carmendrahl - Slashdot User

Submission + - Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself-with a bad trip (acs.org)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @04:45PM

carmendrahl writes: "In Austria, people can submit their street drugs to a lab-on-a-bus to ensure they got what they paid for. The government is using the bus to track emergence of new variants of bath salts and other drugs. Now, researchers have developed a test they'd like to add to the bus's offerings: it assesses drug action instead of just reporting chemical structure.
Note- this is a resubmit that fixes the broken link here."

Submission + - Some Scientists Are Questioning Sex Lubes' Safety (acs.org)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Monday December 10, 2012 @01:55PM

carmendrahl writes: "Some personal lubricants, like KY Warming Jelly, kill cells in lab tests or increase transmission of herpes in lab rodents compared to no lube. Now scientists are trying to figure out whether sex lubes are safe, or just smoothing the way for STDs. Lubricants could be a key part of anti-HIV gels, so the answer is important. It's complicated, because researchers must translate results from the lab to real life."

Submission + - Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself (with a bad trip)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Monday December 10, 2012 @01:42PM

carmendrahl writes: "In Austria, people can submit their street drugs to a lab-on-a-bus to ensure they got what they paid for. The government is using the bus to track emergence of new variants of bath salts and other drugs. Now, researchers have developed a test they'd like to add to the bus's offerings: it assesses drug action instead of just reporting chemical structure."

Submission + - Cancer takes one on the chin, courtesy of a six year old girl (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10, 2012 @11:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: For decades, one of cancer's most powerful weapons has been to corrupt the human immune system. Finally, researchers in Philadelphia have developed a way to turn that weapon against certain cancers, and potentially open the door to a whole new generation of therapies for all manner of cancers

Submission + - Nanosized probe tickles ear hair cells to mimic sound waves (acs.org)

Submitted by LilaG on Thursday December 06, 2012 @11:47AM

LilaG writes: A tiny probe simulates sound waves by tickling microscopic hairlike projections on inner ear cells. The device could help researchers understand how the cochlear cells' ion channels convert sound waves into electrical signals the brain can interpret, say the probe’s developers, who are from Stanford University.

Submission + - Thorium Fuel has Proliferation Risk (phys.org)

Submitted by Capt.Albatross on Thursday December 06, 2012 @10:18AM

Capt.Albatross writes: Thorium has attracted interest as a potentially safer fuel for nuclear power generation. In part, this has been because of the absence of a route to nuclear weapons, but a group of British scientists have identified a path that leads to uranium-233 via protactinium-233 from irradiated thorium. The protactinium separation could possibly be done with standard lab equipment, which would allow it to be done covertly, and deliver the minimum of U233 required for a weapon in less than a year.

The full article is in Nature, paywalled.

Submission + - Hunt For Male Pill Continues (acs.org)

Submitted by

MTorrice

on Tuesday September 25, 2012 @11:37AM

MTorrice writes: "When men and women plan their personal birth control strategies, men scan a much smaller menu of options than women do. A woman can pick from two types of intrauterine devices (IUDs), several forms of hormonal contraception such as the pill, multiple barrier methods such as diaphragms, or two sterilization procedures. A man can choose between a condom or a vasectomy.

Despite decades of research on male contraceptives, no treatment has moved past clinical trials to reach the market. And in the past five years, the few pharmaceutical players working on male contraception have mothballed their programs. Experts say part of the problem is that the normal hurdles drugs face—achieving high efficacy and low toxicity—are even higher for male contraceptives. A story in Chemical & Engineering News discuses work to develop new drugs that could overcome these barriers."

Submission + - Light Wakes Tadpoles from New Anesthetic (acs.org)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Monday September 24, 2012 @01:54PM

carmendrahl writes: "Now, it's shine and rise. Researchers have adapted a popular anesthetic so it can be switched off with blue-violet light. In a video, tadpoles exposed to the molecule wake up immediately with light shining on them, but when the light is moved away the effect is reversed and the tadpoles go back under.

The team developed the molecule in order to control responses to the neurotransmitter GABA. They aren't sure how useful the new molecule will be in anesthesia. They're planning to determine whether it might help improve visual responses in the retina, because GABA is involved in the biology of vision."

Submission + - Facial Recognition Software Bans Smiling on NJ Driver's Licenses

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Monday September 24, 2012 @11:28AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Dana DiFilippo writes that New Jersey has launched new face-recognition software and is forbidding license applicants from smiling widely or making other exaggerated facial expressions that might confuse the computer. The goal is to catch fraudsters. If the photo on a new driver's license matches another driver's license photo that carries a different name, a red flag goes up, and investigators step in. "That could be someone trying to steal someone else's identity to get insurance benefits, or someone trying to get out of a DUI by getting a license under another name," said Mike Horan, spokesman for the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. "This helps us weed out fraud." Four other states have already ordered people to wipe the grins off their faces in their license photos: Arkansas, Indiana, Nevada and Virginia. A total of 31 states do computerized matching of driver's license photos and in Illinois, photo matching has stopped 6,000 people from getting fraudulent licenses since the technology was launched in 1999. However Pennsylvania uses the very same facial recognition software and Jan McKnight, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, told the Inquirer: "You can smile in Pennsylvania.""

Submission + - Fermilab prepares for a future of muons (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo on Monday September 24, 2012 @10:25AM

ananyo writes: At Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, protons were always the primary particles, coursing through the circular tracks of the the Tevatron, which until 2009 was the highest energy collider in the world. But there's a new particle making the rounds at the Batavia, Illinois campus: the muon, a heavy but short-lived cousin of the electron — interesting both for its usefulness in testing the Standard Model, as well as potentially being used someday in a powerful colliderLink text.
On 19 September, the lab announced that the US Energy Department (DOE) had granted the $40 million experiment “mission need” approval, a first step towards eventual funding. Last month, a second muon experiment, called Mu2e and priced at $200 million, received a second stage blessing from the DOE.
The g-2 experiment will focus on an anomaly in the spin rate of a muon within a magnetic field, which some theorists believe is evidence that supersymmetry could resolve problems in the Standard Model. Meanwhile, the Mu2e experiment, which aims to begin taking data in 2019, will sift through many trillions of muons to see if any happen to spontaneously morph into their cousins, the electron — something that is almost entirely forbidden under the Standard Model.

Submission + - The Ongoing Rift in Forensics (acs.org)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Monday September 10, 2012 @11:37AM

carmendrahl writes: "Despite a 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences that found the science in crime labs wanting, very little reform of forensic science has taken place. At a session about the Innocence Project, a group that exonerates prisoners with DNA evidence, speakers called on chemists to join the fight for reform. But forensic chemists don't all agree on what needs reforming."

Submission + - Fujitsu Building Robot To Pass Math Exams (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Monday September 10, 2012 @11:37AM

itwbennett writes: "Pity those poor Japanese students who attend cram schools, either full time or in addition to their regular schooling, to have a shot at passing the grueling math entrance exams for Tokyo University. If Fujitsu has its way, those students will be upstaged by a robot. The company has set a goal for the year 2021 of building an artificial intelligence robot that can pass the exams."

Submission + - Tough, super-stretchy hydrogel could be used to replace cartilage (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Monday September 10, 2012 @04:52AM

cylonlover writes: Scientists at Harvard University have created a hydrogel that’s tough, biocompatible, self-healing, and can be repeatedly stretched to 21 times its regular length without breaking – all of which are qualities that could make it an ideal replacement for damaged cartilage in humans. Being a hydrogel, it’s composed mostly of water, although it also contains calcium ions, and a mix of two common polymers. While each of those polymers are fairly weak on their own, the results are truly impressive when they’re combined.

Submission + - Sugars in Mummies Survive Thousands of Years (acs.org)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Wednesday June 27, 2012 @03:23PM

carmendrahl writes: "The natural carbohydrates that serve to protect human proteins can survive for millenia in the preserved flesh of natural mummies such as Ötzi the Iceman. (These types of mummies differ from Egyptian mummies- in these cases the corpse encounters some extreme conditions that allow it to be preserved). Researchers reported this discovery last month at a mass spectrometry conference. It's a surprising finding- experts expected the sugars to have degraded long ago. The researchers who made the discovery hope to use their technique to learn more about the evolution of blood types, which are dictated by the carbohydrates attached to blood proteins."

Submission + - Debate Simmers over Science of Food Pairing (acs.org)

Submitted by

carmendrahl

on Wednesday June 20, 2012 @12:34PM

carmendrahl writes: "Why do foods taste good together? Scientists aren't anywhere near figuring it out, but that hasn't stopped one popular idea from spawning a company dedicated to discovering avant-garde new pairings. The idea, called flavor-pairing theory, says that if foods share a key odor molecule, they'll pair well. But some scientists say the idea can't explain all cuisines, and another contends his work with tomato flavor shows that flavor pairing is "a gimmick by a chef who is practicing biology without a license.""

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