Space Shuttle Discovery - 360VR Images. Sex with Neanderthals boosted human immunity - Technology & Science. Some immune system genes carried by modern humans came from interbreeding with Neanderthals and other ancient hominins called Denisovans, a new study suggests. "The cross breeding wasn't just a random event that happened," said Peter Parham, who co-authored the study published online in Science Express, in a statement. "It gave something useful to the gene pool of the modern human. " Parham, a professor of microbiology and immunology at California's Stanford University, and his collaborators analyzed a family of immune system genes called human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes, which are extremely varied and help the body recognize and destroy disease-causing pathogens.
They sequenced and compared HLA genes from humans with those from: Neanderthals, who lived in West Asia and Europe and died out 30,000 years ago. Denisovans, a group of hominins who lived in East Asia 30,000 to 50,000 years ago and were discovered in 2008 from a finger bone and a tooth in a cave in Siberia. Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Existence--In Space. Scientists have found the biggest and oldest reservoir of water ever--so large and so old, it’s almost impossible to describe.
The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as desolate and desert dry, but it's turning out to be pretty lush. Researchers found a lake of water so large that it could provide each person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water--20,000 times over. Yes, so much water out there in space that it could supply each one of us all the water on Earth--Niagara Falls, the Pacific Ocean, the polar ice caps, the puddle in the bottom of the canoe you forgot to flip over--20,000 times over.
The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole that is in the process of sucking in matter and spraying out energy (such an active black hole is called a quasar), and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together. The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water. Star Trek-Style Bedroom Doors: The Ultimate in Home Improvement - PCWorld.
Hello, visitors from StumbleUpon! Like what you see here? Check out PCWorld's GeekTech Blog for more cool hacks and cutting-edge tech. Or check out GeekTech on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for dropping by! If you were like every other geek child out there, you too may have wished to be beamed to the starship Enterprise in geosynchronous orbit directly above your house. Then you'd want to take the elevator to the bridge and walk through those automatic air-whooshing doors. Star Trek enthusiast Marc DeVidts had those same dreams and built an air-powered automatic door for his own home, and so can you.
Marc had been trying for years to install a Star Trek-style door, but at the time he still was in school and lived with his mother. Check out the full instructions and photos on his blog. Marc truly brought the glory of Star Trek to his home, let's hope that others follow suit. [UIProductions via Make and Gizmodo] Like this? Emergency and Disaster Information Service. Robot adapts to injury. Lindsay France/University Photography Graduate student Viktor Zykov, former student Josh Bongard, now a professor at the University of Vermont, and Hod Lipson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, watch as a starfish-like robot pulls itself forward, using a gait it developed for itself. the robot's ability to figure out how it is put together, and from that to learn to walk, enables it to adapt and find a new gait when it is damaged.
Nothing can possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ... The truth behind the old joke is that most robots are programmed with a fairly rigid "model" of what they and the world around them are like. If a robot is damaged or its environment changes unexpectedly, it can't adapt. So Cornell researchers have built a robot that works out its own model of itself and can revise the model to adapt to injury.
"Most robots have a fixed model laboriously designed by human engineers," Lipson explained. Turbulence Discovery Could Lead to Better Planes | Wired Science. With just a single measurement, a new model may deftly describe turbulent fluid flows near an airplane wing, ship hull or cloud, researchers report in the July 9 Science. If the long-sought model proves successful, it may lead to more efficient airplanes, better ways to curb pollution dispersal and more accurate weather forecasts. Fluid dynamicist Alexander Smits of Princeton University calls the new model “a very significant advance” that opens up a new way of thinking about chaotic, energy-sapping turbulence.
Turbulence is a problem that extends far beyond a bumpy plane ride. Fluid flowing past a body — whether it’s air blowing by a fuselage or water streaming across Michael Phelps’s swimming suit — contorts and twists as it bounces off an edge and interferes with incoming flows, creating highly chaotic patterns. In their new study Marusic and his colleagues measured forces in a giant wind tunnel, both near and away from a wall. Image: zoagli/Flickr. 'Ghost particle' sized up by cosmologists.
Cosmologists at UCL are a step closer to determining the mass of the elusive neutrino particle, not by using a giant particle detector, but by gazing up into space. Although it has been shown that a neutrino has a mass, it is vanishingly small and extremely hard to measure -- a neutrino is capable of passing through a light year (about six trillion miles) of lead without hitting a single atom. New results using the largest ever survey of galaxies in the universe puts total neutrino mass at no larger than 0.28 electron volts -- less than a billionth of the mass of a single hydrogen atom.
This is one of the most accurate measurements of the mass of a neutrino to date. The research is due to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, and will be presented at the Weizmann:UK conference at UCL on 22-23 June 2010. It resulted from the PhD thesis of Shaun Thomas, supervised by Prof. Ofer Lahav and Dr. Filipe Abdalla. Dr. Dr. Astronomers spot 'superstorm' on planet in another solar system. By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 17:00 GMT, 23 June 2010 A powerful 'superstorm' on a planet in another solar system has been spotted by astronomers.
Winds blowing at more than 6,200mph were detected on the distant world, which orbits a Sun-like star 150 light years away. The 'exoplanet' HD209458b has about 60% the mass of Jupiter and is located near the constellation of Pegasus. Circling its parent star at just a 20th of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, it is heated to a temperature of around 1,000C. An artist's impression of the 'hot Jupiter' planet HD209458b where astronomers have detected a superstorm But since the planet always has the same side facing the star, one half is very hot while the other is much cooler. 'On Earth, big temperature differences inevitably lead to fierce winds, and as our new measurements reveal, the situation is no different on HD209458b,' said Dr Simon Albrecht, one of the scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, US.
Ten years on, genomic revolution only just starting. Six new planets discovered. An international team, including Oxford University scientists, has discovered six diverse new planets, from 'shrunken-Saturns' to 'bloated hot Jupiters', as well a rare brown dwarf with 60 times the mass of Jupiter. The CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and Transits) space telescope is operated by the French space agency CNES. It discovers planets outside our solar system -- exoplanets -- when they 'transit', that is pass, in front of their stars. Once CoRoT detects a transit, additional observations are made from the ground, using a number of telescopes all over the world.
Although astronomers cannot see the planets directly, they use the space- and ground-based data to measure the sizes, masses, and orbits of these new planets precisely. This is why, among all known exoplanets, those with transits yield the most complete information about planet formation and evolution. "Every discovery of an extrasolar planetary system is a new piece in the puzzle of how these systems do form and evolve. British Amputee Cat First to Get Bone-Grafted Exoprosthetic Paws. When Oscar the cat lost both his hind paws in a farming accident, it was feared he'd have to trundle around in one of those wheeled-cat apparatuses.
But Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic veterinary surgeon in Surrey, pioneered a groundbreaking technique instead, installing weight-bearing bone implants to create a bionic kitty. Custom-engineered metal implants -- called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (ITAPs) -- are fastened directly to Oscar's little ankle bones, inside his fuzzy little legs. From there they protrude directly through the skin and fur, using a biomimicking design inspired by the way that deer's antlers anchor to bone and then extend out through the skin. Prosthetic paws attach to the ends of the implants and let Oscar (no relation to Oscar Pistorius) walk normally. "The real revolution with Oscar is [that] we have put a piece of metal and a flange into which skin grows into an extremely tight bone," Fitzpatrick told BBC News.