SCIENCE, 2007-2008
"But as for you, Daniel, conceal these words and seal up the book until the end of time; many will go back and forth, and knowledge will increase." (Daniel 12:4)
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'Matrix
For Mice' Probes How Mental Maps Are Made
A virtual reality system created especially for mice could help to
explain how the brain creates maps of its surroundings. When both
mice and people navigate, specialised "place" cells in the
brain's hippocampus fire. Implanted electrodes that sit next to
neurons have in the past detected these signals, which are thought
to help the brain build maps of the environment. But researchers
have long theorised that activity occurring within place cells,
which isn't detected by this type of brain implant, is also key to
map-making. The trouble is that recording activity within neurons is
a more delicate process, which gets disrupted by the physical
movement necessary to trigger place-cell activity. Now David Tank at
Princeton University, and colleagues, have overcome this problem
using virtual reality.
Posted 10/16/09
A
Guaranteed Discovery Of Extraterrestrial LIFE
The Phobos Grunt is an
incredible mission to land on Mars' moon, perform experiments and
then blast a tiny rocket-propelled robot all the way back to Earth,
making it the most amazing return trip since Indiana Jones escaped
the Temple of Doom. The LIFE mission is intended to test the
effects of interplanetary space on organic life. It's a little
removed fosm manned missions, what with the tiny samples having to
be freeze-dried first (maknig it slightly incompatible with the idea
of astronauts), but even these tiny test samples will investigate
the effect of cosmic radiation on DNA. Even on the
International Space Station we're shielded from an incredibly
unfriendly universe by the Earth's magnetosphere - if we're going to
fly further we need to find out what awaits, and the Planetary
Society's admirable idea is "let's just send something and
see." Unfortunately our attitude towards organic life
seems to be seeing it as a filthy stain on a supremely sterile
existence.
Posted 10/15/09
History
And The Great Year Cycle
Discoveries like the ancient Greek Antikythera computer (1500
years before the invention of precision geared devices) the Baghdad
batteries (2000 years before Volta "invented" the battery)
or dental and brain surgery artifacts found in ancient Pakistan
(8000 years out of historical sequence) appear "anomalous"
within our current paradigm of history. However, they are not
unexpected according to the ancient cyclical view. Giorgio de
Santillana, the former professor of the history of science at MIT,
tells us that most ancient cultures believed consciousness and
history were not linear but cyclical, meaning they would rise and
fall over long periods of times. In his landmark work, Hamlet's
Mill, Giorgio and co-author Hertha von Dechend showed that the myth
and folklore of over 30 ancient cultures around the world spoke of a
vast cycle of time with alternating Dark and Golden Ages that move
with the precession of the equinox. Plato called this the Great
Year.
Posted 10/9/09
The
Waking Nightmare Of Sleep Paralysis
"The light had been switched off, and a comfortable feeling of
warmth and heaviness marked the onset of sleep. But suddenly a
slurping sound startled the sleeper. Everything seemed completely
normal – until he noticed the green liana which had grown from the
pot plant and reached his body. Every movement became impossible,
and every scream was smothered by the plant material that was
growing around his mouth and throat. Thoughts raced through the
mind: This wasn't a nightmare, the reality of the room was far too
distinct and his perception and thinking were far too clear. Were
the plants taking revenge on humankind, or had aliens conquered the
planet?" The above account sounds like a scene from a bad
horror movie. But it isn't. Dr Stephan Matthiesen, a physicist at
the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, sent me the
account last year saying he had personally experienced this
terrifying scenario and lived to tell the tale. It's taken from his
book The Normality of Altered States of Consciousness.
Posted 10/8/09
Evidence
Points To Conscious 'Metacognition' In Some Nonhumans
J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University
at Buffalo who has conducted extensive studies in animal cognition,
says there is growing evidence that animals share functional
parallels with human conscious metacognition -- that is, they may
share humans' ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their
states of mind. Smith makes this conclusion in an article published
the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Science
(Volume 13, Issue 9). He reviews this new and rapidly developing
area of comparative inquiry, describing its milestones and its
prospects for continued progress. He says "comparative
psychologists have studied the question of whether or not non-human
animals have knowledge of their own cognitive states by testing a
dolphin, pigeons, rats, monkeys and apes using perception, memory
and food-concealment paradigms. "The field offers growing
evidence that some animals have functional parallels to humans'
consciousness and to humans' cognitive self-awareness," he
says. Among these species are dolphins and macaque monkeys (an Old
World monkey species).
Posted 9/16/09
First
Detailed Photos of Atoms
For the first time, physicists have photographed the structure of an
atom down to its electrons. The pictures, soon to be published in
the journal Physical Review B, show the detailed images of a single
carbon atom's electron cloud, taken by Ukrainian researchers at the
Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine.
This is the first time scientists have been able to see an atom's
internal structure directly. Since the early 1980s, researchers have
been able to map out a material's atomic structure in a mathematical
sense, using imaging techniques. Quantum mechanics states that an
electron doesn't exist as a single point, but spreads around the
nucleus in a cloud known as an orbital. The soft blue spheres and
split clouds seen in the images show two arrangements of the
electrons in their orbitals in a carbon atom. The structures verify
illustrations seen in thousands of chemistry books because they
match established quantum mechanical predictions.
Posted 9/16/09
At
The Outset Of The Golden Era Of Biotech
Biotech is at a critical juncture: a golden era of valuable
discoveries that forever will revolutionize its foundation. Within
the life science fields, the most promising space includes molecular
biology, cellular biology, and genetics, and the intersection of the
three. This space is accruing intellectual capital at such a fast
rate that, in my estimation, the quantum of what is known is
doubling every 2-3 years... The comparison to the semiconductor and
computer industries may be more than casual. For example, while
biotech thus far has focused largely on genes and their expressions
through cellular processes, there is a Brave New World in DNA in the
untranscribed regions, e.g. the regulatory domains. As we develop a
deeper appreciation for the logical control motifs within DNA and
thus within cellular machinery, we begin to unlock the sort of power
that therapeutics thus far have lacked...
Posted
9/2/09
National
Science Foundation Awards $1.4 Million For GenoCAD Development
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a three-year
$1,421,725 grant to Jean Peccoud, associate professor at the
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, to develop
GenoCAD — a web-based Computer Assisted Design environment for
synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, a rapidly emerging area of
biological research, applies methods developed in engineering to
design artificial biological systems that meet user-defined
specifications. It has also been used to re-design natural systems
to better understand the fundamental properties of living organisms.
"We are considering DNA as a language to program living
organisms instead of computers," said Peccoud. "This
analogy has led us to apply methods and results from computer
science to biology. In particular, rules describing how different
functional elements should be combined can be described in the
language grammar."
Posted 9/2/09
When
Cocaine And Monsanto's Roundup Collide, War On Drugs Becomes A
Genetically Modified War On Science
At the intersection of cocaine and Roundup in rural South America,
Monsanto and the U.S. government are struggling to keep up
appearances. That's becoming more and more difficult as the
unanticipated hazards of genetic modification become clearer. Back
in April, Argentinean embryologist Andrés Carrasco gave an
interview with a Buenos Aires newspaper describing his recent
findings suggesting the chemical glyphosate, a chemical herbicide
widely used in agriculture as well as in U.S. anti-narcotic efforts,
could cause defects in fetuses in much smaller doses than those to
which peasants and farmers in his country were already being
exposed. Loud calls for a ban on the substance were issued by
Argentinean environmental lawyers, and the country's Ministry of
Defense banned the planting of glyphosate-resistant soya crops in
its fields.
Posted 9/2/09
Single
Molecule, One Million Times Smaller Than A Grain Of Sand, Pictured For First
Time
It may look like a piece of honeycomb, but this
lattice-shaped image is the first ever close-up view of a single molecule.
Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the
chemical bonds within a molecule. ‘This is the first time that all the
atoms in a molecule have been imaged,’ lead researcher Leo Gross said. The
researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly
used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of
22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms...
Posted 9/1/09
iGEM:
Prying Pandora's Box Open Is The Fun Part
It has been said that where the 20th century was the century of
physics, the 21st will be the century of biology. The past
generation was shaped by applications of theoretical physics,
most notably the advent of nuclear power. Similarly, basic
biological research, especially with the recent sequencing of
the human genome, has advanced to the point of significant
practical application. The annual International Genetically
Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM) provides a community and
a framework for undergraduate biologists to explore and discover
for themselves such applications. The competition, hosted by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), bills itself as the
"premier undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition,"
explaining that synthetic biology is an interdisciplinary field
located at the interface of biology and engineering. Indicative
of this interaction is the fact that participants are given
MATLAB software, an engineer's programming language, along with
an add-on for biological applications.
Posted
8/28/09
Physicist
Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox
Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the
process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase
any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot
to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been
suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a
visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding
paradox in physics. The laws of physics, which describe
everything from electricity to moving objects to energy
conservation, are time-invariant. That is, the laws still hold
if time is reversed. However, this time reversal symmetry is in
direct contrast with everyday phenomena, where it’s obvious
that time moves forward and not backward. For example, when milk
is spilt, it can’t flow back up into the glass, and when pots
are broken, their pieces can’t shatter back together. This
irreversibility is formalized through the second law of
thermodynamics, which says that entropy always increases or
stays the same, but never decreases. This contrast has created a
reversibility paradox, also called Loschmidt’s paradox, which
scientists have been trying to understand since Johann Loschmidt
began considering the problem...
Posted
8/28/09
Science,
God coexist at National Institutes of Health
America's scientific establishment is up in arms over the
appointment of an evangelical Christian to a national post.
Posted 7/23/09
Science
education issue finally settled in Texas <-
Don't mess with Texas! We are not PC here, we are GC (God
Correct)! :)
"It amounts to the same thing," Saenz explains. "And
that's that students and teachers are going to continue in Texas to
have the freedom to discuss all sides of scientific theories."
Posted 3/31/09
Spooky!
Haunting Photo Baffles Ghost Busters <-
WEIRD!!!
Even confirmed ghost sceptic Professor Richard Wiseman, who led the
study, admitted being puzzled. "It is certainly very
curious," he said. "We ran it by three photographic
experts and they said it hadn't been Photoshopped at all.
Posted 3/27/09
Believing
Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules
... His creationism aroused “some concern by faculty members
there, and disagreements,” he recalled, and there were those who
argued that his religious beliefs should bar him from earning an
advanced degree in paleontology. ...
Posted 2/13/07
The
Day the World Didn't End
Last month when scientists switched on the Large Hadron Collider,
the world did not come to an end. In today's story, a particle
physicist explains why not--and why Earth is safe from black
holes when the collider is reactivated in the months ahead.
Posted 10/13/08
Free
Podcast: National Geographic News (January 12, 2007)
This week: new stem cell source found, 2007
may be hottest year on record, Louisiana
slipping into Gulf,
fish smell their way home, new bat discovered, and more.
Posted 1/16/07
Heat-beaming
weapon ready by 2010
Posted
1/25/07
Is
this Atlantis?
THIS is
the amazing image which could show the fabled sunken city of
Atlantis. It shows a perfect rectangle the size of Wales lying
on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean nearly 3½ miles down...
Posted 3/11/09
Israelis
create Bible smaller than a pinhead
Posted
12/28/07
Most
dense memory circuit unveiled
Posted
1/25/07
One
Small Chip for a PC, One Giant Leap for Computing
Researchers at Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) unveiled
an experimental 80-core microchip Monday at the International Solid
States Circuit Conference in San Francisco. Known as a "Teraflop
research chip," it is the first programmable microprocessor
capable of delivering performance formerly associated only with
supercomputers, according to Intel.
Posted
2/14/07
Top
Ten Photos of 2006 From National Geographic News
Purported pyramids, giant jellyfish, and a number of pythons that
swallowed more...
Posted 2/2/07
Top Ten Stories of 2006 From National Geographic News
The
Gospel of Judas unveiled. A "lost world" of animals
discovered...
Posted 2/2/07
'Who's
Who' list challenging Darwin grows
100 more of the world's top scientists express
skepticism of theory
Posted 2/13/07