Tag: science

I didn’t understand why people would look at me whenever the word science was used

WANTED: Vegan Drummer

YouTube comment or e.e. cummings?

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Spent the evening dying my hair and hanging about in Eliza’s SWEATSHOP again as she worked to fundraise for her friend Lorraine, who recently fractured her back. Eight hours painting, by the end. Some bloody nice work. Nice, too, to spend time with people while stuck at home, (one of which was her father, Rick), chatting about late sixties sci-fi and introducing people to odd cultural treasures, like sexually charged religious sculpture, the Brick Testament, (now up to Revelation!), and tentacle rape soda.

Today I’m working from home, signed in to the help-desk, sewing the last sequins onto my hallowe’en bustier, and systematically going through my camera cards with PhotoRec, an open source data recovery program, rescuing photographs that have been locked away for far, far too long. Eye-strain and headaches aside, I’m eager to go through them, as I expect to find all sorts of treasure. Already I’ve found a forgotten batch from California, and the silly pictures from when Beth bleached my hair. Hopefully, soon, I’ll come across the photos I took a few weekends ago at the Seattle butterfly house, which captivated me utterly, so amazing it was to be so close to such delicate beings.

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FOR SCIENCE! High-Speed ‘Other’ Internet Goes Global, Space Sex! Astronauts rule out the Missionary Position.

The Universe Is On Fire (could have sworn I’d posted this already)

via the ever delightful Ben Peek, who delightfully came up in conversation recently as “the person farthest away from here to say Hello To That Mike for me”:

“This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly, but it’s far from serene: what resemble the dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes.”

Link.

Decellularisation! Organ scaffolds!

via jwz:

Hybrid hearts could solve transplant shortage

"It’s amazing, absolutely beautiful," says Doris Taylor, describing the latest addition to an array of tiny thumping hearts that sit in her lab, hooked up to an artificial blood supply. The rat hearts beat just as if there were inside a live animal, but even more remarkable is how each one has been made: by coating the stripped-down "scaffolding" of one rat’s heart with tissue grown from another rat’s stem cells.

The idea is fairly simple: take an organ from a human donor or animal, and use a mild detergent to strip away flesh, cells and DNA so that all is left is the inner "scaffold" of collagen, an "immunologically inert" protein. Add stem cells from the relevant patient to this naked shell of an organ and they will differentiate into all the cells the organ needs to function without inducing an immune response after transplant, or any new infections.

Although Taylor only added stem cells to the hearts, these cells differentiated into many different cells, in all the correct places, which is the best part of using decellularised scaffolds. The stem cells transformed into endothelial cells in the ventricles and atria, for example, and into vascular and smooth-muscle cells in the spaces for blood vessels, just as in a natural heart. Taylor thinks this happened because she pumped blood and nutrients through the organ, producing pressure in each zone which helps to determine how cells differentiate there.

But chemical, as well as mechanical, cues seem to have guided differentiation. Taylor has evidence that growth factors and peptides remained anchored to the scaffold even after the flesh was washed off. These chemicals likely signalled to the stem cells, indicating how many should migrate to which areas and what to change into in each zone. "Our mantra is to give nature the tools and get out of the way," she says.

Also: Stem cells used to restore sight

The idea to team stem cells with contact lenses came from an observation that stem cells from the cornea stick to contact lenses. To obtain the stem cells, Dr Watson took less than a millimeter of tissue from the side of each patients’ cornea. Working with colleagues at POWH and UNSW, he cultured stem cells from the tissue in extended wear contact lenses.

Within 10 to 14 days the stem cells began to attach to the cornea, replenishing damaged cells. Satisfied that the stem cells were doing their job, Dr Watson removed the lenses and the patients have been seeing with new eyes for the last 18 months.

I can’t help but feel squidgy whenever I remember there are people in space!

via Warren:

Astronauts discover a long stretch of damage on the space shuttle Atlantis.

The shuttle appears to be in good overall shape, but the survey did uncover a 53cm (21in) line of chips on the vehicle’s right side. The line of chips uncovered by the inspection are in thick tiles that make up the protective heat shield on Atlantis’ starboard side. The damage is located where the right wing joins the shuttle’s fuselage. Nasa said the chips could be related to a debris event detected by the wing’s leading edge sensors 104-106 seconds into the lift-off.

This report leads to one of those surprising and uncomfortable truths about humanity’s current space travel skills:

If something goes wrong on this mission, Atlantis’ crew will not be able to shelter on the International Space Station (ISS). The station orbits at around 350km (220 miles) above Earth, while Hubble occupies an orbit about 560km (350 miles) up.

The Shuttle can’t fly there. It can’t shed 130 miles of altitude, establish a new orbit on a radically different inclination and maneuver to ISS. Because our things that fly in space still aren’t really spaceships as we’ve been brought up to think of them. In fact, the Endeavour’s on the launchpad now, ready to launch an unprecedented rescue mission if it’s determined that the Atlantis may not survive re-entry.

SCIENCE!!

Scientists have found a way to make an almost limitless supply of stem cells that could safely be used in patients while avoiding the “ethical” dilemma of destroying embryos:

In a breakthrough that could have huge implications, British and Canadian scientists have found a way of reprogramming skin cells taken from adults, effectively winding the clock back on the cells until they were in an embryonic form.

…

Because the cells can be made from a patient’s own skin, they carry the same DNA and so could be used without a risk of being rejected by the immune system.

Scientists showed they could make stem cells from adult cells more than a year ago, but the cells could never be used in patients because the procedure involved injecting viruses that could cause cancer. Overcoming the problem has been a major stumbling block in efforts to make stem cells fulfil their promise of transforming the future of medicine.

Now, scientists at the universities of Edinburgh and Toronto have found a way to achieve the same feat without using viruses, making so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell therapies a realistic prospect for the first time.

The insect’s flight path can be wirelessly controlled via a neural implant.

The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle:

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.

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The beetle’s payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals’ optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that’s controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle’s optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively.

I love living in the future, it’s just. so. neat!

See also: Growing neural implants, first successful robot fly.

science is so groovy

Our world may be a giant hologram:

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

I like the blog, though it’s all too simplistic

Rule #1: Exercise – Exercise boosts brain power.
Rule #2: Evolution/Survival – The human brain evolved, too.
Rule #3: Wiring – Every brain is wired differently.
Rule #4: Attention – We don’t pay attention to boring things.
Rule #5: Short-Term Memory – Repeat to remember.
Rule #6: Long-Term Memory – Remember to repeat.
Rule #7: Sleep – Sleep well, think well.
Rule #8: Stress – Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
Rule #9: Sensory Integration – Stimulate more of the senses.
Rule #10: Vision – Vision trumps all other senses.
Rule #11: Gender – Male and female brains are different.
Rule #12: Exploration – We are powerful and natural explorers.

“How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new knowledge? Is it true that men and women have different brains?”

Following links from a TED Talk last week, I came across an interesting brain-hacking website for the book Brain Rules: Principles for Surviving and Thriving At Work, Home, and School, by John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant and director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University. What little I’ve read so far has been interesting and nicely bolsters some of my own inexpertly cobbled together theories on memory and learning. (Though nothing beats the annuals, journals and articles I regularly hunt down and devour. Science is yummy.) There’s twelve rules in all, and each rule has a corresponding tutorial page on the site that’s meant to reinforce the concepts in the books.

They, of course, recommend reading the chapters first, but this is the internet! Onward video!