Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that the skin of mice can sense low levels of oxygen and regulate the production of erythropoietin, or EPO, the hormone that stimulates our bodies to produce red blood cells and allows us to adapt to high-altitude, low-oxygen environments.
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| ©UC San Diego
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| Mutant mice with an enhanced HIF-1 gene (at right) are smaller than normal mice and have reddish skin, due to increased blood flow through their skin.
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Bursts of sound waves that ripple across the sun are caused by powerful solar flares, astronomers say.
The finding, which will be published in the May 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, comes from data collected with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint venture between NASA and ESA.
Somerset Struben De Chair was an adventurous young British soldier stationed with the Royal Horse Guards in Palestine when he saw a larger-than-life marble bust (pictured below) displayed in the shop-window of an antique dealer named Ohan, opposite the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
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| ©Bonhams
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| Two-faced
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National Iranian Oil Company's (NIOC) Discovery Affairs Director announced here Friday discovery of a new natural gas field in Masjed Soleiman region.
Engineer Seyyed Mahmoud Mohaddes who was speaking at Iran's 13th International Gas, Oil and Petrochemistry Exhibition said, "The technical surveys done at Asmari Mountain, 30 kilometers to the south of Masjed Soleiman, it was revealed that back in 1975 a group of excavators had dug this mountain, but due to the difficulties of digging, they had not succeeded to find hydrocarbon resources and abandoned their well."
High food prices and global grain shortages may force governments from China to Britain to rethink opposition to genetically modified crops, analysts say.
Asian manufacturers are buying genetically modified corn for food stuffs, U.S. wheat growers look to biotechnology to boost yields and European agricultural leaders view engineered crops as a way to alleviate the strain on the worldwide agriculture market, The New York Times reported Monday.
Comment: Yes, alleviating the food crisis is a laudible aim, however this article only serves to confuse the issue. The food crisis is not caused by some mysterious all-pervasive substandard crop quality to be fixable by some genetic 'magic bullet'.
Food-price shocks are a result of financial manipulation of the world's markets. Starvation is caused by economic and military destruction. No amount genetically engineered tomatoes can alter the fact that genocide, economic blockades, corporate/political theft on a global scale, are what cause hunger.
Genetically modified foodstuffs are being heavily pushed by the same players who participate in all the above, so why? The most significant result of genetically modified crops, to date, is that 'terminator seeds' have been developed and are widely pushed. These seeds are sterile, producing only a single generation of crop that cannot produce its own seeds. So, farmers are 'locked in' to keep re-buying seeds from the manufacturer, year after year. How in the world, does THAT alleviate the food crisis?! Obviously it doesn't, it simply adds to the hunger and poverty, and feeds the greed of the pathological corporations that set up this situation.
Just how birds use the earth's magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades.
But in recent years, a growing body of evidence points to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction in bird retinas involving radical ion pairs.
Comment: The
quantum Zeno effect "describes the situation in which an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. This occurs because every measurement causes the wavefunction to 'collapse' to a pure eigenstate of the measurement basis."
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| ©NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
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| Image of Spider Crater taken by NASA's ASTER satellite.
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The spectacular "spider crater" in Western Australia mountainous Kimberley region has been photographed by a NASA satellite tracking system.
Think of a chicken egg. Sometimes you can see a tiny embryo amid the yolk and the egg white, which - if you weren't going to eat them scrambled - would be all the embryo needs to become a fluffy, yellow chick.
Now, consider the human placenta, an advanced version of the yolk and the egg white. It supports a growing baby for months, constantly delivering oxygen and nutrients from its mother. It is the only mammalian organ that grows in adulthood. It's also the only one with a natural expiration date, as it is expelled after childbirth.
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| ©AFP/British Museum
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As Indiana Jones gets set to hit cinema screens with a new death-defying adventure in the "
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", a Paris museum acknowledged Friday that its own star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be.
People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.
Researchers at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.
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| ©Mats Bäcker
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| Fredrik Ullén.
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Comment: Yes, alleviating the food crisis is a laudible aim, however this article only serves to confuse the issue. The food crisis is not caused by some mysterious all-pervasive substandard crop quality to be fixable by some genetic 'magic bullet'.
Food-price shocks are a result of financial manipulation of the world's markets. Starvation is caused by economic and military destruction. No amount genetically engineered tomatoes can alter the fact that genocide, economic blockades, corporate/political theft on a global scale, are what cause hunger.
Genetically modified foodstuffs are being heavily pushed by the same players who participate in all the above, so why? The most significant result of genetically modified crops, to date, is that 'terminator seeds' have been developed and are widely pushed. These seeds are sterile, producing only a single generation of crop that cannot produce its own seeds. So, farmers are 'locked in' to keep re-buying seeds from the manufacturer, year after year. How in the world, does THAT alleviate the food crisis?! Obviously it doesn't, it simply adds to the hunger and poverty, and feeds the greed of the pathological corporations that set up this situation.