Living on just 10 liters of water per day.
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Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider is Nearly Ready! [PICS]
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September
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Personalized Stem Cells One Step Closer to Reality
For the first time, scientists have proven that embryonic-like stem cells that are specific to both a person and to a disease can be manufactured using adult human cells.
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MIT: 'Major discovery' primed to unleash solar revolution
In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.
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Plastic Bags -- Proof of the Necessity for a Worldwide Ban
Less than 1% of bags are recycled. It costs more to recycle a bag than produce a new one.
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Penguins Are Washing Up Closer to Equator
A record number of penguins, both dead and alive, are landing on beaches close to the equator. One explanation: overfishing is driving the birds farther north.
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Cheap Catalyst Could Turn Sunlight and Water Into Fuel
A new catalyst makes it feasible to split water with solar power. MIT chemists say the catalyst, used in conjunction with cheap photovoltaic solar panels, could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, this may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence.
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50 Ways in Which NASA Changed Our World
Today, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration marks its first half-century of exploration and discovery. But missions to the Moon and beyond are only part of the story. Without Nasa's scientists, life on Earth would be very different indeed.
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A Radio Telescope the size of Planet Earth is ready to work
This fall, the world's largest telescope will begin its scientific mission. Made up of radio telescopes in Chile, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Africa, and Sweden, the e-VLBI - for electronic very long baseline interferometer - creates in effect a telescope with a diameter of 11,000 kilometers.
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Driving Through a Massive Dust Storm
Does anyone know where dust storms like this occur? That is totally insane and I would be convinced the world was coming to an end.
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Will Loneliness Spell Society's Doom?
A University of Chicago psychologist explores the dangers of loneliness, and how it can lead humans to a miserable life and even an early grave.
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Secrets of the World's Oldest Calculator Are Revealed Today
The secrets of the worlds oldest calculating machine are revealed today, showing that it had dials to mark the timing of eclipses and the Olympic games. Ever since the spectacular bronze device was discovered in 1900, it was found to be have existed long before the birth of Christ and was one of the wonders of the ancient world.
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Scientists Are Still Deeply Puzzled by the Nature of Glass
Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.” He added, “This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade.”
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APOD: Beautiful Galaxies on a String
Galaxies NGC 5216 (top right) and NGC 5218 really do look like they are connected by a string. Of course, that string is a cosmic trail of gas, dust, and stars about 22,000 light-years long.
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10 Ways Rogue Geneticist Craig Venter Sees Energy's Future
He helped map the human genome, and now he wants to power the next generation of cars with modified algae fuel--not to mention hate on McCain's electric-car prize, and politicians in general. Very rare interview!
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Houston Doctors: We May Have Found a Way to Destroy HIV
There is real hope that what’s happening in a Houston lab might lead to a cure for HIV. Dr. Paul and Dr. Miguel Escobar aren’t talking about just suppressing HIV – they’re talking about destroying it permanently by arming the immune system with a new weapon lab tests have shown to be effective. “We have found an innovative way to kill the virus"
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Three things you can do to be healthier and save some cash
Financial times are tight right now. Fuel costs continue to climb as well as the cost of food and most everyone we know are tightening their belts. Often times people think of being environmentally conscious as costing money.
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Nanoparticles + light = dead tumor cells
Medical physicists at the University of Virginia have created a novel way to kill tumor cells using nanoparticles and light. Quantum dots are semiconductor nanostructures, 25 billionths of a meter in diameter, which can confine electrons in three dimensions and emit light when exposed to ultraviolet radiation.
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How Quantum Physics Could Power the Future
The strange behavior of quantum physics might seem too unpredictable to rely on for our energy needs, but new technologies hope to capitalize on its very strangeness. The most familiar of these quantum tricks is the fact that light acts both like a wave and a particle.
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Humans Predicted to Contact Extraterrestrial Civilization
Some leading astronomers are quite confident that mankind will make contact with intelligent alien life within two decades. The search for extraterrestrial life will leap forward next year when NASA launches the Kepler space telescope.
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APOD: The Milky Way Over Ontario
Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month over Ontario, Canada, when part of a spectacular sky also became visible in a reflection off a lake. To start, the brightest objects visible are bright stars and the planet Jupiter, seen as the brightest spot on the upper left.
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Is Aging an Accident of Evolution? Scientists Say Yes.
Everyone has assumed we age by rust. But how do you explain animals that don't age? Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, there are whales that live to be 200 and clams that make it past 400 years.
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Researchers Synthesize Evolution of Language
For all the talk about memes acting like genes and cultures evolving like organisms, no theory of non-biological evolution exists -- but that could change. In a study published today, linguists observed an artificial language evolve from random to ordered, naturally adapting in ways that assured its reproduction.
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Researchers Discover Electrons That Behave Like Light
These newly discovered electronic states of matter may enable powerful new electronic devices that exploit the principles of quantum mechanics to compute and communicate.
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Warp Drive Engine and Travelling Faster Than Light
Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.
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7 Superb Examples of Recycled Urban Architecture
Adaptive reuse used to be a tactic of necessity - people didn’t have the time, energy or money to build something new so they made the best with what they had. Today it is a way to stand out, make a statement, go bold and try something completely different. From airplanes, chapels and garages turned into houses to airplane hangers
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Radiation-loving fungi found in smashed Chernobyl reactor
Our findings suggest that [the fungi] can capture the energy from radiation and transform it into other forms of energy that can be used for growth," said microbiologist Arturo Casadevall from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, USA.
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Personal Genome Project Could Unlock the Mysteries of Life
Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data - genotype and phenotype - for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality. The PGP has begun to explore this.
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New computer language enters a cell's "mind" & writes codes
"This language is stepping into an unknown universe, when your computer starts building things for you..."
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Where Is Human Evolution Heading?
If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future.
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Incredible Views of Jupiter [PICS]
Jupiter is in the news again, this time because its "Baby Red Spot" - a storm less than a year old - appears to have been swallowed up by the massive storm known as the Great Red Spot. This is good occasion to share some of the best photographs of Jupiter and its larger system of rings and moons
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A New Era In Search For 'Sister Earths'
Research presented at a recent astronomical conference is being hailed as ushering in a new era in the search for Earth-like planets by showing that they are more numerous than previously thought and that scientists can now analyze their atmospheres for elements that might be conducive to life
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
Testing quantum weirdness on a large scale
Signals from space to Earth using quantum technology could establish the reality of Einstein's worst fear, that the theory of relativity cannot be made compatible with quantum requirements. It is an open issue whether quantum laws, originally established to describe nature at the microscopic level of atoms, are also valid at the macroscopic level.
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New Way To Weigh Giant Black Holes
How do you weigh the biggest black holes in the universe? One answer now comes from a completely new technique that astronomers have developed. By measuring a peak in the temperature of hot gas in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4649, scientists have determined the mass of the galaxy's supermassive black hole.
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The tribe that lives without numbers
The 300-strong group use one term to quantify things between one and four and another for five or above, researchers found. 'It is often assumed counting is an innate part of human cognition,' said Prof Edward Gibson, of US university MIT.
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Biofuels, Food Prices and Global Warming Roundup
The current rate at which biofuels are falling out of favor is largely founded on biased ideologies, which have been shaped by widespread political and corporate agenda-pushing from all sides of the fence.
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Dance Club Stays Alive With Power Generating Floor
Believe it or not, this actually isn't the first power-generating dance floor to harness some of the pent up energy of club-goers, but it is apparently the first one to hit the UK, and hopefully a sign of more to come.
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To trust or not to trust: How the brain handles betrayal
The development of trust is an essential social tool. Bonds of trust are also extremely fragile, and a single act of betrayal can instantly erase years of trustworthy behavior. Recent research has attempted to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying trust behavior and investigate how the brain deals with breaches of trust.
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