Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

US: Researchers Search for Cloning Hindrances, Create Functional Stem Cells

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:50 UTC
Image
© The New York Stem Cell FoundationBlastocysts created by somatic cell nuclear transfer can be a source of embryonic stem cells.The New York Stem Cell Foundation
A new method of cloning produces working stem cells, but the technique has no clinical purpose due to its incompatibility with human tissue

Researchers from the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory have discovered what has previously prevented cloning methods from working properly, thus achieving a self-reproducing line of embryonic stem cells.

There have been many issues with cloning in the past. For instance, large numbers of human egg cells are required for the process, which are difficult to obtain, and there are ethical questions associated with the use of eggs in such research. While the introduction of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have dodged some of the ethical issues, they do not act entirely like embryonic stem cells.

In some cases, egg cells will just stop developing at some point. Even in some instances where adult DNA was successfully inserted into an egg cell to create a clone in animal models, such as Dolly the sheep, they can grow to have health problems and die at an early age.
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Binoculars

Freak waves probability higher than thought

Anna Salleh
ABC
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:33 UTC
sea waves
© Andrejs Pidjass/iStockphotoOnce considered a sailor's myth, freak waves can appear to come out of nowhere
Devastating freak waves the size of a 10-storey building can be more common than previously thought, say researchers.

The findings, by civil engineer Dr Alessandro Toffoli, of Swinburne University of Technology, and colleagues, have been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"They call them freak because they are not well understood," says Toffoli.

Freak waves are steep waves that can appear to come out of nowhere. They are hundreds of metres long can be two to three times higher than the surrounding waves at the time.
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Satellite

3 Weird Alien Planets Found Around Sun-Like Star


Space.com
Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00 UTC
Kepler Space telescope
© unknownKepler Space Telescope
A NASA spacecraft has found an unusual three-planet system that consists of one super-Earth and two Neptune-size worlds orbiting a star similar to our sun, a new study reveals.

The planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope discovered the three planets around the star Kepler-18, which is only 10 percent larger than the sun and contains 97 percent of the sun's mass, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin said. The alien system could also host more planets than have been found so far, they added.

All three planets, which are designated Kepler-18b, c, and d, orbit much closer to their parent star than Mercury does to the sun. The planet Kepler-18b orbits closest to the star, taking 3.5 days to complete its journey. The planet is about 6.9 times the mass of Earth and is twice the size of our home planet, making planet b a so-called super-Earth, the researchers said.

Kepler-18c, which takes 7.6 days to orbit the star, is about 5.5 times larger than our planet, and has a mass equivalent to about 17 Earths. Kepler-18d has a 14.9-day orbit and is about seven times the size of Earth, with a mass of about 16 Earths. According to these figures, planets c and d qualify as low-density "Neptune-class" worlds, the researchers said.

The findings were presented Tuesday (Oct. 4) at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science in Nantes, France. The study will be published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in November.
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Info

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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