‘A recent study has found that an older, commonly prescribed bipolar drug — lithium — can significant increase the lifespan of a certain type of worm. Researchers at the Buck Institute said nematode worms treated with lithium showed a 46 percent increase in lifespan.
It is not yet known whether people taking lithium might also benefit in a similar manner with an increased lifespan.
In the study, scientists discovered the worms’ longevity increased when the lithium reduced the activity of a gene that modulates the basic structure of chromosomes.
“Understanding the genetic impact of lithium may allow us to engineer a therapy that has the same lifespan extending benefits,” said Gordon Lithgow, the lead researcher in the study. “One of the larger questions is whether the lifespan extending benefits of the drug are directly related to the fact that lithium protects neurons.”‘
‘I was recently talking with a colleague who was a fellow theoretical physics graduate student at Princeton University back in the early 1980s. He had been thinking about an obscure academic physics journal he would occasionally skim in the library during those years. This journal was filled with bizarre extra-dimensional models of particles and forces, esoteric ideas about cosmology, and a slew of highly speculative theorising, with little in common other than a lack of any solid evidence for a connection with reality.
“You know,” he said, “at the time I thought these things were a joke, but now when I look at mainstream physics papers, they remind me a lot of what was in that journal.”
Why is it that central parts of mainstream physics have started to take on aspects that used to characterise the outer fringes of the subject? At the very centre of the physics establishment, things have been getting more and more peculiar.’
‘An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday.
Researchers attached to NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November.
The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75.
A 1-in-75 shot is “wildly unusual,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth’s neighborhood.
“We’re used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million,” Chesley said. “Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs.”‘
‘Radioactive sample of uranium ore. Useful for testing Geiger Counters. License exempt. Uranium ore sample sizes vary. Shipped in labeled metal container as shown.’
Apparently, people who bought uranium ore also bought the Bender’s Big Score movie DVD. 🙂
Children’s chemistry sets suck these days.
(24.1meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘A new species of giant rat has been discovered in a remote region of New Guinea by a team of totally freaked-out zoologists.
The scientists from Conservation International spotted the ‘absolutely mental thing’ during a five-day trek through the hazardous Foja mountains.
Expedition leader Professor Wayne Hayes said: “I was filling my water bottle when I saw this huge fucking thing and I shouted to my mate Dave, I said, ‘Dave, look at the size of that fucker!’ and Dave was like, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s a fucking monster!
“I shouted over to Stevie and Ben, I said, ‘get a look at this bastard’ and they’re like ‘no way, man, that’s mental’ – they were totally freaking out.”‘
‘The UK, the United States and Canada are facing growing fears over a drug-resistant ‘superbug’ being brought back by wounded soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq that threatens to contaminate civilian hospitals.
The intensified concern comes amid sharply rising infection rates in the US and fresh worries in Canada that the bug could be imported into its civilian healthcare system. Military health officials who have studied the bacterium in Afghanistan believe the infection of wounded British soldiers in field hospitals there is probably inevitable. [..]
The bacterium, Acinetobacter baumannii, first emerged as a ‘mystery infection’ afflicting US service personnel returning from the war in Iraq in 2003-04. It was described by a scientific journal specialising in hospital epidemiology as the ‘most important emerging hospital-acquired pathogen worldwide’. The journal added that it was potentially a ‘major threat to public health’ due to its ability to mutate rapidly and develop a resistance to all known drugs.’
‘In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.
“On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced,” said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. “While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don’t have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them.”‘
From when chemistry was more like some sort of crazy magic. Let’s all eat mercury! Hooray.
[sigh] 🙂
‘Smoking during a brain scan is not easy. Why would you want to? Because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to observe activity in the brain, and doing so while smoking tobacco or pot could enhance our understanding of addiction and how to treat it.
But during an MRI, the head must remain completely still. In the narrow bore of a superconducting magnet, there isn’t much room to maneuver a cigarette or eat a pot brownie either. Smoke raises a second set of concerns. At the very least, it will stink up the lab. Perhaps, it could even damage the expensive machine.
So Blaise Frederick at Harvard Medical School built a device that delivers smoke into the narrow confines of a scanner. His colleagues, Kim Lindsey and Liz Ryan, tested it out on nine volunteers at McLean Hospital. They described their work in the May issue of Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior.’
‘A fruit-picking trip to southern New South Wales ended in the death of a Scottish backpacker who became embroiled in a bizarre row about creationism and evolution.
English backpacker Alexander Christian York, 33, was today sentenced to a maximum of five years jail for the manslaughter of Scotsman Rudi Boa in January last year. [..]
The Scottish couple and York, neighbours at the caravan park, were becoming friends and spent the night of January 27 drinking at the Star Hotel in Tumut.
However, towards the end of the night, an argument between York and the pair about creationism versus evolution escalated into a shouting match at the pub.
The couple, both biomedical scientists, had been arguing the case of evolution, while York had taken a more biblical view of history. [..]
According to Ms Brown, York was making dinner when he attacked the couple outside his tent, stabbing Mr Boa with a kitchen knife as the argument escalated.’
‘Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra “hidden variables”. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).’
‘Sophisticated scans have revealed the eating disorder anorexia is linked to specific patterns of brain activity.
Even young women recovering from anorexia who have maintained a healthy weight for over a year had vastly different brain activity patterns.
The findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry point to a brain region linked to anxiety and perfectionism.’
‘Astronomers have discovered white dwarf stars with pure carbon atmospheres. These stars possibly evolved in a sequence astronomers didn’t know before.
They may have evolved from stars that are not quite massive enough to explode as supernovae but are just on the borderline. All but the most massive two or three percent of stars eventually die as white dwarfs rather than explode as supernovae.
When a star burns helium, it leaves “ashes” of carbon and oxygen. When its nuclear fuel is exhausted, the star then dies as a white dwarf, which is an extremely dense object that packs the mass of our sun into an object about the size of Earth. Astronomers believe that most white dwarf stars have a core made of carbon and oxygen which is hidden from view by a surrounding atmosphere of hydrogen or helium.
They didn’t expect stars with carbon atmospheres.’
‘The capacity for free will is said to reside in the brain’s frontal lobes, which enable us to decide what actions we will take. Now researchers have discovered a spot in the frontal lobes that could be called the home of our “free won’t.”
The dorsal fronto-median cortex (dFMC), located in the center of the brain behind the forehead, becomes active when we inhibit an action, according to the authors of a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers Marcel Brass and Patrick Haggard think this may explain why some people are less adept at restraining their impulses.
“The capacity to withhold an action that we have prepared but reconsidered is an important distinction between intelligent and impulsive behavior,” said Brass, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and of Ghent University. This could have significant neuroethical implications, the authors state in their paper, since the inability to restrain impulses has been linked to antisocial and criminal behavior.’
‘New research is pointing to a different possibility: There may be no adaptive advantage provided by schizophrenia in and of itself, but rather from some genes that contribute to the disease. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, there is evidence that some of the gene variants associated with schizophrenia—especially a mutation in a gene called disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1 (DISC1)—have been selected for by evolution. This supports the idea that the disease may be a maladaptive combination of mutations that individually have the potential to enhance fitness. It could be a more complicated version of the familiar case of sickle cell anemia: having two mutant copies of a certain gene causes the disease, whereas having only one mutant copy provides protection against malaria.’
‘The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers.
The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a Germany quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports.
The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.
The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.
The claw itself measures 46cm – indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human.’
‘Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. “Being poor sucks,” Lisi says. “It’s hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you’re trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.”
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.’
‘A new antenna made of plasma (a gas heated to the point that the electrons are ripped free of atoms and molecules) works just like conventional metal antennas, except that it vanishes when you turn it off.
That’s important on the battlefield and in other applications where antennas need to be kept out of sight. In addition, unlike metal antennas, the electrical characteristics of a plasma antenna can be rapidly adjusted to counteract signal jamming attempts.
Plasma antennas behave much like solid metal antennas because electrons flow freely in the hot gas, just as they do in metal conductors. But plasmas only exist when the gasses they’re made of are very hot. The moment the energy source heating a plasma antenna is shut off, the plasma turns back into a plain old (non conductive) gas. As far as radio signals and antenna detectors go, the antenna effectively disappears when the plasma cools down.’
‘Our brains can turn down our ability to see to help them listen even harder to music and complex sounds, say experts.
A US study of 20 non-musicians and 20 musical conductors found both groups diverted brain activity away from visual areas during listening tasks.
Scans showed activity fell in these areas as it rose in auditory ones.
But during harder tasks the changes were less marked for conductors than for non-musicians, researchers told a Society for Neuroscience conference.’
I have been trying to explain to people how noises can make it hard to see for a few weeks now. 🙂 Hooray for science.
‘A definite integral walks [in] and orders 10 shots of whiskey. “You sure about that, buddy?” “Yeah, I know my limits.” [..]
sin(x) walks into a bar and asks for drink. The barman declines: “We don’t cater for functions.” [..]
A neutron walks into a bar. “How much for a beer?” “For you? No charge.”‘
‘Construction on a cooling system for the world’s biggest science experiment that produces temperatures colder than outer space was completed today.
The mammoth chill factory can generate temperatures as low as 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-456 degrees Fahrenheit) for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a circular particle smasher 17 miles (27 kilometers) wide that is being built at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
The cooling system uses more than 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen and 130 tons of liquid helium.’
‘The San Rossore train station on the edge of Pisa, Italy, is a lonely stop. Tourists who visit this city to see its famous leaning tower generally use the central station across town. But San Rossore is about to be recognized as one of the country’s most significant archeological digs. For nearly a decade archeologists have been working near and under the tracks to unearth what is nothing short of a maritime Pompeii.
So far the excavation has turned up 39 ancient shipwrecks buried under nine centuries of silt, which preserved extraordinary artifacts. The copper nails and ancient wood are still intact, and in many cases cargo is still sealed in the original terra cotta amphorae, the jars used for shipment in the ancient world. They have also found a cask of the ancient Roman fish condiment known as garum and many mariners’ skeletons—one crushed under the weight of a capsized ship. One ship carried scores of pork shoulder hams; another carried a live lion, likely en route from Africa to the gladiator fights in Rome.’
‘Two-photon (2-P) microscopy offers several advantages for biological imaging – in particular for non-injurious imaging of dynamic cell behaviors deep within intact tissues, organs and even the living animal [Cahalan et. al., 2003, Stutzmann et al., 2005]. However, its widespread adoption for such applications has been hindered by two factors: commercial 2-P microscopes are very expensive, and they typically acquire images at frame rates too slow to resolve many biological processes. Both of these problems may be circumvented by building your own 2-P microscope!
[..] The object of this web page is to gather together all the information you should need to build your own 2-P microscope.’
‘A physicist and his biologist son destroyed a common virus using a superfast pulsing laser, without harming healthy cells. The discovery could lead to new treatments for viruses like HIV that have no cure.
“We have demonstrated a technique of using a laser to excite vibrations on the shield of a virus and damage it, so that it’s no longer functional,” said Kong-Thon Tsen, a professor of physics at Arizona State University. “We’re testing it on HIV and hepatitis right now.” [..]
In the latest research, Tsen and his son demonstrated that their laser technique could shatter the protein shell, or capsid, of the tobacco mosaic virus, leaving behind only a harmless mucus-like mash of molecules.
The laser shattered the capsid at low energy: 40 times lower, in fact, than the energy level that harmed human T-cells. Other types of radiation, like ultraviolet light, kill microbes on produce, but would damage human cells.’
‘An Australian researcher is on the road to riches after discovering a way to make broadband connections up to 100 times faster.
University of Melbourne research fellow Dr John Papandriopoulos is in the throes of moving to Silicon Valley after developing an algorithm to reduce the electromagnetic interference that slows down ADSL connections.
Most ADSL services around the world are effectively limited to speeds between 1 to 20Mbps, but if Dr Papandriopoulos’s technology is successfully commercialised that speed ceiling would be closer to 100Mbps.’
‘A study of more than 5000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoke marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don’t.
But the same was not true for those who used both tobacco and marijuana, who tended to be heavier users of the drug, said the report by Dr J.C. Suris and colleagues at the University of Lausanne.
The study did not confirm the hypothesis that those who abstained from marijuana and tobacco functioned better overall, the authors said.
In fact, those who used only marijuana were “more socially driven … significantly more likely to practice sports and they have a better relationship with their peers” than abstainers, it said.’
‘Australia’s 2007 Toy Of The Year, Bindeez, was being pulled from shelves after it was revealed the product’s “magic beads” contain a chemical that when swallowed converts into the toxic illegal drug fantasy.
Two NSW children have been hospitalised over the past 10 days suffering seizures after eating the beads, while a two-year-old boy from Toowoomba in southeastern Queensland was flown to a Brisbane hospital after swallowing Bindeez beads. [..]
Testing by scientists in NSW found the chemical link to the drug gamma-hydroxy butyrate (GHB) – also known as fantasy or Grievous Bodily Harm – which can also cause drowsiness, coma and can lead to death. [..]
Sydney-based poisons specialist Dr Naren Gunja said the list of Bindeez’s ingredients supplied by the manufacturer said it should contain the non-toxic chemical known as 1,5-pentanediol.
“What we’ve found in the beads from testing done … by our hospital scientists is that it contains 1,4-butanediol,” Dr Gunja said, adding this chemical was metabolised by the body into GHB.’
‘In the preservation of animal specimens for study, animals are usually preserved using formalin where the whole body would be immersed in the posture in which it is supposed to stay permanently because it will be hardened. The ratio of formalin to carcass must at least be 12 to 1 to ensure a good fixation.
Here is a series of great specimens of animals submerged in formalin with 31 more pics after the jump.’
‘New UC Irvine research is among the first to demonstrate that neural stem cells may help to restore memory after brain damage.
In the study, mice with brain injuries experienced enhanced memory – similar to the level found in healthy mice – up to three months after receiving a stem cell treatment. Scientists believe the stem cells secreted proteins called neurotrophins that protected vulnerable cells from death and rescued memory. This creates hope that a drug to boost production of these proteins could be developed to restore the ability to remember in patients with neuronal loss.
“Our research provides clear evidence that stem cells can reverse memory loss,” said Frank LaFerla, professor of neurobiology and behavior at UCI. “This gives us hope that stem cells someday could help restore brain function in humans suffering from a wide range of diseases and injuries that impair memory formation.”‘
