‘Six blind patients have had their sight partially restored by a “bionic eye” surgically implanted on to their retina. Although it restores only very rudimentary vision, the device has proved so successful that its developers are about to begin a study of a more sophisticated version with between 50 and 75 patients.
If this trial goes to plan the device could be available to patients in two years, and one day it could be used to digitally enhance human sight. The bionic eye works by converting images from a tiny camera mounted on a pair of glasses into a grid of 16 electrical signals that transmit directly to the nerve endings in the retina.’
‘The United Nations has been urged to launch a space mission designed to take out an asteroid threatening to smash into the Earth in 2036.
In scenes straight out of Hollywood action movie Armageddon, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists say they are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a one in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036. [..]
“It’s not just Apophis we’re looking at. Every country is at risk. We need a set of general principles to deal with this issue,” Mr Schweickart, a member of the Apollo 9 crew that orbited the moon in March 1969, told an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.’
Followup to NASA looks for solutions to asteroid problem.
‘Just when you think Republicans can’t get any crazier, we find out that the powerful chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, Warren Chisum, doesn’t even believe that the earth revolves around the sun.’
‘The opiate drug morphine is effective in easing long-standing coughs, as doctors have suspected, a study shows.
Physicians have been prescribing, on a hunch, the powerful drug to people with stubborn coughs for years.
But until now, there was no hard proof from a trial comparing the effect of morphine with a dummy treatment.’
This stuff bounces for ages. It’s excellent. :)
If I could bounce this much I’d rule the world. And you’d all love it.
(3.6meg Google video)
see it here »
‘AIDs patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs – and with fewer side effects – according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot.
In a five-day study performed in a specially ventilated hospital ward where patients smoked three marijuana cigarettes a day, more than half the participants tallied significant reductions in pain.
By contrast, less than one-quarter of those who smoked “placebo” pot, which had its primary psychoactive ingredients removed, reported benefits, as measured by subjective pain reports and standardized neurological tests.’
‘The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
(23.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Deep in the dusty, unlit corridors of Kenya’s national museum, locked away in a plain-looking cabinet, is one of mankind’s oldest relics: Turkana Boy, as he is known, the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found.
But his first public display later this year is at the heart of a growing storm — one pitting scientists against Kenya’s powerful and popular evangelical Christian movement. The debate over evolution vs. creationism — once largely confined to the United States — has arrived in a country known as the cradle of mankind.
“I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it,” says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of Kenya’s 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims have 10 million followers. “These sorts of silly views are killing our faith.”‘
‘Researchers who wanted to find out why it is not only taboo to kiss your sister, but also disgusting, said on Wednesday they have discovered why in a discovery that challenges some basic tenets of Freudian theory.
The instinct evolved naturally and cannot be taught, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California Santa Barbara wrote in their report in the journal Nature. [..]
“This data shows that the degree to which we feel those things is governed by these cues that, for hunter-gatherers, predict whether somebody is a sibling. And it works regardless of your beliefs — who you are told who your siblings are,” she said.’
‘It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I’m sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol, Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab, which contains a glowing caldera of “plasma” three times as hot as the surface of the sun. Every few minutes there’s a horrific clanking noise—grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue makes when it first ignites.
“Is it supposed to do that?” I ask Longo nervously. “Yup,” he says. “That’s normal.”’
‘In an apparent acknowledgment of the plummeting standard of public scientific education in the West, the UN’s nuclear tentacle today unveiled a new danger sign for radiation which must approach the nadir of literalism. [..]
Spokeswoman Caroline MacKenzie summed up the new stance against Darwinian natural selection, and in favour of Homer Simpson: “We can’t teach the world about radiation, but we can warn people about dangerous sources for the price of sticker.”
So, as well as the traditional exclamation mark trefoil, a skull and crossbones is there to belt and braces the fact that radiation isn’t nice. Any dunderheads then unsure of what to do in such circumstances are further helped out by the addition of the image of a running stick man.’
see it here »
‘Grocery store shopping cart handles have more germs than public restrooms, making them one of the worst public places for germs, according to researchers.
It’s a problem that at least one state, Arkansas, is trying to address, by passing a law forcing stores to clean up their carts.
How germy could shopping carts really be? Very, according to researchers at the University of Arizona who tested all kinds of public surfaces. They found that shopping carts were loaded with more saliva, bacteria and even fecal matter than escalators, public telephones, and even public bathrooms.
The only surfaces that had more germs were playground equipment and bus rails.’
‘Your body is your canvas. Tattoos and piercings can be the brushstrokes used on that canvas.
But when you’re a teenager, do you really think about how you will breast-feed your baby if you have nipple rings?
The subject might be of limited interest, but there is enough speculation about it that the June/July edition of AWHONN Lifelines – the official magazine of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses – explores the issue.
And it finds, surprisingly, that “women with healed nipple piercings can breast-feed and should be encouraged to do so.”’
‘Men who have had a vasectomy may face an increased risk of developing a rare type of dementia marked by a steady loss of language skills, researchers said on Tuesday.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, writing in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, linked this male sterilization surgery to a neurological condition called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA. [..]
Of those with primary progressive aphasia, 40 percent had undergone a vasectomy, compared to 16 percent of the others. Those with PPA also suffered the ailment an average of four years earlier than the others.’
‘Soap can be made from just about any kind of fat. Even though fat from bacon, called lard, isn’t the finest of fats to use for making soap, it somehow seemed to be the most exciting. Why? Because bacon is amazing. It has an almost mystical power to it and is a food that can be craved to almost no end. I figured what better way use the extra grease I had from cooking bacon then to turn it into soap!’
‘Medical researchers need more marijuana sources because government supplies aren’t meeting scientific demand, a federal judge has ruled.
In an emphatic but nonbinding opinion, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own judge is recommending that a University of Massachusetts professor be allowed to grow a legal pot crop. The real winners could be those suffering from painful and wasting diseases, proponents believe.
“The existing supply of marijuana is not adequate,” Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled.’
‘Feeling insecure in close relationships may take a toll on the immune system, preliminary Italian research suggests.
A team led by Dr Angelo Picardi from the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome reports its findings in the current issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
In a study of 61 healthy women the researchers found that those who had difficulty establishing close, trusting relationships showed signs of weaker immune function.
Specifically, lab experiments showed that the women’s “natural killer” immune system cells were less lethal compared with those from other study participants.’
‘Former One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, the outspoken proponent of polarising immigration policies, has discovered she is of Middle Eastern heritage.
Ms Hanson said she was “amazed” and “mystified” to learn of her ancestry.
A recent DNA swab, taken with Ms Hanson’s permission by The Sunday Mail, has revealed the controversial former MP’s genetic makeup is drawn from a rich multicultural background, with 9 per cent originating in the Middle East, 32 per cent from Italy, Greece or Turkey and 59 per cent from northern Europe.
When told of the results, the former fish and chip shop owner appeared flustered, making references to “rape and pillage” in ancient times, adding: “All I can think of is that probably down the track it eventuated from some war.’
‘The apparent key to the difference was that LSD activated the receptor in a subtly different way from natural chemicals, said Mount Sinai’s Stuart C. Sealfon, a co-author of the paper. The receptor seems to be “like a switch that can go on in more than one direction,” he explained.
When the mind-bending drug activated the receptor, it not only triggered the typical changes in the cell, it caused additional cell responses, he said. The evidence for this, the group reported, was that the LSD seemed to cause a characteristic chain reaction of brain chemistry involving a class of molecules called G proteins, which are often involved in normal signaling processes.’
‘Our past contributions to the field of gelatin-related studies include our quest for the Ultimate Jell-O shot, setting a Jell-O shot on fire, and mixing homemade ballistics gel. If anything involves Jell-O and science, we’re there. So it was with great interest that we read Graeme Cole’s groundbreaking research into the feasibility of securing Jell-O to a vertical surface by means of manually impacted cylindrical metal fasteners – otherwise known as “nailing Jell-O to a wall.”’
‘Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations.
D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel “universes”), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach.’
This is a video of that woman who smells like a fish.
Followup to: Smells Like Dead Fish
(6.3meg Windows media)
see it here »
‘String theory could be ruled out by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator scheduled to open by the end of 2007, a new study says. The finding offers a new approach for testing this potential “theory of everything”, a goal that has so far proven elusive. [..]
In 2006, string theorist Allan Adams of MIT in Cambridge, US, and others offered a more promising check. They showed that some particle collisions could reveal whether certain fundamental assumptions underlying string theory are wrong.
Now, another team has shown that the energies needed to reveal such effects are achievable at the LHC, which is being built in Geneva, Switzerland. The team was led by Jacques Distler of the University of Texas in Austin, US.’
‘With the rising use of radioisotopes in medicine and the growing use of radiation detectors in a security-conscious nation, patients are triggering alarms in places where they may not even realize they’re being scanned, doctors and security officials say.
Nearly 60,000 people a day in the United States undergo treatment or tests that leave tiny amounts of radioactive material in their bodies, according to the Society of Nuclear Medicine. It is not enough to hurt them or anyone else, but it is enough to trigger radiation alarms for up to three months.’
`The tiny skeletal remains of human “Hobbits” found on an Indonesian island belong to a completely new branch of our family tree, a study has found.
The finds caused a sensation when they were announced to the world in 2004.
But some researchers argued the bones belonged to a modern human with a combination of small stature and a brain disorder called microcephaly.
That claim is rejected by the latest study, which compares the tiny people with modern microcephalics.’
`On 27 January, Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) switched itself into a protective “safe mode” after a short in its electronics. NASA engineers believe the fault has killed the camera’s ability to see deep and wide. “It’s really a blow to Hubble science; there’s no way around that fact,” says Holland Ford, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and principal investigator for ACS. He adds that of the roughly 800 current proposals for using Hubble, two-thirds involved the ACS.’
`Paris-based satellite company Eutelsat is investigating “unidentified interference” with its satellite broadcast services that temporarily knocked out several television and radio stations. The company declined to say whether it thought the interference was accidental or deliberate.
The problem began Tuesday afternoon, blocking several European, Middle East and northeast African radio and television stations, as well as Agence France-Presse’s news service. All transferred their satellite transmissions to another frequency to resume operations.’
‘The US wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming.
It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a UN report on climate change, the first part of which is due out on Friday.’
`People living in the western region of the United States may be the most likely to become victims of a serial killer, while those living in the Northeast may be the least likely, according to a new study led by James DeFronzo, professor emeritus of sociology.
The study, published in the February issue of the journal Homicide Studies, also found that someone living in California may be almost three times more likely to become the victim of a male serial killer than a person living in the state of New York.’
‘Patients with premature ejaculation who used a topical anaesthetic spray were able to delay ejaculation for five times as long, according to a study in the February issue of the urology journal BJU International. [..]
“The men who were prescribed the TEMPE spray, which delivers a combination of lidocaine and prilocaine, managed to delay ejaculation by just under an extra four minutes after using the product” reports Professor Wallace Dinsmore from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast.’
