New bionic-eye for the totally blind | Al Jazeera
Engineers in Australia have developed a technology they hope will allow totally blind people to see.
Unlike bionic-eye projects elsewhere, the Melbourne-based team’s system bypasses the body’s visual mechanics entirely.
Patients don’t even need eyes as the images are plugged straight into the brain.
Andrew Thomas reports from Melbourne.
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I mostly reblog awesome stuff.
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Science!
Space!
Music
Movies
Chemistry
Biology
Sci Fi
Ukulele
Hip Hop
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Hayao Miyazaki
And some other stuff.
XNA is synthetic DNA that’s stronger than the real thing
New research has brought us closer than ever to synthesizing entirely new forms of life. An international team of researchers has shown that artificial nucleic acids - called “XNAs” - can replicate and evolve, just like DNA and RNA.
We spoke to one of the researchers who made this breakthrough, to find out how it can affect everything from genetic research to the search for alien life.
The researchers, led by Philipp Holliger and Vitor Pinheiro, synthetic biologists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, say their findings have major implications in everything from biotherapeutics, to exobiology, to research into the origins of genetic information itself. This represents a huge breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology.
Science!
Stephen Colbert and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. This is the most perfect event that ever occurred ever.
Americium-241 (33 kBq / 0.9 µCi).
That purple-red metal in the middle is the synthesized, highly radioactive Americium-241 isotope as used in an ionization chamber smoke detector. This element does not exist naturally on Earth except in very small quantities within concentrated uranium ore due to beta decay and neutron capturing processes.
This isotope is fissionable with a critical mass of around 60 kg when shaped as a sphere (at which the diameter of the sphere is roughly the same as a volleyball). However, to acquire enough of the isotope to reach the critical mass solely through collecting smoke detectors, one must gather more than 215 000 000 smoke detectors.
It decays by emitting alpha particles and gamma radiation into neptunium-237, so after a while any sample of americium-241 will contain small amounts of neptunium-237 as well. Unlike most actinides which decays to lead, the neptunium series decays to thallium.
Scientists claim brain memory code cracked
ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2012) — Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.
In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona demonstrate a plausible mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons.
Microtubules are cylindrical hexagonal lattice polymers of the protein tubulin, comprising 15 percent of total brain protein. Microtubules define neuronal architecture, regulate synapses, and are suggested to process information via interactive bit-like states of tubulin. But any semblance of a common code connecting microtubules to synaptic activity has been missing. Until now.
Original paper here.
This is amazingly awesome.
The Atmosphere of Saturn’s Moon Titan
Titan (or Saturn VI) is the largest moon of Saturn. It is the only natural satellite known to have a fully developed dense atmosphere, and the only object other than Earth for which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found. The atmospheric composition in the stratosphere is 98.4% nitrogen—the only dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere in the Solar System aside from the Earth’s—with the remaining 1.6% composed of mostly of methane (1.4%) and hydrogen (0.1–0.2%).
Above: True-color image of layers of haze in Titan’s atmosphere.
Below: A graph detailing temperature, pressure, and other aspects of Titan’s climate. The atmospheric haze lowers the temperature in the lower atmosphere, while methane raises the temperature at the surface. Cryovolcanoes erupt methane into the atmosphere, which then rains down onto the surface, forming lakes.
Iridescent Dinosaurs
Photo illustration courtesy Jason Brougham, University of Texas
According to a new study, Microraptors—four-winged, feathered dinosaurs that lived 125 million years ago—sported Earth’s earliest known iridescence, as pictured in this illustration.
Recent research suggests the pigeon-size Microraptor’s feathers glimmered black and blue in sunlight, like feathers of modern crows or grackles.
The findings are the earliest evidence of iridescence in any creature-bird or dinosaur, said study leader Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Clarke and colleagues also suggest this iridescent coloring may have helped make Microraptor’s tail feathers even more eye-catching to mates.
Using an electron microscope, the researchers compared tiny, pigment-containing structures called melanosomes in a Microraptor fossil to melanosomes of living birds.
The team found that Microraptor’s melanosomes were narrow, elongated, and organized in a sheetlike orientation—features that produce an iridescent sheen on modern feathers.
“This study gives us an unprecedented glimpse at what this animal looked like when it was alive,” study team member Mark Norell, chair of the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology, said in a statement.
(See “True-Color Dinosaur Revealed: First Full-Body Rendering.”)
The new findings are detailed in this week’s issue of the journalScience.
—Ker Than
Emission spectra for a few elements. Spectroscopy is the foundation of astronomy
Oxygen discovered at Saturn’s moon Dione
Scientists now think oxygen production is a universal process wherever an icy moon is bathed in a strong trapped-radiation and plasma environment. — Published: March 2, 2012Dione, one of Saturn’s icy moons, has a weak exosphere that includes molecules of oxygen, according to new findings from the Cassini-Huygens mission.
The international mission made the discovery using combined data from the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS), which includes a sensor designed and built at the University College London’s (UCL) Mullard Space Science Laboratory.
Dione joins Rhea and the main rings in Saturn’s system in having an oxygen-rich exosphere, as well as Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto — the target for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) proposed JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission for launch in 2022.
“It now looks like oxygen production is a universal process wherever an icy moon is bathed in a strong trapped-radiation and plasma environment,” said Andrew Coates from UCL. “Energetic particles hit the icy surface, the hydrogen is lost, and molecular oxygen remains as an exosphere. We now know that this happens at Saturn’s moons as well as Jupiter’s, and it may well occur in extrasolar planetary systems, too.”
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Nomad Alien Planets May Fill Our Milky Way Galaxy
Our Milky Way galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets that ramble through space instead of being locked in orbit around a star, a new study suggests.
These “nomad planets” could be surprisingly common in our bustling galaxy, according to researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The study predicts that there may be 100,000 times more of these wandering, homeless planets than stars in the Milky Way.
If this is the case, these intriguing cosmic bodies would belong to a whole new class of alien worlds, shaking up existing theories of planet formation. These free-flying planets may also raise new and tantalizing questions in the search for life beyond Earth.
“If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist,” study leader Louis Strigari said in a statement. [continue reading…]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzwg0yJm4v1qe649zo1_500.jpg)
Nomad Alien Planets May Fill Our Milky Way Galaxy
Our Milky Way galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets that ramble through space instead of being locked in orbit around a star, a new study suggests.
These “nomad planets” could be surprisingly common in our bustling galaxy, according to researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The study predicts that there may be 100,000 times more of these wandering, homeless planets than stars in the Milky Way.
If this is the case, these intriguing cosmic bodies would belong to a whole new class of alien worlds, shaking up existing theories of planet formation. These free-flying planets may also raise new and tantalizing questions in the search for life beyond Earth.
“If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist,” study leader Louis Strigari said in a statement. [continue reading…]
