33650391
submission
Med-trump writes:
A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory in South Korea last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx.
26805650
submission
Med-trump writes:
One year ago a media controversy was ignited when Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues held a press conference to announce the discovery of a bacterium that not only survived high levels of arsenic in its environment but also seemed to use that element in its DNA. Last week, the genome of the bacterium, known as GFAJ-1, which gets its name from the acronym for "Give Felisa a Job." (No joke!), was posted in Genbank, the public repository of DNA sequences for all who care to take a look. But it doesn't settle the debate over whether arsenic is used in DNA.
26371814
submission
Med-trump writes:
Alberta's Can$60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: "the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure — and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question."
25537456
submission
Med-trump writes:
Scientists now report that they have made a non-DNA molecular knot.
They created a 160-atom-loop with five crossing points, a molecular pentafoil knot. The researchers used a technique known as "self-assembly" to prepare the knot in a chemical reaction. Apparently 85% of the elasticity of natural rubber is due to knot-like entanglements in the rubber molecules chains.
24445346
submission
Med-trump writes:
Scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory have reprogrammed an adult human egg cell to an embryonic state using cloning technology and created a self-reproducing line of embryonic stem cells from the developing embryo.
24300714
submission
Med-trump writes:
The US government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time.
23502532
submission
Med-trump writes:
Can you get a text output of your thoughts? Princeton scientists show that it is possible to generate text about the mental content reflected in brain images. The paper published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience describe the functional magnetic resonance imaging method used to identify areas of the brain activated when study participants thought about physical objects such as a carrot, a horse or a house.
23447184
submission
Med-trump writes:
Stanford microsurgeons used a poloxamer gel and bioadhesive rather than a needle and thread to join together blood vessels. The technique published in the recent issue of Nature Medicine may replace the 100 year old method of reconnecting severed blood vessels with sutures. According to the authors of the study, "ultimately, this has the potential to improve patient care by decreasing amputations, strokes and heart attacks while reducing health-care costs."
22681552
submission
Med-trump writes:
Stanford researchers say they have developed a transparent battery. Trasparent futuristic gadgets have been a topic of science fiction and dream of engineers. The paper "Transparent lithium-ion batteries" was published in the July 25 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They used a grid-structured electrode, which is fabricated by a microfluidics-assisted method, such that the feature dimension in the electrode is below the resolution limit of human eyes, and, thus, the electrode appears transparent.
22465866
submission
Med-trump writes:
Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Now scientists have identified a piece of Neanderthal DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome and conclude that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals. The study was published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
