I thought this was fascinating. Instead of genetically modifying the mosquito itself, modify the simpler bacteria that lives in the mosquito and let it do the work. Very cool idea..

Mosquito Gut Bacteria to Fight Malaria
Researchers engineer a member of the insect’s intestinal flora to help thwart the malaria parasite before it can infect new hosts.

For years, researchers have been altering mosquito genetics in an attempt to halt the malaria parasite’s lifecycle in the insect before it can spread the disease. But getting the modified gene or genes to spread through a population of mosquitoes has proved to be an intractable problem. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are taking a different approach—introduce malaria-thwarting genetic changes into mosquito commensal flora.

“We thought that it would be easier to introduce bacteria than genes into mosquitoes in the field,” Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena told the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science (authored by Ed Yong, a regular contributor to The Scientist). Plus, the mosquito gut is the site of the malaria parasite’s reproduction, a particularly vulnerable stage of Plasmodium‘s lifecycle.

Jacobs-Lorena and his team chose to work with Pantoea agglomerans, a harmless bacteria common to the mosquito gut, engineering it to fight the Plasmodium parasite. When the researchers introduced the engineered bacteria into mosquitoes in the lab, they found that the number of Plasmodium oocysts, the sporozoite-manufacturing cells that reside in the mosquito gut, were 85 to 98 percent lower than in uninfected mosquitoes. Fewer than 20 percent of the engineered mosquitoes acquired an infection after drinking a contaminated blood meal.

Once again, however, the challenge will be to introduce the bacteria into wild populations of mosquitoes where malaria is still a persistent killer. This problem is compounded by the fact that the engineered bacteria, working hard to produce antimalarial factors, may be less fit than the other commensals in the mosquito gut. “Mosquitoes would therefore have to be continuously exposed to large numbers of these GM bacteria in the field, for the bacteria to stand any chance of becoming a major portion of the microbes that reside in the mosquito gut,” George Dimopoulos, also of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told Not Exactly Rocket Science.

What is redshift?
http://i.imgur.com/ayzsg.jpg

• The term "redshift" arises from the fact that light from more distant objects shows up on Earth more red than when it left its source
• The colour shift comes about because of the Doppler effect, which acts to "stretch" or "compress" waves from moving objects
• It is at work in the sound of a moving siren: an approaching siren sounds higher-pitched and a receding one sounds lower-pitched
• In the case of light, approaching objects appear more blue and receding objects appear more red
• The expansion of the Universe is accelerating, so in general, more distant objects are moving away from us (and each other, and everything else) more quickly than nearer ones
• At cosmic distances, the shift can profoundly affect the colour - the factor by which the wavelength is "stretched" is called the redshift

This is cool if you've never seen it.


Ant Hill Excavation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFg21x2sj-M

yeah, it's only 9.8m/s squared. HOWEVER, do you realize how far it is from the surface of the earth to the core? 6384 km at the equator. in meters, that's 6.384 million meters. you'll hit terminal velocity at a certain point, and assuming you don't have a parachute (which wouldn't work in a vacuum anyway), you would most assuredly die of acceleration alone

(note: I could easily be wrong on this. I'm relying on physics I a few years ago in my undergrad; there's a reason I went into genetics rather than physics--pretty sure my reasoning here is sound, don't feel like digging out a textbook, pen and paper)

Ha ha... cats are awesome...

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House cats kill more critters than thought

That mouse carcass Kitty presents you with is just the tip of a very bloody iceberg. When researchers attached kittycams to house cats, they found a secret world of slaughter.

While only 30% of roaming house cats kill prey — two animals a week on average — they are still slaying more wildlife than previously believed, according to research from the University of Georgia.

Wildlife advocates say it is a frightening level of feline foul play. Based on a U.S. house-cat population of 74 million, "cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American birds species are in decline," says George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy.

"The previous estimates were probably too conservative because they didn't include the animals that cats ate or left behind," University of Georgia researcher Kerrie Anne Loyd says.

The cats brought home just under a quarter of what they killed, ate 30% and left 49% to rot where they died.

The carnage cuts across species. Lizards, snakes and frogs made up 41% of the animals killed, Loyd and fellow researcher Sonia Hernandez found. Mammals such as chipmunks and voles were 25%, insects and worms 20% and birds 12%. The researchers will present their findings this week at an Ecological Society of America conference in Portland, Ore.

Seeking a window into the hidden lives of cats, the researchers recruited 60 owners in the Athens, Ga., area. Each owner put a small video camera mounted on a break-away collar on the cat in the morning and let the cat out, then removed the camera and downloaded the footage each night. Each cat's activities were recorded for seven to 10 days. The cats usually spent four to six hours outside every day.

The researchers worked with the National Geographic CritterCam team, which builds tiny mobile data gathering systems to study wild animal behavior. The cat cameras were the smallest they've made to date, National Geographic's Greg Marshall says.

Cats aren't just a danger to others, they're also a danger to themselves. The cats in the study were seen engaging in such risky behavior as crossing roadways (45%), eating and drinking things they found (25%), exploring storm drains (20%) and entering crawl spaces where they could become trapped (20%).

Male cats were more likely to do risky things than female cats, and older cats were more careful than younger ones.

Why you get away with anal.... scientifically explained....

Sex Makes Everything Less Disgusting

Our biological drive to do it conflicts pretty directly with our biological drive not to get involved with other people's bodily fluids. How do we ignore the obvious grossness of sex for long enough to propagate the species? Maybe, researchers say, by turning off our disgust reflex whenever we get turned on.

Earlier studies have asked this question in a variety of ways. For example, by asking men to "self-stimulate" and then quizzing them on what sex acts or partners they'd be open to..LMAO. Or by showing men erotic slideshows and then having them stick their hands into cold pea soup or buckets of condoms. Psychology researchers Charmaine Borg and Peter J. de Jong at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands—perhaps feeling less pessimistic than others about their ability to arouse a group of female subjects—decided to study the question in women instead.

The researchers gathered 90 female university students. Rather than just answering questions about distasteful things, these subjects were going to be challenged with some actual gross tasks to see how many they would do.

But first the researchers had to turn their subjects on. Well, a third of them, anyway. One group of women watched a film described as "female friendly erotica." A second group watched a movie that was meant to be non-sexually arousing—that is, heart-pounding but not steamy. These women saw footage of sky diving and mountain climbing. The third group saw a movie about a train ride, meant to not cause any feelings at all. The movies had been previously tested with a separate group to make sure they elicited the right emotions.

As the women watched their steamy, exciting, or boring movies, they were periodically interrupted by an experimenter who showed up and gave them disgusting tasks to do. There were a total of 16 challenges, ranging from picking up apparently soiled toilet paper to sticking a needle in a cow eye. The subjects didn't have to go through with any task they didn't want to, but they did have to rate how disgusting they found each one.

Out of the 16 gross-out tasks, 5 were classified as sex-related. These included touching some "used" condoms, handling "used" women's underwear, and reading aloud a sexual phrase about, um, a dog. (The researchers made liberal use of Halloween-style tools and props, including blood-colored ink, fake feces, coconut milk in the underwear, and one plastic bug. And one real worm, which they rereleased outside when the study was over.)

The groups who watched the train movie and the sky-diving movie didn't differ in their willingness to do the gross tasks, or in how disgusting they rated those tasks. But the women who watched the erotic film rated the sex-related tasks as significantly less disgusting than the other groups. They seemed to find the rest of the tasks less gross too, though the result wasn't quite significant. And overall, the erotica group completed more challenges of both kinds. The turned-on subjects completed 85% of the non-sexy tasks, for example, compared to about 66% in the other two groups.

Charmaine Borg says she was surprised to see that sexual arousal, but not general arousal (the sky-diving kind), "makes us approach stimuli that are in general so disgusting." The way subjects perceived disgusting things seemed to change when they were sexually aroused.

The study focused on a small group of young, heterosexual, dysfunction-free women. It was limited to one method of turning those subjects on (the erotic film) and an odd handful of gross, somewhat sex-related tasks. And the study relied on subjects' own ratings of their arousal and repulsion. But if it proves to be generally true that sexual arousal squelches disgust, it would explain how we manage to reproduce despite our usual instincts—which presumably evolved to keep us safe from disease-carrying stuff.

Borg is more interested, though, in women whose bodies don't let them have sex. She wonders if sexual disorders such as dyspareunia (painful intercourse) or vaginismus (involuntary clenching of the muscles around the vagina, making intercourse difficult or impossible) are rooted in problems overcoming disgust.

"Studies from our lab with women afflicted with vaginismus have shown that they experience disgust responses towards erotic stimulation," Borg says. "Sex-related stimuli appeared to elicit disgust rather than arousal." Since our usual response to disgust is to keep far away from what's causing it, she says the problem could be self-perpetuating as women start avoiding sex altogether.

Borg says her results so far are "very exciting." By carrying on her experiments in the condom-filled, fake-blood-soaked laboratory, she helps to hope women overcome their difficulties and get down to whatever business they want.

Wow... in just 25 years.. Imagine where we'll be in another 200.....

http://imageshack.us/a/img819/8125/3...6908041643.jpg

Comet due in 2013 could be brighter than the full moon


Late next year, there will be a new object in the night sky nearly 10 times brighter than the full moon. This temporary attraction, called C/2012 S1, is a comet that has likely never passed through our inner solar system before, so it's larger and more reflective than those our sun has already blasted.

C/2012 S1 won't just be bright; it'll be large enough to see without the need for binoculars or a telescope. Its brightness magnitude is expected to be -16, with the Sun by comparison being -26. Comet Hale-Bopp, seen above, was magnitude -1 when it passed through our solar system in 1997. Astronomers are predicting that C/2012 S1 will appear in the sky near the sun and horizon, so it should be fairly easy to pinpoint without a sky map. Should it contain a large amount of gas beneath its icy exterior, the comet could sprout a massive glowing tail as it nears the sun and the ice is melted away, making it even easier to see — not to mention much cooler looking.


Scientists tracking C/2012 S1 have pointed out that the comet's brightness isn't entirely guaranteed, but even if their estimates are off it should still be visible to the naked eye. That wasn't the case with Kohoutek, a comet that entered our solar system in 1973 and was expected to be brilliant in the night sky, only to disappoint because it turned out to be mostly rock and not highly reflective ice.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technolo...004852031.html

You all have tiny bugs burrowed into your skin right now! Creepy little bugs that come out at night and crawl all over your face, chewing on your skin cells. Many of them live in your eyelashes right now...

This is a Demodex folliculorum, also known as Demodicids or “face mites”.

http://imageshack.us/a/img40/8302/fo...emodexfoll.jpg

They're sensitive to light, so during the day, they burrow down into your hair follicles. The yellow shaft is a human hair. The green things are the tails of burrowed face mites.

http://imageshack.us/a/img88/3450/60...2719836714.jpg

Demodex: Mites That Live On Your Face!

Demodex folliculorum, also known as Demodicids and “face mites”, is a species of tiny mites that live in the hair follicles on humans—primarily around your face, near the nose, eyebrows, scalp, but more commonly around the eyelashes. Demodex brevis is another shorter type of Demodex found in the sebaceous glands connected to hair follicles. While mites can be beneficial in the removal of dead skin cells, an overabundance of mites can cause numerous problems. Large infestations of Demodex are called Demodicosis.

Researchers have identified Demodex to be a profound contributor to hair loss and a cause of some skin problems such as acne, rosacea, blackheads, and skin irritations.

These mites have been observed since the 1840s and they are passed on from contact with others starting as early as infancy; e.g. a parent rubbing their cheek on their baby’s face as an innocent gesture of love.

Anatomy of Demodex

Adult mites have a semi-transparent body that is up to 0.3-0.4 mm long and can only be seen by high-powered microscopes. Their bodies are segmented into two with one part having eight short legs. Their bodies are covered with scales for anchoring themselves to the hair follicle. They have pin-like mouth parts for eating skin cells, hormones and oils (sebum) in your hair follicles. Because Demodex is sensitive to light, they leave hair follicles only at night and slowly walk around on the skin at a speed of 8-16 cm/hour.

Both males and females have a genital opening for mating but neither have an excretory opening to excrete waste due to their highly efficient digestive system. In order to repopulate, eggs are laid inside the hair follicle opening or sebaceous glands. After 3-4 days, six-legged larvae hatch and take about seven days to develop into adults. Their total lifespan spans several weeks and at the end of their life, they decompose inside the hair follicles or sebaceous glands.

How Demodex Can Affect Our Bodies
Demodex is generally harmless to a large percentage of the population who may not experience skin troubles. Others that are more susceptible to Demodex-related problems may be unaware that it is the underlying cause of or contributor. People with oily skin are particularly prone to having the mites. Signs of Demodex mites are frequent itchiness around your eyebrows, eyelids, or nose, especially at night or early morning.

There is a close association between inflammation and Demodex. It is suggested that skin inflammation and infection results when a large number of mites infest a single hair follicle. The mite is commonly associated with the inflammation of the eyelids, a condition that is known as Demodex blepharitis. Symptoms include itchiness, discomfort of the eyelashes, and loss of eyelashes. Research has shown many as 25 mites can colonize a single eyelash.

Some research suggests that the Demodex mites are not the direct cause of hair loss but rather our body’s reaction to Demodex. In some people, their body reacts by instigating an inflammatory response to reject the mites. The inflammation, however, blocks the hair follicle killing both the mite and the hair follicle.

Another common reasoning for hair loss from Demodex is the severity of the infestation. Because the mites feed off of sebum produced by the sebaceous glands and dead skin cells, too many mites feeding off of one hair follicle can cause malnourishment to the follicle resulting in loss of the hair.

geee thanks for that, now I'm itching all over!

awesome thread

It's going to pass closest to Earth on December 26th 2013. The religious 'END OF THE WORLD' nuts are going to go balls on bat shit crazy.

So do these little face mite dudes tails get chopped off when I shave? do they grow new ones or do they live without thier jabba the hut looking tails? wtf?

Those mites are grody to the max!

Great, we know where the enemy lives. Now how do we kill them all?

You can buy this cure-foam for 3 easy installments of $39.95! Call within the next 10-minutes and they will include another 4oz bottle absolutely free! (just pay 12.99 s&h)

Comet - Really, really cool.

Ant hill excavation - Proof of alien origin.

Face mites - Sometimes there's such a thing as too much knowledge.

I bet that when you chop off their tails with your razor, it makes 2 worms out of both pieces like an earthworm. Probably best to quit shaving.. :D

Also, it's not noted in the article I posted, but these little face mite critters don't actually have a butthole. Yeah... no butthole at all. They simply eat over their very short lifetime, and fill up with shit, and then die. Never once feeling the sweet release of pinching a loaf....

Yeah it's in there, they just called it an excretory opening. Lol
Posted via Mobile Device

I occasionally fall asleep with the lights left on.

It's now gonna be every ****ing night til the end of time, or until I forget this article, whichever comes first.

Controlling Brains With a Flick of a Light Switch
Using the new science of optogenetics, scientists can activate or shut down neural pathways, altering behavior and heralding a true cure for psychiatric disease.

by Amy Barth
From the September 2012 issue; published online September 25, 2012

Stopped at a red light on his drive home from work, Karl Deisseroth contemplates one of his patients, a woman with depression so entrenched that she had been unresponsive to drugs and electroshock therapy for years. The red turns to green and Deisseroth accelerates, navigating roads and intersections with one part of his mind while another part considers a very different set of pathways that also can be regulated by a system of lights. In his lab at Stanford University’s Clark Center, Deisseroth is developing a remarkable way to switch brain cells off and on by exposing them to targeted green, yellow, or blue flashes. With that ability, he is learning how to regulate the flow of information in the brain.

Deisseroth’s technique, known broadly as optogenetics, could bring new hope to his most desperate patients. In a series of provocative experiments, he has already cured the symptoms of psychiatric disease in mice. Optogenetics also shows promise for defeating drug addiction. When Deisseroth exposed a set of test mice to cocaine and then flipped a switch, pulsing bright yellow light into their brains, the expected rush of euphoria—the prelude to addiction—was instantly blocked. Almost miraculously, they were immune to the cocaine high; the mice left the drug den as uninterested as if they had never been exposed.

Today, those breakthroughs have been demonstrated in only a small number of test animals. But as Deisseroth pulls into his driveway he is optimistic about what tomorrow’s work could bring: Human applications, and the relief they could deliver, may not be far off.

For all its complexity, the brain in some ways is a surprisingly simple device. Neurons switch off and on, causing signals to stop or go. Using optogenetics, Deisseroth can do that switching himself. He inserts light-sensitive proteins into brain cells. Those proteins let him turn a set of cells on or off just by shining the right kind of laser beam at the cells.


That in turn makes it possible to highlight the exact neural pathways involved in the various forms of psychiatric disease. A disruption of one particular pathway, for instance, might cause anxiety. To test the possibility, Deisseroth engineers an animal with light-sensitive proteins in the brain cells lying along the suspected pathway. Then he illuminates those cells with a laser. If the animal begins cowering in a corner, he knows he is in the right place. And as Deisseroth and his colleagues illuminate more neural pathways, other researchers will be able to design increasingly targeted drugs and minimally invasive brain implants to treat psychiatric disease.

[...]

Crick’s idea was that light, with its unparalleled speed and precision, could be the ideal tool for controlling neurons and mapping the brain. “The idea of an energy interface instead of a physical interface to work with the brain was what was so exciting,” Deisseroth says. He thought creating a light-sensitive brain was probably impossible, but then an idea floated up: What about tapping the power of light-sensitive microbes, single-celled creatures that drift in water, turning toward or away from the sun to regulate energy intake? Such brainless creatures rely on signals from light-sensitive proteins called opsins. When sunlight hits the opsin, it instantly sends an electric signal through the microbe’s cell membrane, telling the tiny critter which way to turn in relation to the sun.

Deisseroth wondered if he could insert these opsins into targeted mammalian brain cells in order to make them light-sensitive too. If so, he could learn to control their behavior using light. Shining light into the brain could then become the tool Crick imagined, providing a way to control neurons without electric shocks or slow-acting, unfocused drugs.


Lighting the Brain

The necessary tools were already out there. The first opsin—the light-sensitive protein made by microbes—had been identified in 1971, the same year Deisseroth was born. Bacteriorhodopsin, as it was called, responded to green light, and scientists have since found it in microbes living in saltwater all over the world. The next opsin, halorhodopsin, which responds to yellow light, was discovered in 1977. Like bacteriorhodopsin, it was found in bacteria living in salty lakes and seas.

Deisseroth, who read everything he could about opsins, realized that light-sensitive microbes speak the same basic language as neurons: When light hits the opsin, gates in the cell membrane open, allowing charged particles called ions to flow in and out. In microbes, ion flow tells the organism which way to turn. In neurons, ions flowing through the cell wall initiate action, setting off a string of communications that tell organisms like us how to feel and behave. This similarity suggested to Deisseroth that opsins could be manipulated to switch brain cells on and off.

Much more at link above..

http://imageshack.us/a/img835/5990/1...3c4e9fdf83.jpg

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The pistol shrimp... the noisiest creature in the ocean. Colonies of them make a distinct snapping noise that overshadows nearly all other sounds throughout the world's oceans, including the calls of some whales. In fact, they are so loud, their snapping sounds interfere with military and scientific sonar (so much so, that hostile submarines have used large colonies of pistol shrimps to hide!).

So how on earth does the pistol shrimp, which can be anywhere from a couple centimeters to a couple inches in length, make such a loud sound? They possess an oversized claw which they close shut quickly enough to move water over 60 mph, creating a cavitation bubble in its wake. This bubble exists for a tiny fraction of a second (between 10 nanoseconds and 300 picoseconds), but it becomes so hot (over 8,540F) that it emits light. The cavitation bubble finally collapses and creates a bang as loud as 218 decibels. As a comparison, the space shuttle launch was as loud as 170~ decibels.

Now the next question; why? These shrimp use their super claws to stun prey. The shockwave from the collapse of the shrimp's claw is enough to stun small shrimp and fish and kill them.. without even touching them. They also compete and fight with one another to see who is louder. Overall... this shrimp is pretty awesome.

Deep down, we're all spaghetti monsters...

Central and respiratory nervous system.

http://imageshack.us/a/img689/208/54...7454594964.jpg


Human transit system..

http://imageshack.us/a/img38/462/hum...apfullsize.jpg

That person was obviously touched by his noodly appendage.

The acceleration would start at 9.81 m/(s^2) but the mass of the earth above your falling head would also create a gravitational pull above your head trying to pull you back up. This oppositional gravitational force would be less than the earths but would be sufficient to slow you down. Once at the center the force due to gravity would be the same on all sides (almost, the earth isn't truly spherical but a prolate spheroid) but the conversion of all that gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy would push you past the center where the exact same effects would occur in the opposite direction resulting in a gentle stop at the other side

http://www.forskningsradet.no/en/New...p1177315753918

New material may replace silicon

Norwegian researchers are the world’s first to develop a method for producing semiconductors from graphene. This finding may revolutionise the technology industry.



The method involves growing semiconductor-nanowires on graphene. To achieve this, researchers “bomb” the graphene surface with gallium atoms and arsenic molecules, thereby creating a network of minute nanowires.
The result is a one-micrometre thick hybrid material which acts as a semiconductor. By comparison, the silicon semiconductors in use today are several hundred times thicker. The semiconductors’ ability to conduct electricity may be affected by temperature, light or the addition of other atoms.
http://www.forskningsradet.no/servle...&ssbinary=true Grafen consists of a single layer of carbon atoms. (Illustration: Wikimedia Commons). Fantastic potential

Graphene is the thinnest material known, and at the same time one of the strongest. It consists of a single layer of carbon atoms and is both pliable and transparent. The material conducts electricity and heat very effectively. And perhaps most importantly, it is very inexpensive to produce.


“Given that it’s possible to make semiconductors out of graphene instead of silicon, we can make semiconductor components that are both cheaper and more effective than the ones currently on the market,” explains Helge Weman of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Dr Weman is behind the breakthrough discovery along with Professor Bjørn-Ove Fimland.


“A material comprising a pliable base that is also transparent opens up a world of opportunities, one we have barely touched the surface of,” says Dr Weman. “This may bring about a revolution in the production of solar cells and LED components. Windows in traditional houses could double as solar panels or a TV screen. Mobile phone screens could be wrapped around the wrist like a watch. In short, the potential is tremendous.”
Broad-based public funding

The researchers have received assistance in gaining patents and founding a company from NTNU Technology Transfer AS, a collaborative partner to the programme entitled Commercialising R&D Results (FORNY2020) at the Research Council of Norway.


However, the path to these remarkable findings started with basic research funded under the Research Council’s Clean Energy for the Future Programme (RENERGI) and the now-concluded programme, Nanotechnology and New Materials (NANOMAT), which initiated the findings.

This video explains the new material. (Video: CrayNano AS)
Huge interest among electronics giants

The researchers will now begin to create prototypes directed towards specific areas of application. They have been in contact with giants in the electronics industry such as Samsung and IBM. “There is tremendous interest in producing semiconductors out of graphene, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find collaborative partners,” Dr Weman adds.
The researchers are hoping to have the new semiconductor hybrid materials on the commercial market in roughly five years.


<dl class="author"><dt> Written by: </dt><dd> Bård Amundsen/Thomas Keilman. Translation: Glenn Wells/Carol B. Eckmann </dd></dl> <dl class="dates"><dt class="publisertDato"> Published: </dt><dd class="publisertDato"> 28.09.2012 </dd></dl>

I went to "The Human Body" exhibit while it was in Vegas, and the exposed nervous system was the creepiest by far.

It was drying up and flaking on the ground, and yes, it was not enclosed. People were actually touching it. :eek:

Funny...some dead guys CNS giving others "butterflies"

Must have struck a nerve.

Whoa, I got it mixed up. The Circulatory system was what I was thinking of.

Imagine a dark room with this lit up in the middle:

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/images/thumbn...c653a9730e434e

Oh damn.. that looks like a Syfy movie prop...

LMAO Damn you notorious can't you quit them!!

RE the graphene as semiconductor post: I have an erection.

low tech is the best tech

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Kuratas, the 13-foot mech: unleashes your inner Ripley, costs $1.35 million


Suidobashi Heavy Industries has put the finishing touches to its latest project, the 4.4-ton Kuratas. Mobile suit obsessives around the world can thank artist Kogoro Kurata and robotics expert Wataru Yoshizaki for the robot frame, which has space to house a pilot inside. The mech's touchscreen UI even includes a Kinect-based movement interface and the shudder-inducing "smile-activated" twin BB gatling guns. You can customize your own diesel-powered beast in the dystopian gang colors of your choosing, but be advised: the $1.35 million price tag doesn't include further customization options like a faux leather interior, cup holder or phone cubby. The Kuratas does, however, come with the ability to make phone calls direct from the cockpit, so you can tell your enemies that you're coming for them.


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Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!


LMAO

I cannot possibly agree more with the idea of the abolition of all patents immediately.

The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them)

90 SEP 27 2012, 1:21 PM ET 215

Our patent system is a mess. It's a fount of expensive litigation that allows aging companies to linger around by bullying their more innovative competitors in court.

Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on "trolls" who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all?

That's the striking suggestion from a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working paper by Michele Boldrin and David Levine, professors at Washington University in St. Louis who argue that any patent system, no matter how well conceived, is bound to devolve into the kind of quagmire we're dealing with today.

Here's the (slightly jargony) core of their argument, which we'll unpack together in a moment:

A closer look at the historical and international evidence suggests that while weak patent systems may mildly increase innovation with limited side-effects, strong patent systems reerun innovation with many negative side-effects. Both theoretically and empirically, the political economy of government operated patent systems indicates that weak legislation will generally evolve into a strong protection and that the political demand for stronger patent protection comes from old and stagnant industries and firms, not from new and innovative ones. Hence the best solution is to abolish patents entirely [emphasis mine] through strong constitutional measures and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent-seeking, to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it.

In plain-speak, the authors are arguing that, yes, the evidence suggests that having a limited amount of patent protection makes countries slightly more innovative, presumably by encouraging inventors to cash in on their great ideas without fear of being ripped off. But patent protections never stay small and tidy. Instead, entrenched players like intellectual property lawyers who make their living filing lawsuits and old, established corporations that want to keep new players out of their markets lobby to expand the breadth of patent rights. And as patent rights get stronger, they take a serious toll on the economy, including our ability to innovate.

We can see that cost today as tech companies like Google spend billions on "defensive patents," which are essentially useless other than as a protection against lawsuits. We see it whenever a cool startup firm is forced to license a bogus patent from a litigious troll. And we see it in the untold dollars spent on legal fees and unnecessary patent filings for ludicrously broad or impractical ideas. The authors' extreme case in point: Somebody out there actually patented a method for moving information through the fifth dimension.* As in faster than the speed of light.

Freaking replicators! Seriously.

Tea... Earl Grey... HOT!

How to Make Almost Anything
The Digital Fabrication Revolution
By Neil Gershenfeld
September 27, 2012

A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication. It draws on the same insights that led to the earlier digitizations of communication and computation, but now what is being programmed is the physical world rather than the virtual one. Digital fabrication will allow individuals to design and produce tangible objects on demand, wherever and whenever they need them. Widespread access to these technologies will challenge traditional models of business, aid, and education.

The roots of the revolution date back to 1952, when researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wired an early digital computer to a milling machine, creating the first numerically controlled machine tool. By using a computer program instead of a machinist to turn the screws that moved the metal stock, the researchers were able to produce aircraft components with shapes that were more complex than could be made by hand. From that first revolving end mill, all sorts of cutting tools have been mounted on computer-controlled platforms, including jets of water carrying abrasives that can cut through hard materials, lasers that can quickly carve fine features, and slender electrically charged wires that can make long thin cuts.

Today, numerically controlled machines touch almost every commercial product, whether directly (producing everything from laptop cases to jet engines) or indirectly (producing the tools that mold and stamp mass-produced goods). And yet all these modern descendants of the first numerically controlled machine tool share its original limitation: they can cut, but they cannot reach internal structures. This means, for example, that the axle of a wheel must be manufactured separately from the bearing it passes through.

[...]

Labs like mine are now developing 3-D assemblers (rather than printers) that can build structures in the same way as the ribosome. The assemblers will be able to both add and remove parts from a discrete set. One of the assemblers we are developing works with components that are a bit bigger than amino acids, cluster of atoms about ten nanometers long (an amino acid is around one nanometer long). These can have properties that amino acids cannot, such as being good electrical conductors or magnets.(HOLY SHIT COOL!) The goal is to use the nanoassembler to build nanostructures, such as 3-D integrated circuits. Another assembler we are developing uses parts on the scale of microns to millimeters. We would like this machine to make the electronic circuit boards that the 3-D integrated circuits go on. Yet another assembler we are developing uses parts on the scale of centimeters, to make larger structures, such as aircraft components and even whole aircraft that will be lighter, stronger, and more capable than today’s planes — think a jumbo jet that can flap its wings.

A key difference between existing 3-D printers and these assemblers is that the assemblers will be able to create complete functional systems in a single process. They will be able to integrate fixed and moving mechanical structures, sensors and actuators, and electronics. Even more important is what the assemblers don’t create: trash. Trash is a concept that applies only to materials that don’t contain enough information to be reusable. All the matter on the forest floor is recycled again and again. Likewise, a product assembled from digital materials need not be thrown out when it becomes obsolete. It can simply be disassembled and the parts reconstructed into something new.

The most interesting thing that an assembler can assemble is itself. For now, they are being made out of the same kinds of components as are used in rapid prototyping machines. Eventually, however, the goal is for them to be able to make all their own parts.

[More info at link....]

Dead.

I see the assemblers can assemble themselves. So when will Skynet become sentient?

Russkies found another one:

http://news.yahoo.com/well-preserved...121929576.html

http://imageshack.us/a/img801/5060/i...re20112f92.jpg

Super-Toxic Snake Venom Could Yield New Painkillers
By Katherine Harmon | October 3, 2012 |

A bite from the black mamba snake (Dendroaspis polylepis) can kill an adult human within 20 minutes. But mixed in with that toxic venom is a new natural class of compound that could be used to help develop new painkillers.

Named “mambalgins,” these peptides block acute and inflammatory pain in mice as well as morphine does, according to a new study.

Researchers, led by Sylvie Diochot, of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at Nice University, Sophia Antipolis in France, purified the peptides from the venom and profiled the compounds’ structure. They then were able to test the mambalgins in strains of mice with various genetic tweaks to their pain pathways. Diochot and her colleagues determined that the mambalgins work by blocking an as-yet untargeted set of neurological ion channels associated with pain signals. The findings were published online October 3 in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

As a bonus, mambalgins did not have the risky side effect of respiratory depression that morphine does. And the mice developed less tolerance to them over time than is typical with morphine.

Experimenting with the newfound compounds should also help researchers learn more about the mechanisms that drive pain. As the researchers noted in their paper, “It is essential to understand pain better to develop new analgesics. The black mamba peptides discovered here have the potential to address both of these aims.”

Venoms from plenty of other species of animals, including spiders, scorpions, ants and even snails, have also been studied for their analgesic potential.

Just don’t try extracting any of this venom in the wild. There is antivenom for the black mamba snake’s bite, but it is not always available, and without it, the bites are usually fatal. These snakes can move along at speeds up to about 20 kilometers per hour and grow to up to 4.4 meters in length.

I would really love to see Alzheimer's cured. My grandfather had it, and I saw him slowly lose his mind. Someday we'll overcome it.

New human neurons from adult cells right there in the brain

Researchers have discovered a way to generate new human neurons from another type of adult cell found in our brains. The discovery, reported in the October 5th issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, is one step toward cell-based therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"This work aims at converting cells that are present throughout the brain but themselves are not nerve cells into neurons," said Benedikt Berninger, now at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "The ultimate goal we have in mind is that this may one day enable us to induce such conversion within the brain itself and thus provide a novel strategy for repairing the injured or diseased brain."

The cells that made the leap from one identity to another are known as pericytes. Those cells, found in close association with the blood vessels, are important for keeping the blood-brain barrier intact and have been shown to participate in wound healing in other parts of the body.

"Now, we reason, if we could target these cells and entice them to make nerve cells, we could take advantage of this injury response," Berninger says.

Further testing showed that those newly converted neurons could produce electrical signals and reach out to other neurons, providing evidence that the converted cells could integrate into neural networks.

"While much needs to be learnt about adapting a direct neuronal reprogramming strategy to meaningful repair in vivo, our data provide strong support for the notion that neuronal reprogramming of cells of pericytic origin within the damaged brain may become a viable approach to replace degenerated neurons," the researchers write.

I think that curing Alzheimers is just as important as curing cancer. Living dead is some scary stuff. Everything about you or your loved one dies, but their body is still there to remind you.

Hopefully that's the 12/21/2012 discovery that brings on a new era.

hopefully this christian country can handle the hell of using Science to help others.

More evidence that Voyager has exited the solar system

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/10...-solar-system/

There's a lot of graphs so I'm not going to bother pasting the article.

It's just mind blowing to even think about...

VY Canis Majoris

http://imageshack.us/a/img191/6488/6...1925329173.jpg

Do you sometimes think you are larger than life? Well here is something to bring you down to size! When we look at our sun every day, we see a small ball of burning gas. But how big is it really? Our sun is actually 93 million miles (150 million kilometres) away from our planet, which in reality means it is gigantic. You can fit a million Earth's inside the sun. Now, that just sounds incredibly huge. But compared to a lot of stars, our sun is actually quite small. The largest star discovered so far is known as VY Canis Majoris, located in the Canis Major constellation. This "Hypergiant" as astronomers call it, is about 4,900 light years from Earth and is visible with a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. This massive star is estimated to be a billion times bigger than our sun, shining 500,000 times as bright. If it were at the center of our solar system, it would reach as far out as Saturn.

We have recently discovered that this supermassive red giant seems to be nearing the end of its life. There have been recordings of giant explosions on the star's surface, causing loops and arcs which spray matter from the star into space. Normally, the star will lose matter. But when these giant explosions occur, "VY CMa" can lose 10 times as much as its normal rate. These explosions have been going on for at least the past 1,000 years, scientists think. When the star finally dies, it will create a supernova, some of the biggest explosions in the universe from what we know. But it is possible that because VY CMa is so big, it will create an even bigger explosion, known only as a Hypernova. Hypernovae can contain and release more energy than 1,000 supernovae and emits massive amounts of gamma rays, which are sent in all directions. The core of the star is so massive, that when it collapses in on itself, it will even crush the neutrons inside. This creates so much power and energy, that nothing but a massive black hole is left behind. Luckily for Earth, we are too far away to be affected by all of this mayhem that VY CMa is going to create at the end of its life.

Shitty news guys. Jurassic Park was fake!!

The dream is dead. I'll never ride a Tyrannosaurus... First Matt Cassel, now this. FML...

http://imageshack.us/a/img692/7127/t...gpz1qciggi.jpg
This will never be me, because life isn't fair.


DNA has a 521-year half-life
Genetic material can't be recovered from dinosaurs — but it lasts longer than thought.

Few researchers have given credence to claims that samples of dinosaur DNA have survived to the present day, but no one knew just how long it would take for genetic material to fall apart. Now, a study of fossils found in New Zealand is laying the matter to rest — and putting paid to hopes of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex.

After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate.

Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process.

But palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions including a temperature of 13.1 ºC. The findings are published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1.

Diminishing returns
By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.

Spider, spider
 

100-Million-Year-Old Spider Attack Found in Amber

http://news.yahoo.com/100-million-ol...193233281.html

Post 292 destroyed a major dream in my life.

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Oh well, we can still have reverse engineered woolly mammoths. I wanna saddle up one and put on some of those cool "300" style spikey tusk things.
My attack mammoth would be the envy of all SE Alaskans.

actually its the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. the respiratory system gets its juice from both

Finally, an actual positive use for magnetics. As apposed to the ridiculous magnetic bracelets and such that so many have wasted money on...

Cancer cells executed by magnet
Metal nanoparticles trigger cell's own death machinery

Evil geniuses, commence drooling. Scientists have figured out how to remotely control a cell’s self-destruction. Magnets that guide the behavior of tiny metal beads can be used to flip on a cell’s death switch, kick-starting the cell’s demolition. The approach might one day be used to kill cancer cells or orchestrate other cellular events without drugs or incisions.

In the past, scientists have explored killing cancer using tiny iron-containing nanoparticles that latch onto malignant cells and heat up when exposed to a magnetic field. In the new work, a bit of protein guides each nanoparticle to death receptor 4, an aptly named handle on the outside of a cell that acts as a molecular doomsday switch. Exposing the cells to a magnetic field makes the nanoparticles clump together. This clumping pulls together the three molecular prongs that make up the switch, activating it and triggering a process that leads to the cell’s demise.

The scientists from Yonsei University in South Korea tried the approach with a dish of colon cancer cells. Within 24 hours, more than half of the cells exposed to the magnetic field were dead, the team reports online October 7 in Nature Materials.

“They’ve identified a major opportunity for magnetic nanoparticles,” says bioengineer Andrew MacKay of the University of Southern California. “This might be a new way to do really targeted therapeutics.”

Figuring out how to target only particular cells is an ongoing problem, though. Death receptor 4 sits on normal cells too, which can also be destroyed via remote-controlled magnetism. When the researchers tested their approach on developing zebra fish, the tails of the exposed fish developed a kink where cells were killed off in a particular area.

It’s not yet clear whether the magnetic field could be directed with such finesse and specificity that it would kill only tumor cells and not nearby healthy cells. Many cancer cells become resistant and stop responding to the protein that normally hits the death switch; such cells also might not respond to the magnetic nanoparticle version, says Courtney Broaddus, a doctor at the University of California, San Francisco who investigates resistance in cancer cells.

“But it’s very intriguing, the potential applications of this technology for remote controlling activities at the cell membrane,” she says.

The researchers are now working on extending the concept to switches on other cells, such as those that stimulate blood vessel growth, says chemist and team member Jinwoo Cheon.

How much does the internet weigh?

http://imageshack.us/a/img3/3730/768...7928712599.jpg

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/PmDTtkZlMwM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

E=MC VAGINA...

Merica!

****ing sad.....

http://imageshack.us/a/img835/9856/2...7446073210.jpg

Robot farmers

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http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/ns...rm-robots.html

Move over farmers: soon a swarm of robots could take over all the hard labour. A new robot developed by David Dorhout and colleagues from Dorhout R&D is designed to plant seeds in a field while coordinating with a gang of other robotic farmhands.

In this video, you can see the prototype in action. The robot can walk in any direction while avoiding obstacles, using a sensor underneath its body to detect where seeds have already been planted. Once it finds an untouched patch, it drills a hole in the ground and releases a seed, triggering an electronic eye that guides the planting.

The robot's communication system is inspired by the way ants self-organise. When an ant finds a food source, it releases a pheromone that attracts other ants. In a similar way, a robot can beam out an infrared signal to recruit help, overriding the random movement of the swarm and directing them to areas that need to be farmed. "There's no long-term memory, there's no centralised command and control: robots just follow simple rules from which complex behaviour arises," says Dorhout.

Whereas other automated systems are designed to replace people with electronics - tractors that drive themselves, for example - Dorhout's approach is to improve the farming process. By providing assistance, a robot swarm allows farmers to focus on the science and business side of their operation. "The farmer is like the shepherd that gives the robot instructions," says Dorhout. Robots are also able to transcend the limitations of farm equipment to maximise efficiency, for example by planting in a grid instead of rows.

So far, the prototype is able only to plant seeds. But the system is being developed to weed, fertilise and harvest as well, ultimately creating autonomous robots that can perform whatever tasks are necessary year round.

For more about the robotic future of farming, check out our full-length feature, "Farmerbots: a new industrial revolution".

Pot farmers are gonna love that shit.

Yeah.... until those ****ing Jawas steal them....

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/3229/swjawa2.jpg

When planets act like douchebags...

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/9...8069278814.png

Condescending Jupiter,.. Really needs Wonka's hat.

Animals from space?
 

:hmmm:

Video

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Tyson has got to be one of my most respected people on this planet.

Mofo is my hero. Can you imagine some of the shit this country could accomplish if we had a few guys like him running it?

I'd vote twice for him :)

Sad... Based on THIS report, state science standards really suck. There's a state by state breakdown at the link in the last sentence. See the links at the bottom to help change this.

Missouri: http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/pub...s-Missouri.pdf

Kansas: http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/pub...rds-Kansas.pdf

U.S. State Science Standards Are “Mediocre to Awful”

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/666...rdsmap0201.jpg

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute paints a grim picture of state science standards across the United States. But it also reveals some intriguing details about exactly what’s going wrong with the way many American students are learning science.

Standards are the foundation upon which educators build curricula, write textbooks and train teachers– they often take the form of a list of facts and skills that students must master at each grade level. Each state is free to formulate its own standards, and numerous studies have found that high standards are a first step on the road to high student achievement. “A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful,” write the authors of the report. Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A’s. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia each scored an A-, and a band of states in and around the northwest, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, scored F’s. (For any New Yorkers reading this, our standards earned a respectable B+, plus the honor of having “some of the most elegant writing of any science standards document”).

What exactly is going wrong? The study’s lead authors identified four main factors: an undermining of evolution, vague goals, not enough guidance for teachers on how to integrate the history of science and the concept of scientific inquiry into their lessons, and not enough math instruction.

Let’s take these one by one. For evolution, the report points out that eight anti-evolution bills were introduced in six state legislatures last year. This year, two similar bills were pre-filed in New Hampshire and one in Indiana. ”And these tactics are far more subtle than they once were,” write the authors. “Missouri, for example, has asterisked all ‘controversial’ evolution content in the standards and relegated it to a voluntary curriculum that will not be assessed … Tennessee includes evolution only in an elective high school course (not the basic high school biology course).” Maryland, according to the report, includes evolution content but “explicitly excludes” crucial points about evolution from its state-wide tests.

States cited for vague standards include Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. One example: New Jersey fourth graders are asked to “Demonstrate understanding of the interrelationships among fundamental concepts in the physical, life and Earth systems sciences.” Meanwhile, in A-scoring California, the standards explain to teachers and curriculum writers much more specifically that “Electricity and magnetism are related effects that have many useful applications in everyday life.” The standards go on to list half a dozen specific skills and facts that students must master in order to understand that overarching concept, such as “Students know electrical energy can be converted to heat, light, and motion.”

The report also notes that standards for introducing scientific inquiry into classrooms are, in many states, vague to the point of uselessness. In Idaho, students are “merely asked to ‘make observations’ or to ‘use cooperation and interaction skills.’ ”

Finally, the report noted that few states make the link between math and science clear. In its own words: “Mathematics is integral to science. Yet .. many [states] seem to go to great lengths to avoid mathematical formulae and equations altogether.”

A December report by Change the Equation, a group of CEOs working to support President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign, also found that states set radically different expectations for students in science. The report looked not at the standards themselves but at how each state scores its assessment tests and how it defines “proficiency” in the subject.

Lastly, a bit of good news. At least 26 states have signed on to an effort to write new, common “Next Generation Science Standards” that will be more rigorous and specific than what many states currently have on the books. To read more about that effort, visit http://www.nextgenscience.org/ or http://www.achieve.org/ or read the document upon which the standards will be based here.

I'm a phd-track grad student who went to high school in missouri... I can say without a doubt that I got little from h.s. science classes... Most of what I got was due to self-motivation.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the reason I am going into aerospace engineering

Fulgurites.....

This is what happens when sand gets struck by lightning!

Fulgurites are natural hollow glass tubes formed in quartzose sand, silica, or soil by lightning strikes (at 3,270 °F), which instantaneously melts silica on a conductive surface and fuses grains together over a period of around one second.

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/5...4347650560.jpg

The following pictures are of a man-made fulgurite that was created when a high voltage power line fell during a windstorm, and then continued to arc to the ground for a couple of hours. When a high voltage power line initially contacts the ground, it begins arcing. The intense heat of the arc and the high current flowing into the ground cause sand, rocks, and minerals in the soil near the line to fuse into a glassy, lava-like substance. A couple of video clips showing downed power lines arcing to the ground can be seen here and here(Note the power hum. Wow...). In the latter video clip, the molten region of soil near the downed line can clearly be seen glowing for quite some time even after power was turned off. For a variety of technical reasons, downed power lines may remain energized for quite some time before the power company detects the problem and kills power to the circuit. Even worse, automatic "re-closers" may temporarily cut off power for a few seconds, and then reapply it with no warning. This sequence may repeat several times before the re-closer locks out and must be manually reset. During the brief dead times, people nearby may think that the line is safely dead, and may get injured or killed when power is suddenly reapplied.

Since molten minerals are excellent electrical conductors, the current-conducting area around the line continues to expand and glow as electrical power continues to flow into the ground fault. Once power is finally removed, the molten materials solidify into a bubbly, glassy "rock", leaving a man-made "fulgurite" behind. Unlike natural fulgurites, those created by a downed power lines tend to be considerably thicker and more massive. Linemen sometimes call these curious artifacts "clinkers" because of the ringing sound they make when struck. As with natural fulgurites, clinkers are often hollow with polished, glassy interior walls. However, because they're thicker, they tend to be considerably heavier and massive than the thin, fragile lightning-created fulgurites which are created within a fraction of a second.

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/647...lgurite195.jpg

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/4...lgurite198.jpg

These pictures are of a clinker that was formed in Northern California in 1994 when a 7,200 volt power line fell onto a pile of clam shells next to a canal in Hickman, California. Although this 28 inch long specimen weighs about 80 pounds, it is actually only a small piece of the 15 foot long clinker that was created. Shell fragments can be seen embedded in the exterior of the glassy walls.