Freaky insect altruism-like behavior. That's all I can think of. How that behavior would ever come to be is beyond me.

Ants are one of the most fascinating species on Earth...

Wow. This is pretty amazing. I cannot imagine what that would be like..

Man who received deep brain stimulation surgery for Parkinson's disease turns off his neurostimulator. Watch the change.

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Thanks Science!

Yeah, but you would think those who accumulated these glandular structures would die earlier, and even some before reproductive age. Over time, they would simply die out, and those without these glandular structures would persist.

We watched something very similar to this during my neuro core in my first year. Amazing impact.

**** science my gpa is a 3.5 because of it.

That's a good point. If death is the end result of this condition, it's kind of hard to efficiently pass that on to offspring in a natural selection type of way. So how did they learn/evolve this? Natural selection does not reward suicide. It's more puzzling the more I think about it...

I like Pi..

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/5109/zg63.jpg

Absolutely. But very interesting nonetheless.

No matter how much you know, nature will always present something to stump you. That's part of the beauty of science.

A paralysis/behavior modification virus in their DNA.. Nature is scary shit yo....

The Cotesia Glomerata embryos are injected into a caterpillar by their mothers and develop for about 14 days before using a virus in their DNA to paralyse their host. After gnawing their way out using saw-like teeth, they spin cocoons. The caterpillar, still affected by the virus but no longer paralysed, builds a silky blanket over the larvae and defends them from attackers until it starves to death.

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This is badass. The power is unimaginable...

NASA Releases Movie of Sun's Canyon of Fire

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A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create a short movie of this gigantic event on the sun.

In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields.

These images were captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths.

Different wavelengths help capture different aspect of events in the corona. The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun's magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious. By comparing this with the other colors, one sees that the two swirling ribbons moving farther away from each other are, in fact, the footprints of the giant magnetic field loops, which are growing and expanding as the filament pulls them upward.

The movie runs 2.3 minutes and is available for download in high resolution at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11379

Yes, I remember writing that paper in college...

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http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/57...0-and-counting

Most of those exoplanets are smaller than ur mom

And they aren't anywhere near as large as Ur -Anus.

Holly Crap :eek:

8.8 billion habitable Earth-size planets exist in Milky Way alone

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/8-8-b...way-8C11529186

Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone.

There are about 200 billion stars in our galaxy, with 40 billion of them like our sun, Marcy said. One of his co-authors put the number of sun-like stars closer to 50 billion, meaning there would be at least 11 billion planets like ours.

Based on the 1-in-5 estimate, the closest Earth-size planet that is in the habitable temperature zone and circles a sun-like star is probably within 70 trillion miles of Earth, Marcy said.

If we leave now we might get there by 1,000,000 A.D.

Bring a QT cup to pee in!

That is ****ing insane....awesome!!

How in the hell...........

New Law of Urination: Mammals Take 20 Seconds to Pee

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Call it the other Golden Rule: Scientists have found that all mammals weighing more than 2.2 pounds (a kilogram) empty their full bladders in about 20 seconds.

Like many new parents, David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has changed a lot of diapers. Unlike many new parents, however, these soggy diapers caused Hu to think about the physics of urination.

“While I was changing these diapers, I was wondering how it would be different for different animals. How much fluid would they create and how long would it take to leave the body?” Hu said. (Also see “Growing Teeth and Four More Odd Uses for Urine.”)

“The physics of urination—what the forces are and how they affect how quickly urine comes out, is not totally understood, even though it’s a really old problem.”

Although it might sound silly on the surface, urination is actually serious business in the medical and veterinary worlds, especially during the aging process. Many men get enlarged prostates as they get older, which can narrow the urethra and impede urine flow. Veterinarians have been looking for a quick and easy way to identify problems with animals’ urinary tract.

Pee Cam

First, Hu wanted to know how urination varied from species to species. The bladder of a large domestic dog can hold 1.4 liters (about 0.4 of a gallon) of fluid, or roughly the amount of a large bottle of soda. An elephant’s bladder, however, can hold 160 liters of fluid, or enough to fill three large garbage cans. Hu wanted to know how this size difference affects the urinary tract and urine flow.

Enter the pee cam. Three of Hu’s graduate students at Georgia Tech used high-speed cameras to record peeing animals at Zoo Atlanta and elsewhere.

They also measured how much pee was produced by each of these animals, which ranged from rats to jaguars to elephants. The scientists supplemented their research with YouTube videos from zoo visitors. Last, the researchers obtained measurements of the animals’ bladder and urethra widths and lengths from other researchers.

Hu and colleagues suspected that bigger animals would take longer pee breaks than smaller animals, since they had to expel larger volumes of urine. But when they began determining the urination duration of each of these animal species, that wasn’t what they found.

“Even though you have thousands of times more urine, it’s coming out in the same amount of time, which is around 20 seconds,” said Hu, whose study appeared recently on the Cornell University website arXiv. (Also see “Urine Battery Turns Pee Into Power.”)

Urination Law Explained

Urinary tract measurements helped to solve the mystery of how animals of such different sizes all pee for the same amount of time.

Larger animals not only had larger bladders, they also had longer and wider urethras. The length of the urethra increases the force of gravity on the urine, which in turn increases how fast pee flows out of the body.

A wider urethra also increases flow rate by increasing the volume of urine that can leave the body at the same time. These increases correlate with the increase in body mass, such that an elephant can empty its bladder in the same amount of time as a cat. (Also see “Turtles Urinate Via Their Mouths—A First.”)

Saying an elephant pees for the same amount of time as a domestic cat seems impressive enough, but it gets even more impressive when you consider just how much urine the elephant produces: several bathtubs’ worth. It’s like having 60 showerheads all going at full blast, Hu said.

For small mammals—those weighing less than 2.2 pounds (a kilogram)—Hu’s Universal Law of Urination wasn’t as accurate. Their urethras were so narrow and short that the surface tension of the urine slowed flow down to mere droplets. Their bladders were also much smaller, so a few drops could successfully empty the bladder. These animals, like rats and mice, can successfully urinate in less than a second.

Animals benefit from such relatively short pee breaks because such pit stops increase risk of predation, Hu noted. Faster urine flow may also help prevent urinary tract infections by flushing out the system.

Now I just have to fight the urge to bring a stopwatch with me into the bathroom.

42 gallons of piss? Holy shit..... I mean holy piss!

You know, a long time ago, someone made this claim to me, and I fervently argued it and thought they were dumber than a bag of hammers. Oops.

Hot water freezes faster than cold - and now we know why.

Hot water seems to freeze faster than cold water, known as the Mpemba effect. The effect was named after the Tanzanian student who in 1963 noticed that hot ice cream mix freezes faster than a cold one. The effect was first observed by Aristotle in the 4th century BC, then later Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Mpemba published a paper on his findings in 1969.

Theories for the Mpemba effect have included: faster evaporation of hot water, therefore reducing the volume left to freeze; formation of a frost layer on cold water, insulating it; and different concentrations of solutes such as carbon dioxide, which is driven off when the water is heated. Unfortunately the effect doesn’t always appear, and cold water often freezes faster than hot water. Until now, no one had ever worked out exactly why hot water freezes more quickly than cold.

Now a team of physicists from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, led by Xi Zhang, have found evidence that it is the chemical bonds that hold water together that provide the effect. Each water molecule is composed of one oxygen atom bonded covalently to two hydrogen molecules. These bonds involve atoms sharing electrons and are well understood. The separate water molecules are also bound together by weaker forces generated by hydrogen bonds. These forces occur when a hydrogen atom from one molecule of water sits close to an oxygen atom from another.

The team now suggest it is these bonds that cause the Mpemba effect. They propose that when the water molecules are brought into close contact, a natural repulsion between the molecules causes the covalent bonds to stretch and store energy. When the liquid warms up, the hydrogen bonds stretch as the water gets less dense and the molecules move further apart.

The stretching in the hydrogen bonds allows the covalent bonds to relax and shrink somewhat, which causes them to give up their energy. The process of covalent bonds giving up their energy is essentially the same as cooling, and so warm water should in theory cool faster than cold. The team’s calculations suggest that the magnitude of the covalent bond relaxation accounts for the experimental differences in the time it takes for hot and cold water to freeze.

Didn't know whether to put this into a music thread or what, but just had an amazing example of how quirky memory is.

Started listening to Harmontown, and he had a random intro song.

I shit you not, I heard ONE drumbeat, and my brain screamed 'Sweet Pea'

Sure enough it was Tommy Roe [who I saw at World of Wheels as a teen, BTW, double bill of him and Lee Greenwood, who played two saxophones at once, IIRC this was before Proud to be an American came out, Winter 84/85].

Maybe it's a particularly distinctive drumbeat, but it was just one. And I haven't heard that song in at least 15 years.

<iframe frameborder="0" width="480" height="270" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xtjpm"></iframe><br /><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xtjpm_sweet-pea-tommy-roe_music" target="_blank">Sweet Pea - Tommy Roe</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/dcck105" target="_blank">dcck105</a></i>

Ice Cream Gets Glow-In-The-Dark Makeover From Jellyfish Protein

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Right before Halloween, the UK-based Lick Me I’m Delicious revealed the combination we’ve all been waiting for: jellyfish and ice cream.

The inventor, Charlie Harry Francis, claims to have been inspired by bioluminescent sea creatures and wanted to incorporate it into an ice cream. The luminescent protein is synthesized by a scientist in China, so no actual jellyfish were harmed in the making of this dessert. The calcium-activated protein only glows in the ice cream when it has been warmed up and agitated, so essentially, it lights up when you lick it.

In the natural world, animals use bioluminescence to communicate many things like attracting a mate, warning a predator, or lighting up the environment. The luminescent proteins have been synthesized for extensive use as biomarkers in cellular and molecular biology.

Public response to this green glow-in-the-dark ice cream has been mixed. Some are more than excited to get their hands on this new product while others are balking at the $220 per scoop price tag, which Francis himself describes as “insanely expensive.”

Oddly enough, there isn’t any information out there regarding flavor, as safety seems to be the prime concern. While there haven’t been any scientific studies on the topic, Francis has been using himself as a guinea pig: “Is it safe to eat? Well I tried some and I don't seem to be glowing anywhere, so we'll go with a yes for now.”

What is next to come out of the Lick Me I'm Delicious kitchen? “Next we're working on an invisible ice cream. Any scientists or magicians out there who think they can help, please get in touch.”

He took a picture with the entirety of humanity all within the camera frame.

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/2729/tpzj.jpg

Interdasting....

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has anyone seen the remote controlled cockroach?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...ith-an-iphone/

Yeah I've seen it. I can't believe people are complaining about cockroaches being used under these circumstances, when we make cockroach spray and powder to kill millions of them all their children and everything else. Its just borderline reeruned to say that this is mistreating an animal.

Borderline? No sir, that is full reerun

They need to strap some roach poison on the robotic one and send him in as a sleeper agent.

That or some firecrackers. Think of it as a type of "Roach Jihad".

They would hate to hear about our treatment of mice.

This is pretty good.

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NASA shares image of massive 'Hexagon' on Saturn

(CNN) -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided your multicolored space distraction of the day: images of a swirling, six-sided weather feature on the surface of Saturn.

Scientists say the "Hexagon," the formation's working title at NASA, is unlike anything they've seen elsewhere.

They say the feature is "turbulent and unstable," packing 200-mph winds. That's nearly 50 mph stronger than the wind speed required for a Category 5 hurricane.

"A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades -- and who knows -- maybe centuries," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini team member at the California Institute of Technology.

The Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997 and has been in orbit around Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, since 2004. NASA hopes it will collect more pictures and other data of Saturn and its rings and moons through 2017.
Cassini had photographed the hexagon before. But the short video clip released this week is the first high-resolution image of the massive jet stream, and the first with color filters.

Cassini captured images of the hexagon over a 10-hour time period on December 10, 2012.

The images, which scientists are still analyzing, are rendered in "false color," a method that makes it easier to tell the difference between different parts of the storm. To human eyes, the hexagon and the planet's north pole would appear in tones of gold and blue.

Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004. But NASA has begun getting better images of the planet from Cassini since sunlight began bathing Saturn's northern hemisphere with the arrival of the planet's spring season in 2009. ("Seasons" on Saturn go on for years, as the distant planet's orbit around the sun takes 29 years.)

Is the universe a hologram?

Basically an explanation of how Einstein's theories could still be correct in the face of currently accepted theories on quantum physics.

http://www.nature.com/news/simulatio...logram-1.14328

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.



In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed¹ that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.


Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.


In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.
In one paper², Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. In the other³, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.


“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team's work.
Regime change

The findings “are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory”, Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”


“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.


Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.
Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.

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About 1.5 liters of saliva are produced every 24 hours.

This chicken is black. Not just black feathers mind you. Everything. Down to the muscle and bones. All black.

It's a genetic condition called fibromelanosis. And it's teaching us a lot about evolution.


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Genetic Study of Black Chickens Shed Light On Mechanisms Causing Rapid Evolution in Domestic Animals

Dec. 22, 2011 — The genetic changes underlying the evolution of new species are still poorly understood. Genetic studies in domestic animals can shed light on this process due to the rapid evolution they have undergone over the last 10,000 years. A new study describes how a complex genomic rearrangement causes a fascinating phenotype in chickens.

In the study published in PLoS Genetics researchers at Uppsala University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, North Carolina State University and National Chung-Hsing University have investigated the genetic basis of fibromelanosis, a breed characteristic of the Chinese Silkie chicken (image on left). This trait involves a massive expansion of pigment cells that not only makes the skin and comb black but also causes black internal organs.

Chickens similar in appearance to the Silkie were described by Marco Polo when he visited China in the 13th century and Silkie chickens have a long history in Chinese cuisine and traditional Chinese medicine.

"We have shown that the genetic change causing fibromelanosis is a complex rearrangement that leads to increased expression of Endothelin 3, a gene which is known for promoting the growth of pigment cells," explains Ben Dorshorst the post-doctoral researcher responsible for the work.

The research group led by Leif Andersson has by now characterized a number of traits in domestic animals, and a clear trend is emerging, namely that genomic rearrangements have contributed significantly to the rapid evolution of domestic animals. Other examples include Greying with age in horses and mutations affecting the size and shape of the comb in chickens.

"We have good reason to believe that such rearrangements have also played a significant role in the evolution of other species, including ourselves," concludes Leif Andersson.

The researchers also studied other chicken breeds where fibromelanosis occurs, including the Bohuslän-Dals svarthöna breed (image on right) from Sweden, and they found that all fibromelanotic breeds carried the exact same very unusual mutation. This finding is consistent with anecdotal evidence suggesting that this Swedish breed of chicken inherited their black skin and internal connective tissue color from Asian chickens that were first brought to Norway by a sailor on the East Asian trade routes centuries ago. This is a nice example of how humans have distributed a single novel mutation with an interesting effect when they developed breeds of domestic animals around the world. -- It is obvious that humans have had a strong affection for biological diversity in their domestic animals, says Leif Andersson.

Inflation of androconial organs in male moth

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The androconial organs are responsible for releasing pheromones to attract lady moths. Party favor sound added for hilarity affect. LMAO.....

Because Science, Bitches!

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Amazing photo of severed hand surgically attached to an ankle

Medicine is amazing but sometimes it can look like the darkest corners of Stephen King's brain. This is exactly the case: Chinese doctors saved a man's severed hand by attaching it to his ankle, creating some impossible anatomy in the process.

Xiao Wei—an industrial worker in Changde, China—suffered a dramatic accident in which his hand was severed. It took seven hours to get him to the hospital along with his hand, recovered by his co-workers. Doctors thought it would be impossible to reattach the hand at the time, so they did what they thought it was the best option: attach it to the ankle so it could survive.

It works. After spending an entire month with his hand living attached to his ankle while his injured healed, the doctors successfully re-attached the hand to his arm.

Interesting but it seems like there's a word missing here.

Were they waiting on his wrist to heal or the hand itself?

I wonder what effect internet pornography has had on this.

I bet he became a limber mother****er trying to masturbate.

How did they attach the veins to provide blood flow?


Something about this just screams "BULLSHIT Chinese Propaganda".

Who says guns are bad?

The Skin Gun.

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Your mother generates triple that amount of saliva within 24 seconds of seeing a Golden Corral chocolate fountain.

She died in 92 from asphyxiation due to complications from ptyalism gravidarum. Thanks.

:rockon:

That rules.

Oh yeah? Well... ****

Did you happen to Google "ptyalism gravidarum"?

:evil:

Holy shit this is some next-level battlefield shit right there.

holy crap, Leif freaking Andersson! I actually know that guy. tall swedish looking dude (well, he is one). small world. he does companion animal genetics and I ran into him at a conference a few months ago. a friend of mine actually is doing her postdoc at Uppsala as well (not in his lab though).

Yes I did.. hadn't the damnedest clue that could even happen.

in reference to the rapid evolution of domestics:

Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment

Foxes bred for tamability in a 40-year experiment exhibit remarkable transformations that suggest an interplay between behavioral genetics and development
Lyudmila Trut
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At an experimental farm in Novosibirsk, Siberia, geneticists have been working for four decades to turn foxes into dogs. They are not trying to create the next pet craze. Instead, author Trut and her predecessors hope to explain why domesticated animals such as pigs, cattle and dogs are so different from their wild ancestors. Selective breeding alone cannot explain all the differences. Trut's mentor, the eminent Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev, thought that the answers lay in the process of domestication itself, which might have dramatically changed wolves' appearance and behavior even in the absence of selective breeding. To test his hypothesis, Belyaev and his successors at the Institute have been breeding another canine species, silver foxes, for a single trait: friendliness toward people. Although no one would mistake them for dogs, the Siberian foxes appear to be on the same overall evolutionary path—a route that other domesticated animals also may have followed while coming in from the wild.

http://www.americanscientist.org/images/blue-arrow.gif Go to Article

I believe the key to this will be found in epigentetics

uh, no. in this case, it's pleitropy. it's classic genetics--the behavior genes are in linkage disequilibrium with the genes that cause floppy ears and the coat color change.

epigenetics, however, may have some effect on other behavioral components, but it's still a rapidly changing field.

The Lotus Effect.

Is this self-cleaning plate the future of eating?

Wow. Such plate. So self-cleaning. Very future.

http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/9499/px7t.jpg

There's little that I find more depressing or exasperating than coming home to see a huge pile of dirty dishes. Washing dishes is the worst. Really, that's why the dishwasher was invented. But loading and unloading dishwashers also can be something of a tedious chore. So we should all be thrilled that Tomorrow Machine, a Swedish design company, has invented this self-cleaning plate and bowl.

These are made entirely of cellulose — plant pulp — finished with a water-repellent coating found in nature on the leaves of lotus plants, nasturtiums, and elephant's-ear plants, and on the wings of some butterflies. These biological structures are water-repellent because they are roughened at a nano-scale level. This minimizes adhesion, causing droplets of water to bead rather than flatten. This means they easily roll off, taking dirt particles with them. For the lotus plant, this kind of coating keeps the plant's leaves free of dirt and contaminants, helping to ward off disease and parasites.

What does this mean for you? That cleaning this plate is as easy as tipping it over and watching the gunk roll off. No scrubbing necessary. Just like a lotus leaf:

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The material is produced from a sheet of cellulose which is then pressed into a mold, making the cellulose harden like ceramic. The result is a plate lighter than ceramic, but which won't shatter when dropped.

The one big problem? The water-repellent coating is not yet approved for food consumption. That's a pretty big stumbling block, and only rigorous testing will tell whether hydrophobic coatings are safe to serve up food for human consumption. This means that it could be awhile before we see these plates used in homes and restaurants.

The plate was created for a project called Ekoportal 2035, commissioned by the Swedish Forest Industries Federation. They asked Tomorrow Machine and research institute Innventia to create three products that explore potential future uses for cellulose created from materials from Swedish forests.

Beside the self-cleaning plate and bowl, the project also produced a transparent digital touch screen made from nano-cellulose, and an item made from a cellulose-based plastic that can be 3D-printed.

Replacement Parts

To cope with a growing shortage of hearts, livers, and lungs suitable for transplant, some scientists are genetically engineering pigs, while others are growing organs in the lab.

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5932/0oo1.jpg

For Joseph Vacanti, the quest to build new organs began after watching the death of yet another child. In 1983, the young surgeon was put in charge of a liver transplantation program at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts. His first operation was a success, but other patients died without ever being touched by a scalpel. “In the mid-80s, kids who were waiting for organs had to wait for a child of the same size to die,” says Vacanti. “Many patients became sicker and sicker before my eyes, and I couldn’t provide them with what they needed. We had the team, the expertise, and the intensive care units. We knew how to do it. But we had to wait.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, David Cooper was having the same problem. Having taken part in the first successful series of heart transplants in the United Kingdom, he had moved to South Africa to run a transplantation program at the University of Cape Town Medical School. At the time, people had a 50/50 chance of surviving such a procedure, but Cooper recalls that most of his patients were killed by a lengthy wait. “We just didn’t have enough donors,” he says.

Today, the organ shortage is an even bigger problem than it was in the 1980s. In the United States alone, more than 114,000 people are on transplant lists, waiting for an act of tragedy or charity. Meanwhile, just 14,000 deceased and living donors give up organs for transplants each year. The supply has stagnated despite well-funded attempts to encourage donations, and demand is growing, especially as the organs of a longer-lived population wear out.

Faced with this common problem, Vacanti and Cooper have championed very different solutions. Cooper thinks that the best hope of providing more organs lies in xenotransplantation—the act of replacing a human organ with an animal one. From his time in Cape Town to his current position at the University of Pittsburgh, he has been trying to solve the many problems that occur when pig organs enter human bodies, from immune rejection to blood clots. Vacanti, now at Massachusetts General Hospital, has instead been developing technology to create genetically tailored organs out of a patient’s own cells, abolishing compatibility issues. “I said to myself: why can’t we just make an organ?” he recalls.

[...]

The ideal scaffold

While some scientists struggle to get human bodies to accept pig organs, others are attempting the more ambitious feat of engineering bespoke human organs from scratch. Such organs, grown from a patient’s own cells, should avoid the problems of immune rejection that plague the field of xenotransplantation. “Cartilage, skin, and bone are already on the market. Blood vessels are in clinical trials. The progress has been really gratifying,” says Laura Niklason of Yale University.

These tissues—either flat planes or hollow tubes—are relatively simple to produce, and consist of a small number of cell types. Solid organs, such as the lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys, pose a greater challenge. They are bigger, they contain dozens of cell types, and they have a complex architecture and an extensive network of the most essential component: blood vessels. “Every cell needs to eat and breathe, and each one needs to be close to a source of nutrition and oxygen,” says Vacanti. Still, he is optimistic that it should be possible to engineer even these complex organs. “People differ about whether it’ll be achieved in 5 or 100 years, but most people in the field believe that it’s a realistic goal,” he says.

Full article is long, but interesting: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...acement-Parts/

Merry Christmas!

http://imageshack.us/a/img713/4427/2kb4.jpg

as in the days of Noah..

The future's so bright we can't afford shades...

That is interesting. As a guy with a pig valve in my chest, I feel a little cannibalistic when I eat bacon. I'm ready to no longer feel the guilt.

I accept you for the pig mutant you are.

Bees are pretty awesome.

Can Bees Be Trained to Sniff Out Cancer?


http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/5883/88b1.jpg

Some insects, such as bees, have a sense of smell so acutely sensitive that they can locate the faintest of odors in a room, even if it consists of only a few molecules. But scientists are particularly intrigued by the fact that these bugs can even be taught to detect various chemicals, from methamphetamines to ingredients in explosives. They’ve even been shown to effectively diagnose diseases like tuberculosis and diabetes.

U.K.-based product designer Susana Soares has created a simple, elegant way of harnessing bees to screen for a number of diseases, including cancers, like tumors of the lung and ovaries. Her glass apparatus, called “Bee’s,” features a large chamber and a smaller connected chamber housed within it. After training the bees to associate a specific chemical odor with a food reward, such as sugar, the insects are released into the diagnostic device through an opening. Patients would simply blow into the smaller compartment and wait to see if a swarm gathers toward something alarming in the person’s breath.

The project, part of her master’s thesis at London’s Royal College of Art, began in 2007 when Soares came across research on bees and their phenomenal olfactory abilities. After talking to researchers in the field, she learned that certain diseases, such as lung cancer, noticeably alter the composition of bodily fluids, producing odorous compounds that show up in urine and sometimes blood. Some investigators have even been experimenting with various sensory methods to home in on these “biomarkers.” In Philadelphia, for instance, scientists have trained mice to identify the scent of lung cancer. Trained dogs have also been used to sniff out ovarian cancer. Others have focused on replicating these animal abilities in electronic nose devices that are calibrated to pick up these biomarkers undetectable to human noses.

Insects offer key advantages over mammals and electronics, however, because of their antennae. For example, electronic nose devices have trouble detecting an odor amid more complicated conditions, like when there’s a greater mixture of gases, as is found in human breath. And studies have revealed that sniffer dogs identify odors correctly only about 71 percent of the time, while also requiring at least three months’ training. Bees, in contrast, have achieved an accuracy rate of 98 percent and can be trained in about 10 minutes.

In developing “Bee’s,” the Portuguese native needed something that enabled the user to easily transport bees into the instrument and safely suck them back out using a vacuum. The source material also had to be malleable enough to shape into a system with well-defined pathways that don’t impede their movement. She eventually settled on glass as the material because of its flexibility and transparency. “To know the results of a breath test, you’d have to see the behavior of the insects,” she says. “Everything is about their behavior.”

Prototypes have undergone field testing, and although it didn’t find any instances of cancer, it did turn up a case of diabetes that was later confirmed. It’s unlikely, though, that the concept will amount to anything beyond being an exhibition curiosity. While there was a brief period in which she felt ambitious enough to reach out to potential collaborators, the process proved so time consuming and unfruitful that she ultimately gave up. The only organizations that seemed even remotely interested in her idea were a handful of charities. So for now, “Bee’s” exists as one of those purely academic exercises to show, as she puts it, the “symbiotic relationship” humans have with nature and how “technology and science can better foster these relationships.”

“I think there’s only four labs in the world doing research into insects for disease screening, which shows you that this approach doesn’t go over well in the western world,” says Soares. “Medical and health technologies are a big business, and the bottom line is they just don’t see how something like this can be profitable.”

Glen C. Rains, an agricultural professor at the University of Georgia, largely concurs, though he adds that there are more complex issues besides economics. The entomologist, as well as licensed beekeeper, has dealt with numerous challenges while developing a similar device called the Wasp Hound, which uses a batch of five wasps to detect the presence of bedbugs. Rains’ system is a bit more elaborate in that it uses a camera to record the wasps’ behavior. The data is then fed into software that analyzes these movements to determine if the bugs actually did indeed detect these unwanted guests. After over a decade of development, Rains has forged a partnership with Bennett Aerospace, an engineering firm, to refine the technology for large-scale real applications.

“The whole notion is definitely something people find fascinating,” he says. “But once you get into how it would work or how they make money, there’s no model for how it would be done.”

While there’s a tried-and-true market for electronic technologies, Rains points out that disease screening systems based on insects requires a separate infrastructure that the industry players haven’t bothered to think through. Facilities, for instance, would need a way to efficiently obtain odor samples for training and, obviously, a beekeeper on site who can manage and train the insects. After a few positive results, the insects’ willingness to buzz towards the chemical starts to diminish significantly, as they start to catch on to the fact that a sugary reward no longer await them at the other end. Thus, in a lab setting, bugs would need constant retraining throughout the day. But what’s encouraging, he adds, is that the enlisting of bugs for clinical purposes isn’t unprecedented, with the use of maggots and leaches to clean wounds being a well-accepted medical practice.

Despite these challenges, Soares has left at least the back door open to such a possibility, if someone with the right resources is willing to take a risk. “It has the potential to save so many lives,” she says. “It can even be an open-source concept, so for anyone who is interested, I’d be happy to talk.”

He had some pretty handy footwork.

Thank you!

I'm like wolverine, but not. I'm ManBearPig.

The irony is that they cut off his foot so they could attach the hand to it.

That was a very good article. Thanks for sharing.

That is amazing. And...

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yep, in the days of noah they were just going nuts with the biological engineering and cloning. :spock:

Everytime I think there is no way to go further down, he pulls through. He's really kinda amazing.

Just freakin adorable....

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A little boy who dreams of becoming an astronaut one day is on a mission to save NASA. He has started an online petition on the White House website.
Connor Johnson is 6 years old and fixated on space. Not just because it’s pretty cool, but because Connor is quite sure space will be his future.

“The whole reason I want to be an astronaut so I can discover, like, new worlds,” he says.

Connor says, since he was three, he’s been inspired by NASA.
“To discover like asteroids or stuff that I could build stuff out of.”

NASA has given countless kids like Connor reason to believe they too can land in space. But recently, over Thanksgiving, Connor learned Congress is cutting funding to the space program.

“He was disappointed to hear that they were decreasing funding,” said Connor’s mother.

Connor knew he had to do something. He chipped in his allowance – just over $10. Then, he decided to give his whole piggy bank to NASA.
But then, after talking with his family, he decided to create an online petition. They put it out there, posting it on Facebook and emailing friends and family. That got him about 40 signatures.

A Denver news station shared it, helping bring in more signatures. To get a response from the White House, it needs 100,000 signatures.
Which means Connor needs roughly 99,000 more.

“While I would be very sad, NASA is mostly the only space station, like space company, I’ve known for a very long time.”

A young boy inspired to take on a huge challenge to help save the very place that taught him to think big. Just think of all the significant moments that started with someone’s little dream.

Johnson must get 100,000 signatures by December 29. As of Monday morning, his petition had nearly 4,000 signatures.

Sign the online petition here:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pet...ue-cj/1Qq31jDb
http://whnt.com/2013/12/09/6-year-ol...-to-save-nasa/


Source: https://www.facebook.com/AllScienceAllTheTime

Videos - Colonel Richard French explains the reality of UFO's and alien life on earth...

http://www.unacknowledged.info/richa...aliens-aboard/

Boyd Bushman - senior research scientist for Lockheed Martin...

http://www.unacknowledged.info/we-no...avel-to-stars/

This is a nice thread that mostly contains studies published in the peer reviewed literature or has progressed to commercial applications. Please keep wacko shit out of this nice thread.

Its my opinion that science and the supernatural go hand in hand, you in particular should spend the 25 minutes with Boyd Bushman, as a math guy yourself, i know you'd love him for sure.

Calling it wacko without watching it all... it just blows my mind, there are realms of science that are being studied at the highest level yet most people never hear about it and thus its "wacko" to them.