Since it’s the most interesting thing I’ve read this morning I’m just going to copy-paste this from Slashdot for those of you that missed it.
“Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There’s been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. ‘Human beings are not really individuals; they’re communities of organisms,’ says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. ‘This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.’ Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon’s lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria’s far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. ‘We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as human,’ says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears ‘we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn’t thought about.’”
It is definitely outside-of-the-box thinking and well worth the read.
From the office of strange and neat science facts here is an interesting one. Cannonballs can float in mercury. Thank you BBC for showing this one off.
Can you hear this sound? Don’t feel bad if you can’t because it is a nerve grating tone that can’t be forgotten. I can’t believe I can still hear anything after all the late night parties I attended in my youth in the first place. Its a fun little test though since it is a sound generally only heard by those under the age of 25. Take good care of yourself.
The future is here and it always is. Now we’re almost about to see 3-d holographic displays everywhere. Well, not everywhere. Just where they would be useful and entertaining.
The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has designed an easily reproducible, low-cost 3D display system with a form factor that offers a number of advantages for displaying 3D objects in 3D. The display is:
autostereoscopic - requires no special viewing glasses
omnidirectional - generates simultaneous views accomodating large numbers of viewers
interactive - can update content at 200Hz
The system works by projecting high-speed video onto a rapidly spinning mirror. As the mirror turns, it reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer. Our rendering algorithm can recreate both virtual and real scenes with correct occlusion, horizontal and vertical perspective, and shading.
While flat electronic displays represent a majority of user experiences, it is important to realize that flat surfaces represent only a small portion of our physical world. Our real world is made of objects, in all their three-dimensional glory. The next generation of displays will begin to represent the physical world around us, but this progression will not succeed unless it is completely invisible to the user: no special glasses, no fuzzy pictures, and no small viewing zones.
In this Instructables a person can gain the skills to forecasting the weather by looking at the clouds in the sky. This should really be something everyone should know how to do, but in the age of the lazy and moronic Idiocracy seems to become the law of the land.
Cirrus clouds are white wispy clouds that stretch across the sky. By all accounts, cirrus clouds indicate fair weather in the immediate future. However, they can also be an indication of a change in weather patterns within the next 24 hours (most likely a change of pressure fronts).
By watching their movement and the direction in which the streaks are pointed, you can get a sense of which direction the weather front is moving.
Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water.
The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car’s tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it.
It yet another shining example of why science rocks scientists have announced that they’ve taken significant strides in curing a formed of skin cancer, melanoma. This was accomplished by taking cancer-fighting cells, cloning them about five billion times, and then injecting those cells back into the patients body! Wow.
Scientists claim they have cured advanced skin cancer for the first time using the patient’s own cells cloned outside the body.
The 52-year-old man involved was free of melanoma two years after treatment.
Nick Hasty is calling his thesis project the EM Brace. Its “a wearable device that lets you experience electromagnetic radiation emitted by devices and gadgets that are around us.” Very neat idea.
Do you remember when Pluto was a planet, and then two years ago the International Astronomical Union said it wasn’t? It appears they’re going to apologize in a round about way.
“Plutoid” is the word of the moment for astronomers.
It is the new classification that has been sanctioned for the object that was formerly known as the “ninth planet”.
It is nearly two years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its former status as a “proper” planet.
Now an IAU committee, meeting in Oslo, has suggested that small, nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune should carry the “plutoid” tag…
Check out NASA’s Moonstream. Its designed to make future moon (and hopefully Mars) explorations sexy. I think it works.
“The Moonstream is the ultimate space lounge, designed to change public perceptions of NASA and entice people to be more interested in the future mission to the moon. The Moonstream enables true comfort for habitants of vehicle and also provide an appealing setting for filming of the daily lives of people on the 1st ever moon road trip from the north to the south pole.”
At first I didn’t get into Second Life. I just didn’t get it. After breaking my primary MMO addictions I was able to step back to gain an outside perspective. Of all the MMOs that currently survive those that don’t require an initial investment work, and those that are free overall stay. NASA is another organization that seems to be taking advantage of The World of Second Life.
NASA is trying all manner of Web 2.0 software to promote its science to the tech-savvy crowd. Months ago, the media director at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab began sending out Twitter messages, or 140-character digital notes, about the Phoenix Lander mission to Mars. Now, NASA has created a so-called cybertwin for the Phoenix rover in the virtual world Second Life.
Even though the term “cybertwin” sounds very Web 1.0, the technology is based on techniques in artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing. Instead of tapping NASA’s media director for answers, the Phoenix cybertwin calls on a database of knowledge that’s been programmed by scientists from JPL. That way, people can ask questions of the Phoenix chat bot to receive quasi-personalized responses about the rover’s mission. (The cybertwin was developed by Australia-based start-up MyCyberTwin.)
As you might expect, the cybertwin comes off like a robot.
Q: What is your purpose?
[16:21] Phoenix: I’ll be using instruments to probe the northern polar site’s soil and ice and I’m here with three main objectives: to study the history of water on Mars, to determine if the Martian arctic soil could support life, and to study the Martian weather.
Q: What is your schedule?
[16:21] Phoenix: I have some pre-programmed commands but mostly I will wait for commands from Earth that arrive in the Martian morning and send my results back in the afternoon. So far I have had commands including the deployment of my robotic arm.
It’s hard to gauge whether the Second Life bot will resonate with the virtual community, considering that NASA Web 2.0 promotions can be a mixed bag. So far, the Twitter page has drawn thousands of followers, but Facebook is another story. The Phoenix Lander page on Facebook has only 16 fans. Turns out, social networks can be a lonely place, just like in space.
You can find the Phoenix cybertwin on the NASA Island in Second Life via this address.
One of the greatest strengths about science is that finding out that something is wrong is just as good as finding out that something is right. Recently NASA scientists used new infrared imaging from the Spitzer Space Telescope to determine that the universe is made up of two arms instead of four. This may not seem like much, but for those astronomers mapping galaxies it means everything.
On the left is an artist’s rendition of the revised structure of the Milky Way galaxy; on the right is an earlier sketch, showing the four-armed structure. Since the 1950s, scientists have continued to revise their models of the Milky Way.
War is hell. It doesn’t take people long to develop a stronger gun or a smarter bomb. In this case its an environmentally friendly bomb.
New environmentally friendly, nitrogen-based explosives could deliver more of a bang while being safer to handle than traditional charges, according to chemists at the University of Munich in Germany.
When detonated, common explosives now used in military and industrial applications such as TNT and RDX generate toxic gases that pollute the environment. They’re also dangerous to handle: They don’t like to be dropped or bumped and are super sensitive to electrical sparks.
To make them safer and reduce environmental dangers, German scientists have turned to tetrazoles—synthetic compounds that derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon, as do many conventional explosives. Tetrazoles are already used to generate the gas to fill the airbags in some cars.
Chemists at the University of Munich made tiny bombs from two tetrazoles called HBT and G2ZT, which not only proved more stable than conventional explosives but more powerful as well, according to researcher Thomas Klapötke. Here’s a video that shows it in action.
Unfortunately we can’t embed the video here so you’ll just have to follow the link to watch.
Lets see what Mars is really made of. NASA just reported that the Mars Lander’s touched the planet’s terrain for the first time on Saturday. Why is this important? We need to find ice and other minerals so we can colonize that ball of dirt. Its just plan stupid to put all of the eggs of humanity on just one planetary basket in case of mass destruction. Perpetuation of the species should be our number one priority. For those that are interested the Phoenix Mars Lander has its own Twitter Feed which is nice.
The effort, which came seven days after the lander touched down, is part of NASA’s efforts to scoop up Red Planet specimens for experiments on the lander.
A behemoth “footprint” was left behind by the robotic arm’s touch in the King of Hearts area of Mars. The mark, which was captured by the camera attached to the lander, looks like it could have been made by the mythological Himalayan snowman. In reference to this, NASA dubbed the impression area “Yeti.”
In another example of how science is awesome scientists made the worlds smallest noodle bowl.
Japanese scientists have made it more difficult to watch what you eat. They created a ramen bowl so small, it can only be seen with a microscope. The engineers carved the bowl out of microscopic nanotubes, and put a microscopic serving of noodles inside.
Link (there is an audio link of you follow it over)
Normally this is something one would read on Wikipedia very drily to pass the time. I stipulate normally in that sentence. Cracked.com did a damn good job about describing borderline mad scientist administering their experiments on themselves. As always an example is the best proof.
“...Drs. Warren and Marshall isolated the bacteria responsible for stomach ulcers, but the wider scientific community maintained that stress, lifestyle and general whining were the real cause. Dr. Marshall countered with the little known “frat party” method of science, declaring, “I’ll fucking show you” and drinking the vial of filthy bacteria they’d culled from the stomachs of ulcer suffers…”
