3D display technology

More HERE.

Our Genome Changes Over Lifetime

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that epigenetic marks on DNA-chemical marks other than the DNA sequence-do indeed change over a person's lifetime, and that the degree of change is similar among family members. The team suggests that overall genome health is heritable and that epigenetic changes occurring over one's lifetime may explain why disease susceptibility increases with age.

"We're beginning to see that epigenetics stands at the center of modern medicine because epigenetic changes, unlike DNA sequence which is the same in every cell, can occur as a result of dietary and other environmental exposure," says Andrew P. Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H, a professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the Epigenetics Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "Epigenetics might very well play a role in diseases like diabetes, autism and cancer."

More HERE.

Baby to be born free of breast cancer after embryo screening

A woman has conceived Britain’s first baby guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer.

Doctors screened out from the woman’s embryos an inherited gene that would have left the baby with a greater than 50% chance of developing the cancer.

The woman decided to have her embryos screened because her husband had tested positive for the gene and his sister, mother, grandmother and cousin have all had the cancer.

The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman’s womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant.

More HERE.

Building Giant 'Nanoassemblies' That Sense Their Environment

Researchers in Texas are reporting the design, construction, and assembly of nano-size building blocks into the first giant structures that can sense and respond to changes in environmental conditions.

The study, scheduled for the July 9 issue of ACS's Nano Letters, a monthly journal, terms those structures "giant" because they are about the size of a grain of rice — millions of times larger than anything in the submicroscopic realm of the nanoworld.

In the new study, Pulickel M. Ajayan and colleagues point out that such structures are a step toward the development of futuristic nanomachines with practical applications in delivering medicines to patients, labs-on-a-chip, and other products. Until now, scientists have had difficulty in using nanomaterials to build more complex, multifunctional objects needed for those applications.

More HERE.

Definition: Proteome

The proteome is the entire complement of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism. More specifically, it is the expressed proteins at a given time point under defined conditions. The term is a blend of proteins and genome.

It was coined by Marc Wilkins first in 1994 in the symposium: "2D Electrophoresis: from protein maps to genomes" in Siena, Italy, and was subsequently published in 1995 (1), which was part of his PhD thesis. Wilkins used it to describe the entire complement of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism.

More HERE.

Calculation predicts death row executions

Which inmates on death row will eventually be executed? Many never make the final journey from prison cell to execution chamber - but nobody really understands who will be spared. Until now. A new computer system can predict which death row prisoners will live and which will be killed - with chilling accuracy. And its dispassionate analysis has confirmed suspicions that the people most likely to be executed are those who have had the least schooling, rather than those who have committed the most heinous crimes.

So how were those 53 chosen? "We couldn't see any clear patterns in the data," says computer scientist Stamos Karamouzis, who has been investigating this question with criminologist Dee Wood Harper at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Full story HERE.
More HERE.
And more HERE.

How a 730-Ton Ball Kept the Second Tallest Building From Falling During the Chinese Earthquake

The recent Sichuan Earthquake in China was so intense, tremors were felt all the way over in the tallest completed building in the world—the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan—a whole eight minutes after the quake originated. What's interesting about the 101 is that it has a gigantic suspended tuned mass damper, or hanging ball, which takes up four stories and works like this to prevent the building from falling over and tragically crushing office workers. This 730 ton sphere looks intimidating when still, but wait until you see it in motion during the earthquake.

More HERE.

Martian Soil Could Grow Asparagus

The Mars Phoenix Lander may deserve a Nobel Prize by the time it’s through. Just a week after the robot explorer took the first pictures of water ice on the on Mars, NASA scientists have a new announcement: The Phoenix has analyzed a scoop of soil, and found that the Martian dirt has the necessary ingredients to support plant life. Researchers say the soil they tested is slightly alkaline, not harshly acidic as feared, and that it contains the mineral nutrients potassium, magnesium, and sodium.

Full story HERE.

'Dynamic Tower'

Math Could Help Cure Leukemia

University of Maryland associate professor of mathematics Doron Levy, Stanford Medical School physician and associate professor of medicine (hematology) Peter P. Lee, and Dr. Peter S. Kim, École Supérieure d'Électricité (Gif-sur-Yvette, France) describe their success in creating a mathematical model which predicts that anti-leukemia immune response in CML patients using the drug imatinib can be stimulated in a way that might provide a cure for the disease.

"By combining novel biological data and mathematical modeling, we found rules for designing adaptive treatments for each specific patient," said Levy, of the University of Maryland Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling. "Give me a thousand patients and, with this mathematical model, I can give you a thousand different customized treatment plans."

Full story HERE.

Microscopic 'Clutch' Puts Flagellum In Neutral

A tiny but powerful engine that propels the bacterium Bacillus subtilis through liquids is disengaged from the corkscrew-like flagellum by a protein clutch, Indiana University Bloomington and Harvard University scientists have learned. Their report appears in Science on June 20.

Scientists have long known what drives the flagellum to spin, but what causes the flagellum to stop spinning -- temporarily or permanently -- was unknown.

"We think it's pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem," said IU Bloomington biologist Daniel Kearns, who led the project. "How do you temporarily stop a motor once it gets going?"

Full story HERE.

Interview: Why our brains are so clumsy

In his new book, Kluge: The haphazard construction of the human mind, Gary Marcus aims to take the human species down a peg or two. We might like to think of ourselves as sleek and perfectly-adapted products of evolution, but Marcus instead describes the brain as a clumsy collection of spare parts. If evolution is so powerful, he asks, how did we end up so flawed? Jo Marchant caught up with him.

What exactly is a kluge?

A kluge is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem that gets the job done, but not necessarily in the best way possible.

Why do you think that the mind is a kluge?

There are two answers to that. The first is a general argument about evolution: that if you look at evolution it makes a lot of kluges. Evolution tends not to optimise things; it simply tinkers with what's already there. So it tends to make things better but there's no guarantee that it will make the best.

The second is an empirical argument. I look to see whether there is anything clumsy about the human mind, and I find lots of examples.

Full story HERE.

Bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Full story HERE.

New Cancer Treatment Targets Both Tumor Cells and Blood Vessels

In 50 percent of breast cancer cases, a mutated protein, known as p53, is present. Previous research has indicated that when p53 is functionally abnormal, tumor cells are prolific and develop quickly. PRIMA-1, a small molecular drug, targets and returns normal function to the mutated p53, but PRIMA-1 alone is not enough to stop tumor growth. Proliferating blood vessels supply oxygen and other nutrients that the tumor needs to grow. However, a specific antibody, 2aG4, has the ability to destroy these blood vessels and prevent future growth. According to the MU research team, no one has previously tried to attack tumor cells by targeting mutated p53 and the tumor-associated blood vessels with this combination of PRIMA-1 and 2aG4.

“Tumors are entities that want to live,” said Salman Hyder, professor of biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. “They adapt under conditions that would cause anything else to die. In order to effectively treat tumors, treatments must attack the breast tumor cells and the blood vessels that supply nutrients to the tumor. Treatment strategies in our study that targeted both areas resulted in improved and more potent responses.”

Full story HERE.

Bacteria anticipate coming changes in their environment

"What we have found is the first evidence that bacteria can use sensed cues from their environment to infer future events," says Saeed Tavazoie, an associate professor in the department of Molecular Biology, who conducted the study along with graduate student Ilias Tagkopoulos and post-doctoral researcher Yir-Chung Liu.

The research team, which included biologists and engineers, used lab experiments to demonstrate this phenomenon in common bacteria. They also turned to computer simulations to explain how a microbe species' internal network of genes and proteins could evolve over time to produce such complex behavior.

"The two lines of investigation came together nicely to show how simple biochemical networks can perform sophisticated computational tasks," says Tavazoie.

Full story HERE.

Ten Times the Turbine

Today’s largest wind farms are the size of small towns, made up of turbines 30 stories tall with blades the size of 747 wings. Those behemoths produce a great deal of power, but manufacturing, transporting, and installing them is both expensive and difficult, and back orders are common as the industry grows by more than 40 percent a year. The solution, says inventor Doug Selsam, is to think smaller: Capture more power with less material by putting 2, 10, someday dozens of smaller rotors on the same shaft linked to the same generator.

“The wind-turbine design out there right now is a thousand years old,” Selsam points out, as he lets one of his carved wooden blades speed to a blur in the makeshift wind tunnel he’s made of the alley behind his Fullerton, California, apartment. He brainstormed his multi-rotor approach in the early ’80s, in a fluid-dynamics class at the University of California at Irvine. “The textbook said, this single-rotor turbine design is the most power you can get. I knew then it wasn’t right. More rotors equals more power.”

Full story HERE.

Cheap Lamps Made with Aluminum Foil

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made the low-cost lamps by treating aluminum foil bought at the grocery store with an acidic bath. The new light source, which is lighter, brighter, and more efficient than incandescent light, is described in the June issue of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

"We wanted to make this technology as inexpensive as we possibly could," said physicist Gary Eden. "Expensive technology can be interesting, but the opportunity for using it is limited."

The alternative light source developed by Eden and colleagues is built of foil bathed in acid so that its surface is full of tiny holes. The acid also converts the foil into sapphire, a type of aluminum oxide, which creates a robust structure that allows volts to travel across the thin layer of aluminum without breaking it down. The tens of thousands of cavities are filled with gas and wired together, and the whole device is sealed between two pieces of glass or something similar.

Full story HERE.

MIT students build advanced all-electric Porsche

The Porsche was donated two years ago by Professor Yang Shao-Horn of mechanical engineering and the Electrochemical Energy Laboratory, who with her husband, Quinn Horn, bought it on eBay and made it available to students interested in converting it to electric power. In addition to providing an unusual opportunity for hands-on learning, the project will ultimately yield information valuable to Shao-Horn's research on advanced batteries.

"In the laboratory we work on materials to make batteries safer, last longer and have higher energy," she said. "But we are also interested in gaining a good perspective on the system. What's involved in building an electric vehicle, and what's required of the batteries?"

The student project took off last year when Valence Technology Inc. donated 18 lithium phosphate rechargeable batteries valued at $2,030 each, plus a battery-management system. The team began by removing the original engine, exhaust lines and fuel tank and installing an electric motor and motor controller, the batteries and battery-management system, a battery charger and various smaller components. Each of the batteries is equipped with a built-in computer that monitors its conditions--ideal for the data-gathering task.

Full story HERE.

Microchip sets low-power record

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A low-power microchip developed at the University of Michigan uses 30,000 times less power in sleep mode and 10 times less in active mode than comparable chips now on the market.

The Phoenix Processor, which sets a low-power record, is intended for use in cutting-edge sensor-based devices such as medical implants, environment monitors or surveillance equipment.

The chip consumes just 30 picowatts during sleep mode. A picowatt is one-trillionth of a watt. Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years.

Full story HERE.

Earliest genetic material may have come from the stars

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008.

The finding suggests that parts of the raw materials to make the first molecules of DNA and RNA may have come from the stars.

The scientists, from Europe and the USA, say that their research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, provides evidence that life's raw materials came from sources beyond the Earth.

The materials they have found include the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the molecules that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases.

Full story HERE.

Nano-tech Process Produces Plastics 10 Times More Stretchable

Researchers in China report the first successful "electrospinning" of a type of plastic widely used in automobiles and electronics. The high-tech process, which uses an electric charge to turn polymers into thin fibers in the presence of electricity, produced plastic mats that can stretch 10 times more without breaking than the original material and could lead to new uses for the plastic, they say.

Zhao-Xia Guo and colleagues point out that the original plastic, called polyoxymethylene (POM), is an engineering staple known for its metal-like hardness, light weight, and resistance to chemicals. However, the material is relatively brittle, limiting its applications. Although many different types of plastics have been electrospun into fibers with extended uses and properties, researchers have been unable to spin POM into fibers until now, the researchers say.

Full story HERE.

Definition: Orrery

A mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system in heliocentric model. Typically driven by a large clockwork mechanism with a globe representing the Sun at the centre, and with a planet at the end of each of the arms.

According to Cicero, the Greek philosopher Posidonius constructed an orrery, possibly similar or identical to the Antikythera mechanism, which exhibited the diurnal motions of the sun, moon, and the five known planets. Cicero's account was written in the first century BC.

More HERE.

Fossilized Burrows In Antarctica

ScienceDaily (Jun. 8, 2008) — For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods -- any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages -- in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago.

The fossils were created when fine sand from an overflowing river poured into the animals' burrows and hardened into casts of the open spaces. The largest preserved piece is about 14 inches long, 6 inches wide and 3 inches deep. No animal remains were found inside the burrow casts, but the hardened sediment in each burrow preserved a track made as the animals entered and exited.

Full story HERE.

Nanoscope peers beyond the limits of light

The power of light microscopes to resolve fine details has just doubled. A new technique can distinguish tiny structures inside cells, in colour and 3D, even if they are only 100 nanometres apart.

"We have opened a door to a whole new world of structures that you could not see and study before," says Heinrich Leonhardt of the Center for Integrated Protein Science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

Full story HERE.

BMW 'GiNA' Concept Car

Human Travel Patterns Surprisingly Predictable

Human beings are creatures of habit, and new data shows that we may be less spontaneous than previously thought. In a study detailed this week in the journal Nature, researchers from Northeastern University, in Boston, used cellphone signals to demonstrate that human travel patterns are similar among individuals and conform to a simple mathematical model.

“We were surprised by some of the aspects of the study,” says lead author Marta González. “There is a lot of similarity between the behavior of people.”

The study analyzed human motion by monitoring cellphone records and tracking each phone’s signal as it moved from one phone tower to the next. They used the data to come up with a probability equation for describing human movement. The results could have implications for urban planning, traffic monitoring, and the spread of disease, all of which rely on human travel.

Full story HERE.

Bionic hand wins top tech prize

The world's most advanced, commercially available, bionic hand has clinched the UK's top engineering prize. The i-LIMB, a prosthetic device with five individually powered digits, beat three other finalists to win this year's MacRobert award. The technology has been fitted to more than 200 people, including US soldiers who lost limbs during the war in Iraq.

The device started life in Scotland in 1963 as part of a project to help children affected by Thalidomide. The complex device finally went on sale in July 2007. It is produced by a company called Touch Bionics based in Mid Calder, Livingston.

Full story with VIDEO HERE.

Dead Zones Grow in the Gulf of Mexico

Each spring, the cycle of death begins anew. Nitrogen and phosphorus, leached from fertilizer, pass from farmland into streams, from streams into rivers—the Mississippi, the Potomac, the Susquehanna—and then, finally, into some of the country's great bodies of water: the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay. There the chemicals collect each summer, spawning the growth of algae, which deplete the water of oxygen and lead to ghostly aquatic wastelands. Marine life, if mobile enough, will swim away; the rest will suffocate and die.

Scientists have monitored the growth of these so-called dead zones since the late 1970s. They have tried to promote policies to reduce their size, without much success. Last summer, the dead zone along the Gulf of Mexico coast spanned nearly 8,000 square miles— its third-largest occurrence on record and roughly the size of Massachusetts.

Full story HERE.

School Of Robofish Communicate With Each Other

ScienceDaily (Jun. 9, 2008) — In the world of underwater robots, this is a team of pioneers. While most ocean robots require periodic communication with scientist or satellite intermediaries to share information, these can work cooperatively communicating only with each other.

Over the past five years Kristi Morgansen, a University of Washington assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, has built three Robofish that communicate with one another underwater. Recently at the International Federation of Automatic Control's Workshop on Navigation, Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles she presented results showing that the robots had successfully completed their first major test. The robots were programmed to either all swim in one direction or all swim in different directions, basic tasks that can provide the building blocks for coordinated group movement.

This success in indoor test tanks, she said, will eventually provide the basis for ocean-going systems to better explore remote ocean environments.

Full story HERE.

Sun goes longer than normal without producing sunspots

BOZEMAN -- The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites.

That's good news for people who scramble when space weather interferes with their technology, but it became a point of discussion for the scientists who attended an international solar conference at Montana State University. Approximately 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered June 1-6 to talk about "Solar Variability, Earth's Climate and the Space Environment."

The scientists said periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual.

Full story HERE.

Livermore researchers use carbon nanotubes for molecular transport

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Molecular transport across cellular membranes is essential to many of life’s processes, for example electrical signaling in nerves, muscles and synapses.

In biological systems, the membranes often contain a slippery inner surface with selective filter regions made up of specialized protein channels of sub-nanometer size. These pores regulate cellular traffic, allowing some of the smallest molecules in the world to traverse the membrane extremely quickly, while at the same time rejecting other small molecules and ions.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are mimicking that process with manmade carbon nanotube membranes, which have pores that are 100,000 times smaller than a human hair, and were able to determine the rejection mechanism within the pores.

Full story HERE.

Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas

from BOINGBOING.net -
"Does standing up a lot during the day reduce susceptibility to colds? Go ahead and doubt it; I did. But Roberts has data to back it up, and while it would be foolish to believe that standing up a lot during the day would eliminate colds across an entire population -- foolish, that is, without experiments to prove it -- Roberts' own practice of standing up a lot has a lot more empirical back-up than many of the more "sensible" things we naively believe.

"Here's anther one: for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.

"The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, "a new idea in sleep research." Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food."

More HERE.

Stupid flies live longer

Scientists Tadeusz Kawecki and Joep Burger at the University of Lausanne said Wednesday they had discovered a "negative correlation between an improvement in a fly's mental capacity and its longevity."

"In other terms, the more the fly becomes intelligent, the shorter its lifespan," the scientists said.

This is most probably because the increase in neural activity weakens the fly's life-support systems, they speculated.

Full story HERE.

Micro-fossils discovered in harshest environments on Earth

IN CLOSE-UP, they look like something out of a 1950s B-movie. Colonies of fossilised creatures, dubbed "hairy blobs", have been discovered in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The find may turn out to be crucial for spotting signs of extraterrestrial life in rocks on other planets.

Kathleen Benison, a geologist at Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, led a team that studied the sediments formed by acidic and very salty lakes in modern day Western Australia, and those deposited around 250 million years ago in North Dakota. It is very difficult to survive in such a tough environments and few signs of life have ever been found in these sorts of lakes.

Full story HERE. More HERE.

Giant telescopes could be built from Moon dust

Dust – often thought of as an impediment to lunar exploration – could be put to good use to build giant telescopes on the Moon – perhaps some large enough to fill entire craters, says a team of US researchers. The team, led by Peter Chen of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, has devised a simple method to create a concrete-like substance using a mixture of carbon nanotubes, epoxy and a crushed rock material that NASA uses as a stand-in for Moon dust.

Using the mixture, they built a 30-centimetre disc. Then they added more liquid epoxy to its surface and spun it, coating it with aluminium in a vacuum. They believe the process could be scaled up to produce 20- to 50-metre-wide telescopes on the Moon. That would be useful, says Chen, since the limited fuel and cargo capacities of rockets make it unfeasible to launch large mirrors or telescopes to the Moon. "By this technique, we are no longer restricted by how much a rocket can carry," Chen said.

Full story HERE.

NASA appointees suppressed climate data

WASHINGTON — Political appointees at NASA headquarters deliberately downplayed scientific evidence documenting global warming for political reasons for more than a year, the agency's watchdog reported Monday. Kevin Winters, NASA's assistant inspector general for investigations, outlined his findings in a 93-page report evaluating allegations that the agency's public affairs specialists suppressed climate change science and denied National Public Radio access to Dr. James Hansen, a NASA scientist.

Winters said his investigation found that NASA headquarters' public affairs specialists "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public" from fall 2004 through early 2006. Investigators, who interviewed 59 witnesses and reviewed 10,000 pages of documents, attributed the actions to "inappropriate political posturing or advantage."

Full story HERE.

Definition: Aerobraking

Aerobraking is a spaceflight maneuver that reduces the high point of an elliptical orbit (apoapsis) by flying the vehicle through the atmosphere at the low point of the orbit (periapsis), using drag to slow the spacecraft. Aerobraking saves fuel, compared to the direct use of a rocket engine, when the spacecraft requires a low orbit after arriving at a body with an atmosphere.

Full story HERE.
More HERE.
Interactive illustration HERE.

New superconductors

In an article published today in the journal Nature, the team, led by Chia-Ling Chien, the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and director of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at The Johns Hopkins University, offers insights into why the characteristics of a new family of iron-based superconductors reveal the need for fresh theoretical models which could, they say, pave the way for the development of superconductors that can operate at room temperature.

"It appears to us that the new iron-based superconductors disclose a new physics, contain new mysteries and may start us along an uncharted pathway to room temperature superconductivity," said Chien, who teamed up on the research with Tingyong Chen and Zlatko Tesanovic, both of Johns Hopkins, and X.H. Chen and R.H. Liu of the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, China.

Full story HERE.

High pressure stimulates growth of new cartilage

HOUSTON, June 4, 2008 -- Bioengineers at Rice University have discovered that intense pressure -- similar to what someone would experience more than a half-mile beneath the ocean's surface -- stimulates cartilage cells to grow new tissue with nearly all of the properties of natural cartilage. The new method, which requires no stem cells, may eventually provide relief for thousands of arthritis sufferers.

"This tissue-engineering method holds promise not only for cartilage but also for tissues to repair bladders, blood vessels, kidneys, heart valves, bones and more," said lead researcher Kyriacos Athanasiou, Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering.

The findings appear this week in the journal PLoS ONE. They are the latest from the emerging field of tissue engineering, a new discipline that aims to capitalize on the body's innate healing abilities to develop new ways of growing tissues that can be used to surgically repair wounds without risk of rejection.

Full story HERE.

Collision in Saturn's rings

The Cassini spacecraft has revealed a never-before-seen level of detail in Saturn's F ring, including evidence for the perturbing effect of small moonlets orbiting in or close to the ring's bright core.

For some time, scientists have suspected the presence of tiny moonlets that orbit Saturn in association with the clumpy ring. As the small satellites move close to the F ring core they leave a gravitational signature. In some cases they can draw out material in the form of a "streamer"--a miniature version of the interaction Cassini has witnessed between Prometheus and the F ring material. The dynamics of this interaction are the same, but the scale is different. See Thieving Moon for a view of Prometheus creating a streamer.

Full story HERE.

Microgeneration could rival nuclear power, report shows

British buildings equipped with solar, wind and other micro power equipment could generate as much electricity in a year as five nuclear power stations, a government-backed industry report showed today.

Commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), the report says that if government chose to be as ambitious as some other countries, a combination of loans, grants and incentives could lead to nearly 10m microgeneration systems being installed by 2020.

Such a large scale switch to microrenewable energy could save 30m tonnes of CO2 – the equivalent of nearly 5% of all UK electricity.

The report estimates that there are nearly 100,000 microgeneration units already installed in Britain. Nearly 90,000 of these are solar water heaters, with limited numbers of biomass boilers, photovoltaic panels, heat pumps, fuel cells, and small-scale hydroelectric and windpower schemes.

Full story HERE.

News flash: Newton's laws were 'overthrown'

Bizarre talking points of Washington Post columnist Krauthammer

Sir Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses in all human history. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer? Not so much.

Krauthammer has written a classic anti-science screed, "Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment," that recasts many favorite anti-scientific denier memes in odd terms. You still hear and see all of these today, so let me touch on a few of them. And as I will discuss in Part 2, the article is most useful because it is a very clear statement of the real reason conservatives don't believe in climate science: They hate the solution.

Full editorial HERE.

Tissue of dead humans to be cloned

Scientists are to be permitted to use tissue from dead people to create cloned human stem cells for research, under a legal change put forward by the government.

Health ministers have proposed that laboratories should be allowed to use stored human tissue to create cloned embryonic stem cells without the explicit consent of the tissue donor. This would allow research to be done on tissue donated for medical research as long as 30 years ago. Scientists would also be able to use cells from people who have died since they donated their tissue or who cannot be contacted.

Full story HERE.

Synthetic Copycat Of Living Cell

ScienceDaily (May 29, 2008) — Researchers at The University of Nottingham have taken some important first steps to creating a synthetic copycat of a living cell, a leading science journal reports.

Dr Cameron Alexander and PhD student George Pasparakis in the University's School of Pharmacy have used polymers — long-chain molecules — to construct capsule-like structures that have properties mimicking the surfaces of a real cell.

In the new work, they show how in the laboratory they have been able to encourage the capsules to 'talk' to natural bacteria cells and transfer molecular information.

Full story HERE.

Secret messages could be hidden in net phone calls

The next time your internet (VoIP) phone call sounds a bit fuzzy, it might not be your ISP that's to blame. Someone could be trying to squeeze a secret message between the packets of data carrying the caller's voice.

Wojciech Mazurczyk and Krzysztof Szczypiorski, information scientists at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland, revealed last week that they are developing a "steganographic" system for VoIP networks (www.arxiv.org/abs/0805.2938). Steganography is the art of hiding messages by embedding them in ordinary communications. For example, a message can be encoded as a string of numbers which are used to modify the brightness and colour of an image. The effect is too subtle to be noticed by unwitting observers but the message can be deciphered with appropriate software by anyone who knows it's there.

The full paper is HERE.