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Cloning Used To Create Human Stem Cells


redOrbit
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:10 UTC
Cloning
© redOrbit

Scientists have for the first time used a form of cloning to create personalized embryonic stem cells, an important advancement that could impact the study and treatment of diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The researchers derived embryonic stem cells from individual patients by adding the nuclei of adult skin cells from patients with type-1 diabetes to unfertilized donor oocytes.

Stem cells are primitive cells that differentiate into the various tissues of the body. Scientists believe stem cells may someday be used in humans to create replacements for diseased or damaged organs.

The idea behind the current research is to take versatile stem cells from early-stage embryos that have been "cloned" to the same DNA as the patient, so that any cells are recognized as friendly by the patient's immune system. By comparison, conventional cloning involves taking an egg and removing its nucleus, which contains the vital DNA code. The core is then replaced with the nucleus of a cell from the donor, and the two parts are fused together using electricity.

"The specialized cells of the adult human body have an insufficient ability to regenerate missing or damaged cells caused by many diseases and injuries," said study leader Dr. Dieter Egli at The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory in New York City.
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Magic Wand

Flying Carpet Powered by Ripples of Electricity

Nic Halverson
Discovery News
Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:17 UTC
Magic Carpet
© Lambert/Getty Images

That song from Aladdin -- A Whole New World -- is a sneaky ditty. Just when you think you've managed to rid your head of its infectious melody, it has a funny way of skimming the clouds of memory and floating back into your consciousness.

Especially when Princeton University graduate student Noah Jafferis just developed a flying carpet that is neither animated, nor fictional. But you do have to stretch your imagination a little bit. The fully functional, miniature carpet is actually a 4-inch sheet of plastic, but the technology it employs is anything but exaggerated.

Jafferis' prototype "flies" using waves of electrical currents to drive thin pockets of air above a flat surface, but it won't be soaring and darting over palace kingdoms anytime soon. In fact, currently it can only travel at speeds of around one centimeter per second.

Professor James Sturm, lab leader of Jafferis' research team, told the BBC the "flying carpet" faces many challenges.

"What was difficult was controlling the precise behavior of the sheet as it deformed at high frequencies," he said. "Without the ability to predict the exact way it would flex, we couldn't feed in the right electrical currents to get the propulsion to work properly."
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Oscar

Nobel prize for discovery that the universe is accelerating into the void

Ian Sample
The Guardian
Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:13 UTC
Three scientists share Nobel Prize in Physics for research showing the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate


Scientists who watched stars explode in faraway galaxies and deduced that the universe was expanding at an ever-faster rate have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The discovery in the late 1990s meant textbooks had to be rewritten and forced researchers to consider a universe of stars and planets that is being torn apart by a mysterious force that counteracts gravity.

The nature of the force that drives the growth of the cosmos is so mysterious that scientists named it "dark energy". It is thought to make up more than 70% of the universe.

Half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (£934,000) prize money went to the US physicist Saul Perlmutter, 52, and the other half to two members of a competing team that conducted similar work, the US-born researcher Brian Schmidt, 44, who is based in Australia, and another US scientist, Adam Riess, aged 42.
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Info

Machine That Feels May Usher in 'Jedi' Prosthetics

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:00 UTC
Jedi Prosthetic
© Lucasfilm LtdLuke Skywalker's prosthetic hand could become a reality -- if scientists can get artificial limbs to communicate sensory information to the brain.

A new method of feeling without touching may allow people with paralyzed or lost limbs to interact with the world using sophisticated prosthetic devices that send sensations directly to the brain.

The method, tested only in monkeys so far, is "a major milestone" for neural prosthetics, according to study researcher Miguel Nicolelis, a physician and neurobiologist at Duke University Medical Center. Neural prosthetics are robotic limbs or exoskeleton-like devices controlled only by nerve signals. Nicolelis and other researchers plan to test these devices in humans within the next one to three years.

"I like to say that we actually liberated the brain from the physical limits of the monkey's body," Nicolelis told LiveScience. "He can move and feel using the brain only." [The Future Is Here: Cyborgs Walk Among Us]
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Igloo

Little Ice Age Shrank Europeans, Sparked Wars

Brian Handwerk
National Geographic News
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:21 UTC
Ice Age Over Europe
© Abraham Hondius via Heritage Images/CorbisPainting - London's River Thames, frozen over in 1677.

Pockmarked with wars, inflation, famines and shrinking humans, the 1600s in Europe came to be called the General Crisis.

But whereas historians have blamed those tumultuous decades on growing pains between feudalism and capitalism, a new study points to another culprit: the coldest stretch of the climate change period known as the Little Ice Age.

The Little Ice Age curbed agricultural production and eventually led to the European crisis, according to the authors of the study - said to be the first to scientifically verify cause-and-effect between climate change and large-scale human crises.

Prior to the industrial revolution, all European countries were by and large agrarian, and as study co-author David Zhang pointed out, "In agricultural societies, the economy is controlled by climate," since it dictates growing conditions.

A team led by Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, pored over data from Europe and other the Northern Hemisphere regions between A.D. 1500 to 1800.

The team compared climate data, such as temperatures, with other variables, including population sizes, growth rates, wars and other social disturbances, agricultural production figures and famines, grain prices, and wages.
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Eye 1

Facebook: Brutal Dishonesty


uncrunched.com
Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:33 UTC
facebook
© unknown
"Facebook does not track users across the web," - A Facebook spokesperson on September 25, 2011

and

"Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people." - Facebook employee on September 25, 2011

v.

"A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain." - Facebook Patent application dated September 22, 2011

Whoops
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Eye 1

Internet Firms Co-Opted for Surveillance

Georgina Prodhan
Reuters
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:08 UTC
evil eye
© maxidus
Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies, Web experts said this week.

Although such companies try to keep their users' information private, their business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted advertising, and when governments demand they hand it over, they have little choice but to comply.

Suggestions that BlackBerry maker RIM might give user data to British police after its messenger service was used to coordinate riots this summer caused outrage -- as has the spying on social media users by more oppressive governments.

But the vast amount of personal information that companies like Google collect to run their businesses has become simply too valuable for police and governments to ignore, delegates to the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi said.
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Cell Phone

You Love Your iPhone. Literally.

Martin Lindstrom
The New York Times
Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:18 UTC
iphone love
© Mark Allen Miller
With Apple widely expected to release its iPhone 5 on Tuesday, Apple addicts across the world are getting ready for their latest fix.

But should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like "addiction" and "fix" aren't as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is "love."

As a branding consultant, I have followed Apple from its early days as a cult brand to its position today as one of the most valuable, widely admired companies on earth. A few years back, I conducted an experiment to examine the similarities between some of the world's strongest brands and the world's greatest religions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects' brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery.

This past summer, I gathered a group of 20 babies between the ages of 14 and 20 months. I handed each one a BlackBerry. No sooner had the babies grasped the phones than they swiped their little fingers across the screens as if they were iPhones, seemingly expecting the screens to come to life. It appears that a whole new generation is being primed to navigate the world of electronics in a ritualized, Apple-approved way.
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Info

Human Crises Linked to Climate Change, Study Suggests

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:00 UTC
BBM
© NASAThe big Blue Marble, Earth, as seen from space.

Historically, changes in climate have not only been tied to increased food prices, but also economic crises, social upset and wars, new research suggests.

"Climate is the ultimate cause, and economy is the direct cause, of large-scale human crises," study researcher David Zhang, of the University of Hong Kong, told LiveScience in an email. "The issue of environmental change is one that involves our daily life, such as food, health and savings."

Zhang has studied the effect of climate change on humans, specifically on cultural turmoil and wars. His previous work found that swings in temperature were correlated with times of war in eastern China between 1000 and 1911, and also correlated with climate swings and war records worldwide.

Now, he has taken these studies several steps further by looking at all major aspects of human society during times of climate shift. This work also was able to draw a direct link between climate and social factors.
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Question

Spinning Object Discovered In The Kuiper Belt


Europlanet Outreach, Queen's University Belfast
Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:07 UTC
Kuiper Belt Spinning Object
© redOrbit

The bizarre, hourglass-shaped Kuiper belt object 2001QG298 spins round like a propeller as it orbits the Sun, according to an astronomer from Queens University Belfast. The discovery that the spinning object is tilted at nearly 90 degrees to the ecliptic plane is surprising, and suggests that this type of object could be very common in the Kuiper belt. The finding will be presented by Dr Pedro Lacerda at the Joint Meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences in Nantes, France, on 3 October 2011.

The Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) orbit the sun beyond Neptune and are the best preserved leftovers of the formation of the planets. 2001QG298 is a remarkable KBO made up from two components that orbit each other very closely, possibly touching.

"Imagine that you glue two eggs together tip to tip - that's approximately the shape of 2001QG298. It looks a bit like an hourglass," says Lacerda.
The strange shape of 2001QG298 was uncovered by Dr Scott Sheppard and Prof David Jewitt in 2004. They noticed that 2001QG298′s apparent brightness periodically tripled every 7 hours or so.

"The object is so distant that we cannot resolve its shape. But this brightness oscillation, called a lightcurve, reveals the strange shape of 2001QG298 as it spins round. The object appears faint at times because one lobe is hidden behind the other, so less area is reflecting sunlight. As the hidden component rotates back into view, we can see the full hour-glass shape. The reflecting area increases and the whole thing looks brighter," explains Lacerda.
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