The world's first direct electrical link between nerve cells and photovoltaic nanoparticle films has been achieved by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Michigan.
The development opens the door to applying the unique properties of nanoparticles to a wide variety of light-stimulated nerve-signaling devices - including the possible development of a nanoparticle-based artificial retina.
Nanoparticles are artificially created bits of matter not much bigger than individual atoms. Their behavior is controlled by the same forces that shape molecules; they also exhibit the bizarre effects associated with quantum mechanics.
Erika Check
NatureWed, 28 Feb 2007 06:09 UTC
When did ancient populations learn that drinking milk 'does a body good'? A team of scientists in Germany has tried to answer this question by studying ancient DNA extracted from skeletons thousands of years old.
Many adult humans can drink cow's milk - a rare feat among mammals, which usually lose the ability to digest the sugar in milk after they are weaned. Scientists have found the genetic mutations that allow many Europeans and some Africans to digest milk. Geneticists have estimated that these mutations first spread 3,000 to 7,000 years ago in eastern Africa, and slightly earlier than that in Europe.
SAN FRANCISCO - About twice a year, an asteroid smashes into Earth's atmosphere with the force of a Hiroshima-size atomic blast. And those are small ones, scientists say; the space rocks vaporize before they can do any harm.
When the big one hits, we won't be as fortunate.
Astronomers have found a neutron star spinning at an astonishing 1122 rotations per second, 1.5 times faster than any other star.
Till now, no neutron star has ever been found to spin faster than 716 times per second, which was the previous record.
But now, new observations have revealed a neutron star that appears to be spinning much faster than that supposed speed limit.
If confirmed, the finding could bolster the possibility of exotic "soft" states of matter inside dense stars, as it is highly possible that the star might not have been ripped apart by its ultra-fast rotation.
A star that is visible to the naked eye in the night skies of Southern Arizona has properties nearly identical to the sun's, researchers announced Thursday.
A study done at the Fairborn Observatory in the Patagonia Mountains and at the Lowell Observatory in Flag-staff found that 18 Scorpii, a star that is more than 270 trillion miles away, is "just about as close to a twin of the sun as you can find," said Jeffrey Hall, an astronomer at Lowell who has been observing the star for more than 10 years.
The European comet-chasing spacecraft Rosetta has been sending back "beautiful new images" after swooping over the surface of Mars overnight, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Sunday.
Houston - Long before NASA was confronted with an off-duty astronaut's bizarre behavior and arrest in Florida earlier this month, the agency had developed procedures to deal with a mental breakdown in space.
The guidelines were developed to respond to an attempted suicide or severe anxiety, paranoia or hysteria aboard the international space station. Astronauts are instructed to bind the stricken flier's wrists and ankles with duct tape, restrain the torso with bungee cords and administer strong tranquilizers.
Jackson Pollock couldn't possibly have been thinking of fractals when he started flinging and dripping paint from a stick onto canvas. After all, mathematicians didn't develop the idea of a fractal until a couple of decades later. But if one physicist is right, Pollock ended up painting fractals anyway. And that mathematical quality may explain why Pollock's seemingly chaotic streams of paint come together into an ordered, beautiful whole, and why the technique brought Pollock acclaim as a master of American abstract painting.
A fractal is a geometric structure in which the shapes at a large scale reflect the shapes at a small scale, forming an interlocking set of patterns that nest inside each other like Russian dolls. Approximations of fractal structures have been noticed throughout nature. For example, the overall crystal structure of a snowflake looks remarkably like the structure in a single arm. And the ridges of a mountain range jut into the sky, forming patterns similar to the crags thrusting out from a single peak.
