Science & TechnologyS


Info

Vampire Bat Bites Help Shield Peruvians from Rabies

Trevor Stokes
LiveScience
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:01 UTC
Vampire Bat
© Pascual SorianoThe vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, must find a blood meal every one to two days to survive. Razor-sharp teeth and infrared-sensing 'pit organs' surrounding its nose help the bat achieve this goal.
Rabies has been thought of as virtually 100-percent fatal unless treated immediately, but new research shows that a small number of isolated Peruvians have natural immunity from the animal-transmitted disease.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one in 15 people living in the remote Amazonian region in Peru were protected without medical intervention against the virus that kills more than 55,000 people globally every year.

Their trick: Vampire bats exposed the remote Peruvians to enough of the rabies virus to confer resistance, but not enough to kill them.

"Our results open the door to the idea that there may be some type of natural resistance or enhanced immune response in certain communities regularly exposed to the disease," Amy Gilbert, a researcher with the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and co-lead study author, said in a statement.

"This means there may be ways to develop effective treatments that can save lives in areas where rabies remains a persistent cause of death."
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Attention

Humanlike Skin Cancer Found in Wild Fish


LiveScience
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:01 UTC
Trout with Cancer
© Michael Sweet, Newcastle UniversityThe skin cancer lesions (black spots) found on the coral trout living on the Great Barrier Reef were surficial, and appeared nearly identical to that in humans.
The first case of skin cancer in a wild marine fish population looks eerily similar to the melanoma that plagues humans, researchers report today (Aug. 1).

Coral trout living on Australia's Great Barrier Reef are directly beneath the Antarctic ozone hole, the world's largest, which is the result of the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere that normally protects humans from harmful UV rays.

"Further work needs to be carried out to establish the exact cause of the cancer, but having eliminated other likely factors such as microbial pathogens and marine pollution, UV radiation appears to be the likely cause," study researcher Michael Sweet, of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

Sweet and his colleagues examined 136 common coral trout (Plectropomus leopardus), and found 20 individuals, or 15 percent, showed dark skin lesions.

The lesions ranged in size from small (covering just 5 percent of the skin) to large, covering the fish's full body, they report online in the journal PLoS ONE.
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Laptop

A Computer Infection that Can Never Be Cured

Tom Simonite
Technology Review
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:22 UTC
A hacker demonstrates that code can be hidden inside a new computer to put it forever under remote control, even after upgrades to the hard drive or operating system.

trojan horse computer graphic
© n/a
As the manufacturing of computers and other gadgets has migrated to China, an occasional paranoid voice has asked whether the country might be tempted to preinstall software for surveillance. This remains a far-fetched notion, but now a French hacker has at least shown how such a covert back door could be created.

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas last week, Jonathan Brossard demonstrated software that can be hidden deep inside the hardware of a PC, creating a back door that would allow secret remote access over the Internet. His secret entrance can't even be closed by switching a PC's hard disk or reinstalling its operating system.

Corporate and government-sponsored computer espionage is a growing problem, and hackers are using ever more sophisticated methods to bypass security ramparts. A congressional report, published in March this year, concluded that electronics manufactured in China posed a "potential" threat to U.S. communication systems, but there is no evidence of attempted espionage by hiding surveillance tools inside new equipment to date.
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Heart - Black

Yahweh The Two-Faced God: Theology, Terrorism, and Topology


Esoteric Online
Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:51 UTC
A book with the title of this blog has been written 'by Oxford educated authors and researchers, Dr's Joseph P. Farrell and Scott D. de Hart expose the history behind the End of Times apocalyptic panic and pandemonium; the theological terror; the underlying agenda to divide saints from sinners, darkness from light, and the accompanying geopolitical aim to turn nation against nation of how the three historic monotheistic religions set the stage for the apocalypse theater. It is a story of the ancient unholy alliance of terrorism, theology, geopolitics.'

Below is some 'bad' news and 'good' news regarding this conce
Image
© Unknown
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Bizarro Earth

Scientists discovered giant carbon sink in deep ocean

Richard Chirgwin
The Register
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:24 UTC
The world's oceans are known to be carbon sinks, but the process that draws CO2 from the air down into the deep ocean hasn't been documented. Until now.

A team of British and Australian scientists have identified huge plunging currents - as much as 1,000 kilometers wide - that appear to be key to the process of storing CO2 in the deep ocean. Those currents, the researchers say, are the result of local eddies (resulting from a combination of wind, currents, and massive whirlpools) that create localized pathways down from the surface.

Published in Nature Geoscience, the research used Argo robotic floats to help explore ocean dynamics up to 2 Km down, along with analysis of temperature, salinity, and pressure data.

The Argo floats - 80 in total - were deployed in 2002 and collected data for ten years as the basis of this research. CTD (conductivity, density and temperature) profilers were also used to collect data at depths of up to 7 Km, the researchers say.
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Better Earth

South American sea bird stuns researchers


Terra Daily / SPX
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 08:53 UTC
A team of researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the National Research Council of Argentina recently fitted a South American sea bird called an imperial cormorant with a small camera, then watched stunned as it became "superbird" - diving 150 feet underwater in 40 seconds, feeding on the ocean floor for 80 seconds where it eventually caught a snakelike fish, before returning to the surface 40 seconds later.


This is the first time researchers have been able to watch first-hand the amazing feeding techniques of these fascinating birds, which occur off the coast of Argentina.

The footage shows the cormorant briefly on the surface before diving for the bottom. The camera is attached to the bird's back, so the view is of its head as it pumps its feet to swim deeper.

When it finally reaches the ocean floor, it explores a vast area searching for food. It eventually finds an elongated fish, which it brings to the surface to eat.
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Meteor

Meteorite craters in Australia

Beau Gamble
Australian Geographic
Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:01 UTC
Australia bears the scars of more than 30 major asteroid impacts, of the 176 worldwide.

Image
© Michael PayneA sample of Australia's 30-odd confirmed meteorite craters.
Exploring his vast cattlestation in 1899, Walter Parke came upon a feature in the landscape he could not explain. A 15m-deep, bowl-shaped depression, larger than a football field, had been gouged out of the Central Australian desert. "One of the most curious spots I have ever seen in the country," he wrote in a letter to the anthropologist Frank Gillen. "An immense amphitheatre...To look at it I cannot but think it has been done by human agency, but when or why, goodness knows."

Further investigation revealed 12 craters pitting Parke's property at Henbury station, 115km south-west of Alice Springs. But their origin remained a mystery to Europeans until 1931, when local prospector, J. M. Mitchell, reported finding slugs of iron strewn across the site, "as though they had dropped from a molten mass falling at great speed".

Massive asteroid impact chances "extremely slim"

As one of the oldest and least geologically disturbed continents, Australia has a rich record of meteorite craters. Of 176 confirmed impacts worldwide, our country bears the pockmarks of 30 - and about 20 others await confirmation. Indeed, as you read this, another 1275 potentially hazardous asteroids (meteorite is the name of an asteroid once it has fallen to Earth) are orbiting in space - and that's just the ones we know about.

Comment: Read the following articles to learn more about the real nature of comets and other heavenly bodies.

Electric Comet Theory: The Enduring - Yet Downplayed - Mysteries of Comets
The True Origins of Electric Comet Theory
Electric Universe: Where Do Asteroids Come From?

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Arrow Down

Scientists Engineer "Chimera" Primates to Combat Human Ailments

Amanda Schupak
PopSci
Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:29 UTC
Engineered Monkeys
© Oregon Health and Science University
Roku, Hex and Chimero are the world's first primate chimeras - individual monkeys made from multiple fertilized eggs of the same species. Each animal has six different sets of genes instead of one.

To produce each monkey, biologist Shoukhrat Mitali­pov and his team at the Oregon Health and Science University placed six separate four-celled embryos into a petri dish and, using a micropipette, nudged them into a single aggregation.

After a few days, the researchers implanted the aggregation into an adult female macaque. The resulting young have cells descended from each of six embryos evenly distributed throughout their bodies.
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Info

Boy or Girl? Mother Can Control Outcome

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:00 UTC
Baby
© iStockPhotosMothers appear to have some control over the gender of their unborn children, research shows.
Mothers can adjust the sex of their unborn children in response to the environment where they live, according to new research.

The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, finds that mothers exert far more control than fathers do over whether or not the couple has a son or daughter. The goal is to improve the child's survival.

"It seems likely that when there are large and predictable costs associated with producing and/or rearing either sons or daughters in a given environment, females should bias offspring sex ratios to produce the sex that will perform best in the given environment," co-author Sarah Pryke told Discovery News.

"Altering offspring sex ratios in response to the quality of the local environment is likely to be highly advantageous to any species, as it should allow mothers to best match the phenotype of their offspring to the prevailing condition, and thus maximize their own fitness," added Pryke, a researcher in Australian National University's Research School of Biology.

Prior studies on birds, reptiles and mammals -- including humans -- has long suggested that this was the case, but scientists were unclear on what factors triggered the son or daughter outcome. Some researchers, for example, speculated that the overall body condition and health of the mother affected the outcome of her child's sex.

To help eliminate that possibility, Pryke and colleague Lee Rollins studied a bird, the blue-faced parrot finch, whose body condition appears largely insensitive to changes in nutritional quality.
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Meteor

Meteors, Comets and Asteroids: What the Past Teaches

Jim Algar
Sci-tech-today.com
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:35 UTC
Image
Artist's impression of the 1908 Tunguska event
Cosmic interlopers have survived plunges through our planet's atmosphere to leave their mark on the Earth's surface. Can it happen again? One instance occurred in June of 1908, when a giant fireball (the debate is split between it's being a comet or an asteroid) never reached the ground but exploded in a violent air burst miles above ground.

When astronomers consider cosmic collisions having impacts on the Earth, their eyes turn either to events of the distant past -- like the asteroid impact 65 million years ago that may have pushed the dinosaurs to extinction -- or to the uncertain future, as telescopes and satellites search for so-called Near Earth Objects that might someday represent a collision threat to our planet.

But there are at least a couple of recent examples -- one well known, one somewhat less so -- of cosmic interlopers that survived a plunge through our planet's atmosphere to leave their mark on the Earth's surface.

Most people are aware of the Barrington Crater, commonly known as just the Meteor Crater, in the desert of northern Arizona.

Comment: Tunguska, the Horns of the Moon and Evolution

Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

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