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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Mediaeval 'Black Death' linked to present plague
Post Date: 2011-09-05 09:20:25 by Tatarewicz
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A much less virulent version of the Black Death plague that killed a third of Europe's population in the 14th century is still present today, according to a German study published Tuesday. DNA testing on the skeletons of plague victims unearthed in a mediaeval London mass grave reveals part of the same gene sequence as the modern bubonic plague, despite its different attributes. "At least this part of the genetic information has barely changed in the past 600 years" said Johannes Krause, one of the authors of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "Without a doubt, the plague pathogen known today as (yersinia) pestis was ...
Soil bacteria helps kill cancers
Post Date: 2011-09-05 07:07:40 by Tatarewicz
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A bacterium found in soil is a showing promise as a way of delivering cancer drugs into tumours. Spores of the Clostridium sporogenes bacterium can grow within tumours because there is no oxygen. UK and Dutch scientists have been able to genetically engineer an enzyme into the bacteria to activate a cancer drug. Experts said it would be some time before the potential benefits of the work - presented to the Society of Microbiology - were known. The work is being presented to the society's autumn conference at the University of York. The spores grow only within solid tumours, such as breast, brain and prostate tumours and not in other tissue in the body, where oxygen is present. ...
Electric motor made from a single molecule
Post Date: 2011-09-05 06:59:14 by Tatarewicz
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Researchers have created the smallest electric motor ever devised. The motor, made from a single molecule just a billionth of a metre across, is reported in Nature Nanotechnology. The minuscule motor could have applications in both nanotechnology and in medicine, where tiny amounts of work can be put to efficient use. Tiny rotors based on single molecules have been shown before, but this is the first that can be individually driven by an electric current. "People have found before that they can make motors driven by light or by chemical reactions, but the issue there is that you're driving billions of them at a time - every single motor in your beaker," said Charles ...
Childhood’s End … and the End of Camping, Too
Post Date: 2011-09-04 18:10:50 by X-15
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To me, the most haunting image in Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel’s new book A.D. After Disclosure is this paragraph (p. 86): There is … a story offered by a high-level intelligence official about a UFO briefing President Carter received in June 1977. It was unknown to the source what specifics were discussed, only that when the President was seen in his office, he was sobbing, with his head in his hands, nearly on his desk. It was clear that the President was deeply upset. The authors of A.D. offer a very persuasive prediction for how humans will react to the knowledge of “Others” visiting or living on our planet. But while they comprehensively summarize the various ...
AIDS Invaded U.S. in 1969
Post Date: 2011-09-03 13:03:45 by Turtle
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New evidence that a St. Louis teen-ager died of AIDS in 1969 suggests that the AIDS virus may have been introduced into the United States several times before touching off the current epidemic, according to experts in disease transmission. Until now, many experts have assumed that the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome first appeared in the country sometime in the mid-1970's. Evidence indicates to many experts that the disease originated before then in Africa, although this has not been proved. The patient, identified only as Robert R., died in 1969 of an illness that baffled his doctors at Washington University in St. Louis. They published a paper in 1984 ...
Top Swiss science prize goes to molecular dynamics
Post Date: 2011-09-03 06:56:35 by Tatarewicz
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An Italian-born physicist has been awarded Switzerland’s top science prize for his work on molecular dynamics, it was announced on Thursday. Michele Parrinello, who holds posts at both the University of Italian-speaking Switzerland and at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, will be presented with the Marcel Benoist prize on November 28. Molecular dynamics is the computer simulation of the physical movements of atoms and molecules. Parrinello’s work has applications in a many areas of physics, chemistry and biology. His findings have enabled industry to develop more efficient chemical processes and to develop new medicines. In quite a different area, they have been ...
Exciting stone tool find in Kenya
Post Date: 2011-09-02 03:05:57 by Tatarewicz
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The world's earliest sophisticated stone tools have been found near Lake Turkana in northwest Kenya. The teardrop-shaped hand-axes date to about 1.76 million years ago, and would have been used for a range of tasks from chopping wood to cutting up meat. They would have been so useful in fact that scientists describe them as the "Swiss army knife" of the Stone Age. Researchers tell the journal Nature that the tools were probably made by the human ancestor Homo erectus. This was a bigger-brained, smarter and more dextrous creature than any human species before it. Homo erectus ranged across Africa and Asia before going extinct about 70,000 years ago. Many suspect it was on ...
Scientists Use Cultured Stem Cells for Blood 'Self-Transfusion'
Post Date: 2011-09-02 01:49:41 by Tatarewicz
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THURSDAY, Sept. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers report that they used stem cells to create cultured red blood cells and then successfully injected the blood cells back into the human donor who provided the stem cells in the first place. The findings raise the possibility of creating individualized blood supplies without making people donate their own blood for storage before they need a transfusion, a potentially dicey situation if someone is ill. The researchers said that the cultured red blood cells created with the help of stem cells from the donor -- and then inserted back into the donor -- lived about as long as regular blood cells normally do. The study, the first to show that ...
Gut bacteria picky about what we eat: study
Post Date: 2011-09-02 00:23:47 by Tatarewicz
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CHICAGO (Reuters) - Gut bacteria -- colonies of bacteria that live in the human digestive tract -- appear to have fairly picky dining habits, with one type preferring high-fat, fast-food fare, and another preferring a high-fiber feast, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Researchers are increasingly trying to understand the interplay of bacteria and their human hosts. "We know our human bodies are colonized with tons and tons of bacteria and other organisms. In your colon alone, you have more bacterial cells than you have human cells in your whole body," said Dr. James Lewis, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked on the study published in the journal ...
Scientists use laser beams to control rainfall
Post Date: 2011-09-01 02:16:54 by Tatarewicz
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In a discovery that may have weather forecasters the world over eyeing the job vacancy websites, scientists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland claim to have found a way to control the weather using laser beams. According to the results of a study published in the Nature Communications journal this week, the researchers have found a way of using laser beams to make water droplets in the air through a method called laser-assisted water condensation. This is a safer method than current rain-inducing techniques, which fill the air with tiny particles of dry ice and silver iodide. With laser-assisted water condensation, nitric acid particles are formed when powerful laser beams are ...
pecialized Adult Stem Cells Re-Grow Fingertips
Post Date: 2011-09-01 00:36:48 by Tatarewicz
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WEDNESDAY, Aug. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Specialized adult stem cells make it possible for mammals to re-grow the tips of injured fingers or toes, rather than a "jack of all trades" cell type formed in response to serious injury, a new study shows. Researchers from Stanford University found the regenerating stem cells are tissue-specific, meaning each has a particular job regenerating bone, skin, tendon, vessels or nerves. The findings call into question a popular theory that damaged extremities are regenerated by a bump of cells considered "pluripotent," meaning that they are able to grow into a variety of cell types. This versatile bump of repair cells is called a ...
Chinese want to capture an asteroid into Earth's orbit
Post Date: 2011-08-31 08:31:51 by Tatarewicz
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While most astronomers seem to be understandably worried about the best way to steer asteroids away from Earth, Chinese scientists are instead trying to figure out how they can capture nearby asteroids into Earth orbit. And then mine them. At first glance, nudging an asteroid closer to Earth seems like one of those "what could possible go wrong" scenarios that we generally try and avoid, and for good reason: large asteroid impacts are bad times. The Chinese, though, seem fairly optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about ...
Amazon might be ship up to 5 million tablets in Q4
Post Date: 2011-08-30 05:56:50 by Tatarewicz
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Book shop takes on fruity toymaker Analysts believe Amazon stands a good chance of threatening Apple's dominance in the tablet market when it introduces its first tablet later this year. Forrester expects Amazon to sell between three and five million units in Q4, which sounds impressive. Apple managed to sell just over three million iPads in the first quarter after launch. However, Forrester’s forecast relies on a $300 price, meaning that Amazon will offer tablets at a very competitive price. “Amazon’s willingness to sell hardware at a loss combined with the strength of its brand, content, cloud infrastructure, and commerce assets makes it the only credible iPad ...
Encouraging anti-hacking news from China
Post Date: 2011-08-30 05:24:57 by Tatarewicz
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BEIJING - Starting on Thursday, hackers who broke into 20 or more computers will face jail terms of up to seven years, according to a new judicial interpretation issued jointly by the China's Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate. People who hack from 20 to 100 computers, or steal from 10 to 50 user names and passwords for online-payment or stock accounts, will get at least three years in prison. And those who hack even more computers or steal more passwords will face jail terms of up to seven years. The latest rule, an interpretation made to deal with online crimes, which were added to the Criminal Law in 2009, also applies to Chinese hackers who steal ...
Cell phones reduce sperm motility
Post Date: 2011-08-29 06:34:34 by Tatarewicz
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Did you know, that men who carry a cell phone in the front pocket of their jeans may be reducing their chances of having kids in the future? That’s because, according to research out of the Cleveland Clinic, a cell phone can emit damaging radiofrequency electromagnetic waves when exposed to the “boys next door”. In an experiment, scientists took semen samples and placed them in a jar one inch away from a cell phone for one hour (guess that would be a laboratory equivalent of having phone sex). The reproductive researchers realized that the sperm exposed to cell phone radio waves had significantly reduced their motility (they preferred to sit around and talk on the phone). So, ...
A Weather Newsgasm
Post Date: 2011-08-29 06:31:16 by Ada
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What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it. The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do. By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster. By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over ...
Biodiesel bike takes to the road
Post Date: 2011-08-28 03:22:23 by farmfriend
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Biodiesel bike takes to the road By LAUREN BOYER, Daily Record/Sunday News The Lancaster County Career and Technology Center instructor revved the engine of his custom-made chopper outside the Colonial Courthouse in York on Thursday. Instead of black smoke billowing from the exhaust pipe, it just smelled like fried food. "It smells like the fair - the York Fair," Lingle said with a laugh. "When people drive behind you, they want to know where that smell is coming from." A year ago, his students built the bike using a four-cylinder Volkswagen turbo engine that runs solely on biodiesel collected from school cafeteria cooking oils. Inclement weather stunted ...
Speed Comparison: GT vs. F1
Post Date: 2011-08-28 00:05:48 by X-15
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Poster Comment:24 Hours of LeMans classes versus Formula 1 on the same track (different race days) as a comparison. The F1 drivers are truly the top of the heap when it comes to driving skills.
Steve Jobs right up there with Edison and Ford
Post Date: 2011-08-27 04:50:58 by Tatarewicz
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In January, 2007, while unveiling the iPhone, Steve Jobs encapsulated how he ran Apple Inc. “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love,” Mr. Jobs told the assembled faithful at the annual Macworld gathering in San Francisco. “ ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple, since the very, very beginning. And we always will.” Mr. Jobs is the great industrialist of the modern era, whose 3 1/2 decades in the computing business has placed him in a pantheon of ambitious innovators. The celebrations of his career, as he retires as Apple CEO this week because of deteriorating health, ...
'Klaatu Barada Nikto!'
Post Date: 2011-08-26 06:56:35 by Ada
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If you want to protect your life – and those of your children and grandchildren – you’d better memorize this phrase. It may save you from a threat apparently being voiced at NASA: an attack from another planet somewhere in the vastness of our universe. Why might such an assault be forthcoming? Because we humans have not heeded the warnings of Al Gore! Our carbon-based activities could spread their deadly influence to other planets which, for the sake of their own survival, might lead them to decide to destroy our planet. This would be done, of course, as an act of "preventive war," a proposition that has caused Boobus Americanus to embrace the Bush-Obama doctrine ...
Genetically modified bacteria fights infections
Post Date: 2011-08-26 05:51:43 by Tatarewicz
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Researchers in Singapore have succeeded in creating a laboratory bacterium, Escherichia coli, genetically engineered to combat hospital infections. The new bacterium was built from tools of synthetic biology. It is able to perceive and kill Pseudomonas aeruginosa, another bacterium responsible for pulmonary and gastrointestinal infections in hospitalized patients. In the experiment conducted in the laboratory, the E. Coli killed a culture of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in just 18 hours. The study represents a step towards healing of infections caused by P. aeruginosa. It will still need to be tested on animals and humans. "It will still take a few more years so that the modified bacteria ...
Climate cycles linked to civil war, analysis shows
Post Date: 2011-08-26 03:29:32 by Tatarewicz
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Changes in the global climate that cut food production triggered one-fifth of civil conflicts between 1950 and 2004 El Nino and war : war between the SPLA and Sudan government Cyclical climatic changes such have been linked to civil conflict. A South Sudanese man works on his farm next to an anti-aircraft gun destroyed during the 1998 war. Photograph: Antony Njuguna/Reuters Cyclical climatic changes double the risk of civil wars, with analysis showing that 50 of 250 conflicts between 1950 and 2004 were triggered by the El Niño cycle, according to scientists. Researchers connected the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which brings hot and dry conditions to tropical ...
Save Your Bookmarks, forever
Post Date: 2011-08-25 21:51:35 by Lod
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Check it.
Technology Keeping Internet Freedom Ahead of Censorship
Post Date: 2011-08-25 11:10:05 by christine
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Efforts by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to regulate the Internet may become irrelevant if the new technology being developed succeeds as expected. When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled against the FCC last December, the FCC rewrote its rules to allow them to regulate the Internet anyway through the whitewash called “net neutrality.” Verizon immediately filed suit to overrule the new attempt, and a House subcommittee in March voted to invalidate the actions of the FCC. But the new rules remain in place until the issue is decided. All of which may be irrelevant as new technology, called Telex, is being developed as a “work-around” ...
3-D printing - a paradigm shift
Post Date: 2011-08-25 06:03:40 by Tatarewicz
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As the markets on Wall and Broad Streets continue to feed the bears with an ongoing downtrend, to the nation's entrepreneurs, it merely serves as background noise. The markets do of course matter in the grand scheme of things. But the creative classes continue to do what they have always done, pushing their dreams down the unknown roads. As with the steam engine and personal computers before them, occasionally an idea comes to light that promises to disrupt practically everything. They start small at first, usually on the fringes of the larger economy... But before long, they break through the realm of geeks to the consciousness of the broader markets. Bordering On the ...
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