Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

Marin environmentalist claims recreating extinct species is possible

Stewart Brand
© Larry Busacca/Getty ImagesStewart Brand poses for a portrait during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
Long Beach, San Francisco - Speaking from the prestigious TED Conference in Long Beach Wednesday, Sausalito activist Stewart Brand said scientists are developing the ability to reassemble an extinct animal's genome, and even recreate the animal itself.

Brand, who gained fame after he campaigned to have the original NASA space photos of earth published, and subsequently created the Whole Earth Catalog, said Wednesday that "de-extinction" could be used to help restore organisms and habitats damaged human activity, according to a report in the Marin Independent Journal.

A team of Harvard geneticists are currently working to bring back the passenger pigeon, which has been extinct since 1914, according to the TED website. The passenger pigeon is considered a keystone species because it aided the survival of the buffalo, according to TED. Researchers believe it may now be possible to alter the genetic makeup of a close relative, the band-tailed pigeon, to re-engineer the passenger pigeon.

Magnify

Virtopsy: A new alternative to traditional autopsy

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The body of a 50-year-old man run over by a train. Note the severed spine.
Scientific advances have led experts to pioneer the 'virtopsy', a non-invasive imaging process which can reveal details conventional methods would have missed

Anyone who has spent any time in a courtroom knows how easy it is for a skilled defence lawyer to plant doubt in the mind of a jury. Even in a relatively straightforward case, such as a hit and run, jurors are frequently presented with such a confusing array of photographic and forensic evidence that it is very difficult to know what has taken place and who may be at fault.

But what if there was a kind of technology that could reconstruct the crime scene in 3D and match it to other forensic imaging data? Furthermore, what if this technology could see through skin, bone and even soft tissue to detect bullet fragments overlooked by traditional pathologists equipped only with a scalpel and the human eye?

That is the promise of virtual autopsy - or "virtopsy" - a radical new approach to forensic imaging developed in Switzerland that is fast winning converts in Britain and elsewhere.

Just as forensic pathologists at the University of Leicester recently used computed tomography (CT) to identify the two fatal blows to the Plantagenet king Richard III, so a team of Zurich-based radiologists and pathologists is now using similar CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to help solve modern-day murders and crimes.

The difference is that the Swiss team, led by Professor Michael Thali of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Zurich, has gone a stage further, not only using X-ray imaging to create scalpel-free 3D images of intact cadavers but also building a "Virtobot" capable of carrying out precise postmortem tissue sampling - and all without exposing pathologists to harmful radiation or bodily contaminants.

Galaxy

DNA 'ingredients' discovered in interstellar space; odds of discovering alien life increase

Milky Galaxy
© Wikimedia CommonsArtist's conception of the Milky Way galaxy.
It's a significant finding in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

According to astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope, evidence of prebiotic molecules have been discovered in interstellar space - the first such evidence unearthed. The finding, according to experts, could increase the odds of discovering life outside of our own solar system.

Among the prebiotic molecules discovered by a team of Virginia astronomy students includes a molecule called ethanamine, which is thought to produce adenine, one of the four nucleobases that form the rungs of DNA. Another newly-discovered molecule, called cyanomethanimine, is thought to have a role in the formation of the amino acid alanine - a key process in biology. Laboratories at the University of Virginia and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics measured radio emission from cyanomethanimine and ethanamine, and the frequency patterns from those molecules then were matched to publicly-available data produced by a survey done with the GBT from 2008 to 2011, researcher said in a statement released to the press Thursday.

Question

NASA discovers new radiation belt around Earth

Radiation Belt_1
© NASA/Van Allen Probes/Goddard Space Flight CenterTwo giant swaths of radiation, known as the Van Allen Belts, surrounding Earth were discovered in 1958. In 2012, observations from the Van Allen Probes showed that a third belt can sometimes appear. The radiation is shown here in yellow, with green representing the spaces between the belts.
A ring of radiation previously unknown to science fleetingly surrounded Earth last year before being virtually annihilated by a powerful interplanetary shock wave, scientists say.

NASA's twin Van Allen space probes, which are studying the Earth's radiation belts, made the cosmic find. The surprising discovery - a new, albeit temporary, radiation belt around Earth - reveals how much remains unknown about outer space, even those regions closest to the planet, researchers added.

After humanity began exploring space, the first major find made there were the Van Allen radiation belts, zones of magnetically trapped, highly energetic charged particles first discovered in 1958.

"They were something we thought we mostly understood by now, the first discovery of the Space Age," said lead study author Daniel Baker, a space scientist at the University of Colorado.

Fireball

Big meteorite discovered in Antarctica

Antarctica Meteorite_1
© International Polar FoundationThe fifth largest meteorite ever found in East Antarctica was discovered Jan. 28 by an international team of meteorite hunters.
Meteorite hunters at the bottom of the world bagged a rare find this southern summer: a 40-pound (18 kilogram) chunk of extraterrestrial rock.

A team from Belgium and Japan discovered the hefty meteorite as the members drove across the East Antarctic plateau on snowmobiles. Initial tests show it is an ordinary chondrite, the most common type of meteorite found on Earth, Vinciane Debaille, a geologist from Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said in a statement.

"This is the biggest meteorite found in East Antarctica for 25 years," Debaille said. "This is something very exceptional. When you find such a meteorite on Earth, it means that when it was in the sky, it was much larger."

Alarm Clock

Where does our sense of time come from?

Time
© Wikimedia CommonsThe Past, oil painting on linen by Anastasiya Markovich.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity - showing that wristwatches of two observers in motion relative to one another will measure time differently. Since then, our human concept of time has gotten slippery. It's no longer possible to think of time as ticking along at a constant rate since the universe was born, separate from our own human perceptions.

Studies have borne out the idea that we all perceive time differently. For example, in 2001, two scientists at University College London conducted research showing that our internal clocks don't always match either. My internal clock doesn't tick at the same rate as yours. Everyone's sense of time is different and, at least in part, dependent on what our senses are telling us about the external world.

The UCL scientists - Misha B. Ahrens and Maneesh Sahani - wanted to answer the question, "Where does our sense of time come from?" Their research indicated that we humans use our senses - for example, the sense of sight - to help keep track of short intervals of time.

According to Ahrens and Sahani, we humans have learned to expect our sensory inputs to change at a particular average rate. They said that comparing the change we see to this average value helps us judge how much time has passed, and refines our internal timekeeping.

Top Secret

Pandora's Boxes: Inside nanotechnology's little universe of big unknowns

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© ru.wikipedia.org
A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University's Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them - the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina's piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.

Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.

The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke's Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.

Cassiopaea

White dwarf supernovae are discovered in Virgo cluster galaxy and in sky area 'Anonymous'

Supernova
© HETDiscovery of Supernova 2012ha, the bright spot in the image at the edge of a galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, was confirmed by a spectrogram obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory. The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the Type 1a discovery as Supernova 2012ha.
Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova.

A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who made the initial observation.

The exploding star is in a relatively empty portion of the sky labeled "anonymous" in the faint constellation Canes Venatici. Home to a handful of galaxies, Canes Venatici is near the constellation Ursa Major, best known for the Big Dipper.

A second supernova discovered Nov. 20 exploded about 230 million years ago, said Ferrante, who made the initial observation. That exploding star is in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo constellation.

Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment's robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

The supernova that exploded about 450 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2013X. It occurred when life on Earth consisted of creatures in the seas and oceans and along coastlines. Following naming conventions for supernova, Supernova 2013X was nicknamed "Everest" by Govinda Dhungana, an SMU graduate student who participated in the discovery.

The supernova that exploded about 230 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2012ha. The light from that explosion has been en route to Earth since the Triassic geologic period, when dinosaurs roamed the planet. "That's fairly recent as these explosions go," Ferrante said. Dhungana gave the nickname "Sherpa" to Supernova 2012ha.

Saturn

Hidden moons lurk in Saturn's rings

Saturn's Rings
© NASA/JPL/SSIContact! The short, bright streaks of a propeller called “Bleriot” show the location of a mini-moon.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is orbited by a large extended family of moons - 62, at last count - ranging in size from the gigantic 3,200-mile-wide Titan, wrapped in thick clouds, to the barely 2-mile-wide Methone, smooth as a river rock. But there are even more moons in the ringed planet's retinue, tiny worlds embedded inside the icy rings themselves. Even with the Cassini spacecraft they are nearly impossible to see... until they give themselves away with their shining "propellers."

In the image above we get a view across 9,000 miles of Saturn's A ring, the outermost of the main ring structures, with Saturn itself well off frame to the left. Inside one of the darker segments of the rings, at lower left center, are two short, bright streaks - one pointing up, one pointing down. This is what the Cassini science team calls a "propeller," a clumping of ring particles in front of and behind a tiny moonlet located between the two "blades."

Robot

HAL robotic suit gets international safety certificate

HAL Suit
© CyberdyneHal Suit.
We've been following the HAL robotic suit for a while now, and for good reason: Look at that thing! That looks like the future right there. And now it's gotten a worldwide stamp of safety approval.

This is how HAL works in a nutshell: Hop in, move an appendage slightly, and the suit detects the movement. After that, it guides your natural movement, but with robotic efficiency. So if you're a senior citizen that has trouble getting around, you can move your arm slightly and let HAL help you reach the top shelf. It's powered by a 22-pound battery attached to the waist, and the leg braces can help the wearer walk, and even climb stairs.