laboratory and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have jointly run bioinformatics training courses developed specifically for secondary school science teachers within Europe and EMBL member states. These courses focus on introducing bioinformatics, databases, and data-intensive biology, allowing participants to explore resources and providing classroom-ready materials to support them in sharing this new knowledge with their students. In this article, we chart our progress…

  • Fibrin Networks Regulate Protein Transport during Thrombus Development

    Oleg V. Kim et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Oleg V. Kim, Zhiliang Xu, Elliot D. Rosen, Mark S. Alber Thromboembolic disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In the last several years there have been a number of studies attempting to identify mechanisms that stop thrombus growth. This paper identifies a novel mechanism related to formation of a fibrin cap. In particular, protein transport through a fibrin network, an important component of a thrombus, was studied by integrating experiments with model simulations. The network permeability and the protein diffusivity were shown to be important factors…
 
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    PLOS Genetics: New Articles

  • The Gene Desert Mammary Carcinoma Susceptibility Locus Mcs1a Regulates Nr2f1 Modifying Mammary Epithelial Cell Differentiation and Proliferation

    Bart M. G. Smits et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Bart M. G. Smits, Jill D. Haag, Anna I. Rissman, Deepak Sharma, Ann Tran, Alexi A. Schoenborn, Rachael C. Baird, Dan S. Peiffer, David Q. Leinweber, Matthew J. Muelbl, Amanda L. Meilahn, Mark R. Eichelberg, Ning Leng, Christina Kendziorski, Manorama C. John, Patricia A. Powers, Caroline M. Alexander, Michael N. Gould Genome-wide association studies have revealed that many low-penetrance breast cancer susceptibility loci are located in non-protein coding genomic regions; however, few have been characterized. In a comparative genetics approach to model such loci in a rat breast cancer model,…

  • Hooked and Cooked: A Fish Killer Genome Exposed

    Mark J. Banfield et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Mark J. Banfield, Sophien Kamoun

  • Multi-organ Abnormalities and mTORC1 Activation in Zebrafish Model of Multiple Acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase Deficiency

    Seok-Hyung Kim et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Seok-Hyung Kim, Sarah A. Scott, Michael J. Bennett, Robert P. Carson, Joshua Fessel, H. Alex Brown, Kevin C. Ess Multiple Acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase Deficiency (MADD) is a severe mitochondrial disorder featuring multi-organ dysfunction. Mutations in either the ETFA, ETFB, and ETFDH genes can cause MADD but very little is known about disease specific mechanisms due to a paucity of animal models. We report a novel zebrafish mutant dark xavier (dxavu463) that has an inactivating mutation in the etfa gene. dxavu463 recapitulates numerous pathological and biochemical features seen in patients with…

  • High Trans-ethnic Replicability of GWAS Results Implies Common Causal Variants

    Urko M. Marigorta et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Urko M. Marigorta, Arcadi Navarro Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have detected many disease associations. However, the reported variants tend to explain small fractions of risk, and there are doubts about issues such as the portability of findings over different ethnic groups or the relative roles of rare versus common variants in the genetic architecture of complex disease. Studying the degree of sharing of disease-associated variants across populations can help in solving these issues. We present a comprehensive survey of GWAS replicability across 28 diseases. Most loci and SNPs…

  • Meiosis-Specific Stable Binding of Augmin to Acentrosomal Spindle Poles Promotes Biased Microtubule Assembly in Oocytes

    Nathalie Colombié et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Nathalie Colombié, A. Agata Głuszek, Ana M. Meireles, Hiroyuki Ohkura In the oocytes of many animals including humans, the meiotic spindle assembles without centrosomes. It is still unclear how multiple pathways contribute to spindle microtubule assembly, and whether they are regulated differently in mitosis and meiosis. Augmin is a γ-tubulin recruiting complex which “amplifies” spindle microtubules by generating new microtubules along existing ones in mitosis. Here we show that in Drosophila melanogaster oocytes Augmin is dispensable for chromatin-driven assembly of bulk spindle…
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    PLOS ONE Alerts: New Articles

  • Comparison of Fibronectin and Collagen in Supporting the Isolation and Expansion of Endothelial Progenitor Cells from Human Adult Peripheral Blood

    Elena Colombo et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Elena Colombo, Francesca Calcaterra, Monica Cappelletti, Domenico Mavilio, Silvia Della Bella Background Endothelial colony-forming cells (ECFCs), are circulating endothelial progenitor cells increasingly studied in various diseases because of their potential for clinical translation. Experimental procedures for their ex vivo culture still lack standardization. In particular two different extracellular matrix proteins, either fibronectin or collagen, are commonly used by different Authors for coating plastic plates, both allowing to obtain cells that have all the features of ECFCs.

  • Bacterial Meningitis in Brazil: Baseline Epidemiologic Assessment of the Decade Prior to the Introduction of Pneumococcal and Meningococcal Vaccines

    Luciano Cesar Pontes Azevedo et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Luciano Cesar Pontes Azevedo, Cristiana M. Toscano, Ana Luiza Bierrenbach Background Bacterial meningitis is associated with significant burden in Brazil. In 2010, both 10-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and meningococcal capsular group C conjugate vaccine were introduced into the routine vaccination schedule. Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine was previously introduced in 1999. This study presents trends in demographics, microbiological characteristics and seasonality patterns of bacterial meningitis cases in Brazil from 2000 to 2010. Methods and Findings All meningitis cases…

  • An Eye to a Kill: Using Predatory Bacteria to Control Gram-Negative Pathogens Associated with Ocular Infections

    Robert M. Q. Shanks et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Robert M. Q. Shanks, Viral R. Davra, Eric G. Romanowski, Kimberly M. Brothers, Nicholas A. Stella, Dipti Godboley, Daniel E. Kadouri Ocular infections are a leading cause of vision loss. It has been previously suggested that predatory prokaryotes might be used as live antibiotics to control infections. In this study, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Serratia marcescens ocular isolates were exposed to the predatory bacteria Micavibrio aeruginosavorus and Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus. All tested S. marcescens isolates were susceptible to predation by B. bacteriovorus strains 109J and HD100. Seven of…

  • Spatiotemporal Segregation of Neural Response to Auditory Stimulation: An fMRI Study Using Independent Component Analysis and Frequency-Domain Analysis

    Natalia Yakunina et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Natalia Yakunina, Woo Suk Tae, Kang Uk Lee, Sam Soo Kim, Eui-Cheol Nam Although auditory processing has been widely studied with conventional parametric methods, there have been a limited number of independent component analysis (ICA) applications in this area. The purpose of this study was to examine spatiotemporal behavior of brain networks in response to passive auditory stimulation using ICA. Continuous broadband noise was presented binaurally to 19 subjects with normal hearing. ICA was performed to segregate spatial networks, which were subsequently classified according to their…

  • Regulation of Monocyte Adhesion and Migration by Nox4

    Chi Fung Lee et al.
    18 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Chi Fung Lee, Sarah Ullevig, Hong Seok Kim, Reto Asmis We showed that metabolic disorders promote thiol oxidative stress in monocytes, priming monocytes for accelerated chemokine-induced recruitment, and accumulation at sites of vascular injury and the progression of atherosclerosis. The aim of this study was to identify both the source of reactive oxygen species (ROS) responsible for thiol oxidation in primed and dysfunctional monocytes and the molecular mechanisms through which ROS accelerate the migration and recruitment of monocyte-derived macrophages. We found that Nox4, a recently…
 
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    PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases: New Articles

  • Pulmonary Infiltrates and Eosinophilia in a 25-Year-Old Traveler

    Jose Muñoz et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Jose Muñoz, Edelweiss Aldasoro, Maria Jesús Pinazo, Pedro Arguis, Joaquim Gascon

  • Reprogramming Neutral Lipid Metabolism in Mouse Dendritic Leucocytes Hosting Live Leishmania amazonensis Amastigotes

    Hervé Lecoeur et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Hervé Lecoeur, Emilie Giraud, Marie-Christine Prévost, Geneviève Milon, Thierry Lang Background After loading with live Leishmania (L) amazonensis amastigotes, mouse myeloid dendritic leucocytes/DLs are known to undergo reprogramming of their immune functions. In the study reported here, we investigated whether the presence of live L. amazonensis amastigotes in mouse bone marrow-derived DLs is able to trigger re-programming of DL lipid, and particularly neutral lipid metabolism. Methodology/Principal Findings Affymetrix-based transcriptional profiles were determined in C57BL/6 and DBA/2…

  • Antimicrobial Action of the Cyclic Peptide Bactenecin on Burkholderia pseudomallei Correlates with Efficient Membrane Permeabilization

    Kanjana Madhongsa et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Kanjana Madhongsa, Supaluk Pasan, Onanong Phophetleb, Sawinee Nasompag, Sompong Thammasirirak, Sakda Daduang, Suwimol Taweechaisupapong, Andrei L. Lomize, Rina Patramanon Burkholderia pseudomallei is a category B agent that causes Melioidosis, an acute and chronic disease with septicemia. The current treatment regimen is a heavy dose of antibiotics such as ceftazidime (CAZ); however, the risk of a relapse is possible. Peptide antibiotics are an alternative to classical antibiotics as they exhibit rapid action and are less likely to result in the development of resistance. The aim of this…

  • Familial Transmission of Human T-cell Lymphotrophic Virus: Silent Dissemination of an Emerging but Neglected Infection

    Carlos Araujo da Costa et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Carlos Araujo da Costa, Karen Cristini Yumi Ogawa Furtado, Louise de Souza Canto Ferreira, Danilo de Souza Almeida, Alexandre da Costa Linhares, Ricardo Ishak, Antonio Carlos Rosário Vallinoto, José Alexandre Rodrigues de Lemos, Luisa Caricio Martins, Edna Aoba Yassui Ishikawa, Rita Catarina Medeiros de Sousa, Maísa Silva de Sousa Background HTLV-1 is a retrovirus that causes lymphoproliferative disorders and inflammatory and degenerative diseases of the central nervous system in humans. The prevalence of this infection is high in parts of Brazil and there is a general lack of public…

  • Correlation between Dengue-Specific Neutralizing Antibodies and Serum Avidity in Primary and Secondary Dengue Virus 3 Natural Infections in Humans

    Andreas Puschnik et al.
    13 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    by Andreas Puschnik, Louis Lau, Elizabeth A. Cromwell, Angel Balmaseda, Simona Zompi, Eva Harris Although heterotypic secondary infection with dengue virus (DENV) is associated with severe disease, the majority of secondary infections are mild or asymptomatic. The mechanisms of antibody-mediated protection are poorly understood. In 2010, 108 DENV3-positive cases were enrolled in a pediatric hospital-based study in Managua, Nicaragua, with 61 primary and 47 secondary infections. We analyzed DENV-specific neutralization titers (NT50), IgM and IgG avidity, and antibody titer in serum samples…
 
 
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    Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

  • Firefox addon warns you about PRISM

    David Bradley
    15 Jun 2013 | 2:20 am
    A new Firefox add-on, called “Dark side of the Prism“, has been designed to warn Internet users who have installed it automatically when they visit websites of companies linked to the government surveillance system Prism. All users have to do is install the add-on in Firefox, it will work passively from that moment on. Once you visit a website of a company associated with Prism, it starts to play the song Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. It also displays a logo at the top right for a second or two before it vanishes. Well spotted Martin Brinkmann. Post from: David Bradley's…

  • Another dose of bizarre twitter bios

    David Bradley
    14 Jun 2013 | 7:50 am
    Once you have more than your significant other and half a dozen workmates and friends following you on twitter you will probably start to notice some of the sillier people on the social network begin to follow you. I cannot help but share some of the more amusing, puerile, unintelligible, spammy nonsense people put in their bios. Here are a few of the most recent new followers. Of course, you might look at my bio and think: “idiot”, but hey, you don’t have to follow me and if you’re not, you’re probably not reading this anyway… “Hcc church changed my…

  • Doubling up power on the road

    David Bradley
    6 Jun 2013 | 4:04 am
    The team at Innergie sent me an mMini DC10 for review, this their double USB in-car charger. Lets you power two USB devices at once in the car. Perfect for families with smart phones, satnavs and other gadgets, cuts down on the number of charging arguments and is compatible with iOS devices. Gives you dual power without the bulk of one of those bulky multi-adaptor-adaptors. There is little to tell other than to say it does what it says on the box and works well. 10 Watts and a blue LED to let you know it’s plugged into your “cigarette lighter” properly. Works with cameras,…

  • Dropbox introduces desktop screen capture and share

    David Bradley
    6 Jun 2013 | 12:31 am
    If you are using Dropbox on your phone or tablet as an application, you probably know that it can be configured to save screenshots that you take on the device automatically to the cloud. The screenshots that you take this way are all added to the camera uploads folder on your Dropbox storage from where they are synced to all devices that you use. The latest experimental build of Dropbox introduces the same feature to the desktop computer and will presumably roll out to all users soon. via Latest Dropbox build introduces screenshot sharing -. Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech…

  • Facebook… The musical

    David Bradley
    5 Jun 2013 | 3:38 am
    This very professionally made video with a real show tune and real singers cuts to the quick for fans of the social network and musical drama alike. Love that they snuck in a joke about pronouncing GIF, jif! One of the female singers has more than a passing resemblance to The Zuck though… Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech TalkFacebook… The musical Subscribe to our Email Newsletter Related Posts:BranchOut to get a new jobWho is Andy Sparks?Your online life is real life tooHardware password protection #meerkats11Not Google Plus !G+
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    FlowingData

  • Twitter trend detection algorithm

    Nathan Yau
    19 Jun 2013 | 6:56 am
    Stuff happens, and people tweet about it. Something major happens, and a lot of people tweet about it. Masters student Stanislav Nikolov and his adviser Devavrat Shah are working on ways to algorithmically detect the latter. People acting in social networks are reasonably predictable. If many of your friends talk about something, it's likely that you will as well. If many of your friends are friends with person X, it is likely that you are friends with them too. Because the underlying system has, in this sense, low complexity, we should expect that the measurements from that system are also…

  • Animation shows flow of attendees during a conference

    Nathan Yau
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:13 am
    When you go to a conference, there are typically several talks going on at the same time, and you can always tell there's a popular paper coming up when you see people leave a bunch of rooms at once and head straight into one. There's also the unfortunate case when someone speaks, and there's only a handful of people in the room, all in the back staring at their laptops. Open Data City visualized this activity during the German internet conference re: publica. Open Data City used MAC addresses and access point connections to keep track of where devices went. So a person might be in a room…

  • Non-statistician analysts are the new norm

    Nathan Yau
    17 Jun 2013 | 9:31 am
    As data grows cheaper and more easily accessible, the people who analyze it aren't always statisticians. They're likely to not even have had any statistical training. Biostatistics professor Jeff Leek says we need to adapt to this broader audience. What does this mean for statistics as a discipline? Well it is great news in that we have a lot more people to train. It also really drives home the importance of statistical literacy. But it also means we need to adapt our thinking about what it means to teach and perform statistics. We need to focus increasingly on interpretation and critique and…

  • The differences between a geek and a nerd

    Nathan Yau
    14 Jun 2013 | 8:59 am
    Curious about how people use "geek" and "nerd" to describe themselves and if there was any difference between the two terms, Burr Settles analyzed words used in tweets that contained the two. Settles used pointwise mutual information (PMI), which essentially provided a measure of the geekness or nerdiness of a term. The plot above shows the results. In broad strokes, it seems to me that geeky words are more about stuff (e.g., “#stuff”), while nerdy words are more about ideas (e.g., “hypothesis”). Geeks are fans, and fans collect stuff; nerds are practitioners, and practitioners play…

  • Sniffing out Paul Revere with basic social network analysis

    Nathan Yau
    13 Jun 2013 | 3:07 am
    It's just metadata. What can you do with that? Kieran Healy, a sociology professor at Duke University, shows what you can do, with just some basic social network analysis. Using metadata from Paul Revere's Ride on the groups that people belonged to, Healy sniffs out Paul Revere as a main target. Bonus points for writing the summary from the point of a view of an 18th century analyst. What a nice picture! The analytical engine has arranged everyone neatly, picking out clusters of individuals and also showing both peripheral individuals and—more intriguingly—people who seem to bridge…
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    Science Daily

  • Environmentally friendly battery made from wood

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:22 am
    Taking inspiration from trees, scientists have developed a battery made from a sliver of wood coated with tin that shows promise for becoming a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly energy source. The device is 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper.

  • What do memories look like?

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:21 am
    Scientists develop a way to see the structures that store memories in a living brain.

  • Antioxidant shows promise in Parkinson's disease

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:21 am
    Diapocynin, a synthetic molecule derived from a naturally occurring compound (apocynin), has been found to protect neurobehavioral function in mice with Parkinson's Disease symptoms by preventing deficits in motor coordination.

  • Unusual supernova is doubly unusual for being perfectly normal

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:21 am
    Type Ia supernovae are indispensable milestones for measuring the expansion of the universe. With definitive measures of Supernova 2011fe, the "Backyard Supernova" that thrilled amateur and professional astronomers alike in the summer of 2011, the Nearby Supernova Factory demonstrates that this unusually close-by Type Ia is such a perfect example of its kind that future Type Ia's -- and models meant to explain their physics -- must be measured against it.

  • The rhythm of the Arctic summer: Diverse activity patterns of birds during the Arctic breeding season

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:21 am
    Our internal circadian clock regulates daily life processes and is synchronized by external cues, the so-called Zeitgebers. The main cue is the light-dark cycle, whose strength is largely reduced in extreme habitats such as in the Arctic during the polar summer. Using a radiotelemetry system biologists have now found, in four bird species in Alaska, different daily activity patterns ranging from strictly rhythmic to completely arrhythmic.
 
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    The Why Files

  • 3-D printing: Wave of the future

    admin
    13 Jun 2013 | 9:22 pm
    Saved by the printer! If you’ve been wondering about 3-D printing, it’s probably for the same reason we are. On May 17, we learned that surgeons had placed a life-saving support — built on a 3-D printer — into the airway of Kaiba Gionfriddo. Alejandro Roldan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison holds a printed, 3-D model of a heart against its computer design, which was based on a patient’s MRI scan. The system, still under development, could be used to guide surgery to repair defective organs. Using the realistic, printed model, the surgeon can perform “virtual…

  • Comet explores sun!

    svmedaristwf
    6 Jun 2013 | 1:30 pm
    Lovejoy no killjoy: Comet cracks corona question! ENLARGE Modified from original graphic by Cooper Downs When Comet Lovejoy streaked past the sun, its tail formed a series of rapid squiggles as it was driven by the sun’s complex magnetic fields. Satellite images converted a chunk of ancient ice into a natural scientific instrument that reached where no artificial instrument will ever go. Those open magnetic fields drive the solar wind throughout the solar system. To explore the swirling magnetic fields surrounding our neighborhood star, scientists have press-ganged a “dirty…

  • Cancer genetics: Angelina Jolie’s decision

    svmedaristwf
    30 May 2013 | 12:29 pm
    A life-saving surgery raises profile of cancer genes Photo, fair use: Copyright held by the film company or the artist. Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. The movie was a smash-hit adaptation from a video game. On May 14, cinema super-star Angelina Jolie announced that she’d had a double mastectomy to prevent the family scourge of breast cancer. With a courageous and medically explicit discussion of her odds and her “medical choice” to remove both breasts, Jolie splashed the issues of cancer prevention and genetic testing for cancer across the front pages. Jolie…

  • The cockroach

    svmedaristwf
    23 May 2013 | 1:55 pm
    Eating organic? Roaches disdain key “junk-food” sweetener Video courtesy of Ayako Wada-Katsumata Even with fine doilies and silverware, “glucose-averse” roaches shun jelly. Their normal (“wild-type”) relatives cluster around the jelly, as you’d expect. About 30 years ago, many cockroach haters began to use baited traps that blended high-fructose corn syrup with insecticide. But within seven or eight years, the traps started losing their clout. “We first assumed that cockroaches were becoming resistant to insecticide, “says Coby Schal, a…

  • Toms River

    svmedaristwf
    21 May 2013 | 12:07 pm
    Toms River Dan Fagin • Bantam, 2013, 538 pp. In 1952, the Toms River Chemical Plant opened a vast factory in rural New Jersey, dedicated to making dyes based on a coal product, anthraquinone. Prized for bright, color-fast colors, the manufacturing process also produced prodigious streams of toxic waste. As the plant, eventually renamed Ciba after its owner, the Swiss chemical giant, prospered, streams of waste filtered into the sandy soil and reached the Atlantic through a leaky pipe. Less obvious at the time, a field of municipal water wells a mile or so from the plant fence were…
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    PhysOrg

  • Cheap, color, holographic video: Better holographic video displays

    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    Today in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT's Media Lab report a new approach to generating holograms that could lead to color holographic-video displays that are much cheaper to manufacture than today's experimental, monochromatic displays. The same technique could also increase the resolution of conventional 2-D displays.

  • Scientists find new source of versatility so 'floppy' proteins can get things done

    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    Many proteins work like Swiss Army knives, fitting multiple functions into their elaborately folded structures. A bit mysteriously, some proteins manage to multitask even with structures that are unfolded and floppy—"intrinsically disordered." In this week's issue of Nature, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) report their discovery of an important trick that a well-known intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) uses to expand and control its functionality.

  • Research says Mars had oxygen-rich atmosphere 4000 million years ago

    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    Differences between Martian meteorites and rocks examined by a NASA rover can be explained if Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere 4000 million years ago—well before the rise of atmospheric oxygen on Earth 2500 million years ago.

  • Study finds chemical behind cancer resistance in naked mole rats

    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    Two researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered the chemical that makes naked mole rats cancer-proof. Their research paper will be published this week in the journal Nature.

  • First entanglement between light and optical atomic coherence

    19 Jun 2013 | 11:00 am
    Using clouds of ultra-cold atoms and a pair of lasers operating at optical wavelengths, researchers have reached a quantum network milestone: entangling light with an optical atomic coherence composed of interacting atoms in two different states. The development could help pave the way for functional, multi-node quantum networks.
 
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    Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

  • New Clues Into Mystery of Mars Meteorites & Rocks Revealed

    19 Jun 2013 | 10:13 am
    Scientists are a step closer to reconciling a mystery on Mars, a cosmic oddity centered on Martian rocks and pieces of the Red Planet discovered on Earth.

  • HPV Vaccine Slashes Rate of Infected Teen Girls

    19 Jun 2013 | 10:04 am
    The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine appears to be having an early impact in the United States, reducing the percentage of teen girls infected with certain strains of the virus by more than half, a new study suggests.

  • Legend of Lost City Spurs Exploration, Debate

    19 Jun 2013 | 10:02 am
    Deep in the dense rain forests of Honduras, a glittering white city sits in ruins, waiting for discovery. The inhabitants there once ate off plates of gold; the metropolis was, perhaps, the birthplace of a god. A recent high-tech survey of the region by air reveals possible pyramids and other structures. Has the lost city of Ciudad Blanca been found? Or did it ever exist at all?

  • Robotic Arm Will Kick Your Butt at Air Hockey

    19 Jun 2013 | 9:51 am
    A new research project out of Japan has air hockey champions shaking in their sneakers. Researchers have developed a robotic arm that dominates the air hockey table with a killer combination of precise moves and long-term strategy.

  • TV's 'Futurama' Launches Final Episodes Tonight

    19 Jun 2013 | 8:52 am
    It's the end of the road yet again for "Futurama."
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    Nerdy Science Blog

  • The Top 5 US University Undergraduate Engineering Programs for International Students to Consider

    WTJ
    2 Jun 2013 | 8:17 pm
    International Students 101 According to the education website Braintrack.com, more than half of international students travel to the United States to study either business or engineering and technology. The vast majority of international students are from Asian nations, with China, India, Japan and South Korea contributing the highest numbers of students. While about 33 percent of students arrive to begin their studies as undergraduates, more often they arrive in order to attend graduate school to earn master’s and doctoral degrees in their respective fields. Applying to a American…

  • Kidney Transplant – Is Kidney Transplant Good For You?

    WTJ
    25 Mar 2013 | 4:26 am
    The transfer of a working kidney from a donor to someone, whose kidneys aren’t functioning properly, is known as a kidney transplant. This procedure is done to treat a kidney that has malfunctioned, and is replaced with a fully functional one. Kidney failure is majorly caused by diabetes, high blood pressure and Chronic glomerulonephritis, which is the scarring of the small filters in your kidney. Kidney failure can usually be treated with a strict diet, treatment and medicines for the base cause. If all these fail then the only option is to go for a kidney transplant. A kidney transplant…

  • Time Machine

    WTJ
    17 Feb 2013 | 10:21 am
    The sci-fi fantasy of time travel is fast becoming a reality. As such, it’s a great way to pull eager-minded youngsters into the sciences. The promise of potentially being the wo/man to travel through time has never been so close to reality. Growing up is about finding yourself and discovering who you are by seeing how you react to the trials and tribulations of life. But that’s all so taxing. Imagine if you could find yourself literally in the swirling milieu of time and space by traveling forward and seeing what kind of person you will eventually become. Time travel has been on the…

  • Forensic Science Training

    WTJ
    3 Feb 2013 | 10:01 pm
    Forensic science is a vital part of our justice system. The development of this field enables law enforcement officers to bring society’s dangerous criminals to justice. But further, it provides law enforcement officers the opportunity to provide answers to those who have experienced injustices in hopes that it brings them some sort of closure. The education necessary to achieve a forensics degree requires critical understanding of forensic science and technology, as well as problem solving skills. Aspirants must learn to think backwards; given the results, what are the causes? Forensic…

  • Are Students Addicted to Social Media?

    WTJ
    27 Jan 2013 | 8:17 am
    Social media is a way of social interaction between people, organizations and communities. It mediates human relation with different organizations and brings people together for dialogue. Social media has a significant role in society and today it has the power to influence thoughts of people and students are definitely no exception. In today’s scenario, the question “Are the students addicted to social media?” has a certain answer and that answer is yes. According to experts from SolidEssay.com, students feel connected to social media in any way and somehow they are addicted to it now.
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    Bitesize Bio

  • 6 Ways to Maximize the Lifetime of Your Reagents

    Jason Erk
    19 Jun 2013 | 4:13 am
    Reagents are expensive and are a significant cost to your lab. You know what to do to keep others from stealing your reagents. But contamination, improper storage and “lost” batches will all eat into your stock of reagents, bump up your consumables costs and waste your precious time. Unless you take steps to prevent them, that [...]

  • Scientific manuscripts: what constitutes authorship?

    Kirsten Hogg
    17 Jun 2013 | 9:25 am
    With ever increasing demands on researchers to publish, sometimes it feels like the whole world and their dog are vying for authorship on your latest manuscript. Appropriate and fair representation of those that contributed to sample collection, lab experiments and preparation of the manuscript is essential but can often be complex. So in this article [...]

  • A Quick Primer on Enzyme Kinetics

    Megan Cartwright
    11 Jun 2013 | 11:00 pm
    As biological catalysts, enzymes transform their target substrates into products. Enzyme kinetics is the rate of that transformation. By understanding how an enzyme’s behavior is affected, you can figure out how it functions in physiology or fails to function in disease. Now it gets complicated… What affects an enzyme’s kinetics? In the first place, most [...]

  • More Bad Laboratory Chemicals, and What They Do to You

    Megan Cartwright
    10 Jun 2013 | 4:51 am
    It’s all too easy to forget how many common lab chemicals are dangerous.   To remind you, I pulled together a list (and a few cautionary tales) of hazardous yet ubiquitous chemicals a few weeks back). It proved popular, so I’ve furthered my efforts to bring you even more chemicals that you should not be [...]

  • Talk to me: Good communication with your PhD supervisor / scientific advisor

    Joanne Kamens
    5 Jun 2013 | 5:29 am
    Few scientists in the training stage are lucky enough to have the perfect advisor (aka PhD supervisor PI, boss).  The reality is that most scientific advisors receive little to no training on how to be good mentors.  You may want to take a look at a companion post to this one called “Getting the Most [...]
 
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    PHD Comics

  • 06/17/13 PHD comic: 'The origin of the name'

    18 Jun 2013 | 11:43 am
    Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "The origin of the name" - originally published 6/17/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

  • 06/16/13 PHD comic: 'More Wisdom from my 3 Year Old'

    16 Jun 2013 | 1:19 am
    Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "More Wisdom from my 3 Year Old" - originally published 6/16/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

  • 06/10/13 PHD comic: 'Doing the Impossible'

    11 Jun 2013 | 2:54 am
    Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "Doing the Impossible" - originally published 6/10/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

  • 06/07/13 PHD comic: 'For vs. With'

    9 Jun 2013 | 6:07 pm
    Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "For vs. With" - originally published 6/7/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

  • 06/05/13 PHD comic: 'Friend Request'

    6 Jun 2013 | 11:21 am
    Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "Friend Request" - originally published 6/5/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!
 
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    Physics Today News Picks

  • Evidence of first four-quark particles

    Physics Today
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:58 am
    Nature: In combinations of two (mesons) and three (baryons), quarks are the building blocks of many other particles, but there is no reason why four or more quarks can’t combine. Such tetraquarks have been hypothesized to have existed in the period shortly after the Big Bang. Now, two different particle accelerators have found evidence of four-quark particles. The Belle detector at the KEK research institute in Japan and the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) at the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider in China, both of which collide electrons and positrons, have confirmed…

  • Damaged Kepler space telescope may find new use

    Physics Today
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:16 am
    New Scientist: Although the Kepler space telescope has been hobbled by the failure of two of its four reaction wheels, which help stabilize the craft in space, two researchers propose modifying its mission so that the telescope could continue to produce useful data. Since its launch in 2009, Kepler has discovered 132 exoplanets and more than 3000 other possible ones. Now Keith Horne of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and Andrew Gould of the Ohio State University propose that Kepler could alter its search: Instead of looking for planets inside a solar system’s snow line—close…

  • China’s Tianhe-2 is named world’s fastest supercomputer

    Physics Today
    19 Jun 2013 | 8:02 am
    Science: According to the top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, compiled by a team of researchers in the US and Germany, China’s Tianhe-2 is now number one. Able to perform at more than 33 petaflops (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second), Tianhe-2 has surpassed the US’s Titan, which topped the previous list at some 17 petaflops. Not only does China have the fastest machine, but it is also second in the world in total number of supercomputers, although its total of 66 machines lags well behind the US’s 252. Despite the fact that Tianhe-2 relies…

  • Graphene-based oscillator reaches the ultrahigh-frequency band

    Physics Today
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:28 am
    Ars Technica: Graphene is not a natural semiconductor, but it is attractive for use in electronics because it is only one atom thick and still lets electrons move through it. Some devices have been made using graphene, but they tend to perform at low levels because of current leakage. One such device is a ring oscillator, a circuit made of an odd number of NOT gates arranged in series, where the last gate feeds into the first, and the output is the opposite of the input. The frequency of the oscillations in the output can be used to measure the effectiveness of the circuit, and previous…

  • Subduction-zone birth may be happening off Portuguese coast

    Physics Today
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:15 am
    New Scientist: Subduction zones occur where one tectonic plate is forced under its neighbor until it melts into the mantle. If an ocean lies between the plates, subduction can cause it to be squeezed out of existence within a gigayear. How the zones form is uncertain because the rock involved appears to be too strong to break or be subducted. Now João Duarte at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues believe they have found an area off the southwestern coast of Portugal that is in the process of becoming a subduction zone. Portugal experienced major quakes in 1755 and…
 
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    Scienceray

  • The Healing Properties of St. John’s Wort

    30 May 2013 | 8:36 pm
    St. John’s Wort or Hypericum perforatum, is a yellow flowering plant that is a well-known folk remedy for treating emotional disorders.  Some believe that it rids the body of evil spirits.  It is one of the most used and one of the best-selling herbs in the United States.  The healing properties are both in the flowers and the leaves. St. John’s Wort is native to Europe and Southwestern Asia, but it can be found in the United States and Canada.  It is grown in Australia as a crop, providing 20% of the world’s supply. This is after it was once considered…

  • Kepler Spacecraft Stalled in Search for Exoplanets

    28 May 2013 | 8:29 pm
    If you visit NASA’s Kepler site, you will see that the most recent posts aren’t concerned with  new exoplanetary discoveries, but with the Kepler spacecraft itself. The computer aboard this tiny ship consistently returns itself to safe mode – rather like your home computer rebooting itself and restarting in a Windows safe mode. That Kepler’s computer system reboots itself is not a concern, but  a reward to the NASA scientists that designed it. Rather than waste precious fuel running in an error mode, Kepler shuts itself down to try and figure out the problem…

  • Bedbugs: One Thing You Don’t Want to Bring Back From Vacation

    28 May 2013 | 7:29 pm
      (BPT) – Before going on a trip, most of us are not thinking about what we’ll bring back with us other than souvenirs and digital snapshots. But with bed bug infestations on the rise in many travel destinations, it’s important to take precautions to avoid bringing these unwanted guests home. Bed bugs have been found in schools, homes, college dormitories and even the finest hotels. Protect yourself and your belongings when you’re traveling by learning to identify these globetrotting pests. Adult bed bugs are reddish-brown with small, flat, oval and wingless…

  • Avoid Foodborne Illness This Summer: Dining Outdoors – Tips for Keeping Food Safe and Delicious

    24 May 2013 | 11:03 am
    Institute of Food Technologists (Photo credit: Wikipedia) (BPT) – Al fresco dining is one of the great pleasures of warm weather. Whether you’re hosting a neighborhood barbecue or an intimate dinner party on your deck, outdoor dining is a great way to savor good food, company and the great outdoors. To ensure your meals are safe and enjoyable, it’s important to know how to prepare, transport and store food for outdoor eating. The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) offers some advice for safely handling food when you’re dining outdoors this summer: Purchasing Warm…

  • Kepler Telescope Reveals Stunning Exoplanet Population

    23 May 2013 | 7:47 pm
    Back in the 1980’s the late astronomer Carl Sagan’s phrase “billions of stars” caught the world’s imagination. Imagine – billions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. And now we know that there are billions of galaxies. That leads us to believe that there is an uncountable number of stars in the universe. A recent posting on NASA’s Kepler website puts the number of stars in our own Milky Way at 100 billion. And, based on data culled from the Kepler orbiting telescope, we now know that most of those stars are hosts to exoplanets. That’s at least…
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    Brain And Consciousness Research

  • Not really 'bath salts' -- paper provides update on 'designer stimulants'

    19 Jun 2013 | 12:00 am
    The last few years have seen the emergence of a new drug problem in so-called "bath salts" -- actually "designer stimulants," packaged and sold in ways that skirt drug laws. A review and update on these designer drugs is presented in the June Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

  • Seeing our errors keeps us on our toes

    19 Jun 2013 | 12:00 am
    If people are unable to perceive their own errors as they complete a routine, simple task, their skill will decline over time, Johns Hopkins researchers have found -- but not for the reasons scientists assumed. The researchers report that the human brain does not passively forget our good techniques, but chooses to put aside what it has learned.

  • Never forget a face? Researchers find women have better memory recall than men

    19 Jun 2013 | 12:00 am
    New research from McMaster University suggests women can remember faces better than men, in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it. And, researchers say a technique can help improve anyone's memories.

  • Brain imaging study eliminates differences in visual function as a cause of dyslexia

    18 Jun 2013 | 12:00 am
    A new brain imaging study of dyslexia shows that visual system differences do not cause the disorder, but instead are likely a consequence. "Our results confirm that differences in the visual system of children with dyslexia are the end-product of less reading, when compared with typical readers, and are not the cause of their struggles with reading," said Guinevere Eden, director, Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University; past-president, International Dyslexia Association.

  • Excessive Facebook use can damage relationships, study finds

    17 Jun 2013 | 12:00 am
    Russell Clayton, a doctoral student in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, found that individuals who use Facebook excessively are far more likely to experience Facebook-related conflict with their romantic partners, which then may cause negative relationship outcomes including emotional and physical cheating, breakup and divorce.
 
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    ZME Science

  • Albert Einstein’s secret to learning anything

    Tibi Puiu
    17 Jun 2013 | 11:42 am
    In 1915, a thirty-six year old Albert Einstein had just finished completing the two-page masterpiece that would revolutionize modern physics and catapult the struggling physicist into international fame and glory – the theory of general relativity. Before it was published though, Einstein paused for a moment and wrote a most heartfelt and considerate letter to his then 11-year old son Hans Albert, who was living with his estranged mother and little brother, Eduard “Tete” Einstein, in Vienna. The letter (featured below), like most of Einstein’s correspondence, shines of…

  • Russian tycoon wants to transfer the human mind to machines by 2045 and secure immortality

    Tibi Puiu
    17 Jun 2013 | 8:07 am
    This weekend, one of the most curious and utopian conferences took place in New York City, where some of the brightest minds in the field of neuroscience, biotechnology and robotics gathered to discuss the prospect of transferring the human brain and mind out of the biological body and into an artificial vessel. As oddball and SciFi as this might seem, at the conference, which was organized and financially backed-up by a most ambitious Russian multimillionaire, a clear schedule was outlined that seeks to meet this goal by 2045. 2020: humans will be able to remotely robots using our brains,…

  • Capturing music from the stars

    Tibi Puiu
    14 Jun 2013 | 8:01 am
    Musica Universalis or Music of the Spheres is an philosophical concept which portrays the proportions in the movement of the celestial bodies – the sun, planets, stars and so on – as a form of music. These observable patterns aren’t quite musical, since they lack harmony, but the idea itself has influenced a great of artists, namely musicians in this case. However, is it possible to take this concept literally? Can stars create music? The short answer would be yes, and a fantastic project initiated by Gerhard Sonnert, a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center…

  • Poverty might cause changes to the brain

    Tibi Puiu
    14 Jun 2013 | 7:16 am
    It’s rather clear that social-economic factors have a huge part to play in the development of an individual, but when discussing this we typically refer to education, something that can be more or less manipulated at any time, albeit with various degrees of difficulty. How do social-economic aspects affect the brain, though? Martha Farah, the founding director for Penn’s Center for Neuroscience and Society is currently conducting research in this direction, and so far her preliminary results seem to suggest that the  brain’s response to circumstances of social class…

  • Stem Cell therapy could help us grow back fingers

    Mihai Andrei
    14 Jun 2013 | 6:50 am
    Mammals can naturally regenerate the very top of their fingers and toes after amputation; starting from this idea, researchers have demonstrated the mechanism that describes this process, and explain how stem cells from nails could play a pivotal role in future regeneration of entire fingers. A study conducted on mice showed that the chemical signal that triggers stem cells to develop into new nail tissue also attracts nerves that promote bone and nerve regeneration. The study suggests that nail stem cells could be used to develop new regeneration treatments for amputees. Mice are pretty…
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    BEYONDbones

  • What do Egyptologist Ron Harvey and Parks & Rec director Ron Swanson have in common? More than mustaches

    Caroline
    18 Jun 2013 | 11:09 am
    Meet HMNS consulting conservator Ron Harvey: mummy-restorer, mustache-haver and 33-year veteran of antiquities conservation. From the moment we met him, he reminded us a lot of another Ron — Ron Swanson, Director of the (fictional) Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department, critic of his own government position and ultimate specimen of MAN. After all, both have incredible, well-maintained mustaches: As you can clearly see. Both prefer to work solo in silence and minimize interaction with the public: In addition to mounting a guest-facing gun on his desk, Ron Swanson commissions a desk that…

  • Whip your brain into shape this summer at HMNS’ Aramco Science Fair Boot Camp

    Caroline
    12 Jun 2013 | 1:49 pm
    Are you tired of scrambling at the last minute to complete your science fair project? Is your kitchen a mess annually due to thrown-together experiments and faux lava gone rogue? Now’s your chance to fare better at the Science Fair, thanks to the HMNS Aramco Science Fair Boot Camp. Offered to children ages 13 through 17, attendees use museum exhibits and collections to investigate science’s most looming questions, collect data, hypothesize and draw conclusions. From exploring insect behaviors to climate conditions in the Cockrell Butterfly Center to collecting fossils and…

  • Distinguished Lecture: Merge art and science in an exclusive Giant Screen showing of Chasing Ice

    Amy P
    11 Jun 2013 | 2:01 pm
    The Extreme Ice Survey merges art and science to give a “visual voice” to Earth’s changing ecosystems. Extreme Ice Survey imagery preserves a visual legacy, providing a unique baseline — useful in years, decades and even centuries to come — for revealing how climate change and other human activity impacts our air, water, forests and wildlife. EIS field assistant Adam LeWinter on NE rim of Birthday Canyon, atop feature called “Moab.” Greenland Ice Sheet, July 2009. Black deposit in bottom of channel is cryoconite. Birthday Canyon is approximately 150 feet deep. One aspect of…

  • The road to self-sufficiency: How cities are transitioning to renewable energy — and how Houston can, too

    Daniel B
    10 Jun 2013 | 2:00 pm
    What would it take to go all renewable? What would it take to use exclusively renewable energy resources? What would you have to add to or take away from your home? How would your life change? For most of my energy entries, I’ve talked about conservation at the individual level. That’s because I know we can make changes in what we do and how we view the world. However, it is always heartening to see large groups take up the challenge. And while a nation should have a plan, unless its citizens are behind it, it will never work. That’s why I’m glad to report on some cities and regions…
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    Harvard Gazette

  • Gaiman as a guide

    18 Jun 2013 | 1:05 pm
    Author Neil Gaiman has received multiple honors for his stories, books, and comics, including several Hugo Awards, the Newbery Medal, and the Carnegie Medal. But until his 2012 address to the graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he’d never delivered a commencement speech. “I had no idea how to give a speech to a bunch of graduating artists,” said Gaiman, who never attended college. He decided that he would “write down everything I wish I had known, when I’d started, that could possibly help.” The speech went viral, garnering thousands of views and tweets…

  • Taking stock of technology

    18 Jun 2013 | 11:05 am
    At the recent Harvard IT Summit, Anne Margulies, vice president and University chief information officer, mentioned how Harvard had been at the forefront of information technology since its inception, even to the point of naming the burgeoning field. Quoting from a then-futuristic piece titled “Management in the 1980s” in a 1958 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Margulies noted that the article declared, “We shall call it ‘information technology.’” “Our field didn’t even have a name until Harvard gave it one just 55 years ago,” Margulies told a crowd of about 1,000 in…

  • Science, front and center

    17 Jun 2013 | 12:36 pm
    It’s one thing to conduct good science. It’s another to get people to notice. “We are trying to empower graduate students to communicate science so that they can tell others about the research they’re doing,” said Nathan Sanders, a third-year graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Astronomy and a co-chair of the Communicating Science Conference’s Organizing Committee. ComSciCon, sponsored by Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a three-day workshop during which 50 graduate students chosen from 700 applicants interacted with each other and with experts to…

  • Developing cancer drugs

    17 Jun 2013 | 11:56 am
    Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers have identified in the most aggressive forms of cancer a gene known to regulate embryonic stem cell self-renewal, beginning a creative search for a drug that can block its activity. The gene, SALL4, gives stem cells their ability to continue dividing as stem cells rather than becoming mature cells. Typically, cells only express SALL4 during embryonic development, but the gene is re-expressed in nearly all cases of acute myeloid leukemia and 10 to 30 percent of liver, lung, gastric, ovarian, endometrial, and breast cancers, strongly suggesting it…

  • Heroes, day by day

    15 Jun 2013 | 8:13 am
    Famed actors, scholars, politicians, and musicians are among the many luminaries who have joined Harvard President Drew Faust on the Sanders Theatre stage. “But I have never been in better company,” Faust told an enthusiastic crowd on Thursday as she introduced Harvard’s 2013 Harvard Heroes, including a speedy cafeteria checker, a revolutionary library cataloger, a development rockstar, and a digital pioneer. The festive ceremony celebrates the accomplishments of men and women from across the University, unsung contributors who are nominated by their peers for their exceptional efforts…
 
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    NOVA | PBS

  • The Secret Life of Hugh Herr

    30 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    Meet a double amputee engineer and climber who invents his own prosthetic legs and calls them his gorgeous sculptures.

  • Prospects for Prostheses

    30 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    Prostheses have advanced significantly in the last decade, but Boston Marathon bombing amputees still face challenges.

  • Zeroing in on Surveillance Video

    30 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    New software makes it possible for law enforcement to search through hours of surveillance footage in mere minutes.

  • Surveillance City

    30 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    Producer Miles O'Brien is interviewed about state-of-the-art surveillance systems and what they portend for privacy.

  • Life in the Extreme Cold

    30 May 2013 | 7:00 am
    Cold-loving species are changing everything from laundry detergents to our search for extraterrestrial life.
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    EurekAlert! - Breaking News

  • New research backs theory that genetic 'switches' play big role in human evolution

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:00 pm
    A Cornell University study offers further proof that the divergence of humans from chimpanzees some 4 million to 6 million years ago was profoundly influenced by mutations to DNA sequences that play roles in turning genes on and off.

  • Making memories: Practical quantum computing moves closer to reality

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:00 pm
    Researchers at the University of Sydney and Dartmouth College have developed a new way to design quantum memory, bringing quantum computers a step closer to reality.

  • Scientists date prehistoric bacterial invasion still present in today's cells

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:00 pm
    How long ago did bacteria invade the one-celled ancestors of plants and animals to become energy-producing mitochondria and photosynthesizing chloroplasts? Two UC Berkeley doctoral candidates developed a statistical way to analyze the variation in genes common to mitochondria, chloroplasts and the eukaryotic nucleus to more precisely date these events. They found that the cyanobacterial invasion of plants took place millions of years more recently than thought.

  • Higher strength statins do not increase risk of kidney injury

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:00 pm
    A higher strength of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins did not increase the risk of kidney injury after heart attack. These findings may reassure doctors and patients of the safety of higher strength statins among heart attack survivors.

  • Expressly unfit for the laboratory

    18 Jun 2013 | 9:00 pm
    A new Berkeley Lab study challenges the orthodoxy of microbiology, which holds that in response to environmental changes, bacterial genes will boost production of needed proteins and decrease production of those that aren't. The study found that for bacteria in the laboratory there was little evidence of adaptive genetic response.
 
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    The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

  • "Cosmic Evolution Tends to Extinguish Species that Advertise Themselves" --The Dangers of Messaging ET

    dailygalaxy.com
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:42 am
    “Evolutionary selection, acting on a cosmic scale, tends to extinguish species which conspicuously advertise themselves and their habitats,” according to Adrian Kent, Centre for Quantum Computation, University of Cambridge. Science fiction writer and astrophysicist Dr. David Brin echoed Kent's thesis with his reponse to the recent Lone Signal announcement of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) “beams” to the Gliese 526 solar system. In his Brinstorming Science 2.0 blog, Brin updated his 2006 article on METI (aka active SETI), writing: "Recently, several groups, ranging…

  • Image of the Day: Brilliant Supernova 12 hours After it Exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy

    dailygalaxy.com
    19 Jun 2013 | 4:00 am
    August, 2011, saw the dazzling appearance of the closest and brightest Type Ia supernova since Type Ia's were established as "standard candles" for measuring the expansion of the universe. The brilliant visitor, labeled SN 2011fe, was caught by the Palomar Transient Factory less than 12 hours after it exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in the Big Dipper. Easy to see through binoculars, 2011fe was soon dubbed the Backyard Supernova. Major astronomical studies from the ground and from space followed close on its heels, recording its luminosity and colors as it rapidly brightened and then slowly…

  • Billion-Pixel View of Mount Sharp --Mar's Curiosity Rover Destination

    dailygalaxy.com
    19 Jun 2013 | 1:42 am
    This full-circle view combined nearly 900 images taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, generating a panorama with 1.3 billion pixels in the full-resolution version. The view is centered toward the south, with north at both ends. It shows Curiosity at the "Rocknest" site where the rover scooped up samples of windblown dust and sand. Curiosity used three cameras to take the component images on several different days between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, 2012. This first NASA-produced gigapixel image from the surface of Mars is a mosaic using 850 frames from the telephoto camera of Curiosity's Mast Camera…

  • "Planets Billions of Years Older Than Earth May Exist in the Milky Way" (Featured Post)

    dailygalaxy.com
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:02 am
    Building a terrestrial planet requires raw materials that weren't available in the early history of the universe. The Big Bang filled space with hydrogen and helium. Chemical elements like silicon and oxygen - key components of rocks - had to be cooked up over time by stars. But how long did that take? How many of such heavy elements do you need to form planets? Studies have shown that Jupiter-sized gas giants tend to form around stars containing more heavy elements than the Sun. However, research by a team of astronomers completed last year found that planets smaller than Neptune are located…

  • Galaxy Starbursts Triggered by Dark Matter --A Herschel Space Observatory Discovery

    dailygalaxy.com
    18 Jun 2013 | 7:38 am
    Most of the mass of any galaxy is expected to be "dark matter," the elusive X Factor that has yet to be detected but which astronomers believe must exist to provide sufficient gravity to prevent galaxies ripping themselves apart as they rotate. But ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered a population of dust-enshrouded galaxies that do not need as much "dark matter" as previously thought to collect gas and burst into star formation. With the end of Europe's Herschel Space Telescope (ground controllers put the Herschel Observatory in sleep mode yesterday), turning off the infrared…
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    Science Knowledge

  • 多吃6种辣味食物有益健康

    16 Jun 2013 | 4:04 pm
    多辣不一定伤身！ 合理进食也能养颜排毒 祛风风建胃 洋葱、花椒、辣椒、胡椒......这些都是我们日常生活中必不可少的调味品，它们也是保证健康的重要食物。据营养师介绍，多吃一些辣味食物，不仅养颜排毒而且祛风健胃。 1 洋葱——防动脉硬化…

  • Frost dates and the length of the growing season

    1 Sep 2012 | 7:31 am
    You should know two very important weather dates for your area if you want to grow vegetables successfully: ✓ The average date of the last frost in spring ✓ The average date of the first frost in fall These frost dates tell you several important things: ✓ When to plant: Cool-season vegetables are generally planted 4 to 6 weeks before the last spring frost. Fall planting of cool-season vegetables is less dependent on frost dates, but it’s usually done 8 to 12 weeks before the first fall frost. Warm-season vegetables are planted after the last spring frost or in late summer in warm…

  • Understanding Veggie Varieties

    28 Aug 2012 | 7:26 am
    Before you go drooling over the luscious veggies in catalogs, in garden centers, and online, it’s good to know a little about the varieties you can choose from. If you select your veggie varieties before you design your garden, you can ensure that you have the proper amount of space and the best growing conditions. A variety is a selection of a particular type of vegetable that has certain predictable, desirable traits. These traits may include the following: ✓ Adaptation: Some varieties are particularly well adapted to certain areas and climates. For example, some tomato varieties…

  • Deciding Where to Put Your Vegetable Garden

    26 Aug 2012 | 7:17 am
    Choosing a site is the important first step in planning a vegetable garden. This may sound like a tough choice to make, but don’t worry; a lot of the decision is based on good old common sense. When you’re considering a site for your garden, remember these considerations: ✓ Keep it close to home. Plant your garden where you’ll walk by it daily so that you remember to care for it. Also, a vegetable garden is a place people like to gather, so keep it close to a pathway. Vegetable gardens used to be relegated to some forlorn location out back. Unfortunately, if it’s out of sight,…

  • A Few Good Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

    22 Aug 2012 | 6:43 am
    It’s almost predictable: When economic times are hard, people head to the garden. It happened in the 1920s with Liberty Gardens, in the 1940s with Victory Gardens, and in the 1970s with increases in oil and food prices. Similarly, with current concerns about food safety, global warming, carbon footprints, and pollution, along with a desire to build a link to the Earth and our own neighborhoods, food gardening has become a simple and tasty solution. Food gardens aren’t just in backyards anymore. People grow food in containers on decks and patios, in community gardens, at schools, at senior…
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    Science Business

  • Biotech Developing Genetics Therapies Gains $101M in IPO

    Alan
    19 Jun 2013 | 9:57 am
    (James. J. Caras, National Science Foundation) The biotechnology company bluebird bio in Cambridge, Massachusetts developing therapies for genetic disorders raised $101 million through its initial public offering (IPO) of 5.9 million shares priced at $17.00 a share. The company’s stock, trading on the NASDAQ under the code BLUE was priced at $26.00 a share at 11:00 am ET today. bluebird bio develops treatments for severe genetic and rare diseases with a technology based in part on the work of co-founder Philippe Leboulch, a researcher and lecturer at Paris University School of Medicine,…

  • Pharmas, Academics Partner on New Treatments from Old Drugs

    Alan
    18 Jun 2013 | 3:28 pm
    (FDA.gov) Researchers from pharmaceutical companies and academic labs are partnering on finding therapies for eight types of diseases from drugs tested to treat other disorders. The $12.7 million pilot program, led by National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of National Institutes of Health, funds nine separate projects combining industry and university scientists for up to three years. A key objective of the program, called Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, is reduce the long period of time now needed to develop new treatments, that can take…

  • 3-D Printing, Computer Model Generate Synthetic Bone Matter

    Alan
    18 Jun 2013 | 10:40 am
    Nacre from the interior of an abalone shell (Mauro Cateb, Wikimedia Commons) Engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the 3-D printing company Stratasys Ltd. in Billerica, Massachusetts developed a process that translates complex computer-designed models into bone and related organic composite materials with 3-D printing. The team led by MIT engineering professor Markus Buehler published its findings online yesterday in the journal Advanced Functional Materials (paid subscription required). Bone is composed of materials that make it both rigid and flexible, to…

  • On the Road Again

    Alan
    12 Jun 2013 | 11:14 am
    (TSA.gov) We’ll be traveling for a few days and not able to post stories on Science Business. Regular posting of science news for business people and business news for scientists will resume on Tuesday 18 June.

  • Toshiba, Hospitals, USRowing to Study Athlete Heart Deaths

    Alan
    12 Jun 2013 | 9:41 am
    (USRowing/Flickr) Toshiba America Medical Systems in California is partnering with USRowing, the governing body for competitive rowing in the U.S., and medical centers in Ohio and Mississippi to help determine if sudden cardiac death can be prevented with a heart screening. The Athlete Heart Research Study will initially screen high-school age rowers taking part in USRowing’s national youth championships, 7-9 June in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Sudden cardiac death is a condition where the heart ceases to function, usually due to a failure in the heart’s electrical system, resulting in…
 
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    Frontier Scientists

  • Under pressure: Arctic trends sparking extreme weather at large

    Laura
    12 Jun 2013 | 4:11 am
    Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists In September 2012, at the end of last summer, the Arctic sea ice extent reached a record low since satellite measurements began. And, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic has declined roughly 40 percent in the last three decades. The [...]

  • Tiny aerosol particles, big global impacts

    Laura
    5 Jun 2013 | 2:43 am
    Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists Tiny particles suspended in the air, present in the air we breathe and in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, are called aerosols. And those aerosols, though relatively short-lived, have a huge impact on global climate change. In fact, much of the atmospheric warming observed since 1976 in the Arctic, [...]

  • BARREL mission balloons fly high

    Laura
    28 May 2013 | 8:43 pm
    Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists Balloons are far from the first things that come to mind when you hear scientific discovery, but measurements taken by a fleet of eight-story-tall balloons released earlier this year are helping scientists make new discoveries about our planet. The 20 balloons lofted into the pristine cold air above Antarctica this [...]

  • Eyes on Columbia Glacier’s retreat

    Laura
    21 May 2013 | 10:15 am
    Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists The Landsat mission, a joint effort between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has been collecting data on Earth’s physical features via satellite since the 1970s. ”The Landsat data record — humanity’s longest continuous record of our planet from space — has been an invaluable tool [...]

  • Ozone loss and recovery in the Arctic

    Laura
    14 May 2013 | 1:34 pm
    Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists The ozone hole is a problem which plagues the skies above Antarctica. Yet in 2011, Arctic skies experienced the most severe ozone depletion ever measured in the north. The reasons why are now explained in a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres headed by lead author Susan E. Strahan, an atmospheric scientists [...]
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    Midwest Laboratories Blog

  • Wastewater Plant – Inside Look

    Brent Pohlman
    19 Jun 2013 | 5:33 am
    Check out this video and learn what happens behind the scenes to insure a clean environmental infrastructure is in place for our cities and residencies. I know I often take these types of systems for granted. Take a couple of minutes and remember those people who are diligently working behind the scenes to insure that [...]

  • Swimming Pool Health Reminders

    Brent Pohlman
    18 Jun 2013 | 4:29 am
    The summer heat is on and people are headed to the local swimming pool. It is always a good idea to be aware of your surroundings and take precautions. The last thing you need is a bunch of sick children this summer. This news story offers some good tips to help you have a fun [...]

  • Grilling and Food Safety

    Brent Pohlman
    17 Jun 2013 | 5:54 am
    Check out this video it really gives some great information regarding how to prepare the grill, cook the food and insure that the food prepared is bacteria-free and safe. One of the best purchases I have made in the last two years is a food thermomoeter. It will instantly make you a better grill master [...]

  • Nematode Soil Testing

    Brent Pohlman
    14 Jun 2013 | 5:55 am
    It is not too early to start planning for nematode testing in your corn and soybean fields. Tamara Jackson-Ziems, University of Nebraska regularly talks about corn nematodes and gives some great advice from sampling for nematodes to dealing with nematodes. Check out this interview with Ms. Jackson regarding this topic. Lots of helpful information. In [...]

  • Lead Levels in Soil

    Brent Pohlman
    13 Jun 2013 | 4:59 am
    This topic always seems to come to light. A former smelting plant is the root cause for the higher than normal levels in a neighborhood in Lincoln, Nebraska. The story, “Tests unearth lead issues in North Bottoms” was reported on June 12, 2013 in the Lincoln Journal Star. The story makes a good point that [...]
 
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    EcoTone

  • Supreme Court rules natural genes not patentable

    katie@esa.org (Katie Kline)
    17 Jun 2013 | 1:18 pm
    The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday, June 13th, that Myriad Genomics Inc. may not retain exclusive rights to the use of DNA sequence information for breast cancer associated genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, stating that Myriad had not created anything new in identifying the genes. Continue reading →

  • ESA Policy News: June 14

    katie@esa.org (Katie Kline)
    14 Jun 2013 | 2:04 pm
    Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Science Policy Analyst Terence Houston.  Read the full Policy News here. EDUCATION: STEM REORGANIZATION EFFORT MEETS BIPARTISAN CRITICISM On June 4, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee convened for Continue reading →

  • Geothermal engineering in Newberry volcano

    katie@esa.org (Katie Kline)
    10 Jun 2013 | 1:02 pm
    By Peter Janetos, ESA public affairs intern In the quest for cleaner, greener, and cheaper energy some are looking 10,000 feet below central Oregon where temperatures exceed 600 degrees Fahrenheit in Newberry Volcano.  A recent Popular Science article takes a Continue reading →

  • Water for the trees

    katie@esa.org (Katie Kline)
    7 Jun 2013 | 3:28 pm
    Saving forests from drought as the climate warms. Drought complicates the big problems afflicting modern forests. Gordon Grant, Christina Tague, and Craig Allen think that mitigating drought stress should be an active priority for management of US public forests – in keeping with the US Forest Service mission to “improve and protect the forest” and “secure favorable conditions of water flows”. Continue reading →

  • EU reforms fishing policies

    katie@esa.org (Katie Kline)
    5 Jun 2013 | 12:27 pm
    By Peter Janetos, ESA public affairs intern As noted in a New York Times article on May 30, 2013 a unanimous agreement between all 27 European Union (EU) member states will reform and change current fishing policies to make fishing Continue reading →
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    weird thingsweird things | exploring science, technology, the strange and the unknown

  • the infinitely vast, mandatory miltiverse?

    Greg Fish
    15 Jun 2013 | 11:06 am
    At two events of the Wolrd Science Festival in early June,  a group of five theoretical physicists debated whether we’re living in a multiverse, and more surprisingly, if our current understanding of the cosmos all but mandates that multiple universes exist. It all goes back to the instant of the Big Bang, the femtosecond that set the rules for all reality as we know it in scientific terms. Each tiny little quantum instability and flux was stretched and projected across billions of light years to influence the shape of galaxy clusters and the tiny filaments what underpin our mostly…

  • how to approach a problem with mind wide shut

    Greg Fish
    12 Jun 2013 | 2:44 pm
    Alarmed by the growing number of atheists among the current generation of young adults, one organization of Christians decided to sit some down for an interview to learn why they became atheists, drew conclusions, summed them up, and respectfully posted them online. Unlike many other faith groups, they legitimately wanted to understand what atheists thought and why, and what prompted their de-conversions. Problem is that they didn’t want to understand if all those atheists they interviewed had a point when discussing the improbability of an omniscient deity in their lives, ruling the…

  • social media, the best way to share with friends, family, and nsa analysists

    Greg Fish
    11 Jun 2013 | 2:21 pm
    On the one hand, I am somewhat surprised by recent revelations about exactly how much we’re being watched on the internet by the NSA. However, the big surprise for me is that they couldn’t get data form Twitter. Considering that it’s building an immense data center in Utah, and works with tech companies on a regular basis, is it really that astonishing that the agency is browsing through our communications metadata on a regular basis? We all suspected this was the case, so if anything the current furor is almost a required reaction of anger and hurt to have what we always…

  • why mars is not the next apollo

    Greg Fish
    10 Jun 2013 | 5:15 am
    According to Wired’s laundry list of technical and political issues with getting humans to Mars by the year 2030 or so, exploring another planet many millions of miles away won’t be Apollo 2.0 in many ways. It will be an order of magnitude more expensive per launch, require 30 months for a round trip, and needs to be financed, overseen, and executed by an international group that will include space agencies and ambitious aerospace companies with plans and launch vehicles of their own. And yet, the designs being drawn up sound remarkably like Apollo on steroids. We’re…

  • the impotent cry against reason and logic

    Greg Fish
    8 Jun 2013 | 12:02 pm
    Ever since the New Atheists arrived on the scene, there’s be a loud, wailing siren from religious and humanities pundits decrying the idea that we could use science to explain the universe that we occupy. Generally their argument for why we can’t use reason and experiments to clear up a lot of mysteries and what makes us tick boils down to "how dare you say you can explain all this complexity and wonder in math and mechanistic descriptions?" And that’s really as far as it goes because their objection to using science to explain their pet topics in the language of…
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    bioBlogia

  • De la esgrima a la medicina regenerativa: la historia de la Dra. Carmen Pérez-Terzic

    Francisco P. Chávez
    11 Jun 2013 | 7:55 am
      La esgrimista y otrora campeona venezolana Carmen Militza Pérez, quien lleva muchos años como una destacada científica en los Estados Unidos, forma parte de  la campaña mundial de la Clínica Mayo denominada “Historias Mayo”. Estas historias  que presenta los relatos de los pacientes y médicos de la clínica con raíces hispanas. Mayo Clinic anunció este mes el lanzamiento de una campaña mundial con relatos para la comunidad de origen hispano, que bajo el nombre de “Historias Mayo” presenta los narraciones de los pacientes y médicos de Mayo con raíces hispanas.

  • Los chimpancés tienen cinco personalidades universales

    Francisco P. Chávez
    4 Jun 2013 | 9:08 am
      Si bien los psicólogos han debatido durante mucho tiempo las dimensiones básicas de la personalidad que definen a la humanidad, los investigadores de primates han estado trabajando para descubrir los rasgos de personalidad que definen a nuestro pariente vivo más cercano, el chimpancé. La nueva investigación, publicada en la revista American Journal of Primatology proporciona un fuerte apoyo a la existencia universal de cinco dimensiones de personalidad en los chimpancés: 1) reactividad/independencia, 2) el dominio, 3) la apertura, 4) la extroversión y 5) la amabilidad con un…

  • Visualizan por primera vez una molécula antes y después de una reacción química

    Francisco P. Chávez
    30 May 2013 | 2:01 pm
      Se ha hecho realidad el sueño de todo químico, poder visualizar a escala atómica cómo cambia una molécula antes y después de una reacción química. Esto gracias gracias a una nueva técnica desarrollada por químicos y físicos de la Universidad de California, Berkeley.   Mediante el uso de un actualizado microscopio de fuerza atómica los científicos han tomado las primeras imágenes átomo por átomo, incluyendo imágenes de los enlaces químicos entre los átomos, donde se muestra claramente cómo ha cambiado la estructura de una molécula durante una reacción…

  • Ingenieros biomédicos crean parche cardiovascular con células madre

    Francisco P. Chávez
    29 May 2013 | 1:41 pm
      Ingenieros biomédicos de la Universidad de Duke han crecido en tres dimensiones músculo del corazón humano, que actúa igual como el tejido natural. Este avance podría ser importante en el tratamiento de pacientes de ataque cardiaco o para servir como una plataforma para probar nuevos medicamentos para las enfermedades del corazón.   El “parche cardiaco” cultivado en el laboratorio a partir de células humanas supera los dos obstáculos principales que enfrentan las terapias celulares. Es decir, el parche conduce la electricidad aproximadamente a la misma…

  • Pacientes con apoplejía mejoraron con novedoso tratamiento con células madre

    Francisco P. Chávez
    28 May 2013 | 12:48 pm
      Varias personas que sufrieron apoplejías mostraron signos de recuperación luego de recibir un novedoso tratamiento que consiste en inyectar células madre directamente en el cerebro. El tratamiento, uno de los pioneros en inyectar células madre en pacientes incapacitados física y mentalmente por apoplejías, resultó efectivo en cinco pacientes del Reino Unido.   Las personas que sufrieron apoplejías mostraron moderados signos de recuperación tras serles aplicada una terapia pionera con células madre, según un estudio que divulgan hoy los medios británicos. Keith Muir…
 
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    The Conversation - Science + Technology

  • More data storage? Here's how to fit 1,000 terabytes on a DVD

    Min Gu, Professor of Optoelectronics at Swinburne University of Technology
    19 Jun 2013 | 2:00 am
    We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all? In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies. So how did we manage to achieve such a huge boost in data storage? First, we need to…

  • Inspiring science: fast-track PhD graduates into teaching

    Marguerite Evans-Galea, Research Scientist, Genetic Health Research at Murdoch Childrens Research Institute
    18 Jun 2013 | 10:02 pm
    MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. In this instalment, Marguerite Evans-Galea, Darren Saunders, and Krystal Evans look at ways we can improve the transition from research to teaching. Ask a PhD student what attracted them into research and they’ll probably answer they wanted to make a difference. Ask a teacher what attracted them to the classroom and you will probably hear the same reply. There is a general consensus that a good teacher is passionate, knowledgeable and engages students…

  • Explainer: what is foreign accent syndrome?

    Lyndsey Nickels, Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:13 pm

  • Can ex-doper Matt White lead a clean pro-cycling team?

    Craig Fry, NHMRC Career Development Fellow at Victoria University
    18 Jun 2013 | 1:39 pm
    The official reinstatement of confessed doper Matt White as sports director of Australian World Tour pro-cycling team Orica-GreenEdge passed with surprisingly little media or public scrutiny last week. But while many fans may feel justified in switching off the drugs in sport saga, this latest development in Australian cycling deserves much closer focus than it is presently attracting. White’s return to Orica-GreenEdge comes eight months after his October 2012 admission to doping as a professional cyclist with Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team. He has since revealed that he doped…

  • Breed scientists better for a better breed of science

    Jee Hyun Kim, DECRA Fellow, Behavioural Neuroscience at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health
    18 Jun 2013 | 1:39 pm
    MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. In this instalment, Jee Hyun Kim examines how the culture of academia needs to change its attitude – for the better. If the great goal of science is to improve society, shouldn’t the smaller, everyday objectives of a scientist also reflect that dream? According to all the grants I’ve written or reviewed in the past, scientists aim to help the needy (whether that’s in the context of health, environment or energy resources). But anecdotal evidence…
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    Sciencebase Science Blog

  • Guiding pledge 2.0 dismisses God and the Queen

    David Bradley
    19 Jun 2013 | 12:35 am
    Apparently, the Guiding Movement is to upgrade its pledge that all members must make when they join. Currently they vow to: "to love my God, to serve my Queen and my country" That obviously only applies to people of faith and those with a female monarch…and indeed compromises the integrity of those girls without fixed national domicile. So, after consultation the century-old organisation is planning a bit of a rewording, dropping references to both spiritual and earthly autocrats as well as geography it seems. The pledge will now contain the line: "be true to myself and…

  • Life on the rocks

    David Bradley
    18 Jun 2013 | 3:17 am
    Life on the rocks, unlike love on the rocks, is a surprise… In the beginning… …there was a barren spinning ball of rock, with a hot, molten core, hurtling through space around a distant, but warming fusion reactor. But the spinning ball was not alone on its journey – there were countless misshapen chunks of rock and ice and frozen gases in its vicinity, many with eccentric orbits around the central fusion reactor. These comets and other solar debris could skim past or shift in their orbits at the whim of great balls of gas and rock, although always ruled by the laws of the…

  • What do you do if you’ve got osteoarthritis of the knee?

    David Bradley
    11 Jun 2013 | 3:49 am
    Film director Baz Luhrmann made a spoof graduation speech famous with his hit “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” back in 1999. At the time, I wasn’t particularly worried about the line in that track: “Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.” But, you get older, knees become more of a focus, so what are you to do if you suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee (thankfully, I don’t…yet). According to SBM, here’s what a massive scientific review of the various possible treatments has to say: Exercise – strong…

  • Say my name, say my name

    David Bradley
    9 Jun 2013 | 1:12 pm
    Successful companies have solid brand names we recognise wherever we are in the world and they rarely change them – Coca Cola, Microsoft, Apple, Gap. Of course, there are successful companies that do re-brand, although usually when bigger companies subsume and split them up, think Imperial Chemical Industries, which was commonly known as ICI, which eventually became AstraZeneca and various other firms. Then, there was the ludicrous attempt by Britain’s state-owned “Royal Mail” to rebrand itself for the “modern” age as “Consignia. And, who could forget…

  • Dietary DMAA, dimethylamylamine, death

    David Bradley
    7 Jun 2013 | 2:58 am
    DMAA was originally a decongestant but has been marketed as a “dietary supplement”. It’s dodgy, it seems, to say the least, and the US Food & Drug Administration does not allow its legal sale as a food supplement. Here’s what Andrey Pavlov doggedly had to say about DMAA in a recent Science-based Medicine post: “…there is no reasonable way that DMAA can be considered a natural or safe product for sale as a supplement under the DSHEA (US Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act). And even if it did meet DSHEA requirements, this is an excellent example…
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    QUEST

  • Gamers Going Green: New Video Game Turns Players Into Biofuel Farmers

    Eleanor Nelsen
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:00 am
    Fields of Fuel inspires discussion among Wisconsin college students. Image courtesy of Heather Heggemeier / Wisconsin Energy Institute. For many people, the allure of video games is unparalleled. These games provide hours upon hours of entertainment for dedicated players, many of whom are enticed by the prospect of hunting zombies and defeating alien empires. But of course, video games aren't just about fun these days. Since the late 1980s, video games have been used as teaching tools in the classroom, at home, and in other informal education settings. More recently, there has been a surge in…

  • With Condors on the Brink, California Considers a Lead-Bullet Ban for Hunters

    Lauren Sommer
    14 Jun 2013 | 3:05 am
    Tim Huntington, courtesy the Ventana Wildlife Society After teetering on the brink of extinction 30 years ago, the California condor has made a gradual recovery in the state. But scientists say hunters are hampering a full recovery – not because they’re shooting at condors, but because the giant scavenger birds swallow lead bullet fragments when hunters leave an animal carcass behind. The California legislature is considering a bill that would ban the use of lead bullets in hunting across the state. It would be the first statewide ban in the country and in the midst of a tense national…

  • Restoring the Earth's "Kidneys"

    Anne Glausser
    12 Jun 2013 | 8:00 am
    Anthony Titus, from Richmond Heights, Ohio, plants native grasses during an EPA-funded wetland restoration project. Think of a wetland like a kidney.  Just as kidneys filter blood in the body, wetlands filter pollutants out of waterways. This is an especially important task in some urban areas, where big storm events can overwhelm the sewers and cause an overflow into nearby creeks and streams. According to a 2009 Fish and Wildlife report, wetlands along eastern coastal areas, like the Great Lakes, are disappearing at a rapid clip, with yearly losses of nearly 60,000 acres. But projects are…

  • The Green Side of Drones: Science and Environmental Apps Abound

    Aarti Shahani
    7 Jun 2013 | 4:50 pm
    John Cherbini and Joshua Ott of 3D Robotics, setting up a thermal imaging camera for infrared shots of a field at the Berkeley Marina. Photo by Aarti Shahani It appears that “drones” are here to stay. And Silicon Valley drone makers are going beyond military and spy applications, creating new environmental uses for unmanned aerial vehicles. On Friday afternoons, you’ll usually find Chris Anderson out by the Berkeley Marina, tinkering with his squadron of drones. Looking up at the sky as one of his creations buzzes about, he can’t help blurting out, "So that’s just freakin’ cool,…

  • Recycling a House

    Mary Fecteau
    6 Jun 2013 | 8:00 am
      When you think about recycling, you may picture newspapers stacked neatly on your curb for pickup, or those ubiquitous blue bins around your office filled with bottles and cans. But items like papers, plastics and glass represent only a fraction of what we could be recycling. Across America, landfills are still expanding rapidly. One of the major culprits is the debris from housing construction and demolition—much of which could actually be recycled. “People understand it’s not right to just throw things away,” says Robert Chapman, Executive Director of WARM Training Center.
 
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    As Many Exceptions As Rules

  • The Roots Of Our Animal Family Tree

    19 Jun 2013 | 5:00 am
    Biology concepts – porifera, last common ancestor, placozoa, cladogram, lower metazoan, bilaterians Bonobo apes (Pan paniscus) are very closely related to chimpanzees. They have longer legs than common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and are also distinguished by having pink lips. I think this makes them look significantly more human-like. Also like humans, the families seem to be run by the mothers.Humans are descended from primates; we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and Bonobos (pygmy chimps). But what do we find as we go farther back along the line of mammals, and then from animals…

  • A Big Plant In A Little Package

    12 Jun 2013 | 5:00 am
    Biology concepts – angiosperm, utricle, fruit, flower, phytoremediation, monoecious, dioecious, stalk, stamen, pistil, acaulescentEucalyptus regnans is the tallest flowering plant in the world. It grows in southeastern Australia and Tasmania. As a eucalypt, it is food for koala bears, but I can’t imagine a small koala climbing a monster like this for food. There are over 600 species of eucalyptus leaf that koalas can feed on, most of them being closer to the ground than these leaves.Some of the most massive living organisms are flowering trees. The eucalyptus tree (Eucalyptus regnans) is…

  • The Living Earth – Rocks and All

    5 Jun 2013 | 5:00 am
    Biology concepts – Gaia Hypothesis, photosynthesis, biogeology, plate tectonics, biological weathering, oxygen crisisThe physical form of Earth definitely influences how life evolves on Earth. You can't argue that ice ages and the birth of shallow seas in the middle of continents changed what life forms survived and thrived. But what about the other possibility?Question of the Day – Does life have an effect on the physical form of Earth?This is a small town in Kansas about to be inundated by a dust storm. The dust would reach miles high and would deposit hundreds of tons of…

  • Gas, Knuckles, And The Little Blue Pill

    29 May 2013 | 5:00 am
    Biology concepts – dissolved gas, cavitation, arthritis, decompression sickness, ebulism, gas embolismIt is certainly true that some folks love cracking their knuckles. The little research that has been conducted indicates that about 25-30% of people are habitual knuckle crackers, with the habit lasting on average 35 years. Fine for them, but we’re the ones who have to listen to it.You approach the piano, interlace your fingers and bend your hands backwards, trying to crack your knuckles. Not satisfied, you pop each knuckle individually, followed by making small circles with each thumb…

  • I Know Why She Swallowed The Fly

    22 May 2013 | 5:00 am
    Biology concepts – carnivorous plants, minerals in biology, symbiosis, cryptids, The Thing From Another Planet was a 1951 B-horror movie. Arctic researchers find a space ship in the ice and thaw out the pilot. He turns out to be a walking plant that needs blood to feed his little seedlings. Never minds that the plant is growling, feels just fine at -60 degrees, and is wearing clothes. They finally kill him with electricity.The man-eating tree is a cryptid (hidden) organism. Cryptid means there is no scientific proof for its existence, but for some reason there are people that say it exists.
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    Laboratory News » News

  • Universe evolved ability to make black holes

    admin
    19 Jun 2013 | 1:00 am
    The maths underpinning Darwin’s theory of natural selection might explain how the universe may be designed to make black holes. Researchers from Oxford University propose that if new universes are born inside black holes, a ‘multiverse’ of main possible universes could be shaped by a process similar to evolution so that successive generations of universes become better at making black holes. “This idea of cosmological natural selection is controversial, and physicists have pointed out all sorts of problems with it. But we were interested in seeing if its basic evolutionary logic…

  • Coral reefs could be saved by geoengineering

    admin
    17 Jun 2013 | 1:00 am
    At-risk tropical coral reefs could be bought time by limiting the amount of warming experienced by the world’s oceans in the future suggest Bristol University researchers. The scientists used computer models to investigate how shallow-water tropical coral reef habitats might respond to climate change over the coming decades. “If sea surface temperatures continue to rise, our models predict a large habitat collapse in the tropical Western Pacific which would affect some of the most biodiverse coral reefs in the world. To protect shallow-water tropical coral reefs, the warming experienced…

  • Alligator’s smile provides tooth regeneration clues

    admin
    12 Jun 2013 | 1:00 am
    Scientists are studying alligators in order to potentially understand how to stimulate tooth regeneration in humans. The global researcher team led by Keck School of Medicine of the USC has for the first time uncovered unique cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in American alligators. “Humans naturally only have two sets of teeth – baby teeth and adult teeth,” said USC pathology Professor Cheng-Ming Chuong. “Ultimately, we want to identify stem cells that can be used as a resource to stimulate tooth renewal in adult humans who have lost their teeth. But, to do that,…

  • Redefining the ampere

    admin
    10 Jun 2013 | 1:00 am
    The National Physical Laboratory and the University of Cambridge have joined forces in redefining the ampere in terms of fundamental constants of physics. Published in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers describe the world’s first graphene single-electron pump (SEP)which provides the speed of electron flow needed to create a new standard for electrical current based on electron charge. “This paper describes how we have successfully produced the first graphene single-electron pump. We have work to do before we can define the amphere, but this is a major step towards that goal,” said…

  • Flesh-eating plant discards DNA ‘junk’

    admin
    7 Jun 2013 | 1:00 am
    Scientists have spent decades puzzling over why noncoding DNA makes up the majority (98%) of the human genome, but studying the genome of carnivorous bladderwort plant, Utricularia gibba has offered an unexpected insight. Sequencing the flesh-eating water plant’s genome, which has 80 million DNA base pairs, has revealed that 97% of it consists of genes and small pieces of DNA that control these genes. The researchers suggest the plant has been deleting noncoding “junk” DNA from its genome over many generations. “The big story is that only 3% of the bladderwort’s genetic material is…
 
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    Science News from SciGuru.com

  • Beta amyloid - tau interaction causes synaptic damage, cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease

    SciGuru.com Science News Desk
    19 Jun 2013 | 7:24 am
    A new finding suggests that the progression of Alzheimer's disease worsened with the increased interaction of two proteins. The interaction between the phosphorylated tau and the amyloid-beta in its toxic form at the synapses has damaging effects which could lead to cognitive decline.read more

  • Study reveals new details about H7N9 influenza infections that suddenly appeared in China

    SciGuru.com Science News Desk
    19 Jun 2013 | 6:54 am
    Researchers with the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have revealed new information about the latest strain of type A influenza, known as H7N9, in a report in the journal PLOS Currents: Outbreaks. read more

  • Laughing gas does not increase heart attacks

    SciGuru.com Science News Desk
    19 Jun 2013 | 6:43 am
    Nitrous oxide — best known as laughing gas — is one of the world’s oldest and most widely used anesthetics. Despite its popularity, however, experts have questioned its impact on the risk of a heart attack during surgery or soon afterward. But those fears are unfounded, a new study indicates. The findings by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will appear in the July issue of the journal Anesthesiology.read more

  • Bullying and Suicide Among Youth Is a Public Health Problem

    SciGuru.com Science News Desk
    19 Jun 2013 | 6:39 am
    Recent studies linking bullying and depression, coupled with extensive media coverage of bullying-related suicide among young people, led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assemble an expert panel to focus on these issues. This panel synthesized the latest research about the complex relationship between youth involvement in bullying and suicide-related behaviors.read more

  • New Compound Excels at Killing Persistent and Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

    SciGuru.com Science News Desk
    19 Jun 2013 | 6:35 am
    An international team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has identified a highly promising new anti-tuberculosis compound that attacks the tuberculosis (TB) bacterium in two different ways.read more
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    Patexia Rss Feed

  • German Parliament takes action against software patentss

    17 Jun 2013 | 11:54 am
    Last week the German parliament passed a joint motion addressing the increasingly severa problem of software patent protection, reports IP Watch. The parliament seeks to eliminate non-copyright intellectual property rights on software, ordering the national intellectual property office to reevaluate its regulations on software patents. Though no reports have been confirmed, the sources say that a similar resolution for the EU parliament may be coming forthwith.

  • SC: naturally-occurring DNA not patentable

    14 Jun 2013 | 3:59 pm
    In a long-awaited decision, the supreme court has finally issued a ruling striking down the central patented matter in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. At the heart of the case was whether or not Myriad could patent diagnostic identification of a particular existing mutation in the human genome predisposing women to breast and ovarian cancer. The Justices' decision--unanimous and lead by Chief Justice Thomas--was narrow. Importantly, it left open the...

  • Apple granted "iWallet" patent

    11 Jun 2013 | 10:16 am
    Patently Apple reports that this week's issue of the USPTO Official Gazette included patent 8,459,544 -- "Parental Controls." Though the patent certainly shows a growing interest in mobile payment, the narrow claims and limited applicability don't give too much insight into any upcoming revelations about Apple's product line. The patent describes a system to controlling epayment spending from a "subsidiary" user of an ewallet account. For example a parent...

  • Transparency and Feedback

    6 Jun 2013 | 11:59 am
    We are working hard to make the contest process as transparent as possible, as well as provide more feedback to users on their submissions. We will be providing feedback on your submissions to the Artificial Flame Device and User interface with “throw” gesture contests. You will receive a score from 0 to 3 on your submission, reflecting how well your responses satisfy the question criteria. Here is how the marking scheme works: 0: zero questions correct 1: greater than ...

  • White House talks patent trolls

    5 Jun 2013 | 4:41 pm
    As the New York Times reports, the executive branch is looking to take action against frivolous lawsuits from so-called "patent trolls." The announcement came yesterday, but serves more as an indicator of what's to come that a declaration of any specific action. Aside from the initial reporting, the NYT also published a thoughtful Op-Ed piece primarily by Judge Radar, Chief Justice for the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit -- which hears all patent-related matters ...
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    Citizen Science Center

  • Tree health survey needs you

    Chandra Clarke
    18 Jun 2013 | 1:34 pm
    English: Horse chestnut tree with leaf miner damage, Headington Hill Park. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)I’m not ashamed to say it — I’m a tree hugger. I’m especially fond of flowering trees, but anything involving bark and leaves works for me.That’s why I’m pleased to see that the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network has started a tree health survey in England, Scotland, and Wales this year. Tree pests and diseases seem to be increasing, and researchers need to get a handle on why that might be.To participate in this citizen science study, all you need to do is…

  • Ladybug pictures for science

    Chandra Clarke
    11 Jun 2013 | 4:42 pm
    A ladybug standing on a leaf. Ladybugs vary in their colours and number of spots. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)For reasons we have yet to understand, ladybug species distribution around the world is changing. These lovely insects, with their distinctive colours and patterns, are showing up in places they’ve never been before. In some areas of the world, once common species are dwindling, and in other areas, rare species are flourishing. It’s a mystery that scientists want to solve, because ladybugs provide important, natural pest control.The Lost Ladybug Project is one way to try to…

  • About Hummingbirds

    Chandra Clarke
    16 May 2013 | 7:46 am
    Hummingbird (Photo credit: Wikipedia)I’ve always had a soft spot for hummingbirds; they are tiny, pugnacious, fast, and beautiful. They are tough too; many hummingbirds migrate incredibly long distances.All of that comes at a cost, however: hummingbirds must eat several times their weight in nectar daily to stay alive. This means they may be especially vulnerable to climate change, as changes in local flower crops can mean starvation for the bitty birds. Recent studies suggest that there could be a mismatch between flowering times and the arrival of hummingbirds in their breeding…

  • A space warp on your desktop

    Chandra Clarke
    14 May 2013 | 8:19 am
    Einstein Ring Gravitational Lens (SDSS J162746.44-005357.5); diameter 2.08 ± 0.08″ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The latest citizen science project from Zooninverse wants you to help scientists find zoom lenses in space.Massive objects, such as stars or galaxies, bend space  in such a way that passing light rays curve around them. This means that they end up mimicking the lens in a magnifying glass, and the effect is called a “gravitational lens.”A gravitational lens can have a a magnification factor up to x10 or even more, which gives us a zoomed-in peek at the distant…

  • Use your marbles with Marblar

    Chandra Clarke
    7 May 2013 | 11:14 am
    A screen capture of the Marblar websiteSomething a bit different for today’s entry, as this one isn’t strictly citizen science, but does tap into the scientist and inventor in all of us.Marblar is a new platform designed to help find new uses for unused inventions. Anyone with a bit of lateral thinking ability, or a flair for marketing and commercialization, is invited to login and come up with ideas on how to deploy a technology. It has a game-like design, wherein you collect points, or “marbles” for submitting your ideas, and you have a chance to win cash as well.All…
 
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    Breaking Science News | Sci-News.com

  • Aspergillus felis: New Fungus Found in Australia, Causes Infections in Humans, Cats

    Sci-News.com
    18 Jun 2013 | 1:47 pm
    A multinational team of biologists writing in the open-access journal PLoS ONE has identified a new species of fungus that causes life-threatening infections in humans, dogs and cats. Study lead author Dr Vanessa Barrs from the University of Sydney said: “this all originated from spotting an unusual fungal infection in three cats I was seeing [...]

  • New Species of Virus Found in Patients with Brain Infections in Vietnam, Named CyCV-VN

    Sergio Prostak
    18 Jun 2013 | 8:43 am
    Scientists from the Netherlands, Vietnam and United Kingdom, reporting the journal mBio, have described a new cyclovirus in the viral family Circoviridae. The team has identified the novel virus in the fluid around the brain of two patients with brain infections of unknown cause. The virus, named CyCV-VN, was subsequently detected in an additional 26 [...]

  • Light Warlpiri: New Study Sheds Light on Origins of Recently Discovered Australian Language

    Enrico de Lazaro
    18 Jun 2013 | 6:53 am
    Dr Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist with the University of Michigan, has reported new information on the structure and origins of Light Warlpiri, a recently discovered mixed language spoken in a remote Indigenous community in northern Australia, which combines elements of Warlpiri and varieties of English and Kriol. The people who live in a small community [...]

  • Paleontologists Identify New Species of Prehistoric Shark

    Natali Anderson
    17 Jun 2013 | 8:44 am
    European paleontologists have described a new species of spiny shark that lived about 408 million years ago during the Devonian period. The new species, named Machaeracanthus goujeti, belongs to Acanthodii (spiny sharks), an extinct type of fish that resembles both sharks and bony fish. Fossilized scales and bones of Machaeracanthus were found in Teruel, south [...]

  • Astronomers Find 26 Possible Black Holes in Andromeda Galaxy

    Enrico de Lazaro
    17 Jun 2013 | 8:10 am
    An international group of astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has reported the detection of 26 black hole candidates in Messier 31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy. “While we are excited to find so many black holes in Andromeda, we think it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Most black holes won’t have close [...]
 
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    Science Blog

  • Weighing the Benefits and Risks of Breast Reconstruction Surgery After Mastectomy

    srinivas_s@omicsgroup.co.in (OMICS Publishing Group)
    18 Jun 2013 | 10:13 pm
    By Fonthip Maspithak Breast cancer is no longer the death sentence it was decades ago. Improved medical interventions result in more survivors – even with the most aggressive forms of cancer. While women are concerned for their health, they may also be concerned about restoring the appearance of their breasts, leading them to consider breast reconstruction – a procedure performed after a mastectomy to restore the breast to its original size and shape. While it has risks, new methods provide women with greater and safer options to regain their previous shape.  Breast…

  • Advancements of Scientific Research

    srinivas_s@omicsgroup.co.in (OMICS Publishing Group)
    18 Jun 2013 | 9:07 pm
    By Jessica Reynolds  Over the many decades involving research, knowledge, and the progress of science, we can see and understand the differences in how scientists have changed their processes. Studying electrons in the 1900’s was vastly different from the way we study electrons today; not only with the modern technology we have available, but with regulations that have been implemented. Science and technology are constantly growing and changing; this will never stop. We have many people, ideas, and events to thank for the way our knowledge about how everyday things or incurable diseases…

  • Is Expectorant provokes Surgical Intricacy?

    srinivas_s@omicsgroup.co.in (OMICS Publishing Group)
    10 Jun 2013 | 5:06 pm
    Are we wondering what expectorant does in human? It is a cough syrup we intake during suppressive immunity and bacterial infections. Expectorants are made of different medicinal drugs entangled together to relieve a sufferer from dry cough and tickling throat.It is quite fascinating that it has been an end for cough syrups which solely contained pholcodine. This waving drug is also known as morpholinylethylmorphine which can be in syrup form on consumption. Initially it had no side effects in young ones as it would relieve the tickling throats and sore throat. Recent survey in Australia has…

  • Nanotechnology in Conjunction with Stem Cell Research

    srinivas_s@omicsgroup.co.in (OMICS Publishing Group)
    10 Jun 2013 | 4:44 pm
    Regenerative medicine is an emerging multidisciplinary field that aims to restore or enhance the tissues and organ functions. Regeneration of tissues can be achieved by the combination of living cells, which will provide biological functionality,and materials which act as scaffolds to support cell proliferation. Human beings suffer from a myriad of disorders leading to organ failure. Stem cell research may be the last hope for restoring function. Stem cells in Nanotechnology are among the newest veins of biotechnological research. Nanotechnology is not only an excellent tool to produce…

  • Study shows Exercise can Reduce the Risk of Kidney Stones in Older Women

    srinivas_s@omicsgroup.co.in (OMICS Publishing Group)
    10 Jun 2013 | 4:20 pm
    According to the result of a study conducted by experts in USA, exercise may lower the risk of developing kidney stones.The experts examined data from over 85,000 older women who were 50 or above the age of 50.The participants were surveyed so that experts could keep track of what they were eating. The scientists intended to take into account the factors that lowered the risk of kidney stones such as consuming less meat and drinking lot of fluids. The participants reported how much physical activity they got into which was translated into METs – which is a measure of how much effort is…
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    Tighter Science

  • Aluminum Foil's Potential to Reduce Phantom Limb Pain

    Amanda Krebs
    18 Jun 2013 | 1:44 pm
    Aluminum foil is poised to valiantly charge into battleagainst Phantom Limb Pain.(Photo from The Art of Aluminum Foil by Jane Hintonand Hugh Oliver, General Publishing Co.,Don Mills, Ontario, 1974 via this blog).Researcher Robert C. Minnee and friends recently published an article in the British Journal of Pain that explores the question: can placing a tin foil barrier at the end of an amputated stump reduce phantom limb pain and/or block alien mind control?  (Fine, I made that second one up - maybe it could be a follow-up study.)The article defines phantom limb pain (PLP)…

  • Cute Scientist Round-up: Admit you want to look at attractive smart people

    Jackie Brahe
    13 Apr 2013 | 5:58 pm
    Do a Google image search for "leading scientist." (For the lazy, click here.) Ignoring the flotsam and jetsam of random Matt Damon and Peewee Herman images, what do you observe?Neither of us want to say it, but we both know what I'm getting at.For comparison's sake, try "realtor." Try "attorney." If you want to be a little frightened, try "news anchor." (No matter where you're standing... the eyes... they follow you everywhere...)Yes, I know, our collective cultural obsession with physical appearance is appalling. This is shameful and superficial and sad. But... wouldn't you like to look at…

  • Selfie Determination: are your iPhone photos artistic?

    Jackie Brahe
    11 Apr 2013 | 2:14 pm
    Meryl Streep takes a portrait of the right side of her face and the left side of Hilary Clinton's, thereby proving...something.   (Photo from Gawker)Researchers Nicola Bruno and Marco Bertamini have recently published a zippy little article on PLoS ONE that examines trends in self-portraits taken by non-artists.Apparently it has long been established that artists tend to paint the left side of other people's faces, while favouring the right side when they're painting their own faces. Bruno and Bertamini decided to see if pedestrian, uncreative folks would do the…

  • Looking on the Bright Side: Spectacular New England autums are a side-effect of climate change, new study finds

    Jackie Brahe
    9 Mar 2013 | 10:02 am
    You and I will likely never live to see it, but if your grandkids are planning a trip to New England for the end of this century, you'll want to remind them to charge up their camera implants, because they're in for a treat!Yup, if you're not in one of those poor developing nations, autumns in 2099are going to be super-fantastic!Tourists flock to the eastern United States and Canada every year to check out the autumn leaf displays. These tourists, charmingly known as "leef peepers," spend billions of dollars on their vacations, making a significant contribution the the region's economy.

  • Science Classic: Graham Allison and the Cuban Missile Crisis

    Jackie Brahe
    7 Mar 2013 | 10:53 pm
    Our emphasis here at Tighter Science is usually on fresh, nubile science. However, today we're waxing nostalgic with a wayback playback from the world of political science: Dr. Graham Allison's "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis" from 1969. In-a-gadda-da-vida, you guys! So grab your grooviest pair of reading glasses, and avoid the brown acid, as we look at this old-timey Magical Mystery Tour. (You can read it for free on JSTOR, where they put old articles like this one on the giveaway table. Far out, man!)IntroductionThis article is the most concise distillation of Allison's…
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    GK BLOG

  • How many legs do centipedes have?

    GK
    15 Jun 2013 | 6:31 am
    The prefix centi denotes one hundred, but most centipedes don't measure upto this figure. Half of the known species have only 15 pairs of legs, which means they have 30 in all. The centipede, irrespective of its species, starts life with about 6 pairs. The southern European species known as Himantarum Gabrielis has the maximum (171 to 177) pairs of legs.

  • How microwave ovens cook food and why is it that they finish the job in as little as fifteen minutes?

    GK
    1 Jun 2013 | 6:28 am
    Microwave ovens have provided the mankind with the whole new way of cooking, quite unlike the conventional method followed since thousands of years. When cooking is done in the customary manner, the heat that comes from a conventional gas stove is transferred to food by conduction. The heat is passed first to the food's outer layers and then progressively to its inner ones. But microwave ovens produce heat directly inside the food, heating it more evenly and more quickly than gas stove. Let's see how this works. Inside the microwave oven, a device called magnetron generates the microwaves…

  • Why the colours of leaves on the trees turn yellow, orange, red and brown in the autumn?

    GK
    11 May 2013 | 6:25 am
    The autumn tints are the external signs of important internal changes taking place in the leaves. The green matter, chlorophyll, in the leaves plays an important part as it helps each leaf to work as a food-factory for the plant. In autumn, however, the trees prepare to give up active life for a season and the food-making activities of the leaves are over. Before the leaves fall, they return much useful material to the plant. Green pigment, sugar and other key substances retreat to the stem and roots. With the breaking up of the chlorophyll at this time, other pigments become visible.

  • How many of the ancient seven wonders of the world still exist, more or less in their original form?

    GK
    4 May 2013 | 6:22 am
    Only one-the Great Pyramid of Cheops, in Egypt. Began as a royal tomb in about 2600 B.C., this is the largest of Egypt's 80-odd pyramids and the only wonder which has survived to this day. It stood in splendour 2,000 years before any of the other six wonders were built located outside Cairo, near Giza, the burial tomb of King Cheops is made up of 23,00,000 limestone blocks averaging 2.5 tonnes each. The total mass of these blocks is nearly 58,40,000 tonnes and the volume is 25,68,000 cubic metres. Most blocks weigh 2.25 tonnes, while some would tip the enormous scale at 13.5 tonnes. The…

  • When a terrorist attack seems likely, authorities declare red alert to step up security. why is such alert called red?

    GK
    27 Apr 2013 | 6:19 am
    The expression has its origin in the Second world war when German fighter bombers (photo, below) carried out extensive air raids on Britain’s military as well as civilian targets. The civil defence authorities determined the degree of alertness on the basis of the number of approaching aircraft after having detected them on radar. Civilians were mobilized accordingly, Yellow, blue and red alerts represented increasing degree of readiness for the attack, red alert being the highest level of alarm.
 
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