14216352
submission
cremeglace writes:
Scientists say they may have discovered a way to develop cool new vaccines—and they mean that literally. By replacing essential genes in a mammalian pathogen with their counterparts from Arctic bacteria, they have created strains that provoke a protective immune response in mice—but that don't spread to the warm parts of the body where they could do serious harm. The team hopes that the method will lead to a new generation of vaccines for major bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis. Full story at ScienceNOW.
14210046
submission
cremeglace writes:
A quarter-century of conventional detective work failed to track down the killer responsible for the deaths of at least 10 young women in south Los Angeles dating back to the mid-1980s. But a discarded piece of pizza and a relatively new method of DNA testing has finally cracked the case, police announced last week. On 7 July, L.A. police arrested Lonnie Franklin Jr., 57, a former garage attendant and sanitation worker they suspect is the serial killer nicknamed the "Grim Sleeper." The key evidence? A match between crime-scene DNA and the suspect's son. ScienceInsider has more details.
13687402
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cremeglace writes:
For the first time, an animal has drawn a breath with lungs cultivated in the lab. Although preliminary, the results might eventually lead to replacement lungs for patients. Researchers at Yale University have successfully applied a technique called decellularization that involves using detergent to remove all of the cells from an organ, leaving a scaffold consisting of the fibrous material between cells. More details at ScienceNOW.
13564634
submission
cremeglace writes:
Researchers at MIT have come up with a new way of making batteries from carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are attractive materials for battery-making because of their high surface area, which can accept more positive ions and potentially last longer than conventional batteries. Instead of this design, the MIT researchers introduced something new--using chemically modified carbon nanotubes as the positive ion source themselves. For now, the new batteries can power only small devices, but if the method can be scaled up, the batteries may provide the power needed for applications like electric cars. More details at ScienceNOW.
13230004
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cremeglace writes:
In the late 1990s, astronomers noticed a distinct warp in the disk of dust and gas orbiting a young star some 60 light-years from Earth. Now, using new analytical tools, researchers have discovered a giant planet lurking within the dusty haze. About nine times as massive as Jupiter and composed mainly of gas, the planet is only a few million years old, proving that such enormous planetary bodies can form rapidly.
13039974
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cremeglace writes:
The journal Science is sponsoring the 3rd-annual "Dance Your Ph.D." contest. Grad students in science-related fields create a video of their dissertation, interpreted in dance form, and compete for $1000 and a screening at a film festival in New York. "Science-related field" is broadly defined and includes computer science and engineering. Some funny videos from past years of the contest are up at the contest website, and an official announcement is in the print edition of this week's Science.
12325862
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cremeglace writes:
A team led by a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has used text-analysis software to detect tweets pertaining to various issues—such as whether President Barack Obama is doing a good job—and measure the frequency of positive or negative words ranging from “awesome” to “sucks.” The results were surprisingly similar to traditional surveys. For example, the ratio of Twitter posts expressing either positive or negative sentiments about President Obama produced a “job approval rating” that closely tracked the big Gallup daily poll across 2009. The analysis also produced classic economic indicators like consumer confidence. ScienceNOW has the full story.
11823932
submission
cremeglace writes:
No one had seen a laser reflector that Soviet scientists had left on the moon almost 40 years ago, despite years of searching. Turns out searchers had been looking kilometers in the wrong direction. On 22 April, a team of physicists finally saw an incredibly faint flash from the reflector, which was ferried across the lunar surface by the Lunokhod 1 rover. The find comes thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which last month imaged a large area where the rover was reported to have been left. Then the researchers, led by Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego, could search one football-field-size area at a time until they got a reflection.
11583516
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cremeglace writes:
Whether for online bills or military secrets, encryption schemes help keep digital communication secure. In recent years, physicists and engineers have been developing methods that transmit uncrackable encode messages in individual particles of light, or photons. Now, one team has taken such quantum cryptography a long step forward by demonstrating a system that’s fast enough to encrypt a video transmission. “From the applications point of view, it’s very important,” says Hoi-Kwong Lo, a physicist at the University of Toronto in Canada.
11495646
submission
cremeglace writes:
Astrophysicists have found that when a supermassive black hole quickly devours gas and dust, it can generate enough radiation to abort all the embryonic stars in the surrounding galaxy. It's not clear what this means for life's ability to take hold in such a bleak environment, but the research shows that the process might have determined the fates of many of the large galaxies in the universe.
11283228
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cremeglace writes:
In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang.
11253372
submission
cremeglace writes:
Saturn boasts one of the solar system's most geometrical features: a giant hexagon encircling its north pole. Though not as famous as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, Saturn's Hexagon is equally mysterious. Now researchers have recreated this formation in the lab using little more than water and a spinning table—an important first step, experts say, in finally deciphering this cosmic mystery. More details, including a cool demo video, at ScienceNOW.
11228058
submission
cremeglace writes:
Americans don't have the guts for sushi. At least that's the implication of a new study, which finds that Japanese people harbor enzymes in their intestinal bacteria that help them digest seaweed enzymes that North Americans lack. What's more, Japanese may have first acquired these enzymes by eating bacteria that thrive on seaweed in the open ocean.
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submission
cremeglace writes:
Shaped into the likes of the Death Star of Star Wars fame by the giant crater Herschel, 396-kilometer-diameter Mimas was expected to have its warmest surface temperatures on the equator, where it was early afternoon. Instead, it was warmest in the morning (all of 92 K), giving rise in the science team's temperature-calibrated color scheme to a very large Pac-Man. See full article for image.
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submission
cremeglace writes:
A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. “Since water covers most of the earth, don’t dim the sun,” says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research here. “Brighten the water.” ScienceNOW has more details in Could tiny bubbles cool the planet?.
