I feel terrible about how many of these got me....

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Young glass mantis eating a blue bottle fly. Because science.......

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That's just awesome...

NASA To Reformat Opportunity Rover’s Memory From 125 Million Miles Away

After more than a decade roaming the Red Planet, NASA’s Opportunity rover needs to have its flash memory reformatted in order to resolve computer resets that are interfering with the rover’s science activities.

“Flash-memory induced resets have increased in occurrence, preventing meaningful science until this problem can be corrected,” NASA said in an update. The resets, which number a dozen during the month of August, have been occurring with increasing frequency, prompting the rover team to make plans for reformatting the rover’s flash memory.

“The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover,” according to John Callas, project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project.

Flash memory is a type of storage commonly used in smartphones and othe digital devices. Over time, individual memory cells can be worn-out due to repeated use. Reformatting erases the memory and identifies bad memory cells so they can be marked to be avoided.

This will be the first time Opportunity’s flash memory has been reformatted since it landed on Mars, currently around 125 million miles away from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. However, this kind of maintenance has been performed before with the rover’s twin, Spirit, back in 2009 to resolve a series of, what NASA is calling, “amnesia events.”

Opportunity, which recently set the record for the longest distance traveled by a rover on another world, has been operating on Mars for over 10 years. If all goes to plan, the little rover that could will be roaming the Red Planet for many years to come.

I've posted something similar before. But this still absolutely amazes me about the moon...

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Apparently, sleeping in space really sucks... and Ambien walrus in on the space station pretty much all the time.....

Drugs in space and sleepless in the shuttle

A fascinating study published in today’s Lancet Neurology reports on sleep deprivation in astronauts but also describes the drugs shuttle crew members use to keep themselves awake and help them fall asleep.

The study looked at sleep data from 64 astronauts on 80 space shuttle missions along with 21 astronauts on 13 International Space Station missions, and compared it to their sleep on the ground and in the days before space flight.

Essentially, in-flight astronauts don’t get a great deal of shut-eye, but what’s surprising is the range and extent of drugs they use to manipulate sleep.

Mostly these are the z-drug class of sleep medications (of which the best known is zolpidem, branded name Ambien) but also include benzos, melatonin and an antipsychotic called quetiapine.

Here are the sleep-inducing drugs with my comments in square brackets:

Zolpidem and zolpidem controlled release were the most frequently used drugs on shuttle missions, accounting for 301 (73%) and 49 (12%) of the 413 nights, respectively, when one dose of drug was reported. Zaleplon use was reported on 45 (11%) of 413 nights.

Other sleep-promoting drugs reported by shuttle crew members during the 413 nights included temazepam [sedative anti-anxiety benzodiazepine - similar to Vallium] on 8 (2%) nights, eszopiclone on 2 (<1%) nights, melatonin [hormone that regulates circadian rhythms] on 7 (2%) nights, and quetiapine fumarate [antipsychotic] on 1 (<1%) night.

The paper also notes concerns about the astronauts’ use of zolpidem and similar z-drug medications because they can affect mental sharpness, coordination and can lead to unusual and complex ‘sleep-behaviours’.

Interestingly, it seems astronauts tend to use these drugs in a rather ad-hoc manner and the consequences of this have clearly not been well thought through.

As the Lancet Neurology paper notes:

This consideration is especially important because all crew members on a given mission might be taking a sleep-promoting drug at the same time…. crew members reported taking a second dose of hypnotic drugs—most commonly zolpidem—often only a few hours before awakening. Although crew members are encouraged to try such drugs on the ground at home at least once before their use in flight, such preparations probably do not involve multiple dosing or dosing with two different drugs on the same night.

Furthermore, such tests do not include any measure of objective effectiveness or safety, such as what would happen in the case of abrupt awakening during an in-flight night-time emergency… sleep-related-eating, sleep-walking, and sleep-driving events have been reported with zolpidem use, leading the FDA to require a so-called black-box warning on all hypnotic drugs stating that driving and performance of other tasks might be impaired in the morning after use of such drugs:

“A variety of abnormal thinking and behavior changes have been reported to occur in association with the use of sedative/hypnotics…. Complex behaviors such as ‘sleep-driving’…have been reported. Amnesia, anxiety, and other neuropsychiatric symptoms may occur unpredictably.”

However, use of sleep drugs was reported on more than half the nights before extravehicular activities were undertaken.

Information on stimulant use by astronauts is hidden in the appendix but caffeine was widely used in space, but less than when on the ground – although possibly due to coffee shortages, and modafinil was used occasionally.

Caffeine was widely used throughout all data collection intervals by both shuttle and ISS crewmembers, though supply shortages sometimes led to coffee rationing and reduced consumption aboard ISS. All but eight shuttle mission crewmembers (72/80, 90%) and all but one ISS crewmember (20/21,95%) reported using caffeine at least once during the study…

Given the 3-7 hour half-life of caffeine and the sleep disturbances associated with its use, caffeine may have contributed to or enabled the sleep curtailment observed in this population. However, there is no evidence that caffeine accounts for the reduced sleep duration observed during spaceflight, as caffeine consumption was, if anything, reduced during spaceflight.

The wakefulness-promoting medication, modafinil, was reportedly used on both shuttle (10 reported uses) and ISS missions (2 reported uses). The use of this wakefulness-promoting medication was reported more frequently in post-flight debriefs.

There’s also an interesting snippet that gives the most common reason for sleep disturbance in space:

Nocturnal micturition is common in this age group and was the most reported reason for disruptive sleep both on Earth and inflight

Not stress, not being surrounded by equipment, not a lack of home comforts, but ‘Nocturnal micturition’ or wetting yourself in your sleep.

This is possibly more likely in space due to the fact that bodily cues for a full bladder work less effectively in zero gravity, but one major factor in astronauts wetting themselves was that it a better alternative than waking sleeping colleagues by going to the toilet.

The paper notes that this is why many astronauts wear ‘maximum absorbency garments’ – essentially giant nappies – while they sleep.

Partial eclipse coming up today. Starts here in Phoenix in about 1.5 hours.

Check your times here:

http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/usa/phoenix

Damnit, looks like there's going to be too much cloud cover here.

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I've wondered about this, and I need someone much smarter than me to explain it, but what prevents us from burning methane/human or animal waste to fuel power?

We would need a REALLY ****ing big Fart Jar.

Damn thing has been orbiting up there for 2 years. No clue WTF it's been doing. Probably aliens....

Secret Spaceplane Lands After 674 Days In Orbit

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The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle’s third mission (OTV-3) came to an end on October 17 when the unmanned craft landed safely and autonomously at Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California after 675 days in orbit. Altogether, the three missions have totaled 1367 days, and a fourth mission is expected to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida sometime in 2015. The project, headed by Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is classified. As such, no one really knows what OTV-3 has been doing up there for nearly 2 years.

The Air Force has been fairly vague about the mission. The spaceplane was said to be testing “advanced guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics, high temperature structures and seals, conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems, and autonomous orbital flight, reentry and landing.”

The Boeing X-37B is a modified version of the NASA’s X-37 design. The unmanned craft intended for low Earth orbit looks like a smaller version of the space shuttle at only 29-feet-long with a 15-foot wingspan. Like the space shuttle, it is launched vertically using Atlas V rockets, though it is able to land horizontally on a runway, like a plane. Solar panels charge the spaceplane’s lithium ion batteries once it has left Earth’s atmosphere. Though it was designed to remain in orbit for 270 days, it has far exceeded those expectations.

The Air Force claims that the objectives of the X-37B are to develop “reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.” However, it doesn’t seem likely that it will be used to retrieve satellites. Its cargo area is rather small at about 7 feet by 4 feet, so it is not clear what it could be carrying or what its payload might have been during OTV-3.

The latitudes at which it was observed while in orbit rules out any chance it could have been doing reconnaissance on Russia. If it were doing data collection, it was likely targeting the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or Northern Africa—none of which would be particularly surprising.

The secrecy of the mission and the fact that DARPA and the Air Force are at the helm have caught the attention of conspiracy theorists who love to speculate. Some have asserted that the X-37B was used for deploying bombs, interfering with satellites of other countries, spying on China’s upcoming space station, among other theories. However, many of these are not practical for the X-37B’s design.

It’s hard to tell exactly when the X-37B’s purpose will be revealed. Unless AFSPC decides to release that information, the documents could remain classified for a long time. According to Executive Order 13526, all documents are to be unclassified after a period of 25 years. However, under extenuating circumstances, the documents describing the mission could remain classified indefinitely.

Finally... geez...

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Laboratory-Grown Penises Ready To Be Tested In Humans

Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine could be offering new hope to men with genital abnormalities or injuries in as little as five years, thanks to one of their many tissue engineering endeavors: lab-grown penises.

While that may sound a little far-out, these guys are among the world leaders in regenerative medicine and they’ve achieved some remarkable things in the past. Back in 1999, they became the first in the world to successfully implant a lab-grown organ into humans—a bladder. Since then, they’ve transplanted engineered vaginas into women born with defects or without vaginas entirely, and have started working on growing tissues and organs for more than 30 different areas of the body.

Team leader Anthony Atala began this genital journey back in 1992, but it was not until 2008 that the scientists proved transplanting engineered penises was theoretically possible. Having spent a considerable amount of time working out the best way to engineer these tricky organs, the team managed to grow 12 functioning penises for rabbit subjects. After grafting them on to the recipients, all tried to mate with a female, eight successfully ejaculated, and four produced offspring. While these results were certainly encouraging, gaining approval for human trials is another kettle of fish. However, Atala is confident that it could be granted by the FDA within five years if they can prove the technique is safe.

So how do they do it? They first obtain a donor penis and strip all the cells from it with a detergent. The researchers are then left with a collagen scaffold which they then seed with a combination of cultivated smooth muscle and endothelial cells from the recipient. Using the patient's own cells eliminates the risk of immunological rejection that often occurs when transplants are given from another individual. However, because the cells are taken from the male’s genitals, it means that the procedure could not be used for female-to-male sex reassignment surgery.

The team has already engineered six human penises that are ready for transplantation; if approval for trials is granted and they prove to be a success, the researchers hope that they could be used all over the world to help people with a variety of problems. In particular, they envisage them being used in men who have suffered from traumatic injuries, for example those returning from the battlefield. However, they could also be used in individuals with congenital abnormalities, or children born with a disorder known as ambiguous genitalia. In the majority of instances, boys born with this condition are given a sex-change at birth, which can lead to serious psychological problems throughout life.

This technique also offers a vast improvement from existing penis replacement options, which are far from ideal. The procedure involves constructing a penis from thigh or forearm tissue and then inserting a prosthetic inside in order to achieve sexual function. The prosthetic is either a permanently rigid rod that is difficult to conceal, or an inflatable rod that requires a pump.

Although the team is hoping to be able to replace entire penises when they initiate trials, they think that a more realistic goal is to start with partial replacements, for example helping patients with erectile dysfunction.

**** if i know dude. I wish i could explain something like that.I just thought that video was pretty interesting

Well this happened today

http://youtu.be/UYmDM_MW03Q

That sucks.

This blows my mind all the way out, the vast scale of this universe is truly awe inspiring.

Cant wait until we send an explorer into this planets moon, Titan, ocean.

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/29...-mars-moon-sun

Really hope I'm still alive when they send the supposed submersible into Titans ocean, its bound to be incredibly bizarre...

http://www.cnet.com/news/sunlight-gl...ng-nasa-image/

Happy Halloween

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Revolutionary ALMA image reveals planetary genesis

The observations used the telescope’s near-final configuration and are an enormous step forward in learning how protoplanetary disks develop.

This new image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveals extraordinarily fine detail that has never been seen before in the planet-forming disk around a young star. These are the first observations that have used ALMA in its near-final configuration and the sharpest pictures ever made at submillimeter wavelengths. The new results are an enormous step forward in the observation of how protoplanetary disks develop and how planets form.

For ALMA’s first observations in its new and most powerful mode, researchers pointed the antennas at HL Tauri — a young star about 450 light-years away, which is surrounded by a dusty disk. The resulting image exceeds all expectations and reveals unexpectedly fine detail in the disk of material left over from star birth. It shows a series of concentric bright rings separated by gaps.

“These features are almost certainly the result of young planet-like bodies that are being formed in the disk. This is surprising since such young stars are not expected to have large planetary bodies capable of producing the structures we see in this image,” said Stuartt Corder from ALMA.

“When we first saw this image, we were astounded at the spectacular level of detail. HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disk appears to be full of forming planets. This one image alone will revolutionize theories of planet formation,” said Catherine Vlahakis from ALMA.

HL Tauri’s disk appears much more developed than would be expected from the age of the system. Thus, the ALMA image also suggests that the planet formation process may be faster than previously thought.

Such high resolution can only be achieved with the long baseline capabilities of ALMA and provides astronomers with new information that is impossible to collect with any other facility, even the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. “The logistics and infrastructure required to place antennas at such distant locations required an unprecedented coordinated effort by an expert international team of engineers and scientists,” said Pierre Cox from ALMA. “These long baselines fulfill one of ALMA’s major objectives and mark an impressive technological, scientific, and engineering milestone.”

Young stars like HL Tauri are born in clouds of gas and fine dust, in regions that have collapsed under the effects of gravitation, forming dense hot cores that eventually ignite to become young stars. These young stars are initially cocooned in the remaining gas and dust, which eventually settles into a disk, known as a protoplanetary disk.

Through many collisions, the dust particles will stick together, growing into clumps the size of sand grains and pebbles. Ultimately, asteroids, comets, and even planets can form in the disk. Young planets will disrupt the disk and create rings, gaps, and holes such as those seen in the structures now observed by ALMA.

The investigation of these protoplanetary disks is essential to our understanding of how Earth formed in the solar system. Observing the first stages of planet formation around HL Tauri may show us how our own planetary system may have looked more than four billion years ago when it formed.

“Most of what we know about planet formation today is based on theory. Images with this level of detail have up to now been relegated to computer simulations or artist’s impressions. This high resolution image of HL Tauri demonstrates what ALMA can achieve when it operates in its largest configuration and starts a new era in our exploration of the formation of stars and planets,” said Tim de Zeeuw of the European Southern Observatory.

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First segment on interesting interaction of 'steampunk' early tech and some of the most cutting edge tech of today.

Finally, Jake can lay that slut Brett Ashley.

:DLMAO

Scientists excited by strong winds on Uranus

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Scientists say they are excited after detecting strong winds raging - on Uranus.

Space boffins are intrigued by the “extreme storms” which have been spotted on the normally bland surface of the ice giant planet.

The cloud activity is so bright that even amateur astronomers have seen signs of it in the blue-green atmosphere of the planet, which is 30 times further away from the Sun than the Earth.

Astronomers observing Uranus with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii detected eight large storms in the planet’s northern hemisphere on August 5 and 6.

One was the brightest ever measured on Uranus, accounting for 30% of all light reflected by the rest of the planet at a wavelength of 2.2 microns.

This is the “colour” of light that senses clouds just below the tropopause, where the atmospheric pressure is half what it is at the Earth’s surface.

Later observations by amateur astronomers revealed a bright spot, which scientists believe is evidence of storm activity much deeper in the atmosphere.

Co-investigator Dr Heidi Hammel, from the US Space Science Institute, said: “This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus’s once every 42-year equinox occurred and the sun shined directly on the equator.

“But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody’s guess.”

Uranus has a diameter four times that of Earth and is wrapped in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, plus a dash of methane that gives it a blue tint.

The findings were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences in Tucson, Arizona.

Strong winds coming out of Uranus? Nothing new there.

The science of Fish piss.... chicks dig it........

Behold: The Majestic Power of Tilapia Urine

The secret to successful tilapia farming? Why, golden showers of course – why are you even asking?

A new study from the Centre of Marine Sciences at the University of Algarve in Portugal found that dominant tilapia males produce large quantities of pheromones in their urine that attract greater female attention, thus producing more babies and, ultimately, more fish tacos.

In spawning as in life, it all comes down to a pissing contest. The male tilapia, you see, is a competitive sort, especially when it comes to the mating game. When prepping for reproduction, the men first build a little spawning nest.

“It’s actually a quite interesting fish, because tilapias are highly social animals, so the males form hierarchies in a so-called spawning arena,” study leader Tina Keller-Costa told National Geographic.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, they start peeing. A lot. And it turns out that the more dominant males secrete greater amounts of a pheromone resembling a progesterone steroid, which the females totally dig. Before Gen Z is even a tinkle in her eye, she’s making a beeline (peeline?) for the alpha male and ignoring the piss-poor dude entirely.

Don’t start your lunch quite yet, because there’s more. The research team also found that the alpha males had bigger bladders, which meant not only more urine but more muscle control, allowing them to fire at will.

“They can extend the bladder, and that enables them to hold on to larger urine quantities. When they’re facing a female or when they’re facing a competitor, they’re literally, actively squeezing it all out,” said Keller-Costa. (We told you to put down that sandwich.)

So what does this have to do with tilapia farming? Well, the little pisser is the second most farmed fish in the world (the merits and drawbacks of which we’ll leave for another day). But it’s also become a dangerous invasive, easily able to elude its confines and make its way into the freshwater wilds. If the pee power of the male can be properly harnessed, it could be used to bring escape-minded females back into the farm fold.

“If we can use this pheromone that we identified to attract females into traps, [for instance, we can] see if we can in the future control these invasive populations,” Keller-Costa told the magazine.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed that whole video series. As a kid, I was fascinated by Rube Goldberg devices and while this device has the appearance of one, it is actually an incredibly efficient machine for some very important math before the advent of computers. The whole design of the machine was in perfect harmony with its purpose. It is the perfect combination of imagination and common sense. Personally, it was especially cool since we do a fair amount of Fourier analysis and simulation in our research on noise biology.

The math described by this machine is the same math used to compress electronic signals in MP3s and is the same math embedded in living systems. It is just a thing of beauty.

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Did you know that Uranus was once named George?

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Ancient people didn't have TV or electric lights. So, when the sun went down every night, they got their entertainment by watching the sky. And it was entertaining. Without city lights to interfere, the Milky Way was spectacular. Meteors flitted across the sky. Zodiacal lights chased the sunset.

Of special interest were the five naked-eye planets, the ones you could see without a telescope. (The ancients didn't have telescopes, either.) Countless hours were spent watching Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, whose movements were thought to control the affairs of men.

Would you believe, in spite of all that watching, they missed one? There is a sixth planet you can see without a telescope, a planet named George.

"George" is not as bright as the others, but it is there, glowing like an aqua-blue star of 6th magnitude. It measures four times wider than Earth, has more than 30 moons and a dozen or so thin rings. George goes around the sun every 84 years, always spinning on its side as if something knocked it over.
George is better known as Uranus.

English astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet in 1781 during a telescopic survey of the zodiac. He promptly named it the Georgium Sidus (the Georgian Planet) in honor of his patron, King George III. Later, to the everlasting delight of schoolchildren, George was re-named Uranus, the Greek god of the sky.

Uranus had been seen many times before but mistaken for a star. The earliest recorded sighting was in 1690 when astronomer John Flamsteed cataloged it as 34 Tauri, the 34th star of Taurus the Bull. We can understand the error. Uranus is so far from the sun it looks like a star to the unaided eye. And it moves so slowly; you have to watch for decades to realize that it is a wanderer—or, in ancient Greek, a planētēs.

In modern times, Uranus has become all but impossible to see. The planet is naturally faint, and urban lights wipe it out completely. No one notices when Uranus soars overhead.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news.../11apr_george/

One simple kiss transfers 80 million bacteria. Blech...

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One kiss 'shares 80 million bugs'

A single 10-second kiss can transfer as many as 80 million bacteria, according to Dutch scientists.

They monitored the kissing behaviour of 21 couples and found those who kissed nine times a day were most likely to share salivary bugs.

Studies suggest the mouth is home to more than 700 different types of bacteria - but the report reveals some are exchanged more easily than others.

The research is published in the journal Microbiome.


Locked lips
A team from the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) asked 21 couples a series of questions to assess their kissing habits, including how frequently they had kissed in the last year and when they last locked lips.

Scientists took bacterial samples from the volunteers' tongues and saliva before and after a strictly timed 10-second kiss.

One member of the couple then drank a probiotic drink, containing an easily identifiable mixture of bugs.

On the couple's second kiss, scientists were able to detect the volume of bacteria transferred to the other partner - on average 80 million bacteria in a single 10-second kiss.

But while bacteria in the saliva seemed to change quickly in response to a kiss, bug populations on the tongue remained more stable.

So... scientists are pretty confident that there are 2 additional planetoids way out past Pluto. One of them is larger than Earth. No word on lizard inhabitants...

Extreme trans-Neptunian objects and the Kozai mechanism: signalling the presence of trans-Plutonian planets

The existence of an outer planet beyond Pluto has been a matter of debate for decades and the recent discovery of 2012 VP113 has just revived the interest for this controversial topic. This Sedna-like object has the most distant perihelion of any known minor planet and the value of its argument of perihelion is close to 0°. This property appears to be shared by almost all known asteroids with semimajor axis greater than 150 au and perihelion greater than 30 au (the extreme trans-Neptunian objects or ETNOs), and this fact has been interpreted as evidence for the existence of a super-Earth at 250 au. In this scenario, a population of stable asteroids may be shepherded by a distant, undiscovered planet larger than the Earth that keeps the value of their argument of perihelion librating around 0° as a result of the Kozai mechanism. Here, we study the visibility of these ETNOs and confirm that the observed excess of objects reaching perihelion near the ascending node cannot be explained in terms of any observational biases. This excess must be a true feature of this population and its possible origin is explored in the framework of the Kozai effect. The analysis of several possible scenarios strongly suggest that at least two trans-Plutonian planets must exist.

stopped eating tilapia a while ago, disgusting trash fish

Mods!! - Off to DC

Dave Loon spends his millions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/1...n_6281852.html

That may be the coolest thing I've ever seen. Highly recommend watching the entire series (no pun intended).

What is amazing to me, having studied as an electrical engineer, is how much easier the relationship between the time domain and the frequency domain is, when represented mechanically.

We poor EEs get into it by advanced calculus and it's explained that it's just something you need to do to analyze signals in a different manner. But then who knows, maybe it's better to come at the matter with a more intricate and fundamental understanding based in raw math, than to see it represented visually like that at the outset. But I feel if I'd seen these videos first I'd have said 'oh yeah, so the time to frequency transformations use the Laplacian. Got it.'

For the lay person, time domain and frequency domain are dimensions in which signals are analyzed. Some are easily analyzed in one domain, others in the other. Calculus gives us the tools to traverse these domains. In these videos, the crank moves in time, while the gears plot out the frequencies of sinusoids sin[x], sin[2x], sin[3x] etc. that are contributing in time. It is visual confirmation of mathematical calculations.

Hospital elevator buttons host more bacteria than your average toilet. Delicious...

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Elevator buttons as unrecognized sources of bacterial colonization in hospitals

Elevators are ubiquitous and active inside hospitals, potentially facilitating bacterial transmission. The objective of this study was to estimate the prevalence of bacterial colonization on elevator buttons in large urban teaching hospitals.

Methods:

A total of 120 elevator buttons and 96 toilet surfaces were swabbed over separate intervals at 3 tertiary care hospitals on weekdays and weekends in Toronto, Ontario. For the elevators, swabs were taken from 2 interior buttons (buttons for the ground floor and one randomly selected upper-level floor) and 2 exterior buttons (the "up" button from the ground floor and the "down" button from the upper-level floor). For the toilet surfaces, swabs were taken from the exterior and interior handles of the entry door, the privacy latch, and the toilet flusher. Samples were obtained using standard bacterial collection techniques, followed by plating, culture, and species identification by a technician blind to sample source.

Results:

The prevalence of colonization of elevator buttons was 61% (95% confidence interval 52%–70%). No significant differences in colonization prevalence were apparent in relation to location of the buttons, day of the week, or panel position within the elevator. Coagulase-negative staphylococci were the most common organisms cultured, whereas Enterococcus and Pseudomonas species were infrequent. Elevator buttons had a higher prevalence of colonization than toilet surfaces (61% v. 43%, p = 0.008).

Conclusions:

Hospital elevator buttons were commonly colonized by bacteria, although most pathogens were not clinically relevant. The risk of pathogen transmission might be reduced by simple countermeasures.

Speaking of microbes... We ingest millions-billions of microbes every day from the normal food we eat. Toxins!!!!

[Germaphobes heads explode]

The microbes we eat: abundance and taxonomy of microbes consumed in a day’s worth of meals for three diet types

Far more attention has been paid to the microbes in our feces than the microbes in our food. Research efforts dedicated to the microbes that we eat have historically been focused on a fairly narrow range of species, namely those which cause disease and those which are thought to confer some “probiotic” health benefit. Little is known about the effects of ingested microbial communities that are present in typical American diets, and even the basic questions of which microbes, how many of them, and how much they vary from diet to diet and meal to meal, have not been answered.

We characterized the microbiota of three different dietary patterns in order to estimate: the average total amount of daily microbes ingested via food and beverages, and their composition in three daily meal plans representing three different dietary patterns. The three dietary patterns analyzed were: (1) the Average American (AMERICAN): focused on convenience foods, (2) USDA recommended (USDA): emphasizing fruits and vegetables, lean meat, dairy, and whole grains, and (3) Vegan (VEGAN): excluding all animal products. Meals were prepared in a home kitchen or purchased at restaurants and blended, followed by microbial analysis including aerobic, anaerobic, yeast and mold plate counts as well as 16S rRNA PCR survey analysis.

Based on plate counts, the USDA meal plan had the highest total amount of microbes at 1.3 × 109 CFU per day, followed by the VEGAN meal plan and the AMERICAN meal plan at 6 × 106 and 1.4 × 106 CFU per day respectively. There was no significant difference in diversity among the three dietary patterns. Individual meals clustered based on taxonomic composition independent of dietary pattern. For example, meals that were abundant in Lactic Acid Bacteria were from all three dietary patterns. Some taxonomic groups were correlated with the nutritional content of the meals. Predictive metagenome analysis using PICRUSt indicated differences in some functional KEGG categories across the three dietary patterns and for meals clustered based on whether they were raw or cooked.

Further studies are needed to determine the impact of ingested microbes on the intestinal microbiota, the extent of variation across foods, meals and diets, and the extent to which dietary microbes may impact human health. The answers to these questions will reveal whether dietary microbes, beyond probiotics taken as supplements—i.e., ingested with food—are important contributors to the composition, inter-individual variation, and function of our gut microbiota.

Thought controlled prosthetic limbs. In use......

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When you lose weight, where does the fat go?

Most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide, study shows

Despite a worldwide obsession with diets and fitness regimes, many health professionals cannot correctly answer the question of where body fat goes when people lose weight, a UNSW Australia study shows.

The most common misconception among doctors, dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat.
"There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.

"The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter.

In their paper, published in the British Medical Journal today, the authors show that losing 10 kilograms of fat requires 29 kilograms of oxygen to be inhaled and that this metabolic process produces 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water.

Mr Meerman became interested in the biochemistry of weight loss through personal experience.

"I lost 15 kilograms in 2013 and simply wanted to know where those kilograms were going. After a self-directed, crash course in biochemistry, I stumbled onto this amazing result," he says.

"With a worldwide obesity crisis occurring, we should all know the answer to the simple question of where the fat goes. The fact that almost nobody could answer it took me by surprise, but it was only when I showed Andrew my calculations that we both realised how poorly this topic is being taught."
The authors met when Mr Meerman interviewed Professor Brown in a story about the science of weight loss for the Catalyst science program on ABC TV in March this year.

"Ruben's novel approach to the biochemistry of weight loss was to trace every atom in the fat being lost and, as far as I am aware, his results are completely new to the field," says Professor Brown.

"He has also exposed a completely unexpected black hole in the understanding of weight loss amongst the general public and health professionals alike."
If you follow the atoms in 10 kilograms of fat as they are 'lost', 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide through the lungs. The remaining 1.6 kilograms becomes water, which may be excreted in urine, faeces, sweat, breath, tears and other bodily fluids, the authors report.

"None of this is obvious to people because the carbon dioxide gas we exhale is invisible," says Mr Meerman.

More than 50 per cent of the 150 doctors, dieticians and personal trainers who were surveyed thought the fat was converted to energy or heat.

"This violates the Law of Conservation of Mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the energy in/energy out mantra surrounding weight loss," says Mr Meerman.

Some respondents thought the metabolites of fat were excreted in faeces or converted to muscle.

"The misconceptions we have encountered reveal surprising unfamiliarity about basic aspects of how the human body works," the authors say.

One of the most frequently asked questions the authors have encountered is whether simply breathing more can cause weight loss. The answer is no. Breathing more than required by a person's metabolic rate leads to hyperventilation, which can result in dizziness, palpitations and loss of consciousness.

The second most frequently asked question is whether weight loss can cause global warming.

"This reveals troubling misconceptions about global warming which is caused by unlocking the ancient carbon atoms trapped underground in fossilised organisms. The carbon atoms human beings exhale are returning to the atmosphere after just a few months or years trapped in food that was made by a plant," says Mr Meerman, who also presents the science of climate change in high schools around Australia.

Mr Meerman and Professor Brown recommend that these basic concepts be included in secondary school curricula and university biochemistry courses to correct widespread misconceptions about weight loss among lay people and health professionals.

Wow!!

NASA Just Emailed A Wrench To The International Space Station

http://i61.tinypic.com/dgnw52.jpg

For the first time ever, hardware designed on the ground has been emailed to space to meet the needs of an astronaut. From a computer in California, Mike Chen of Made In Space and colleagues just 3D-printed a ratcheting socket wrench on the International Space Station. “We had overheard ISS Commander Barry Wilmore (who goes by “Butch”) mention over the radio that he needed one,” Chen writes in Medium this week. So they designed one and sent it up.

“The socket wrench we just manufactured is the first object we designed on the ground and sent digitally to space, on the fly,” he adds. It’s a lot faster to send data wirelessly on demand than to wait for a physical object to arrive via rockets, which can take months or even years.

The team started by designing the tool on a computer, then converting it into a 3D-printer-ready format. That’s then sent to NASA, which transmits the wrench to the space station. Once the code is received by the 3D printer, the wrench is manufactured: Plastic filament is heated and extruded layer by layer. The ISS tweeted this photo earlier this week, and you can see more pictures of the very cool wrench-printing process here.

Located on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Made In Space built the first 3D printer for microgravity, and it was launched to the ISS in September. Within a month, the astronauts 3D-printed their first object: a replacement faceplate for the printer’s casing (pictured below).

http://i61.tinypic.com/2j4wpbr.jpg

“We chose this part to print first because, after all, if we are going to have 3-D printers make spare and replacement parts for critical items in space, we have to be able to make spare parts for the printers,” NASA’s Niki Werkheiser said in a news release back in November. “If a printer is critical for explorers, it must be capable of replicating its own parts, so that it can keep working during longer journeys to places like Mars or an asteroid. Ultimately, one day, a printer may even be able to print another printer.”

Since then, another 20 objects have also printed -- though these were designed before the printer left Earth and the files were delivered on a cargo supply flight. These first prints will be brought back down in 2015 for examination. Researchers will be comparing them to identical objects manufactured on the ground to study the effects of microgravity on the 3D-printing process.

Happy 50th

<iframe width="636" height="383" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/F3ao5SCedIk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This curve is called an "analemma" and it occurs because of our elliptical and tilted orbit around the sun.

http://i60.tinypic.com/166hox4.jpg

I think I saw her on tubegalore.

Sorry everyone. But Earth is kill today. It's been scientifically proven....

http://i.imgur.com/rALizyH.jpg

**** him! On 12/25 I hope he eats bad blow fish and the leadership of NK skull-**** his hating ass!

:cuss::#:cuss::#:cuss::#

Doctors who got this wrong probably aren't fit to practice medicine. This is sophomore level biochemistry/biology/nutrition. Yeah they may have forgotten some stuff along the way, but clearly they have lost the scientific basis of the medicine they are supposed to be practicing.

Remember.......

http://i60.tinypic.com/akjwn4.jpg

Well played sir, Well played!:thumb:

:LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL:

We're going places man!

Quantum Physics Just Got A Tiny Bit Easier To Understand, As Two Oddities Merge Into One

The scientific article (Equivalence of wave–particle duality to entropic uncertainty)
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/14...comms6814.html


No one is about to claim that quantum physics is now easy to understand, but maybe it's not quite as devilishly complicated as we thought.
New research suggests that two of the quantum world's most mysterious features--the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality--are simply two sides of a single coin.


"The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you consider them as questions about what information you can gain about a system," Dr. Stephanie Wehner, an associate professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and one of the scientists behind the research, said in a written statement. "Our result highlights the power of thinking about physics from the perspective of information."

Wave-particle duality is the idea that elementary particles can exhibit wave-like behavior--for example, as seen in the classic double-slit experiment. The uncertainty principle holds that it's impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.
The proposed unification of the two features may bring new advances in cryptography, Dr. Patrick Coles, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing in Canada and one of Wehner's collaborators, told The Huffington Post in an email. For example, he said, it could point the way to provide "perfectly secure" online credit card transactions.

In addition, the advance promises to make it easier for physics students to make sense of a field that is notoriously difficult to understand. Instead of having to learn two separate phenomena, Coles said, "they can just learn the uncertainty principle and then deduce the competition between wave and particle behavior as a consequence of the uncertainty principle."


But perhaps most significant is that the unification may change the way scientists see the physical world--as happened when 19th Century scientists discovered that electricity and magnetism aren't distinct forces but just different manifestations of a single force we now call electromagnetism.


"Although our work is not at that level of impact, our work does affect how physicists view the structure of quantum theory," Coles said in the email. "Most physicists believe that quantum theory applies to every object around us, including ourselves. Even though it is weird to think of the particles inside us sometimes behaving like waves, that is the strange truth."


Coles said the key to the new research was to use mathematics to translate the language of wave and particle behavior into the language of uncertainty. He offered the following analogy:

"When we came across the literature on wave-particle duality, it was like trying to read hieroglyphics. The big breakthrough that we made was to discover a Rosetta Stone, or construct a Rosetta Stone, that allowed us to translate these hieroglyphics into our native tongue... it was especially fun because no one had ever translated these hieroglyphics before."

What do other physicists make of the research?


Dr. Robert W. Spekkens, a physicist on the faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, called it "a very nice result" and "significant," adding that "the more we understand the connections between different quantum phenomena, the better our chances of making sense of the foundations of quantum theory."

I just love these Hubble telescope pics
http://www.iflscience.com/space/hubb...llars-creation
Almost 20 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope took a breathtaking image that would soon become one of the most famous pictures in astronomy. That image was of the iconic Pillars of Creation; towering, ghost-like clouds of gas and dust, bathed in the blazing light from a cluster of newborn stars within the Eagle Nebula, or Messier 16. Now, in honor of the instrument’s 25^th year in orbit, astronomers have revisited this sublime celestial landscape and captured its evocative features in an unimaginable level of detail.

http://www.iflscience.com/sites/www....?itok=-4m3rsZ9

LMAO

Yeah but Santa uses magic reindeer. So....**** off.

Like!!! Rep!

Fake.
Clearly That left most pillar is the gopher from Caddyshack.

Bad news guys. It's just piss... and, um... prostate juice...

https://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m...sthro1_500.gif

Here's where female ejaculation comes from, and what it's made of

For the first time, scientists have discovered that women who 'squirt' are expelling one of two different types of liquid - one pure urine, and the other a combination of urine and fluid from the female prostate gland.

Okay everyone, it’s time to talk about female ejaculation. And not because the British government has just banned it from appearing in porn. For the first time, researchers in France have observed the mysterious phenomenon using ultrasound scans, to discover that the ejaculate originates in a woman’s bladder - and is made up mostly of urine.

The team, led by Samuel Salama, a gynaecologist at the Parly II private hospital in Le Chesnay, worked with a small sample of seven healthy women who reported “recurrent and massive fluid emission” when they were sexually stimulated. It’s not uncommon for women to experience a little bit of milky white fluid leaking from their urethra at the point of climax, but the practice of ‘squirting’ enough liquid to fill a drinking glass is relatively rare.

"A few small studies have suggested the milky white fluid comes from Skene glands - tiny structures that drain into the urethra,” says Helen Thomson at New Scientist. "Some in the medical community believe these glands are akin to the male prostate, although their size and shape differ greatly between women and their exact function is unknown.”

Salma’s team first asked the participants to submit a urine sample, and then their pelvis was scanned via an ultrasound machine to make sure there was nothing remaining in their bladders. The women were left to either masturbate in the lab, or have sex with a partner, until they were just about to climax. This gave the researchers enough time to get their ultrasound machines at the ready.

In what must have been one of the most awkward moments of their lives, the women had scans performed on them as they were climaxing, and the expelled fluid was collected in sample bags. One last scan was taken of their pelvises afterwards to get a view of the bladder.

Oddly enough, even though the women had emptied their bladders before the big event, the scan taken just before they climaxed revealed that the bladders been completely refilled again, for no other reason than the women had been sexually stimulated. The scan after the climax - and ejaculation - occurred showed that the volunteers’ bladders were once again clear. The team published their results in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Soooo, does this mean the liquid that’s being squirted during sex is urine? The team had already confirmed that it was coming from the bladder, so it’s a good bet. They compared the samples that had been bagged up during climax to the urine samples collected at the beginning of the study and found that in two of the seven women, the samples were both chemically identical.

In the remaining five women, the samples were slightly different. The team found an enzyme called a prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) that was present in small amounts in these volunteers’ ejaculated urine. "PSA, produced in men by the prostate gland, is more commonly associated with male ejaculate,” says Thomson at New Scientist, "where its presence helps sperm to swim. In females, says Salama, PSA is produced mainly by the Skene glands.”

So when females ejaculate during an orgasm, they either release plain old urine, or urine that's been diluted by fluids from the female prostate gland.

Thomson spoke to an independent expert, Beverley Whipple, a neurophysiologist from Rutgers University in the US, who said that when we talk about female ejaculation, we should really only be referring to when PSA is released, not urine.

The remaining mysteries surrounding this phenomenon are whether or not it serves some kind of adaptive function, and why so few women are able to do it. Researchers think it could have to do with perhaps some women not producing PSA at all, or maybe the size and shape of an individual’s prostate gland comes into play. Salma thinks all women should be able to squirt "if their partner knows what they are doing”, New Scientist reports.

We've all been lied to. This is pretty crazy really...

This Is The True Size Of Africa

How large is Africa compared to the United States, or Western Europe? Most inhabitants of the latter places might guess it is a little larger, but few would have any idea of the scale of the difference. This has led German graphics designer Kai Krause to produce this map to shake people's perceptions a little.

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/ocPQCRj.jpg[/IMG]

Any attempt to map a spherical planet onto a flat map will involve distortions of size, shape or both. There is a passionate debate among cartographers about the best way to hang the world on a wall, but most agree that the most common maps we get our sense of the world from are very bad ways to do it. The problem is that these maps exaggerate the size of the countries at high latitudes, and shrink places near the equator - leading to a perception that Europe is larger than South America, to pick just one example among many.

Lies, filthy lies:

http://i59.tinypic.com/2utgc4k.jpg

Africa, which spans the equator, fares particularly badly on these sorts of projections: Krause says, "Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well - all combined!”

Some have argued that since people associate size with importance this encourages the already strong tendency of the world's wealthiest nations to disregard those who live in the tropics.

Even if you are skeptical of those theories, there are clearer examples. Krause initally released the map years ago, achieving a burst of fame. The image has come back into the spotlight with a renewed relevance recently; the Ebola crisis has led to panic about visiting Africa. Any part of Africa. Tourism in Cape Town and solar installations in Tanzania have been affected because people are scared to fly to those places, despite the fact that Paris is actually closer to the countries with an Ebola outbreak than either of them.

It's called a globe. People should look into them.

Study: Facebook Knows You Better Than Even Your Family, Friends

http://i57.tinypic.com/2whqjaa.jpg

Scientists have designed an algorithm that analyzes your Facebook likes, and it's strikingly accurate

It’s no secret that Facebook knows a lot about us. The social network is constantly collecting data about our lives, tracking our likes, locations and friendships.

But a new study shows just how intimately Facebook knows us. In the study, published Monday, scientists presented the first computer model to accurately predict a subject’s personality based solely on his or her Facebook likes. The researchers say their algorithm is often better at predicting your character traits than your co-workers, friends and even family members.

“Computers do better than human beings in most cases,” says Youyou Wu, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study. “In some cases, the computer’s judgment can even describe real-life behaviors better than self-ratings.”

The researchers fed personality data and Facebook likes from over 85,000 volunteers into their computer model. The data consisted of a 100-item questionnaire via the myPersonality app, which focuses on the Big Five personality traits in psychology: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Do you like Buddhism, Salvador Dali or The Daily Show on Facebook? If so, Wu says, you are probably liberal and artistic. How about the U.S. Navy, the novel Kite Runner or motorcycles? You should be well-organized. Silence of the Lambs, Nicki Minaj or The Urge to Kick Little Kids? Competitive.

“We basically asked our computer model to look at the association between likes and personalities,” says Wu. “We asked the computer to make a judgment for these people, based on their self-ratings.” (David Stillwell, one of the authors of the paper, reports that he received some revenue as owner of the myPersonality application.)

The researchers also asked some of the participants’ families and friends to weigh in on the assessment with a shorter questionnaire. Wu and her team found that the computer could predict a subject’s personality more accurately than a co-worker after analyzing only 10 likes, a friend or roommate after only 70 likes and a family member after only 150 likes.

Spouses generally beat the computer, but only by a hair.

http://i60.tinypic.com/2sb0p07.jpg

The notion that Facebook likes could be powerful predictors of personality is nothing new. A few months ago, a similar paper published in PNAS concluded that intimate personality traits could theoretically be deduced from Facebook likes—and, in all likelihood, from “digital footprints” left behind on other social networks, too.

Wu envisions computer algorithms ultimately playing an active role within dating websites and career centers, helping employers find like-minded employees—or suggesting romantic partners who share each other’s interests and inclinations. “We can imagine that, in the near future, we will be able to trust computers with a lot of important decisions,” Wu says.

J Lo has globes

Just don't let the damn robots watch World Star Hip Hop....

Robots learn to use kitchen tools by watching YouTube videos

http://i61.tinypic.com/2zrm4wm.jpg (picture kind of but not really related)

Robotic systems that are able to teach themselves have been developed by researchers. Specifically, these robots are able to learn the intricate grasping and manipulation movements required for cooking by watching online cooking videos. The key breakthrough is that the robots can 'think' for themselves, determining the best combination of observed motions that will allow them to efficiently accomplish a given task.

Imagine having a personal robot prepare your breakfast every morning. Now, imagine that this robot didn't need any help figuring out how to make the perfect omelet, because it learned all the necessary steps by watching videos on YouTube. It might sound like science fiction, but a team at the University of Maryland has just made a significant breakthrough that will bring this scenario one step closer to reality.

Researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) partnered with a scientist at the National Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence in Australia (NICTA) to develop robotic systems that are able to teach themselves. Specifically, these robots are able to learn the intricate grasping and manipulation movements required for cooking by watching online cooking videos. The key breakthrough is that the robots can "think" for themselves, determining the best combination of observed motions that will allow them to efficiently accomplish a given task.

The work will be presented on Jan. 29, 2015, at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in Austin, Texas. The researchers achieved this milestone by combining approaches from three distinct research areas: artificial intelligence, or the design of computers that can make their own decisions; computer vision, or the engineering of systems that can accurately identify shapes and movements; and natural language processing, or the development of robust systems that can understand spoken commands. Although the underlying work is complex, the team wanted the results to reflect something practical and relatable to people's daily lives.

"We chose cooking videos because everyone has done it and understands it," said Yiannis Aloimonos, UMD professor of computer science and director of the Computer Vision Lab, one of 16 labs and centers in UMIACS. "But cooking is complex in terms of manipulation, the steps involved and the tools you use. If you want to cut a cucumber, for example, you need to grab the knife, move it into place, make the cut and observe the results to make sure you did them properly."

First contracting human muscle grown in laboratory

DURHAM, N.C. -- In a laboratory first, Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.

The lab-grown tissue should soon allow researchers to test new drugs and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body.

The study was led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac's laboratory. It appears January 13 in the open-access journal eLife

"The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish," said Bursac. "We are working to test drugs' efficacy and safety without jeopardizing a patient's health and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseases -- especially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult."

Bursac and Madden started with a small sample of human cells that had already progressed beyond stem cells but hadn't yet become muscle tissue. They expanded these "myogenic precursors" by more than a 1000-fold, and then put them into a supportive, 3D scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel that allowed them to form aligned and functioning muscle fibers.

"We have a lot of experience making bioartifical muscles from animal cells in the laboratory, and it still took us a year of adjusting variables like cell and gel density and optimizing the culture matrix and media to make this work with human muscle cells," said Madden.

Madden subjected the new muscle to a barrage of tests to determine how closely it resembled native tissue inside a human body. She found that the muscles robustly contracted in response to electrical stimuli -- a first for human muscle grown in a laboratory. She also showed that the signaling pathways allowing nerves to activate the muscle were intact and functional.

To see if the muscle could be used as a proxy for medical tests, Bursac and Madden studied its response to a variety of drugs, including statins used to lower cholesterol and clenbuterol, a drug known to be used off-label as a performance enhancer for athletes.

The effects of the drugs matched those seen in human patients. The statins had a dose-dependent response, causing abnormal fat accumulation at high concentrations. Clenbuterol showed a narrow beneficial window for increased contraction. Both of these effects have been documented in humans. Clenbuterol does not harm muscle tissue in rodents at those doses, showing the lab-grown muscle was giving a truly human response.

"One of our goals is to use this method to provide personalized medicine to patients," said Bursac. "We can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples and experiment to see which drugs would work best for each person."

This goal may not be far away; Bursac is already working on a study with clinicians at Duke Medicine -- including Dwight Koeberl, associate professor of pediatrics -- to try to correlate efficacy of drugs in patients with the effects on lab-grown muscles. Bursac's group is also trying to grow contracting human muscles using induced pluripotent stem cells instead of biopsied cells.

"There are a some diseases, like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy for example, that make taking muscle biopsies difficult," said Bursac. "If we could grow working, testable muscles from induced pluripotent stem cells, we could take one skin or blood sample and never have to bother the patient again."

As we speak, those don't exist.

It's sad that we can map out the ocean floors but are still figuring out the female orgasm.

Also, if you've ever been with a squirter, you probably knew that was piss.

aw, you guys take all the fun out of squirting...

it was so much more fun when it was magic juice all over my face...

The second picture can't be real. It looks EXACTLY like the first one. Are they expecting me to believe that nothing has changed in 25 yrs???

Super cool pics thou

Off the top of my head I'd say it's because those things are 1000's of light years tall. Stick around for a couple thousand years and you might be able to notice a difference.

This kind of stuff continues to blow my mind. I read an article (maybe you did too) that said the blast from a nearby supernova is about to blow all that gas away, as we see it now as well as in the next thousand years or so.

Of course, this already happened thousands of years ago.

This is a pretty cool website that is a visualization of global weather conditions,
forecast by supercomputers.

http://earth.nullschool.net

They exist. They are probably slightly altered. They are very very close in cosmic term and are unlikely to have varied much.

If there's been a nearby supernova then all bets are off.

I like my universe to be pretty stable, so I'm okay with that.

Here's the article I was referencing. You'd know better than I if it's legit science, but it's thought provoking.

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/it-sounds-...t-e-1677857108

"Boosting your immune system".

Why it's bullshit.....

Something to Sneeze At

Natural remedies that claim to “boost your immune system” don’t work, and it’s a good thing they don’t.

Browse the cold and flu aisle at the pharmacy or watch certain famous doctors on TV, and you'll encounter a number of products claiming to boost your immunity, “naturally.” Research on these products shows that they are expensive placebos. However, many people remain convinced that these potions can keep them healthy. Millions of people are taken in by the seemingly friendly—but ultimately cynical—marketing of these products, and they happily fork over their money for what overwhelmingly amounts to snake oil. For all you believers (and for skeptics looking for some new arguments), consider this: Boosting your immunity is actually a pretty bad idea. Even if these remedy and prevention products did what they purport to, you wouldn't want them to.

We have two complementary immune systems: innate and acquired. Innate immunity is the body’s natural, knee-jerk reaction to an unknown infection. Innate immunity is fast, broad, and incredibly nonspecific. When it gets activated, you know the feeling all too well—fever, cough, runny nose, and body aches. In short: inflammation. You can already see why you might not want to “boost” this part of the immune system.

Like it or not, as soon as a virus enters your body, innate immunity kicks in. And when it does, the symptoms are pretty similar, regardless of which of the several hundred typical cold viruses it happens to be. Before your body has determined the precise identity of the new invader, your innate immunity mounts a fever to try to cook the microbes and produces cough and phlegm to try to flush those critters out. These haphazard responses are mildly helpful, supremely annoying, but—and this is crucial—are not what actually defeats an infection.

The real work of neutralizing an infection is the purview of acquired immunity, the targeted branch of your immunologic military that is built up over your lifetime. The acquired immune system contains B and T cells that produce and interact with proteins called antibodies that can attack an unbelievable number of specific infections. While a small percentage of antibodies are passed from mother to child, the majority are produced when a person first encounters a particular infection. The resulting antibodies are analogous to weapon caches our bodies keep in storage for decades in the event of a future invasion: It’s the ultimate Cold War. If the body has been previously exposed to an infectious pathogen (or vaccinated against it), the acquired immune system “remembers” it and is able to quickly recognize it in the event of future reinfection. Once reactivated, the acquired immune system synthesizes only the correct antibodies, with astonishing precision and efficiency. Most common and mild viruses are cleared quite trivially in this way, usually within days. It is evolution at its finest. New viruses are dealt with in a similar way. The only difference is that the immune system has no memory of novel viruses, so it takes longer to produce just the right antibodies.

Meanwhile, the innate immune system rages on for much longer than necessary. While the acquired immune system’s antibodies have already fought and won the real battle, the innate branch just doesn’t get the communiqué, so it fights on unwittingly. As we all know, coughs and runny noses can linger for weeks, even after the mildest of viral infections.

This is why boosting your immunity seems like such a bad idea. Over-the-counter alternative-remedy products can’t boost your acquired immunity. Even magical thinkers would have to acknowledge that the only way to do that is through vaccination—something that too many alternative-remedy users seem to shun—or a bone marrow transplant, a dangerous but often necessary treatment in certain blood cancers that also increases immune system cells. That leaves innate immunity as the only target of these over-the-counter remedies that claim to enhance your natural immunity. But who would actually want that? Last I checked, no one wants fever or a runny nose.

The mainstay of treatment for symptomatic cold viruses is to suppress, not boost, our crude and clunky innate immune responses. That’s why we take fever reducers and antihistamines. Even if a natural immunity boost were possible, the very notion of this is misguided. In extreme cases, overreacting to infections can even cause changes in our vascular system, leading to sepsis and shock—our blood vessels become too flimsy in response to inflammation initiated by, you guessed it, our natural innate immune responses.

In general, extremes are bad. Too much immunity (for example, autoimmune responses) can lead to allergies, tissue damage, and even anaphylaxis. Too little immunity, say from chemotherapy or HIV/AIDS, and you're at risk of deadly infections that most people clear with ease. Our bodies have evolved toward a balance, but sometimes innate immunity is overzealous and needs curbing.

So, the next time you feel a cold coming on, maybe what you really want is just a little teensy bit of innate immune suppression, not an immunity boost. Over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and antihistamines should help you feel better. Meanwhile, sit back while your acquired B and T cells do the rest. And if you aren't yet sick, stay up-to-date on your vaccines, including the yearly influenza vaccine. Most importantly, practice vigorous hand washing—after all, the skin is also a component of your natural defenses and one that actually can be enhanced by good hygiene. Take care of yourself by keeping a balanced diet, maintaining good sleep habits, and minimizing stress. These are interventions that have been shown to help keep your immune system at its best. These alone can "boost" your odds of staving off an infection this cold season.

Jeremy Samuel Faust, M.D., M.S., M.A., is an emergency medicine resident physician at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and is co-host of FOAMcast.

Science is Cool....
 

Ive been on a huge immune system kick lately. So many questions..

I've read that a large amount of your immune system is found in the good bacteria in your stomach. They say antibiotics kill bacteria indiscriminately. So is it really worth it to be taking antibiotics all willy nilly?

Also, as far as I'm aware I've never had the flu but I've been alive for 25 years. My body has to have come in contact with it at some point. So did just a small enough amount make its way into my body so that my immune system was able to deal with it before 1) the virus took over or 2) my innate immune response started flipping its shit?

And how in balls' name can you randomly develop an allergy to something?

I need all da ansuhs, bruh.

1) Antibiotics target certain types of bacteria (usually) focusing either on the composition of their cell wall or protein synthesis. If you take antibiotics, you will nuke the good bacteria in your gut, too.

2) Influenza is a highly dynamic class of viruses. Every flu every year is genetically different than the previous year's strain. Thus, even if you had the previous year's strain, you aren't going to be protected from the strain next year, in all likelihood.

3) I haven't taken enough cell bio/physio to give you more than a cursory opinion.

Allergies are a result of an inflammatory process in your body, treating a specific substance as an invader, often a protein. Sometimes that's a good thing, but you also don't want peanut dust to throw you into shock.

In short... Facebook is watching you in new and even scarier ways than before, so glad I dont give a shit about all of that look at me nonsense.

Pretty soon Zuckerbergs minions will just assign people a program to keep them happy like in "Her".