Science & TechnologyS


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Authentic Viking DNA Retrieved From 1,000-year-old Skeletons


Science Daily
Tue, 27 May 2008 20:54 UTC
Although "Viking" literally means "pirate," recent research has indicated that the Vikings were also traders to the fishmongers of Europe. Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went under the helmet; the scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers.

Viking teeth
©Melchior L et al. Evidence of Authentic DNA from Danish Viking Age Skeletons Untouched by Humans for 1,000 Years. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002214
Sampling of teeth for aDNA analysis. The last layer of soil was removed and two teeth extracted while wearing full body suit, hairnet, gloves, shoe covers, and face masks. The teeth were placed in sealed sterile tubes and transported to the aDNA-lab.
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Cow Skull

Games make men feel like 'conquering cavemen'

Wesley Yin-Poole
Video Gamer
Tue, 27 May 2008 15:28 UTC
New research explains why men are more likely to get hooked on games than women.

Men are more likely to get hooked on video games than women because they appeal to the conquering caveman in them, new research suggests.

Scientists at the University of Stanford hooked up men and women to an MRI scanner to test brain activity as they tried to win on-screen territory by clicking a series of balls.

Both sexes showed activation in the brain's mesocorticolimbic centre, the region typically associated with reward and addiction.

Male brains, however, showed much greater activation. The amount increased as they gained more territory.
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Bulb

Dutch claim first sequencing of female DNA


Associated Press
Mon, 26 May 2008 15:26 UTC
Dutch scientists claim they have completed the first sequencing of an individual woman's DNA.

The researchers at Leiden University Medical Center say they have sequenced the DNA of one their researchers, geneticist Marjolein Kriek. They plan to publish it after review. No other scientists have verified their data.
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Bulb

Cold-fusion demonstration "a success"

Jon Cartwright
Physics World
Fri, 23 May 2008 14:32 UTC
On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and - for around a month - the world was under the impression that the world's energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair's results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did "not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion."

This hasn't prevented a handful of scientists persevering with cold-fusion research. They stand on the sidelines, diligently getting on with their experiments and, every so often, they wave their arms frantically when they think have made some progress.

Image
©Unknown
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Rocket

Researchers will study ways to deflect asteroids


Iowa State University
Mon, 26 May 2008 14:37 UTC
An Asteroid Deflection Research Center (ADRC) has been established on the Iowa State campus to bring researchers from around the world to develop asteroid deflection technologies. The center was signed into effect in April by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost.
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New Image-recognition Software Could Let Computers 'See' Like Humans Do


Science Daily
Tue, 27 May 2008 00:32 UTC
It takes surprisingly few pixels of information to be able to identify the subject of an image, a team led by an MIT researcher has found. The discovery could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do.

Image
©Antonio Torralba
Question: What do you see in the red circles? A bottle, a cell phone, a person, a shoe? The answer: They're all the same. Professor Antonio Torralba created these low-resolution images, in which the circled shapes were inserted and are all identical, to demonstrate how context affects our recognition of objects. Even the 'car' in the lower left image is the same object.
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Info

Scientists test brain pacemakers for depression

Lauran Neergaard
Associated Press
Mon, 26 May 2008 23:19 UTC
It's a new frontier for psychiatric illness: Brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients' nerve circuitry fires.

Scientists already know the power of these devices to block the tremors of Parkinson's disease and related illnesses; more than 40,000 such patients worldwide have the implants.

But psychiatric illnesses are much more complex and the new experiments with so-called deep brain stimulation, or DBS, are in their infancy. Only a few dozen patients with severe depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder so far have been treated in closely monitored studies.
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Newspaper

Brain activity reveals mother tongue


The Associated Press
Mon, 26 May 2008 19:17 UTC
ROME: No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can at least figure out in what language we do our thinking.

Before we utter a single word, experts can gauge our mother tongue and the level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing our brain activity while we read, scientists working with Italy's National Research Council say.

For more than a year, a team of scientists experimented on 15 interpreters, revealing what they say were surprising differences in brain activity when the subjects were shown words in their native language and in other languages they spoke.
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Telescope

NASA probe sends first pictures from Martian arctic

Paul Handley
news.yahoo.com
Mon, 26 May 2008 17:12 UTC
WASHINGTON - A NASA probe sent back never-seen pictures of Mars' north pole Monday after a near perfect landing in the most ambitious mission to date to find life-sustaining minerals on the Red Planet.

Pictures from the Phoenix probe provided the first glimpse of the planet's Arctic plains -- a desolate landscape of stony, frozen ground.

Phoenix Mars Lander
©AFP/NASA
Artist's illustration obtained from NASA shows the Phoenix Mars Lander. A NASA probe has sent back never-seen pictures of Mars' north pole after a near perfect landing in the most ambitious mission to date to find life-sustaining minerals on the Red Planet.
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Cow Skull

Australia: Landmark new fossil discovery at Burra


Northern Argus
Wed, 21 May 2008 16:20 UTC


Marsupial lion skeleton
©SA Museum
Marsupial lion (thylacoleo carnifex) skeleton

New evidence at Redbanks Conservation Park near Burra has confirmed that large marsupial lions roamed the area during the Ice Age.
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