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Biotech

Thin Water Acts Like a Solid 138

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mash-downs dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."
Books

Submission + - New Book: "How To Pull An Allnighter"

Submitted by
SmarterThanCaffeine
SmarterThanCaffeine writes: "New Book About How To Pull An All-Nighter Book covers topics such as cognitive effects of sleep deprivation, use of glucose and caffeine during all-nighters, sleep debt, caffeine, avoiding fatty foods, memory, circadian rhythm http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/4/emw52001 1.htm Publisher's Web site for this book: http://www.lulu.com/content/710402"
Biotech

Submission + - Stem Cell Signaling Mystery Solved

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "A newly discovered small molecule called IQ-1 plays a key role in preventing embryonic stem cells from differentiating into one or more specific cell types, allowing them to instead continue growing and dividing indefinitely, according to research performed by a team of scientists who recently have joined the stem cell research efforts at the Keck School of Medicine of USC."
Science

Some Dinosaurs Made Underground Dens 124

Posted by kdawson from the dig-it dept.
anthemaniac writes "Scientists have long puzzled over how some dinosaurs and other creatures survived the asteroid impact that supposedly caused the KT mass extinction 65 million years ago and wiped out all the big dinosaurs. One idea has been that smaller animals, including mammals, could have endured the fallout, the big chill, the subsequent volcanoes, and whatever else by burrowing. Now scientists have come up with the first evidence of burrowing dinosaurs. They speculate that underground dens might explain how some dinosaurs got through long, dark winters at high latitudes, too."
Biotech

Single Gene Gives Mice Three-Color Vision 184

Posted by kdawson from the colors-you-can't-see dept.
maynard writes "A study in the peer-reviewed journal Science shows that mice transgenetically altered with a single human gene are then able to see in full tri-color vision. Mice without this alteration are normally colorblind. The scientists speculate that mammalian brains even from animals that have never evolved color vision are flexible enough to interpret new color-sense information with just the simple addition of new photoreceptors. Such a result is also indicated by a dominant X chromosome mutation that allows for quad-color vision in some women." A sidebar in the article includes a nice illustration of what two-color vs. three-color mice might perceive.
Education

Submission + - Mossie CO2 receptor identified

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team led by Rockefeller University, writing in Nature, has found that that mosquitoes [which were already known to be very sensitive to detecting carbon dioxide in exhaled breath] have identified the receptor responsible for detecting carbon dioxide. In a structure extending from their jaws, mosquitoes are able to sense carbon dioxide gas using protein receptors which were similar to fly proteins [Gr21a and Gr63a]. When they switched on these two proteins in fly, which normally can not detect carbon dioxide, the flies were able to detect carbon dioxide with their antenna. From the article: "the identification of the carbon dioxide receptor provides a potential target for the design of inhibitors that would act as an insect repellent. "These inhibitors would help fight global infectious disease by reducing the attraction of blood-feeding insects to humans." Dr Simon Hay, an expert in malaria at the University of Oxford, said: "Curiously, the work could also open the opportunity for the development of attractants, used to lure mosquitoes away from humans. "Increasing the distance mosquitoes have to fly for blood meals has long been known to increase their mortality and thus decrease disease transmission."
Wine

Submission + - Alcohol more harmful than LSD or ecstacy.

Submitted by
ozmanjusri
ozmanjusri writes: "Professor David Nutt and colleagues have used a comprehensive 9-category matrix of harm to suggest commonly used drugs such as alcohol and tobacco are more damaging than many illicit drugs such as LSD and ecstacy. According to Professor Nutt, in a press release from the Bristol University,

"Drug misuse and abuse are major health problems. Our methodology offers a systematic framework and process that could be used by national and international regulatory bodies to assess the harm of current and future drugs of abuse."
While a sensible framework to assess harm from recreational drugs is helpful, I would be wary of wider adoption of such a scale, since it doesn't take into account the benefits of each drug.

If they could integrate a 9-category of positives; well I'd drink to that..."
Biotech

Submission + - Mice get human gene, can see color

Submitted by troll -1
troll -1 writes: Mice are dichromats, they have only S and M cone pigments. They don't see color too well. But now researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of California at Santa Barbara have successfully transformed their vision by introducing a single human gene into a mouse chromosome. Jeremy Nathans, one of the authors of the study, describes it as 'the same evolutionary event that happened in one of the distant ancestors of all primates and that led ultimately to the trichromatic color vision'.
Sci-Fi

France Opens Secret UFO Files 379

Posted by CowboyNeal from the mulder-and-scully dept.
Radon360 notes that France has become the first country to open its files on UFOs. A new website lists over 1600 sightings dating back to the 1950s. "The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists. Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption."
Mars

NASA's Instrument For Detecting Life On Mars 88

Posted by kdawson from the knock-knock dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "With the financial help of NASA, American and European researchers have developed a new sensor to check for life on Mars. It should also be able to determine if traces of life's molecular building blocks have been produced by anything that was once alive. The device has been tested in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It should be part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013."
Announcements

Submission + - What's new in study of human evolution?

Submitted by je ne sais quoi
je ne sais quoi writes: MSNBC/Newsweek has an informative article summarizing a lot of the recent advancements in tracing the evolution of modern humans. From the article:

Unlike the earlier wave of Homo erectus into Asia a million years ago, the first modern humans, the ancestors of everyone today, departed Africa about 66,000 years ago... These pilgrims were strikingly few. From the amount of variation in Y chromosomes today, population geneticists infer how many individuals were in this "founder" population. The best estimate: 2,000 men. Assuming an equal number of women, only 4,000 brave souls ventured forth from Africa. We are their descendants.
The article emphasizes that evolution is not necessarily linear, in that a given trait might show up multiple times before being used by a successful species. We've come a long way from the old story of humanoid evolution that goes in a more or less linear chain from Australopithicus to Homo Sapiens.
Privacy

Subliminal Messages Might Actually Work 172

Posted by kdawson from the buy-popcorn-now dept.
GrumpySimon writes "New research indicates that subliminal messages may actually work. In a paper titled Attentional Load Modulates Responses of Human Primary Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli, Bahrani et al. demonstrate that even though stimuli may not be available to consciousness, they are processed by the visual cortex. While I'm sure that marketing agencies all over the world are rubbing their hands in glee at this news, the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will. So with any luck the use of subliminal messages in advertising will remain an urban legend."
Space

Submission + - YORP effect observed and measured

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (Yorp) effect describes the torque, or rotational force, created when light particles hit the surface of an object, causing it to heat up. The theory was proposed in order to explain various Solar System phenomena which show peculiar regular behaviour. From the article: Now, separate studies published in the journals Nature and Science have observed and measured the tiny stellar shoves on two spinning asteroids. They reveal that both are gradually starting to spin faster and faster, which could eventually create new Solar System landmarks. "If we can spin up an asteroid so fast, there's a really good chance that these objects will fly apart," said Dr Stephen Lowry, a planetary astronomer at Queen's University Belfast and lead author of one of two Science papers. In this case, the fragments could form a binary asteroid where two objects orbit each other, he said. "This is a phenomenon that gradually affects the evolution of the Solar System," said Dr Mikko Kaasalainen of the University of Helsinki, who is an author of the Nature paper.
Biotech

Submission + - New insights about "Mad Cow" disease origi

Submitted by Gabro
Gabro writes: Fabrizio Tagliavini, of the Besta Institute in Milan, has declared "It is false that the BSE — the mad cow disease — is originated from an unique prion. As a matter of facts, we discovered a different form — called BASE — which can evolve BSE. This is the 'first cause' of BSE and could lead to other important discoveries.". Link to the press release (in Italian) and to the .

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All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. -- Dawkins

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