Science & TechnologyS


Sheeple

The NIH plans to lift the ban on chimera research using human stem cells

Bradford Richardson
Washington Times
Thu, 04 Aug 2016 17:37 UTC
stem cell research
© APA single cell is removed from a human embryo to be used in generating embryonic stem cells for scientific research.
The National Institutes of Health is planning to lift a moratorium on funding for research studying the effects of injecting animal embryos with human stem cells.

The agency last year issued a moratorium for such funding while it studied the issue further. But NPR is reporting the NIH plans to lift that reprieve and allow scientists to conduct so-called "Chimera" experiments under strict and closely monitored parameters.

"They want to take human stem cells and put them inside these animal embryos, in the hopes that the human stem cells, which can become any kind of cell or tissue in the body, will become integrated into the embryos and then develop into animals that have partially or even fully human parts in their bodies," said NPR health correspondent Rob Stein on Thursday.

Scientists say the experiment could lead to major medical breakthroughs that could save countless human lives, such as the ability to grow human organs that could be used to save the lives of patients in need of transplants.

Comment: More useless chimera research that led to zero health breakthroughs: For more on the pseudo scientific quackery of animal medical research in general listen to this episode of the Health and Wellness Show: The Health & Wellness Show: The Quackery and Cruelty of Animal Medical Research

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Control Panel

Hacking your brain: Experts warn of growing threat from monitoring and controlling neural signals

Stacy Liberatore
Daily Mail
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:39 UTC
hacker
Cyberthieves might be mining personal information from your brainwaves this very moment. Experts at the University of Washington reveal hackers are inserting images into dodgy apps and recording our brain's unintentional reaction using brain-computer interfaces
Cyberthieves might be mining personal information from your brainwaves at this very moment.

And although this may sound like a plot from a science fiction film, it is a growing concern among researchers who have demanded officials implement a privacy and security framework to block hackers from reading our neural signals.

Brain-computer Interfaces (BCIs) are widely used in the medical field and other industries, including marketing, gaming and entertainment. Although this technology was initially created to improve and enhance the quality of human lives, in the wrong hands it will wreak havoc on them.

Researchers at the University of Washington say that time is running out and officials need to employ a privacy and security framework to stop those who would use our own brains against us, reports Motherboard.

'There's actually very little time,' electrical engineer Howard Chizeck told Victoria Turk with Motherboard over Skype.

'If we don't address this quickly, it'll be too late.'
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Camcorder

DARPA researching camera technology that can see around walls in 4 years


RT
Thu, 04 Aug 2016 13:02 UTC
Military camera
© Michaela Rehle / Reuters
If you're sick of having to move around corners to see what's behind them, you may have been born at the right time. DARPA, the US military's advanced research arm, says it will have developed a camera capable of seeing around corners in as little as four years.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is providing a $4.4 million grant to the Morgridge Institute for Research, an organization affiliated with the University of Madison-Wisconsin, to develop "non-line-of-sight imaging" camera technology, which can allow users to see around corners of solid objects.

The technology was first demonstrated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Andreas Velten in 2012. It works by sending a pulse of laser light into a room, causing the beam to hit a ceiling or wall, scattering and bouncing off surfaces and objects. Some of the scattered information makes it back to the sensor, allowing for a computer to construct an accurate picture of what the room looks like.
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Comet 2

Brightest Kreutz sungrazer disintegrated by the sun


SpaceWeather
Thu, 04 Aug 2016 06:08 UTC
The sun is about to swallow a comet. The doomed sungrazer appeared earlier today in images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO):
Doomed Comet
© ESA/NASA SOHO
"This is one of the brightest Kreutz sungrazers we've seen over the past 21 yrs," says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. "Awesome! "

Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a single giant comet many centuries ago. They get their name from 19th century German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who studied them in detail. Kreutz fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate almost every day. Most, measuring less than a few meters across, are too small to see, but occasionally a bigger fragment like this one attracts attention.

The comet is vaporizing furiously and is not expected to survive much longer. Monitor the SOHO realtime images page for developments. Updates are also available on Karl Battam's excellent Twitter feed.

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Fireball

Chelyabinsk meteor: A wake-up call for humanity

Elizabeth Howell
Space.com
Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC
Chelyabinsk meteor
© Neuromainker via YouTube/Screenshot by Irene Klotz for Discovery NewsThis is the trail of Chelyabinsk asteroid which exploded about 14 miles above ground with a force nearly 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 2013.
A small asteroid broke up over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013. The shock wave it generated shattered glass and injured about 1,200 people. Some scientists think the meteor may have briefly outshone the sun. The blast was stronger than a nuclear explosion, triggering detections from monitoring stations as far away as Antarctica.

The incident was another reminder to space agencies about the importance of monitoring small bodies in space that could pose a threat to Earth. The same day Chelyabinsk happened, the U.S. House of Representative's Science, Space, and Technology Committee said it would hold a hearing to discuss asteroid threats to Earth, and how to mitigate them on top of NASA's currentefforts.

Coincidentally, the explosion came on the same day that an asteroid was flying by Earth. Called 2012 DA14, it passed within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth. NASA quickly pointed out the asteroid was travelling in the opposite direction to the small body that exploded over Chelyabinsk.

Comment: Indeed, something wicked this way comes. For further reading on the problem humanity is now facing see:

Celestial Intentions: Comets and the Horns of Moses

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Cassiopaea

1987 Supernova used to understand stellar evolution

Matt Williams
Universe Today
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 19:33 UTC
Supernova flare
© CAASTRO / Mats Björklund (Magipics)Artist’s impression of the supernova flare seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud on February 23rd, 1987.
Thirty years ago, a star that went by the designation of SN 1987A collapsed spectacularly, creating a supernova that was visible from Earth. This was the largest supernova to be visible to the naked eye since Kepler's Supernova in 1604. Today, this supernova remnant (which is located approximately 168,000 light-years away) is being used by astronomers in the Australian Outback to help refine our understanding of stellar explosions.

Led by a student from the University of Sydney, this international research team is observing the remnant at the lowest-ever radio frequencies. Previously, astronomers knew much about the star's immediate past by studying the effect the star's collapse had on the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud. But by detecting the star's faintest hisses of radio static, the team was able to observe a great deal more of its history.

The team's findings, which were published yesterday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, detail how the astronomers were able to look millions of years farther back in time. Prior to this, astronomers could only observe a tiny fraction of the star's life cycle before it exploded - 20,000 years (or 0.1%) of its multi-million year life span.

As such, they were only able to see the star when it was in its final, blue supergiant phase. But with the help of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) - a low-frequency radio telescope located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the West Australian desert - the radio astronomers were able to see all the way back to when the star was still in its long-lasting red supergiant phase.
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Butterfly

Microbial communities: Another reason green spaces are important for human health


Phys.org
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 16:38 UTC
nature, parks
New research finds that airborne bacterial communities differ from one urban park to the next but those of parking lots are alike—and differ from those of parks in subtle but potentially important ways.

At a glance, such findings seem intuitive. Parks often have different vegetation in them, and asphalt-covered parking lots are much the same—barren asphalt bombarded by solar radiation as well as heavy metals and fuel from motor vehicles.

The importance, according to University of Oregon researchers, is that this pilot study describes not only the differences in microbial communities but also how far from a park the influence may extend.

Recent studies suggest that the composition of the bacterial communities may be important to human health—and not in the ways you think, says Gwynne Mhuireach, a doctoral student in landscape architecture who led the new study that is online ahead of print in the journal Science of the Total Environment. There is a reason, she says, to believe that healthy air depends not just on the absence of bad things like pollutants, but the presence of good things such as bacteria with which humans have co-evolved.

"We're starting to build larger and more complex cities," Mhuireach said. "I am interested in ways to help maintain people's health and happiness as we do so. Some studies say that as we are building these denser cities we are losing green space. I am looking for mechanisms that explain why vegetation helps people and how we can design for it."
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Battery

Chemists create vitamin B-2 driven battery


University of Toronto
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 16:34 UTC
Dwight Seferos
© Diana Tyszko/University of TorontoUniversity of Toronto chemist Dwight Seferos and colleagues created a lithium-ion battery that stores energy in a biologically-derived unit, using flavin from Vitamin B2 as the cathode.
A team of University of Toronto chemists has created a battery that stores energy in a biologically derived unit, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment.

The battery is similar to many commercially-available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one important difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode: the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device.

"We've been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronics applications," says Dwight Seferos, an associate professor in U of T's Department of Chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Polymer Nanotechnology.

"When you take something made by nature that is already complex, you end up spending less time making new material," says Seferos.

Comment: Other novel battery ideas:

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Eye 2

Napping on the wing: Researchers discover birds can sleep in flight


Phys.org
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00 UTC
frigatebird, birds sleep flying
© B. VoirinFrigatebirds reaches a wingspan of over two metres. They are excellent gliders and can cover several hundred kilometers a day.
For the first time, researchers have discovered that birds can sleep in flight. Together with an international team of colleagues, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen measured the brain activity of frigatebirds and found that they sleep in flight with either one cerebral hemisphere at a time or both hemispheres simultaneously. Despite being able to engage in all types of sleep in flight, the birds slept less than an hour a day, a mere fraction of the time spent sleeping on land. How frigatebirds are able to perform adaptively on such little sleep remains a mystery.

It is known that some swifts, songbirds, sandpipers, and seabirds fly non-stop for several days, weeks, or months as they traverse the globe. Given the adverse effect sleep loss has on performance, it is commonly assumed that these birds must fulfill their daily need for sleep on the wing.

Half-awake or fully awake in flight?

How might a bird sleep in flight without colliding with obstacles or falling from the sky? One solution would be to only switch off half of the brain at a time, as Rattenborg showed in mallard ducks sleeping in a dangerous situation on land. When sleeping at the edge of a group, mallards keep one cerebral hemisphere awake and the corresponding eye open and directed away from the other birds, toward a potential threat. Based on these findings and the fact that dolphins can swim while sleeping unihemispherically, it is commonly assumed that birds also rely on this sort of autopilot to navigate and maintain aerodynamic control during flight.
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R2-D2

Computer algorithms are increasingly shaping and filtering our experience of the real world


Science Daily
Wed, 03 Aug 2016 16:02 UTC
computer algorithms shape reality
The use of algorithms to filter and present information online is increasingly shaping our everyday experience of the real world, a study published by Information, Communication & Society argues.

Associate Professor Michele Willson of Curtin University, Perth, Australia looked at particular examples of computer algorithms and the questions they raise about personal agency, changing world views and our complex relationship with technologies.

Algorithms are central to how information and communication are located, retrieved and presented online, for example in Twitter follow recommendations, Facebook newsfeeds and suggested Google map directions. However, they are not objective instructions but assume certain parameters and values, and are in constant flux, with changes made by both humans and machines.

Embedded in complex amalgams of political, technical, cultural and social interactions, algorithms bring about particular ways of seeing the world, reproduce stereotypes, strengthen world views, restrict choices or open previously unidentified possibilities.

As well as shaping what we see online, algorithms are increasingly telling us what we should be seeing, the study argues. For example, an algorithm that claims to spot beauty and tell you which selfies to delete implies we should trust technology more than ourselves to make aesthetic choices. Such algorithms also carry assumptions that beauty can be defined as universal and timeless, and can be easily reduced to a particular combination of data.
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