Science & Technology
Claussen and his team created a flexible, low cost and disposable biosensor that can detect pesticides in soil. This biosensor is made of graphene, a strong and stable nanoparticle, and provides instantaneous feedback, as opposed to the time and money it would otherwise take to send a sample to a lab and await results.
The growing interest in biodetection from consumers and the food industry itself has reached a global audience. Detecting genetically modified organisms and pesticides in very low concentrations with smart phones will one day be a reality.
USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) supported the project with an Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant as part of the Nanotechnology Program.
The biosensor is made by first printing graphene ink onto paper. A laser then traces over the ink to improve its electrical conductivity by welding together flakes of the graphene ink, making a nanostructured surface that is three dimensional.
A man with advanced prostate cancer decided to try an unconventional method, and he's probably glad he did. Doctors from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore "shocked" his tumors with large amounts of testosterone, and he has been cancer free since.
The study was led by Professor Sam Denmeade, who told the Telegraph: "We are still in the early stages of figuring out how this works and how to incorporate it into the treatment paradigm for prostate cancer."
However, if the results from the test hold up through future testing, it could completely change how prostate cancer is treated. Traditionally, prostate cancer is treated by depriving the cancer of testosterone, because it was thought that the male hormones stimulate and fuel cancer cells, EurekaAlert! reported.
What all these techniques and technologies have in common is that they're recent neuroscientific breakthroughs propelled by military research within a broader context of rapid neuroscientific development, driven by massive government-funded projects in both America and the European Union. Even while much about the brain remains mysterious, this research has contributed to the rapid and startling development of neuroscientific technology.
And while we might marvel at these developments, it is also undeniably true that this state of affairs raises significant ethical questions. What is the proper role - if any - of neuroscience in national defense or war efforts? My research addresses these questions in the broader context of looking at how international relations, and specifically warfare, are shaped by scientific and medical expertise and technology.
Researchers at the University of Bristol have found a means of creating a battery capable of generating clean electricity for five millennia.
Scientists found that by heating graphite blocks - used to house uranium rods in nuclear reactors - much of the radioactive carbon is given off as a gas.
This can then be gathered and turned into radioactive diamonds using a high-temperature chemical reaction, in which carbon atoms are left on the surface in small, dark-colored diamond crystals.

MRT aims to overcome the problem by replacing the mother’s defective mitochondria with those from a healthy donor. Photograph
Doctors will seek permission this month to create Britain's first baby from the DNA of three people if the government's fertility regulator approves the treatment for carefully chosen patients.
Specialists in Newcastle are ready to offer mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) to women who are in danger of passing on devastating and often fatal genetic disorders to their children. The conditions affect about one in 10,000 births.
A scientific review commissioned by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) concluded on Wednesday that the therapy should be approved for "cautious clinical use" when children are at risk of inheriting specific genetic diseases.
The HFEA will now consider the findings and invite clinics to apply for licences if it endorses the recommendations at a meeting on 15 December. Last year, parliament changed the law to allow MRT, but scientists continued with further experiments to assess the treatment's safety.
Expect some spectacular bolides, fireballs, and meteors this month and especially large ones 3-5 days before and following the passing of the less than 10LD NEOs and fifteen small mountain-sized NEO asteroids, diameters ranging from 400m-2.0km, that will safely pass this month.
Be ready for some bolide, fireball, and meteor activity Cameras Ready!

A tornado near Elk Mountain, west of Laramie Wyoming on the 15th of June, 2015. The tornado passed over mostly rural areas of the county, lasting over 20 minutes.
In a new paper, published December 1 in Science via First Release, the researchers looked at increasing trends in the severity of tornado outbreaks where they measured severity by the number of tornadoes per outbreak. They found that these trends are increasing fastest for the most extreme outbreaks. While they saw changes in meteorological quantities that are consistent with these upward trends, the meteorological trends were not the ones expected under climate change.
"This study raises new questions about what climate change will do to severe thunderstorms and what is responsible for recent trends," says Tippett, who is also a member of the Data Science Institute and the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. "The fact that we don't see the presently understood meteorological signature of global warming in changing outbreak statistics leaves two possibilities: either the recent increases are not due to a warming climate, or a warming climate has implications for tornado activity that we don't understand. This is an unexpected finding."
Research published in the academic journal IEEE Security & Privacy, shows how the so-called Distributed Guessing Attack is able to circumvent all the security features put in place to protect online payments from fraud.
Exposing the flaws in the VISA payment system, the team from Newcastle University, UK, found neither the network nor the banks were able to detect attackers making multiple, invalid attempts to get payment card data.
Comment: Guessing card data is one thing, and as demonstrated it's clearly possible to do quickly. But figuring out the full name and actual address associated with the card is far more difficult in many, if not most cases, impossible without direct information about a card holder.
This points out why all online merchants should be including address verification into their credit card processing backend systems - and incidentally address verification is a feature offered by nearly all of the most widely used payment gateway providers, however not all banks provide address verification for the cards they issue - in which case a merchant ought to simply deny the use of the card entirely if address verification fails or isn't available from the bank - all in an effort to protect their shoppers even if that denial is an inconvenience to the shoppers.
According to the current theory of superconductivity, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because for 40 years now, scientists have assumed that superconducting materials must be abundant in free-flowing mobile electrons. But in bismuth, there's just one mobile electron for every 100,000 atoms.
"After the launch of the Soyuz-U launch vehicle along with the Progress MS-04 cargo spacecraft, telemetry connection was lost on the 383th second of flight," Roscosmos said in a statement.
Comment: There have been reports of an explosion in the skies over Tuva, Russia around the time the cargo ship vanished:














Comment: The climate scientists have not considered the importance of atmospheric dust loading and the winning Electric Universe model in their research. Such information and much more, are explained in the book Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. Increasing cometary and volcanic dust loading of the atmosphere (one indicator is the intensification of noctilucent clouds we are witnessing) is accentuating electric charge build-up, whereby we can expect to observe more extreme weather and planetary upheaval as well as awesome light shows and other related mysterious phenomena.