Dan Vergano
USA TodayMon, 26 Mar 2007 11:12 UTC
Biologists and other scientists have long expressed amusement, and gritted their teeth, when they encounter the persistent contention by particle physicists that they alone pursue science in its most pure state. "Particle physics is the most fundamental area of science in that its goal is to reduce the wonderful diversity and complexity of our universe to a few simple mathematical laws," wrote the noted physicists Sylvester James Gates, Jr. and Warren Siegel, two decades ago, expressing a truism often shared by those in their discipline.
What's worse for the long-suffering biologists, physics has long started reaching into others' fields, spawning disciplines such as biophysics, and even taken on subjects such as sociology, the far reaches of messy "soft" sciences.
But maybe the physicists have it backwards, suggests one well-known biologist, embryonic stem cell scientist Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, writing in the current issue of The American Scholar, a quarterly brought to you by the folks at Phi Beta Kappa. Maybe the world is the product of one aspect of biology, the mind, and not the other way around, he argues. "As we have seen, the world appears to be designed for life not just at the microscopic scale of the atom, but at the level of the universe itself," Lanza writes. What if, Lanza asks, this means that instead of infinitesimally tiny particles creating space and time (and making life possible), "the brain can really create physical reality."
French political debate is shifting from Left Bank cafes and being teleported into cyberspace.
Instead of agreeing to disagree over a glass of kir, many French youths are sending their ideas flying through the computer-animated world of Second Life.
"In here, you can see French people expressing themselves as they ought to, instead of being the hypocrites they often are in real life," said an avatar, or computer image, of what appeared to be a woman using the Second Life moniker of Hayahaya Milo.
Astronomers just got their most detailed look yet at supersonic "bullets" of gas piercing through dense clouds of hydrogen gas in the Orion Nebula.
Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second - or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound.
The bulk of both the bullets and the surrounding gas cloud [image] consists of molecular hydrogen. The tip of each bullet is packed with iron atoms that are heated by friction and glow bright blue in the new image, taken by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
As the bullets plow through the clouds, they leave behind tubular orange wakes, each about a fifth of a light-year long. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
SAN FRANCISCO - It was nearly a decade ago that Jose Cibelli plugged his own DNA into a cow's egg in a novel cloning attempt that was condemned as unethical by President Clinton and landed the Michigan State University researcher in a mess of controversy.
CLAUDIA JOSEPH
Daily MailSun, 25 Mar 2007 15:20 UTC
Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
For the first time, physicists have devised a way to make visible light travel in the opposite direction that it normally bends when passing from one material to another, like from air through water or glass. The phenomenon is known as negative refraction and could in principle be used to construct optical microscopes for imaging things as small as molecules, and even to create cloaking devices for rendering objects invisible.
VICTORIA ISLAND - A meteorite the size of four Wal-Mart Supercenters likely plunged into what we now know as the Delta, millions of years ago, according to a geologist and his teenage son.
The duo recently found what they believe to be a 3.4-mile-wide crater buried far beneath the asparagus fields of Victoria Island, about 15 miles west of Stockton.
The discovery was entirely by accident.
NYUCD study finds humans and their oral bacteria evolved from a common African ancestor
A New York University College of Dentistry (NYUCD) research team has found the first oral bacterial evidence supporting the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa to Asia.
The team, led by Page Caufield, a professor of cariology and comprehensive care at NYUCD, discovered that Streptoccocus mutans, a bacterium associated with dental caries, has evolved along with its human hosts in a clear line that can be traced back to a single common ancestor who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.
S. mutans is transmitted from mothers to infants, and first appears in an infant's mouth at about two years of age. Caufield's findings are reported in an article in the February issue of the Journal of Bacteriology.
In his analysis of the bacterium, Caufield used DNA fingerprints and other biomarkers that scientists have also employed to trace human evolution back to a single common African ancestor, known as "ancestral Eve."
Still awaiting a more poetic name, 2003 EL61 largely escaped the media hubbub during last year's demotion of Pluto, but new findings could make it one of the most important of the Kuiper-belt objects for understanding the workings of the solar system. In a recent issue of Nature, the original discoverer of the body, Mike Brown, announces with his colleagues that an entire family of bodies seems to have originated from a catastrophic collision involving 2003 EL61 about the time Earth was forming.
Brown and his team base their assumptions on similar surface properties and orbital dynamics of smaller chunks still in the general vicinity. They conclude that 2003 EL61 was spherical and nearly the size of Pluto until it was rammed by a slightly smaller body about 4.5 billion years ago, leaving behind the football-shaped body we see today and a couple of moons, as well as many more fragments that flew away entirely.
Engineers in the US have discovered that the spin of electrons in organic nanowire "spin valves" is extremely robust. A team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Cincinnati have found that the "spin-relaxation time" in these wires is at least 1000 times longer than that reported in any other system. The result means that these materials could be ideal for use in spintronics, an emerging field that exploits the spin of the electron to encode information in electronic circuits, computers and other devices.
