By injecting tiny magnets into your body, doctors hope to treat diseases without using chemicals or hormones. Don't worry about sticking to the refrigerator - the nano-sized magnets are only strong enough to affect your cells.
For the first time, doctors created bead-shaped magnets that bind with receptor molecules on cell walls. When a magnetic field is applied, the beads are attracted to each other and pull together, dragging the receptors with them. As they cluster, the receptors release biochemical signals that trigger cell functions.
"This technology allows us to control the behavior of living cells through magnetic forces rather than chemicals or hormones," said biologist Don Ingber of Children's Hospital Boston, who devised the technique.
Science & Technology
Scientists have extended the lifespan of yeast, microbes responsible for creating bread and beer, by 10-fold. That's twice the previous record for life extension in an organism.
The breakthrough could ultimately inform efforts to extend human lives.
Instead of one week, the yeast lived for about 10 weeks through genetic tinkering and a low-calorie diet.
"We've reprogrammed the healthy life of an organism," said Valter Longo, a biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who led the life-prolonging experiments.
The breakthrough could ultimately inform efforts to extend human lives.
Instead of one week, the yeast lived for about 10 weeks through genetic tinkering and a low-calorie diet.
"We've reprogrammed the healthy life of an organism," said Valter Longo, a biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who led the life-prolonging experiments.
The European Space Agency (ESA) said Monday it would take part in 10 major missions this year, including long-delayed trips to the space station, new explorations of Earth and deep space, and a joint unmanned trip to the Moon with India.
The missions on ESA's 2008 roster include the dispatch next month of two key components of the International Space Station (ISS), the orbital outpost being assembled by a US-led consortium of five partners.
They are a science module, Columbus, scheduled to be taken aloft on February 7 by the US space shuttle, and a robot freighter, due to be placed in orbit by ESA's Ariane rocket in the third week of February and then automatically rendezvous with the ISS.
The missions on ESA's 2008 roster include the dispatch next month of two key components of the International Space Station (ISS), the orbital outpost being assembled by a US-led consortium of five partners.
They are a science module, Columbus, scheduled to be taken aloft on February 7 by the US space shuttle, and a robot freighter, due to be placed in orbit by ESA's Ariane rocket in the third week of February and then automatically rendezvous with the ISS.
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| In May, GOCE, a satellite billed as "the Ferrari of micro-gravity fields," is scheduled to be taken aloft from ESA's space base in Kourou, French Guiana, with the goal of monitoring ocean circulation -- a key factor in the climate-change question. |
A scientist at a Houston university has created the darkest known material -- about four times darker than the previous record holder.
Pulickel Ajayan, a professor of engineering at Rice University, created a carpet of carbon nanotubes that reflects 0.045 percent light, making it 100 times darker than a black-painted Corvette, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday.
Pulickel Ajayan, a professor of engineering at Rice University, created a carpet of carbon nanotubes that reflects 0.045 percent light, making it 100 times darker than a black-painted Corvette, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday.
Chicago, Illinois - New genetic evidence supports the theory that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe from the New World, U.S. researchers said on Monday, reviving a centuries-old debate about the origins of the disease.
IT is known as the Little Ice Age. Bitter winters blighted much of the northern hemisphere for decades in the second half of the 17th century. The French army used frozen rivers as thoroughfares to invade the Netherlands. New Yorkers walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across the frozen harbour. Sea ice surrounded Iceland for miles and the island's population halved. It wasn't the first time temperatures had plunged: a couple of hundred years earlier, between 1420 and 1570, a climatic downturn claimed the Viking colonies on Greenland, turning them from fertile farmlands into arctic wastelands.
Not to mention the question of which way it goes...
Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? "The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics," says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. "The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic."
Consider it a case of exquisite timing. Just last week, solar physicists announced the beginning of a new solar cycle and now, Jan. 14th, the Ulysses spacecraft is flying over a key region of solar activity--the sun's North Pole.
You may not realize it, but when you tell the grocer you'd like a half-dozen eggs for your family of six, you're using a primitive numbering system. Anthropologists believe that such object-specific counting, in which words like "half-dozen" and "six" denote the same quantity but refer to different objects, preceded abstract counting systems, in which any number can describe any object. Now, a study of Pacific Island languages suggests that counting systems can also evolve in reverse, becoming more object-specific.
People on the Polynesian island of Mangareva take object-specific counting to the extreme. They tally some things, such as unripe breadfruit, using one type of number sequence, whereas they count ripe breadfruit and octopus using another. At the same time, the islanders add up various other objects using an abstract counting system similar to the one English speakers use.
People on the Polynesian island of Mangareva take object-specific counting to the extreme. They tally some things, such as unripe breadfruit, using one type of number sequence, whereas they count ripe breadfruit and octopus using another. At the same time, the islanders add up various other objects using an abstract counting system similar to the one English speakers use.
In the US all executions by lethal injection have been temporarily halted while experts examine whether it is a "humane" form of execution. How does it compare to other forms, and for supporters of capital punishment, is there a more benign method?
The United States is one of 55 countries that practise the death penalty as the ultimate sanction on convicted criminals. But in the majority of US states the procedure is frozen while the Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection is a "cruel and unusual" form of punishment that violates the constitution.
The United States is one of 55 countries that practise the death penalty as the ultimate sanction on convicted criminals. But in the majority of US states the procedure is frozen while the Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection is a "cruel and unusual" form of punishment that violates the constitution.
