New Quantum Theory Separates Gravitational and Inertial Mass

Why acupuncture aids spinal recovery

Rats with damaged spines can walk again thanks to acupuncture. But it’s not due to improvements in their energy flow or “chi”. Instead, the ancient treatment seems to stop nerve cell death by reducing inflammation.

Acupuncture’s scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell

LATE at night on a sultry evening, I watch intently as the predator senses its prey, gathers itself, and strikes. It could be a polecat, or even a mantis – but in fact it’s a microbe. The microscopic world of the single, living cell mirrors our own in so many ways: cells are essentially autonomous, sentient and ingenious. In the lives of single cells we can perceive the roots of our own intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

Green Concrete: Storing carbon dioxide in cement

Making cement for concrete involves heating pulverized limestone, clay, and sand to 1,450 °C with a fuel such as coal or natural gas. The process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: making one metric ton of commonly used Portland cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of it. The 2.8 billion metric tons of cement produced worldwide in 2009 contributed about 5 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based startup Novacem, is trying to eliminate those emissions with a cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide than is released during its manufacture. It locks away as much as 100 kilograms of the greenhouse gas per ton. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar Fuel

Designing the perfect renewable fuel.

When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the ideal renewable fuel, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Biofuels ultimately come from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass–corn or switchgrass or algae? “What we wanted to know,” Afeyan says, “is could we engineer a system that could convert carbon dioxide directly into any fuel that we wanted?” Read the rest of this entry »

Solar-Powered Desalination

Saudi Arabia’s newest purification plant will use state-of-the-art solar technology.

Saudi Arabia meets much of its drinking water needs by removing salt and other minerals from seawater. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine. Saudi Arabia’s national research agency, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), is building what will be the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant in the city of Al-Khafji. Read the rest of this entry »

Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens

The first continuous monitoring system for glaucoma hits the European market.

Glaucoma is the second most common cause of blindness, and without constant vigilance it can prove a very difficult disease to manage. But a Swiss biotech company has developed a monitoring system that allows physicians to keep track of their patients’ symptoms over 24 hours. Sensimed’s “Triggerfish” system consists of a contact lens with embedded sensors that can pick up subtle physical changes in a patient’s eye, and then wirelessly transmit that data to a receiver worn around his neck. Read the rest of this entry »

Prostate Cancer Results in 15 minutes

In an office park in Woburn, MA, a volunteer presents his fingertip for a quick finger stick. A phlebotomist wicks up the small drop of blood with a specially made square of plastic, then snaps the plastic into a credit-card sized microfluidics cartridge and feeds it into a special reader. Fifteen minutes later, the device spits out the volunteer’s prostate specific antigen (PSA) level, a protein used to monitor the return of prostate cancer after treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

The Time-Reversed Laser to See the Light

There’s no question that lasers are cool devices. They work because in certain materials, the passage of a photon past an atom can trigger the release of another photon which goes on to release more photons and so on. This chain reaction generates an exponential increase in the number of photons, a key characteristic of lasing materials. Read the rest of this entry »

Laser Security for the Internet

Scientist Invents a Digital Security Tool Good Enough for the CIA – And for You

A British computer hacker equipped with a “Dummies” guide recently tapped into the Pentagon. As hackers get smarter, computers get more powerful and national security is put at risk. The same goes for your own personal and financial information transmitted by phone, on the Internet or through bank machines. Read the rest of this entry »

Mom and dad, stop stifling me – it’s damaging my brain

Overprotective parents inhibit more than their kids’ freedom: they may also slow brain growth in an area linked to mental illness.

Children whose parents are overprotective or neglectful are believed to be more susceptible to psychiatric disorders – which in turn are associated with defects in part of the prefrontal cortex.

To investigate the link, Kosuke Narita of Gunma University, Japan, scanned the brains of 50 people in their 20s and asked them to fill out a survey about their relationship with their parents during their first 16 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain

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How the human brain works

Super Velcro : Reusable Superglue

A novel adhesive is extremely strong, and its stickiness is reversible.

General Motors researchers have made an extremely strong adhesive that comes apart when heated. The adhesive is 10 times stickier than Velcro and the reusable gecko-inspired glues that many research groups have been trying to perfect.

The polymers in the glue bond to each other within minutes when they are initially heated. Thus, when two pieces of the adhesive materials are heated, they stick together strongly. Once stuck, it takes a lot of force to peel the polymers away from each other, but they come apart easily when heated again. The researchers were able to attach and pull apart the polymers twice before losing one-third of the adhesive strength, according to a Langmuir paper published online. Read the rest of this entry »

Bloom Reveals New Fuel Cells

Its 100-kilowatt modules have been sold to Google, eBay, and Walmart.

The up-to-now secretive startup Bloom Energy took the wraps off its technology this week, unveiling a fuel-cell system that the company claims can run on a variety of fuels and pay for itself in three to five years via lower energy bills. Read the rest of this entry »

Biofuels from Saltwater Crops

A research project will make jet fuel without wasting fresh water or farmland.

A project in the Middle East aims to make jet fuel from saltwater-tolerant crops grown in the desert. Researchers at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates are starting a two-square-kilometer demonstration farm that will combine fish and shrimp farming with the cultivation of mangrove trees and salicornia, a plant with oil-rich seeds that can be converted into fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation

Quantum World

If successful scientific theories can be thought of as cures for stubborn problems, quantum physics was the wonder drug of the 20^th century. It successfully explained phenomena such as radioactivity and antimatter, and no other theory can match its description of how light and particles behave on small scales.

But it can also be mind-bending. Quantum objects can exist in multiple states and places at the same time, requiring a mastery of statistics to describe them. Rife with uncertainty and riddled with paradoxes, the theory has been criticised for casting doubt on the notion of an objective reality – a concept many physicists, including Albert Einstein, have found hard to swallow. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving the ‘unconscious’ a voice

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

“They can now have some involvement in their destiny,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work. Read the rest of this entry »

The strangest liquid: Why water is so weird

We are confronted by many mysteries, from the nature of dark matter and the origin of the universe to the quest for a theory of everything. These are all puzzles on the grand scale, but you can observe another enduring mystery of the physical world – equally perplexing, if not quite so grand – from the comfort of your kitchen. Simply fill a tall glass with chilled water, throw in an ice cube and leave it to stand.

The fact that the ice cube floats is the first oddity. And the mystery deepens if you take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the water at various depths. At the top, near the ice cube, you’ll find it to be around 0 °C, but at the bottom it should be about 4 °C. That’s because water is denser at 4°C than it is at any other temperature – another strange trait that sets it apart from other liquids. Read the rest of this entry »

Made-to-Order Heart Cells

Stem cell advance will help drug development.

Last month, Madison, WI-based Cellular Dynamics International (CDI) began shipping heart cells derived from a person’s own stem cells. The cells could be useful to researchers studying everything from the toxicity of new or existing drugs to the electrodynamics of both healthy and diseased cardiac cells.

CDI’s scientists create their heart cells–called iCell Cardiomyocytes–by taking cells from a person’s own blood (or other tissue) and chemically reversing them back to a pluripotent state. This means they are able to grow or can be programmed to grow into any cell in the body.

Watch Video >> Read the rest of this entry »

A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2

A copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners.

When it’s exposed to the elements, the surface of copper turns green because it reacts with oxygen. But now scientists have discovered a copper-based material with a surprising property: it reacts with carbon dioxide in air rather than oxygen. Though the reaction is not a practical way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it does provide an alternative new route, using a cheap, nonpetroleum feedstock, to make useful chemicals. Read the rest of this entry »

A Pivot Irrigator With a Difference

Developed by a Pune-based engineer, the solar machine saves energy and time while irrigating large stretches of land.

When rains failed all of a sudden last year after having started on a promising note in June, the researchers at the National Research Centre for Onion and Garlic in Rajgurunagar went into a tizzy.

The soy bean crop that had been planted in 4.5 acres of land at the center was at risk of failure. What came to their rescue was a solar-powered pivot irrigator, developed by Pune-based Padmakar Kelkar, an engineer by profession and an entrepreneur by choice. Kelkar’s innovation saved the entire soy bean crop that was almost on the verge of getting wiped out. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Build Strong Bones

Don’t wait for that dreaded bone-weakening disease to strike. The good news: you can reverse bone losses with diet, exercise and medication

I woke up one morning with a nagging pain in my upper back. When a few weeks of rubbing balm didn’t help, I consulted an orthopaedic doctor.

He learnt after asking me a few questions—and so did I—that I had all along been getting too little calcium in my diet. A bone mineral density test soon afterwards shocked me: I had osteopenia, or early-stage osteoporosis that can lead to full blown osteoporosis if left untreated. I’d always believed osteoporosis—a disease where bones weaken and become porous and brittle—afflicted only the elderly. Read the rest of this entry »

Ground-Breaking Science: Very Old Papers Are Both Awesome and Hilarious

Can one species be transmuted into another just by swapping their blood? What are those funny little things swimming in my water? Did this Einstein guy get his math right?

Those are a few of the questions addressed in a trove of history-making papers published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and released in their entirety to celebrate the 350th birthday of the world’s oldest scientific body. Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep success: How to make ZZZs = memory

Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories, suggest Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

They asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up. Read the rest of this entry »

Penguins Evolving Faster Than Thought

The evolutionary march of the penguins happened in double time, according to new genetic calculations.

A study of DNA from ancient and modern Adélie penguins suggests that scientists may have miscalculated the rates at which genetic clocks tick off evolutionary time in other species as well. A team of researchers collected mitochondrial DNA from penguins currently living in rookeries in Antarctica and from bones of penguins that had lived in the same spot as long as 44,000 years ago. Analysis of the DNA reveals that the penguins are evolving on a molecular scale two to six times faster than standard calculations indicated, the team reports in the November Trends in Genetics. Read the rest of this entry »

Birth of New Species Witnessed by Scientists

On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.

In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song. Read the rest of this entry »

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It’s a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush’s IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and “as a result ill-informed”. The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was “in a league by himself”. Bush himself has described his thinking style as “not very analytical”. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow’s weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals

Umbrella or sunscreen? Flood or drought? The secret of flawless weather forecasting turns out to be surprisingly simple

WE’VE all watched those vast heaps of cotton wool float across the sky. Lofted and shaped by updrafts of warm air, cumulus clouds mesmerise with their constantly changing shape. Some grow ever taller, while others wither and die before our eyes. All bear witness to the ceaseless roiling of the ocean of air we call the atmosphere.

About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of such clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Timeline: The secret history of swine flu

Six months ago, swine flu emerged as a massive threat to global health. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but our timeline explains how the origins of the H1N1 pandemic go back more than a century

1889

Prior to 1889, the main flu virus circulating in humans has been from the H1 family. But this year, a new strain of H2 flu emerges in Russia and spreads around the world, killing about 1 million people. Afterwards, H2 replaces H1 in humans. Such replacements seem to be a regular feature of flu pandemics. Read the rest of this entry »

Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic

The decline was rapid. I got my first pair of glasses aged 9, and by my mid-teens could no longer read the title on the cover of New Scientist at arm’s length. With my mum’s eyes just as bad, I always assumed that I’d inherited my short-sightedness from her and that I could do little to stop my vision from becoming a little blurrier each year.

Around the same time, however, rates of short-sightedness, or myopia, were rising to epidemic proportions around the world. Today, in some of the worst-affected countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, around 80 per cent of young adults are myopic, compared to only 25 per cent a few decades back. Read the rest of this entry »

Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning

Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has now recorded some more down-to-Earth signals. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial lightning storms.

The flashes occurred just before, during and immediately after lightning strikes, as tracked by the World Wide Lightning Location Network. Read the rest of this entry »

Serendipity: Out of the Blue Islands Seen From Space

Islands are some of the most beautiful, peaceful, violent, desolate and unique places on Earth. While experiencing a tropical island from its sandy beaches, or a volcanic island from its towering peaks is wonderful, experiencing them from above can be inspiring as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about

WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.

In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing – and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering. Read the rest of this entry »

Instant Expert: Mental Health

When the heart breaks down, it beats erratically or not at all. A bone can chip or snap. But when the complex network of neurons in our brain malfunctions, the result can be a near-endless variety and combinations of mental illnesses.

It’s normal to sometimes be sad, happy, anxious, confused, forgetful or fearful, but when a person’s emotions, thoughts or behaviour frequently trouble them, or disrupt their lives, they may be suffering from mental illness. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 450 million people worldwide are affected by mental, neurological or behavioural problems at any time. Read the rest of this entry »

Forecasting Financial Crashes: The Ultimate Experiment Begins

If a new technique for predicting crashes really works, a bold new experiment will measure how well.

Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved

Genetic analysis of the now-extinct Falkland Islands Wolf has answered a biological riddle that caught the attention of a young Charles Darwin, and helped shape his understanding of evolution.

During his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin observed that the wolves — like his now-famous finches — varied widely in size between different islands, suggesting that the traits of species were not immutable, but changed over time in response to their environments. Read the rest of this entry »

Birds Use Light, Not Magnetic Field, to Migrate

A cell in the eye may be worth two in the beak, at least when it comes to a migratory bird’s magnetic compass. In European robins, a visual center in the brain and light-sensing cells in the eye — not magnetic sensing cells in the beak — allow the songbirds to sense which direction is north and migrate correctly, a new study finds. The study, appearing Oct. 29 in Nature, may improve conservation efforts for migratory birds. Read the rest of this entry »

Butterflies Use Antenna GPS to Guide Migration

Scientists have finally located the 24-hour clock that guides the migration of monarch butterflies. Instead of being in the brain where most people expected, it turns out the circadian clock is located in the butterflies’ antennae.

Every fall, monarchs make an impressive 2,000-mile trek south, using the sun to guide them to the exact same wintering spot in central Mexico. But because the sun is a moving target, changing position throughout the day, biologists have long speculated that in addition to having a “sun compass” in their brains, butterflies must use some kind of 24-hour clock to guide their migration. Now, researchers have located this special GPS system, but it’s not what everyone expected. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence Explained

Tracking and understanding the complex connections within the brain may finally reveal the neural secret of cognitive ability.

A series of black-and-white snapshots is splayed across the screen, each capturing a thin slice of my brain. The gray-scale pictures would look familiar to anyone who has seen a brain scan, but these images are different. Andrew Frew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses a cursor to select a small square. Thin strands like spaghetti appear, representing the thousands of neural fibers passing through it. A few clicks of the cursor and Frew refines the tract of fibers pictured on the screen, highlighting first my optic nerve, then the fibers passing through a part of the brain that’s crucial for language, then the bundles of motor and sensory nerves that head down to the brain stem. Read the rest of this entry »

Blood Test Offers More Accurate Picture of Health

A Seattle company is developing rapid tests for thousands of proteins.

With $30 million in recent financing, a Seattle-based company has launched operations to develop and market inexpensive tests for thousands of blood proteins, offering a comprehensive picture of the health of all the body’s organs. The Seattle startup, called Integrated Diagnostics, is developing cheap diagnostics that work in minutes and could be used to detect diseases at early, more treatable stages. The company’s technology has been in development for the past nine years in labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. The company hopes to provide tests for early diagnosis of neurological disorders and other diseases. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants Know Their Relatives — And Like Them!

Unlike many human brothers and sisters, plant siblings appear to do their best to get along, sharing resources and avoiding competition.

In a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings, scientists discovered that the young plants recognize their siblings — other plants grown from the seeds of the same momma plant — using chemical cues given off during root growth. And it turns out mustard plants won’t compete with their brethren the way they will with strangers: Instead of rapidly growing roots to suck up as much water and minerals as possible, plants who sensed nearby siblings developed a shallower root system and more intertwined leaves. Read the rest of this entry »

Wires Inserted Into Human Brain Reveal Speech Surprise

A rare set of high-resolution readouts taken directly from the wired-in brains of epileptics has provided an unprecedented look at how the brain processes language.

Though only a glimpse, it was enough to show that part of the brain’s language center handles multiple tasks, rather than one.

“If the same part of the brain does different things at different times, that’s a thunderously complex level of organization,” said Ned Sahin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »

Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map

Vast amounts of the clean-burning fossil fuel have been discovered in shale deposits, setting off a gas rush. But how it will affect our energy use is still uncertain.

The first sign that there’s something unusual about the flat black rocks strewn across the shore of Lake Erie comes when Gary Lash smashes two of them together. They break easily and fall into shards that give off the faint odor of hydrocarbons, similar to the smell of kerosene. But for Lash, a geologist and professor at nearby SUNY Fredonia, smashing the rocks is a simple trick designed to catch the attention of a visitor. The black outcroppings that protrude from the nearby bluff onto the narrow beach are what really interest him. Read the rest of this entry »

The Human Genome in 3-D

New technology reveals how DNA molecules pack themselves inside a cell nucleus.

Unfurled, the human genome would contain approximately six feet of DNA. Amazingly, all of that length is packed into a cell nucleus about three micrometers in diameter–roughly one-third the width of a human hair.

New technology that makes it possible to assess the three-dimensional interactions among different parts of the genome has revealed how these molecules are packed into such a tiny space. The findings could also yield new clues to genome regulation–how specific genes are turned on and off. Read the rest of this entry »

Startup That Builds Biological Parts

Ginkgo BioWorks aims to push synthetic biology to the factory level.

In a warehouse building in Boston, wedged between a cruise-ship drydock and Au Bon Pain’s corporate headquarters, sits Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic-biology startup that aims to make biological engineering easier than baking bread. Founded by five MIT scientists, the company offers to assemble biological parts–such as strings of specific genes–for industry and academic scientists. Read the rest of this entry »

Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain

For anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone.

In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they’d lost.

“Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it,” said neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California, Irvine. His remarks appeared in the study he co-authored, published Wednesday in Neuron. Read the rest of this entry »

An Insider’s Guide to the Large Hadron Collider

After more than fifteen years of planning and more than eight billion dollars in funding, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), science’s groundbreaking effort to unlock the deepest secrets of particle physics, is finally complete. It is truly the grandest experiment of all time — the pinnacle of humanity’s quest for unification. Befitting the pursuit of cosmic grandeur and unity, it is set in a stunning location. Read the rest of this entry »

Schrodinger’s Cat experiment for real

How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things

Catching Fake Meds in a Snapshot

Two-dimensional bar codes could reduce drug counterfeiting in the developing world.

Researchers from New York University have proposed a system for authenticating and tracking drugs distributed in the developing world. The system, called Epothecary, would use cell phone cameras to read two-dimensional bar codes affixed to packages and assigned to distributors and pharmacists. The researchers hope the system can be used to prevent the distribution of counterfeit drugs through legitimate channels.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 10 percent of drugs in the developing world are counterfeit. Some counterfeit meds contain the right ingredients in the right quantities, but others are substandard or even poisonous. Read the rest of this entry »

13 more things that don’t make sense

13 Things sent to try us

Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us.  Michael Brooks presents thirteen of the most perplexing. Cracking any one of them could yield profound truths.

Axis of evil

Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern

WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation left over from the big bang? In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “axis of evil“. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s luck got to do with it? The math of gambling

FIVE years ago, Londoner Ashley Revell sold his house, all his possessions and cashed in his life savings. It raised £76,840. He flew to Las Vegas, headed to the roulette table and put it all on red.

The wheel was spun. The crowd held its breath as the ball slowed, bounced four or five times, and finally settled on number seven. Red seven.

Revell’s bet was a straight gamble: double or nothing. But when Edward Thorp, a mathematics student at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, went to the same casino some 40 years previously, he knew pretty well where the ball was going to land. He walked away with a profit, took it to the racecourse, the basketball court and the stock market, and became a multimillionaire. He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Algorithm Predicts When Species Will Go 404, Not Found

Biologists have figured out the most efficient way to destroy an ecosystem — and it’s based on the Google search algorithm.

Scientists have long known that the extinction of key species in a food web can cause collapse of the entire system, but the vast number of interactions between species makes it difficult to guess which animals and plants are the most important. Now, computational biologists have adapted the Google search algorithm, called PageRank, to the problem of predicting ecological collapse, and they’ve created a startlingly accurate model. Read the rest of this entry »

A Liquid Design for Cheaper Fuel Cells

A platinum-free liquid cathode could cut fuel-cell costs by 40 percent.

Platinum remains the best material for speeding chemical reactions in hydrogen fuel cells, although the scarcity and cost of this element keep fuel cells from becoming more affordable and practical. Most alternative approaches involve simply replacing the platinum in the electrodes. Now a U.K. company called ACAL Energy has overhauled fuel cell design to reduce the amount of platinum used by 80 percent.

In a conventional fuel cell, platinum is embedded in porous carbon electrodes. ACAL’s design replaces this with a solution containing low-cost molybdenum and vanadium as the catalyst. The resulting fuel cell works as well as a conventional one but should cost 40 percent less, the company says. Read the rest of this entry »

Astronomers Turn To Omniscopes For Low Cost Observation

Omniscopes promise omnidirectional, omnichromatic astronomy at reasonable cost.

Astronomers want bigger and better telescopes. That’s understandable. But in the world of radio telescopes, there’s a problem looming. Greater sensitivity requires a bigger surface area and the cost for a steerable single-dish telescope grows with area faster than linearly. So really big dishes are just too expensive to build. Read the rest of this entry »

Hammers, Water, Lasers Make Deep Drilling Easier

The process of punching a well hasn’t changed in a century. The search for oil, gas, or water may extend more than 7 miles, but it’s still done with a tricone bit—three grinding cones angled inward and downward, with spinning teeth. This system is effective at crushing and shearing, but every time a bit wears out, engineers have to “trip” the drill: They bring the head to the surface, change it, and send it back down. A lot of drilling time is actually tripping time, which means a project’s cost goes up exponentially with depth. So researchers are developing replacement technologies to reach superheated water for geothermal power or stretch down to previously inaccessible fossil fuel. Here are a few ideas for parts that will be greater than the hole. Read the rest of this entry »

Researcher Pushes Enormous Floating Solar Islands

Creating cheap, clean energy is a huge problem.

So, how’s this for a big solution: Swiss researcher Thomas Hinderling wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power.

He’s the CEO of the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, a privately held R&D company, and he’s already received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility in that country. Read the rest of this entry »

Biodynamic route to wine

In Vino Veritas : Winemakers disappointed by organic methods have turned to biodynamics as the purest route to wine that’s true to soil, grape, and climate.

For years the question in winemaking was how technology could make wine better. This was especially true if the wine was Californian. When California cabernet sauvignon bested the best of Bordeaux–in a legendary blind tasting, the “Judgment of Paris,” convened by the English wine merchant Steven ­Spurrier–it was a moment of great national pride at the time of America’s Bicentennial, and it was achieved in part because California winemakers had used technology in ways tradition-bound French winemakers would not. As California wine became respectable, Silicon Valley millionaires bought vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties. California wine and tech soon enjoyed a happy marriage. Read the rest of this entry »

Calling All Amateur Astronomers: Help Solve a Mystery

A super-bright star is gradually going dim, and scientists want YOU to help them find out why.

For nearly 200 years, astronomers have been wondering why the star epsilon Aurigae turns down its light once every 27 years. Based on careful observations of the star’s periodic dimming, scientists believe that the supergiant star must have a mysterious companion that blocks its light periodically. But they still don’t know what that companion is. Read the rest of this entry »

Cleaning Coal

Converting coal to natural gas is our best strategy for limiting carbon dioxide emissions today.

The hot investments these days involve renewable-energy technologies that promise to generate electricity completely free of emissions, along with biofuels that promise to end global demand for coal and petroleum. Unfortunately, these technologies are not economically, technically, or logistically ready to be adopted on a large scale. Renewable energy will ultimately be a critical element of a more sustainable world. But if we have any hope of winning the battle against climate change, we must also focus on solutions that can have a bigger impact faster.

Burning coal is the single largest source of globalgreenhouse-gas emissions, and coal is not going to go away anytime soon. It is by far our largest energy resource–Illinois alone has more British thermal units (BTUs) of coal than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined have BTUs of oil. Coal now meets 50 percent of U.S. electricity needs, and its use in countries such as China and India is growing. Clearly, we need to find a way to use coal without generating harmful emissions, as an interim solution to one of the biggest threats to society. Read the rest of this entry »

Practical medical devices for use in poor countries

José Gómez-Márquez’s lab at MIT seems to be part toy store, part machine shop, and part medical cente­r. Plastic toys are scattered across the bench tops, along with a disassembled drugstore pregnancy test, all manner of syringes, and a slew of fake body parts. Coffee filters have been transformed into paper-based diagnostics; a dime-store helicopter provides the design for a new asthma inhaler; even a toilet plunger has been put to use, rigged with tubes and glue to form a makeshift centrifuge.

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Scientists Track Down Source of Earth’s Hum

You can’t hear it, but the Earth is constantly humming. And some parts of the world sing louder than others.

After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor. Now, researchers have pinpointed the source of the Earth’s “background noise,” and it looks like it’s coming primarily from the Pacific coast of North America.

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A Cell-Phone Microscope for Disease Detection

A cheap smart-phone microscope could bring fluorescent medical imaging to areas with limited access to health care.

In a twist on traditional smart-phone accessories, researchers have demonstrated fluorescent microscopy using a physical attachment to an ordinary cell phone. The researchers behind the device say that it could identify and track diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and malaria in developing countries with limited access to health care, or in rural areas of the U.S.

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Brain Surgery Using Sound Waves

A revolutionary new approach to neurosurgery avoids both radiation and a scalpel.

A new ultrasound device, used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows neurosurgeons to precisely burn out small pieces of malfunctioning brain tissue without cutting the skin or opening the skull. A preliminary study from Switzerland involving nine patients with chronic pain shows that the technology can be used safely in humans. The researchers now aim to test it in patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

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What Makes Us Happy?

The (Scientific) Pursuit of Happiness

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, begun in 1937, has been following the lives of 268 men, from college to death, to learn what makes for a good life.

Dr. George Vaillant, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has been the director of the study for 42 years. In this excellent short video from The Atlantic, he discusses lessons he learned about fame, ambition, and happiness along the way. In the end, his expansive empirical studies confirmed what John Lennon told us a few decades ago:

“The job isn’t conforming, it isn’t keeping up with the Jones’. It is playing and working and loving. And loving is probably the most important. Happiness is love. Full stop.”

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Your Mind is not restricted to ‘Inside The Head’

Controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake tells how more and more evidence is suggesting that the mind is not restricted to ‘inside the head’

We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But there are good reasons for thinking that this view is too limited. Recent experimental results show that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. And people’s intentions can be detected by animals from miles away. The commonest kind of non-local interaction mental influence occurs in connection with telephone calls, where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone shortly before they ring. Controlled, randomized tests on telephone telepathy have given highly significant positive results. Research techniques have now been automated and experiments on telepathy are now being conducted through the internet and cell phones, enabling widespread participation.

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The Truth Is Out There: Top Academics In Search of Paranormal Phenomena

Paranormal phenomena aren’t just for Fox Mulder, Melinda Gordon, and Rod Serling. Even top academics can’t resist a good ghost story. And maybe that’s for the better: Brilliant ideas often seem crazy at first. Scientific American dubbed the Wright Brothers “the Lying Brothers” despite test flights witnessed by trainloads of startled onlookers. More obscure findings can fare worse: Germs, quarks, black holes, and continental drift were all once considered laughable. Still, impeccably credentialed scientists persist, as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen says, in trying to believe a few impossible things before breakfast—or after they’ve received tenure.

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The next step: The study of energy and heat to create an entirely new theory for how Intelligence works

The U.S. military’s premiere research agency is already trying to use math to predict human behavior and neuroscience to replicate a primate’s brain. The next step: Lean on the study of energy and heat to create an entirely new theory for how intelligence actually works.

The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing sights and smells — derive from physical mechanisms at work, acting according to the principles of “thermodynamics in open systems.” Thermodynamics is founded on the conversion of energy into work and heat within a system (which could be anything from a test-tube solution to a planet). The processes can be summed up in formalized equations and laws, which are then used to describe how systems react to changes in their surroundings.

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Swine Flu:Political Lies and Media Disinformation

What is the flu? Influenza (the flu) is a serious contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses. Millions of people in the United States get the flu each year. Most people are sick for about a week. Some people (especially young children, pregnant women, older people, and people with chronic health problems) can get very sick and may die from the flu. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

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Why we have virus outbreaks & how we can prevent them.

SARS, avian flu, swine flu … each virus outbreak raises the question: What can be done? A compelling answer from virus hunter Nathan Wolfe, who’s outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge — passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa — and stopping them before they claim millions of lives.

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Mirror Neurons aid understand intentions of others

A newly discovered type of brain cell may help us prep for social interactions.

The cells are a special type of “mirror neurons,” which are thought to aid understanding of the actions and intentions of others. Mirror neurons fire both when you do something, like grab a bottle of wine, and when you watch another person do the same thing. Instead of carrying out a step-by-step reasoning process to figure out why a friend is grabbing a bottle of wine, we instantly understand what’s going on inside his head because it’s going on in our heads too.

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How scientific ideas evolve

Treat the links between scientific papers as a network and the changing communities that emerge reveal how scientific ideas evolve
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Medical School @ You Tube !

10 Gory Surgical Triumphs on YouTube

Who needs medical school anymore? You can now watch the world’s surgeons do their thing from the comfort of your parents’ basement.

From open-heart surgery to amputations, sex-change operations to autopsies, the operating rooms of the world have gone online. One website, OR-Live, regularly broadcasts live from the O.R.  For example, tune in next week to watch a hysterectomy. These broadcasts, and dozens of other videos posted to YouTube, draw hundreds of thousands of viewers. We’ve got four words for you: advertising-supported health care.

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Einstein’s unpublished lecture on relativity theory

In 1922 the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Council approved a motion to send an invitation to Albert Einstein to visit Argentina and give a course of lectures on his theory of relativity. The motion was proposed by Jorge Duclout (1856-1927), who had been educated at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich (ETH). This proposal was the culmination of a series of initiatives of various Argentine intellectuals interested in the theory of relativity. In a very short time Dr. Mauricio Nirenstein (1877-1935), then the university’s administrative secretary, fulfilled all the requirements for the university’s invitation to be endorsed and delivered to the sage in Berlin. The visit took place three years later, in March-April 1925.

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Plastic X-Ray Imager could bring down the cost of medical imaging

Researchers at Siemens have discovered a way to print polymer x-ray-sensing panels that work just as well as expensive silicon ones. Using a new printing method, which is similar to the way that cheap plastic solar cells are made, the researchers believe that the approach could bring down the cost of medical imaging systems and be used to make lightweight, flexible imaging panels for procedures such as more comfortable mammograms.

Electrically active polymers hold potential as a cheap alternative to silicon for devices including light sensors, solar cells, and transistors.

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Crawling the Web to Foretell Ecosystem Collapse

The Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

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First rule of ant traffic: no overtaking

Ever seen an ant traffic jam? Researchers studying ant traffic are beginning to understand why

The emerging science of DNA cryptography

If DNA computing can be used to break codes, then the machinery of life can be exploited to encrypt data too

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The pursuit of human knowledge has a shape.

Map of Science Looks Like Milky Way

By crunching data from more than a billion user interactions on scholarly databases, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers produced a high-resolution map of the relationships between different fields of science.

They’re not the first to map science, though they insist that their map is best. Other topographers of knowledge, they say, aren’t up to date on what modern scholars search for, and rely too much on natural science databases.

(Maybe that’s why the Los Alamos map, published in Public Library of Science ONE , looks a bit like the Milky Way, while this lovely scientific paradigm map — a favorite of Nature and Seed magazine — looks like an amoeba.) Read the rest of this entry »

Gravity map to aid oil search

This is a new map of the Earth’s gravitational force, based on satellite measurements. It will make it much easier and cheaper to find new oil deposits.

Oil companies are particularly keen to use the map to find new deposits in the oil-rich Arctic regions, as the sea ice in that region is melting.

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Brain on a Chip : Computer Architecture Branches Out

The next revolution in computer architecture may not come from research in computer science, but rather from the bench of a biology laboratory. Researchers working at the intersection of neurobiology and electrical engineering are already capable of building artificial analogs of biological sensory systems in silicon, but difficulties arise in emulating the more complex neural networks of brain tissue.

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DNA Found to Have “Impossible” Telepathic Properties

DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet.

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