SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
Science & TechnologyS
Scientists in Japan are reporting development of a faster, less expensive version of the fabled polymerase chain reaction (PCR) a DNA test widely used in criminal investigations, disease diagnosis, biological research and other applications. The new method could lead to expanded use of PCR in medicine, the criminal justice system and elsewhere, the researchers say. Their study is scheduled for the July 15 issue of Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal.
It's not only humans that can learn from watching television. Software developed in the UK has worked out the basics of sign language by absorbing TV shows that are both subtitled and signed.
Xanadu, the city built by Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and mentioned by Italian traveller Marco Polo, has been unearthed by Chinese archaeologists who have sketched its layout.
"The most exciting findings are the layout of the moat in front of the Mingde Gate to the royal capital in the three-month excavation," said Yang Xingyu, a senior archaeologist.
Xanadu, also spelled Shangdu, was built in 1256 under the command of Kublai Khan, the first emperor of Yuan or Mongol Dynasty (1206-1368). It became the summer capital of Mongol emperors of China after the Yuan Dynasty moved its capital to what is now Beijing.
"The most exciting findings are the layout of the moat in front of the Mingde Gate to the royal capital in the three-month excavation," said Yang Xingyu, a senior archaeologist.
Xanadu, also spelled Shangdu, was built in 1256 under the command of Kublai Khan, the first emperor of Yuan or Mongol Dynasty (1206-1368). It became the summer capital of Mongol emperors of China after the Yuan Dynasty moved its capital to what is now Beijing.
© Chad Baker / GettyCan DNA predict the details of an organism that develops from it?
Lewis Wolpert
I have entered into this wager with Rupert Sheldrake because of my interest in the details of how embryos develop, and how our understanding of this process will progress. In my latest book, How We Live and Why We Die, I suggest that it will one day be possible to predict from an embryo's genome how it will develop, and I believe it is possible for this to happen in the next 20 years.
I am, in fact, being a little over-keen because 40 years is a more likely time frame for such a breakthrough. Cells and embryos are extremely complicated: for their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe.
Animals develop from a single cell, a fertilised egg, which divides to produce cells that will form the embryo. How that egg develops into an embryo and newborn animal is controlled by genes in the chromosomes. These genes are passive: they do nothing, just provide the code for proteins. It is proteins that determine how cells behave. While the DNA in every cell contains the code for all the proteins in all the cells, it is the particular proteins produced in particular cells that determine how those cells behave.
© NASAEta Carinae, a star in the Milky Way galaxy that is 7,500 light years from Earth, will become a supernova similar to those detected by Jeff Cooke and colleagues.
This method has the potential to allow astronomers to study some of the very first supernovae and will advance the understanding of how galaxies form, how they change over time and how Earth came to be.
"When stars explode, they spew matter into space. Eventually, gravity collapses the matter into a new star, which could have planets such as Earth around it," said Jeff Cooke, McCue Postdoctoral Fellow in physics & astronomy, who reports his findings July 9 in the journal Nature.
© NASAThe answer to the riddle of dark matter could be found in our own solar system
The orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury, departs from what it should be under Newton's laws. A century ago, when Einstein explained this anomaly, it confirmed his theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity.
Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. This provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds too fast for conventional gravity from the mass at the heart of a spiral galaxy to hold them in their orbits, so something else must be keeping them on track.
One theory is that invisible dark matter provides that extra pull. But an alternative is MOND, devised in the early 1980s by Mordehai Milgrom, now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
A group of researchers from the Department of Physics at UAB have designed a device, called a dc metamaterial, which makes objects invisible under certain light - very low frequency electromagnetic waves - by making the inside of the magnetic field zero but not altering the exterior field. The device, which up to date has only been studied in theoretical works, thus acts as an invisibility cloak, making the object completely undetectable to these waves.
The research is based on an initial idea of the British Ben Wood and John Pendry - the latter considered the father of metamaterials - and is a step forward in the race to create devices which could make objects invisible at visible light frequencies.
The research is based on an initial idea of the British Ben Wood and John Pendry - the latter considered the father of metamaterials - and is a step forward in the race to create devices which could make objects invisible at visible light frequencies.
© ReutersCargo ships await their turn to enter a lock in the Panama Canal in this 2008 file image.
As a small knot of scientists and visitors dressed in hard hats and orange safety vests milled around on the banks of the Panama Canal, chatting about the $5 billion expansion program now under way to widen the storied canal and so accommodate the ever-fatter freighters that ply the planet's seas, Rincon, 30, quietly pulled a few digging tools from his backpack. He squatted down near an unremarkable-looking patch of pebbles and broken rock and began methodically scraping away in the dirt.
© Stephen Morris Lyon washboard road experiment, featuring a wheel rolling over a bed of sand, creating ripples.
"The hopping of the wheel over the ripples turns out to be mathematically similar to skipping a stone over water," says University of Toronto physicist, Stephen Morris, a member of the research team.
© STS-119 Shuttle Crew/NASAThe International Space Station is now testing a new communications protocol that could form the backbone of a future interplanetary internet
The new software will make sending data from space less like using the telephone, and more like using the web. In the modern era of the web and information on demand, teams still have to schedule times to send and receive data from space missions.
But the newly installed system aboard the ISS could one day allow data to flow between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts automatically, creating what is being dubbed the "interplanetary internet".
