Science in the news

I managed to catch the countdown and the launch itself - was pretty cool :D though I was a bit nervous that something was going to go wrong after NASA ignored warnings from officials who said that they shouldn't launch it due to some problem(s) they'd discovered with the shuttle.

More news from Yahoo.com

National Zoo observes Panda's first birthday

WASHINGTON - One year ago, he was nearly hairless, pink and weighed about four ounces, less than most bagels. On Sunday, his first birthday, giant panda Tai Shan is an active, 56-pound cub and the star attraction of the National Zoo.

"He's like a rambunctious little toddler that loves to get into everything," said Dr. Suzan Murray, the zoo's chief veterinarian.

Murray has monitored every developmental benchmark for the black and white panda since his birth on July 9, 2005. Those included the opening of his eyes, the development of his distinctive markings, his heartbeat, his mobility, and even the frequency of his squeals, grunts and barks.

The cub still nurses, but he has advanced from milk provided by his mother, Mei Xiang, to eating bamboo. The woody perennial grass is the staple of adult pandas' diets, accounting for more than 90 percent of their nutrition.

"My next challenge is weaning Tai Shan from his mom," said Lisa Stevens, the zoo's curator of pandas and primates.

For his birthday, staffers prepared a giant fruitsicle for the cub, a frozen melange of apples, yams, carrots and fruit juices. That is a favorite of Mei Xiang's, but this was the first prepared for the growing cub.

Tai Shan, whose name means peaceful mountain, routinely awakens before daybreak. After a meal, the mother and cub are often seen wrestling. Tai Shan also rolls around in the outdoor paddock and climbs trees, delighting zoo visitors.

More than 1.2 million have visited the panda exhibit since the cub went on display last December, and more than 21 million people have linked to the panda cam Web site.

Tai Shan is aware of the scent of his father, Tian Tian, in a separate exhibit, and they are often in visual proximity of each other, but they do not look at each other at all, said Stevens.

"In the wild males play no role in the rearing of cubs, so there's no reason for there to be any recognition of who this strange neighbor's scent mark belongs to," said Stevens.

Under the agreement with China that allowed the National Zoo to bring the two adult pandas to the U.S., the cub must be available for shipment to China at 2 years of age to become part of breeding efforts to preserve the endangered species.

Only about 1,600 giant pandas remain in the wild, and fewer than 180 live in captivity. Zoo officials hope the Chinese will allow the cub to remain in the U.S. until it nears breeding age of 5 or 6.

Tai Shan was the product of artificial insemination. Zoo officials hope to breed the adult pandas again in the next year.
Click to expand...
 
Look out, C. K.!!!

Scientists unearth Superman's "kryptonite"

Mon Apr 23, 7:08 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Kryptonite, which robbed Superman of his powers, is no longer the stuff of comic books and films.

A mineral found by geologists in Serbia shares virtually the same chemical composition as the fictional kryptonite from outer space, used by the superhero's nemesis Lex Luther to weaken him in the film "Superman Returns."

"We will have to be careful with it -- we wouldn't want to deprive Earth of its most famous superhero!," said Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum.

Stanley, who revealed the identity of the mysterious new mineral, discovered the match after searching the Internet for its chemical formula - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide.

"I was amazed to discover that same scientific name written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns," he said.

The substance has been confirmed as a new mineral after tests by scientists at the Natural History Museum in London and the
National Research Council in Canada.

But instead of the large green crystals in Superman comics, the real thing is a white, powdery substance which contains no fluorine and is non-radioactive.

The mineral, to be named Jadarite, will go on show at the London's Natural History Museum at certain times of the day on Wednesday, April 25, and Sunday, May 13.
 
Hitachi: Move the Train With Your Brain
Jun 22, 6:06 AM (ET)
By HIROKO TABUCHI

HATOYAMA, Japan (AP) - Forget the clicker: A new technology in Japan could let you control electronic devices without lifting a finger simply by reading brain activity.

The "brain-machine interface" developed by Hitachi Inc. analyzes slight changes in the brain's blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals.

A cap connects by optical fibers to a mapping device, which links, in turn, to a toy train set via a control computer and motor during one recent demonstration at Hitachi's Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, just outside Tokyo.

"Take a deep breath and relax," said Kei Utsugi, a researcher, while demonstrating the device on Wednesday.

At his prompting, a reporter did simple calculations in her head, and the train sprang forward - apparently indicating activity in the brain's frontal cortex, which handles problem solving.

Activating that region of the brain - by doing sums or singing a song - is what makes the train run, according to Utsugi. When one stops the calculations, the train stops, too.

Underlying Hitachi's brain-machine interface is a technology called optical topography, which sends a small amount of infrared light through the brain's surface to map out changes in blood flow.

Although brain-machine interface technology has traditionally focused on medical uses, makers like Hitachi and Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. (HMC) have been racing to refine the technology for commercial application.

Hitachi's scientists are set to develop a brain TV remote controller letting users turn a TV on and off or switch channels by only thinking.

Honda, whose interface monitors the brain with an MRI machine like those used in hospitals, is keen to apply the interface to intelligent, next-generation automobiles.

The technology could one day replace remote controls and keyboards and perhaps help disabled people operate electric wheelchairs, beds or artificial limbs.

Initial uses would be helping people with paralyzing diseases communicate even after they have lost all control of their muscles.

Since 2005, Hitachi has sold a device based on optical topography that monitors brain activity in paralyzed patients so they can answer simple questions - for example, by doing mental calculations to indicate "yes" or thinking of nothing in particular to indicate "no."

"We are thinking of various kinds of applications," project leader Hideaki Koizumi said. "Locked-in patients can speak to other people by using this kind of brain machine interface."

A key advantage to Hitachi's technology is that sensors don't have to physically enter the brain. Earlier technologies developed by U.S. companies like Neural Signals Inc. required implanting a chip under the skull.

Still, major stumbling blocks remain.

Size is one issue, though Hitachi has developed a prototype compact headband and mapping machine that together weigh only about two pounds.

Another would be to tweak the interface to more accurately pick up on the correct signals while ignoring background brain activity.

Any brain-machine interface device for widespread use would be "a little further down the road," Koizumi said.

He added, however, that the technology is entertaining in itself and could easily be applied to toys.

"It's really fun to move a model train just by thinking," he said.
 
Are First-Borns Really Smarter.

WASHINGTON - Boys at the top of the pecking order — either by birth or because their older siblings died — score higher on IQ tests than their younger brothers. The question of whether firstborn and only children are really smarter than those who come along later has been hotly debated for more than a century.

Norwegian researchers now report that it isn't a matter of being born first, but growing up the senior child, that seems to result in the higher IQ scores.

Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal report their findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

It's a matter of what they call social rank in the family — the highest scores were racked up by the senior boy — the first born or, if the firstborn had died in infancy, the next oldest.

Kristensen, of Norway's National Institute of Occupational Health, and Bjerkedal, of the Norwegian Armed Forces Medical Services, studied the IQ test results of 241,310 Norwegian men drafted into the armed forces between 1967 and 1976. All were aged 18 or 19 at the time.

The average IQ of first-born men was 103.2, they found.

Second-born men averaged 101.2, but second-born men whose older sibling died in infancy scored 102.9.

And for third-borns, the average was 100.0. But if both older siblings died young, the third-born score rose to 102.6.

The findings provide "evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such," they concluded.

It's an issue that has perplexed people since at least 1874, when Sir Francis Galton reported that men in prominent positions tend to be firstborns more often than would have been statistically expected.

Since then, several studies have reported higher intelligence scores for firstborns, while other analyses have questioned those findings and the methodology of the reports.

While the Norwegian analysis focused on men, other studies have included women, some indicating a birth-order effect and some not.

Frank J. Sulloway of the Institute for Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, welcomed what he called the Norwegians' "elegantly designed" analysis.

"These two researchers demonstrate that how study participants were raised, not how they were born, is what actually influences their IQs," said Sulloway, who was not part of the research team.

The elder child pulls ahead, he said, perhaps as a result of learning gained through the process of tutoring younger brothers and sisters.

The older child benefits by having to organize and express its thoughts to tutor youngsters, he said, while the later children may have no one to tutor.
 
Internet Warp Speed

Swedish Woman, 75, Gets Superfast Net
Jul 18, 1:13 PM (ET)

By LOUISE NORDSTROM

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed.

Lothberg's 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.

Full story at Iwon/AP News
 
Swedes are crazy with the Internet. Seriously. They've had fast connections basicly available for everyone for years. They've had ADSL2 for few years before they started to talk about it in here - and here it's mentioned only in big cities.
For the nerds, Sweden is a dreamland.


I think my village gets some kind of cable :eek:
 
:rolleyes: I know nothing about internet speeds, mine says that my speed is 54 Mbps, so that's 54 mega-bytes per second right? Hows that compared to other (non swedish lol) places? :lol: :rolleyes: Sorry that this is off topic. I'll find some science news...

Looksie Basically, a really funny looking creature that was once thought extinct isn't. *parties* lmao
 
eggbe4thechicken,
Maximum dialup speed is usually about 56 Kbps. I think it was about 12 Kbps or less when I first started with Compuserve before the internet was offered to the general public.

My cable company offers 1.5 Mbps and 6 Mbps and is considering adding 12 Mbps (each of these at a different price level). I've got the 1.5 Mbps.

Some colleges and businesses use Ethernet fiber optic lines with speeds of 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps, but speed generally drops when more people are on line.

And the news report listed the new 40 Gbps. Zoom zoom zoom.

Hope this helps.
 
Ultra-Flexible Fiber Optics on the Way
Jul 23, 7:52 PM (ET)
By BEN DOBBIN

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) - Corning Inc. is finding its way around very tight corners to help high-speed Internet service reach high-rise apartments and condominiums.

The world's largest maker of optical fiber said Monday it has developed a new fiber that is at least 100 times more bendable than standard fiber, clearing a major hurdle for telecommunications carriers drawing fiber into homes.

"This is a game-changing technology for telecommunications applications," said Corning's president, Peter Volanakis. "We have developed an optical fiber cable that is as rugged as copper cable but with all of the bandwidth benefits of fiber."

Full story at Iwon/AP News
 
Gold rings create first true invisibility cloak
16:56 02 October 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Colin Barras

The world's first true invisibility cloak – a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum – has been created by physicists in the US. But don't expect it to compete with stage magic tricks. So far it only works in two dimensions and on a tiny scale.

The new cloak, which is just 10 micrometres in diameter, guides rays of light around an object inside and releases them on the other side. The light waves appear to have moved in a straight line, so the cloak – and any object inside – appear invisible.

The cloak was built by a team led by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, and borrows some ideas from the first theoretical design for an invisibility cloak, published by Vladimir Shalaev from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, US, earlier this year.

Full story at NewScientistTech.com
 
I saw this yesterday and thought it was pretty interesting.

Oh, it brings such blessed relief and now scientists can tell you why -- scratching an itch temporarily shuts off areas in the brain linked with unpleasant feelings and memories.

"Our study shows for the first time how scratching may relieve itch," Dr. Gil Yosipovitch, a dermatologist at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said in a statement.

Prior studies have shown that pain, including vigorous scratching, inhibit the need to itch. Yosipovitch and colleagues looked at what goes on in the brain when a person is scratched.

He and colleagues used a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging to see which areas of the brain are active during scratching. They scratched 13 healthy people with a soft brush on the lower leg on and off in 30-second intervals for a total of five minutes.

Scratching reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex -- areas linked with pain aversion and memory.

And the more intensely a person was scratched, the less activity they found in these areas of the brain.

"It's possible that scratching may suppress the emotional components of itch and bring about relief," Yosipovitch said.

But they also found why one scratch often begets another.

Scratching increased activity in the secondary somatosensory cortex, a pain center, and in the prefrontal cortex, which is linked with compulsive behavior.

"This could explain the compulsion to continue scratching," Yosipovitch said.

The researchers noted that the study is limited because people were not scratching in response to an actual itch.

But they said understanding what goes on in the brain may lend clues about how to treat people tormented by chronic itch, including people with eczema and many kidney dialysis patients.

The study, which appears online in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, was paid for by the National Institutes of Health.
 
I spotted this in Yahoo!News twp days ago and forgot to post it. It's more about health, but I see it as science.

Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.

"There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue," said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.

She told a news conference the patient was recovering more quickly than he would have if he had received a bone graft from his leg.

"From the outside nobody would be able to tell he has been through such a procedure," she said.

She added, the team used no materials from animals -- preventing the risk of transmitting viruses than can be hidden in an animal's DNA, and followed European Union guidelines.

Stem cells are the body's master cells and they can be found throughout the blood and tissues. Researchers have recently found that fat contains stem cells which can be directed to form a variety of different tissues.

Using a patient's own stem cells provides a tailor-made transplant that the body should not reject.

Suuronen and her colleagues -- the project was run jointly with the Helsinki University Central Hospital -- isolated stem cells from the patient's fat and grew them for two weeks in a specially formulated nutritious soup that included the patient's own blood serum.

In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells -- immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels.

When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said.

The block was later transplanted into the patient's head and connected to the skull bone using screws and microsurgery to connect arteries and veins to the vessels of the neck.

The patient's upper jaw had previously been removed due to a benign tumor and he was unable to eat or speak without the use of a removable prosthesis.

Suuronen said her team had submitted a report on the procedure to a medical journal to be reviewed.
 
Accident could be a key to Alzheimer's cure.

While trying to treat a man for obesity, Spanish scientist Andrés Lozano, accidentally came across a process which seemed to stimulate memories and having tried the technique on a handful of people with Alzheimer's disease, the results are said to look promising.
Originally trying to suppress the appetite of a 50-year-old obese man using deep brain stimulation surgery, researcher found that he inadvertently recalled a memory from 30 years earlier in vivid detail.
The study, which was published in the Annals of Neurology found that the 30-stone man reacted to electrodes stimulating the hypothalamus part of the brain with a feeling of deja-vu.
Researcher wrote: "He reported the experience of being in a park with friends from when he was around 20 years old and, as the intensity of stimulation increased, the details became more vivid.
"The scene was in colour. People were wearing identifiable clothes and were talking."
Following three weeks of continuous hypothalamic stimulation, the man also performed better on cognitive tests.
Professor Lozano, an expert on deep-brain stimulation, told the Independent: "It gives us an insight into which brain structures are involved in memory.
"It gives us a means of intervening in the way we have already done in Parkinson's and for mood disorders such as depression, and it may have a therapeutic benefit in people with memory problems."
Six Alzheimer's sufferers are currently in the first stages of trials with the methods.
 
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