A First: Organs Tailor-Made With Body’s Own Cells
STOCKHOLM — Andemariam Beyene sat by the hospital window, the low Arctic sun on his face, and talked about the time he thought he would die.
Two and a half years ago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studying to be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, when Mr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.” But the doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells. |  |
Are we alone in the universe? We'll know soon
Nasa's Curiosity, the rover now on Mars, may find evidence for creatures that lived early in Martian history; firm evidence for even the most primitive bugs would have huge import. There could be life in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa. But what really fuels popular imagination is the prospect of advanced life – the "aliens" familiar from science fiction – and nobody expects a complex biosphere in those locations.
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Martian moon bites into the sun
NASA's Curiosity rover has caught sight of its first solar eclipse from the surface of Mars — a slight bite taken out of the sun by the Martian moon Phobos, as seen from the rover's vantage point in Gale Crater on Thursday.
Curiosity's Mastcam imaging system captured this image of the partial mini-eclipse through a neutral density filter that reduced the sunlight to a thousandth of its natural intensity. After all, you wouldn't want Curiosity to blow out its camera on Mars, any more than you would want to damage your own eyes by staring at the sun without eclipse-viewing glasses. The bright spots in the darkness surrounding the sun may look like stars, but Keri Bean, a member of Curiosity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me they're just "hot pixels" — flaws in the raw image data. |  |
Eye Contact Quells Online Hostility
Read any Web forum, and you'll agree: people are meaner online than in “real life.” Psychologists have largely blamed this disinhibition on anonymity and invisibility: when you're online, no one knows who you are or what you look like. A new study in Computers in Human Behavior, however, suggests that above and beyond anything else, we're nasty on the Internet because we don't make eye contact with our compatriots.
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Scotch Tape aids superconductivity breakthrough
No, you can’t use duct tape for everything.
Sometimes, only Scotch tape will do. Take it from an international team of physicists, led by the University of Toronto, which used double-sided Scotch tape to give a semiconductor the properties of a high-temperature superconductor. The results of the experiment, published Tuesday in the online journal Nature Communications, may help in the development of new devices that could be used in quantum computers and to improve energy efficiency. |  |
NASA turns to 3-D printing for self-building spacecraft
Spacecraft could build themselves or huge space telescopes someday by scavenging materials from space junk or asteroids. That wild vision stems from a modest proposal to use 3-D printing technology aboard a tiny satellite to create a much larger structure in space.
The "SpiderFab" project received $100,000 from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to hammer out a design and figure out whether spacecraft self-construction makes business sense. Practical planning and additional funding could lead to the launch of a 3-D-printing test mission within several years.
The "SpiderFab" project received $100,000 from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to hammer out a design and figure out whether spacecraft self-construction makes business sense. Practical planning and additional funding could lead to the launch of a 3-D-printing test mission within several years.
Video: Levitating Drugs in Zero-G Could Make Them More Effective
It almost looks like CG, but the floating drops in this video are quite real and potentially life-saving.
The liquid spheres are being levitated in a special machine that uses two small speakers to form sound waves slightly out of range of human hearing — about 22 kHz — that bombard the hovering drops. The sound waves, arriving from both above and below, perfectly cancel each other out and generate what’s known as a standing wave that can hold small amounts of material. The machine was originally developed at NASA to simulate microgravity conditions for testing the effects of space on objects.
The liquid spheres are being levitated in a special machine that uses two small speakers to form sound waves slightly out of range of human hearing — about 22 kHz — that bombard the hovering drops. The sound waves, arriving from both above and below, perfectly cancel each other out and generate what’s known as a standing wave that can hold small amounts of material. The machine was originally developed at NASA to simulate microgravity conditions for testing the effects of space on objects.
Look Ma, No Bubbles! New Material Boils Without the Froth
A new nanomaterial vanquishes the bubbles that normally pop up with boiling, a finding that may point to ways to help prevent explosions in nuclear power plants, researchers say.
To understand how this material works, imagine a hot skillet. When its surface is warm, water on it will bubble. However, once the skillet gets hot enough, the water drops will skitter across its surface as they levitate on a cushion of vapor, an effect known as the Leidenfrost regime after the scientist who investigated it in 1756. |  |
Japan Sets Policy to Phase Out Nuclear Power Plants by 2040
TOKYO — Japan said Friday that it would seek to phase out nuclear power by 2040 — a historic shift for a country that has long staked its future on such energy, but one that falls far short of the decisive steps the government had promised in the wake of the world’s second-largest nuclear plant disaster last year.
Although the long-awaited energy policy was named the “Revolutionary Energy and Environment Strategy” by its authors, it extended the expected transition away from nuclear power by at least a decade and includes caveats that appear to allow some plants to operate for decades past even the new deadline. |  |
Taking wind power to the (extreme) limit
Is there not enough wind blowing across the planet to satiate our demands for electricity? If there is, would harnessing that much of it begin to actually affect the climate?
Two studies published this week tried to answer these questions. Long story short: we could supply all our power needs for the foreseeable future from wind, all without affecting the climate in a significant way. The first study, published in this week’s Nature Climate Change, was performed by Kate Marvel of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Ben Kravitz and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Their goal was to determine a maximum geophysical limit to wind power—in other words, if we extracted all the kinetic energy from wind all over the world, how much power could we generate?. |  |
Discovery: Ancient Fort Aided Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul
Archaeologists say they've identified the oldest known Roman military fortress in Germany, likely built to house thousands of troops during Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the late 50s B.C. Broken bits of Roman soldiers' sandals helped lead to the discovery.
Researchers knew about the large site — close to the German town of Hermeskeil, near the French border — since the 19th century but lacked solid evidence about what it was. Parts of the fort also had been covered up or destroyed by agricultural development. |  |
From Ancient Deforestation, a Delta Is Born
Humans were tampering with nature long before the Industrial Revolution’s steam and internal combustion engines arrived on the scene. The invention of agriculture around 8,000 years ago, some argue, significantly changed ecosystems as it spread around the globe.
Although scientists are only just beginning to understand how these ancient alterations shaped our world today, a new study in Scientific Reports suggests that millennium-old development along the Danube River in Eastern Europe significantly changed the Black Sea ecosystem and helped create the lush Danube Delta in Romania and Ukraine. |  |
X marks the spot: Walter Elliot on his use of ancient art of divination
“I’ve been considered nuts, speaking to two bits of wire and expecting an answer from them,” admitted local historian Walter Elliot as he published his new book on dowsing, called Divining Archaeology, “but I do get an answer from them! I’ve found so much stuff now, they cannae say I’m nuts.”
The amateur archaeologist, who lives in Selkirk, has used divining rods to locate underground objects for more than 50 years, at first hunting for buried field drains and fence posts while working as a fencing contractor.
The amateur archaeologist, who lives in Selkirk, has used divining rods to locate underground objects for more than 50 years, at first hunting for buried field drains and fence posts while working as a fencing contractor.
A Neanderthal-Themed Park For Gibraltar?
The Homo sapiens imagination runs wild: A 4-D Mammoth Hunters ride? An Ice Age-themed roller-coaster?
Pure fantasy only, these ideas flew to mind when I scanned a report this morning about a Neanderthal park that may be established on the Rock of Gibraltar within a few years. |  |
DNA of Hungarian mummies may help combat tuberculosis
One wears a prim white bonnet. Another sticks out its tongue, hands resting over abdomen. A third clutches at its chest, mouth seemingly frozen in a scream. They are faces from the past, just as they were when laid to rest nearly 300 years ago.
In 1994 workers discovered a secret crypt that had been bricked up for 200 years in the northern Hungarian town of Vac, inside were 265 hand painted coffins stacked, one on top of the other, in order of size. The occupants were buried between 1731 and 1838 in the crypt of a Dominican church and had naturally mummified, due to environmental conditions within the sealed room.
In 1994 workers discovered a secret crypt that had been bricked up for 200 years in the northern Hungarian town of Vac, inside were 265 hand painted coffins stacked, one on top of the other, in order of size. The occupants were buried between 1731 and 1838 in the crypt of a Dominican church and had naturally mummified, due to environmental conditions within the sealed room.
"Zombie" Bees Electronically Enhanced to Help Solve Die-Off Mystery
To learn more about a bizarre, zombie-like behavior recently discovered in honeybees, researchers are now tagging the "zombees" with tiny radio trackers.
When infected by parasitic maggots of the scuttle fly, the bees apparently desert their hives at night and cluster near outdoor lights, wandering in increasingly erratic circles on the ground before dying.
The parasite could be controlling the honeybees and making them abandon their hives—or perhaps the infected bees are "committing altruistic suicide" to protect their hive mates, said entomologist John Hafernik of San Francisco State University.
When infected by parasitic maggots of the scuttle fly, the bees apparently desert their hives at night and cluster near outdoor lights, wandering in increasingly erratic circles on the ground before dying.
The parasite could be controlling the honeybees and making them abandon their hives—or perhaps the infected bees are "committing altruistic suicide" to protect their hive mates, said entomologist John Hafernik of San Francisco State University.
Isolated slices of brain tissue can store patterns of activity for short periods
It sounds like the plot of a science fiction film, or like something from a transhumanist fantasy: researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, report that they can induce memory-like patterns of activity in slices of brain tissue, and that the slices can store these activity patterns for short periods of time.
The brain can encode information about the outside world and retrieve it later on, and the mechanisms underlying this ability are of great interest to neuroscientists. The general consensus among researchers is that memories are formed by the strengthening of connections within networks of nerve cells, and recalled by reactivation of the electrical signals generated by these networks. The new work, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, contributes to our understanding of these processes. |  |
Neural Implant Recovers Ability to Make Decisions, Monkey Study Shows
Researchers have taken a key step towards recovering specific brain functions in sufferers of brain disease and injuries by successfully restoring the decision-making processes in monkeys.
By placing a neural device onto the front part of the monkeys' brains, the researchers, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, University of Kentucky and University of Southern California, were able to recover, and even improve, the monkeys' ability to make decisions when their normal cognitive functioning was disrupted. The study, which has been published today (Sept. 14) in IOP Publishing's Journal of Neural Engineering, involved the use of a neural prosthesis, which consisted of an array of electrodes measuring the signals from neurons in the brain to calculate how the monkeys' ability to perform a memory task could be restored. |  |
Why Humanity Needs to Travel to Other Stars
HOUSTON — Launching a mission to another star could teach us not just about space, but about Earth as well, experts argued here today at the 100 Year Starship Symposium.
"I believe space exploration is a human imperative," said Mae Jemison, the first female African American astronaut. "It didn’t begin in 1957 with Sputnik, it's been a part of us" all along. Jemison is heading the 100 Year Starship initiative, which aims to mount a mission to another star within 100 years. Toward that end, scientists and thinkers from a variety of disciplines gathered for a public symposium here from Sept. 13 to 16 to discuss the motivations, challenges and possible solutions for pursuing interstellar spaceflight. |  |
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