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The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is a key step in the creation of ultra-powerful lasers known as gamma-ray annihilation lasers. "The difference in the power available from a gamma-ray laser compared to a normal laser is the same as the difference between a nuclear explosion and a chemical explosion," said Dr David Cassidy of the University of California, Riverside, and one of the authors of the paper. "It would have an incredibly high power density." As a result, there is a huge interest in the technology from the military as well as energy researchers who believe the lasers could be used to kick-start nuclear fusion in a reactor. Mirror world Di-positronium was first predicted to exist by theoretical physicist John Wheeler and its component "atoms" - positronium - were first isolated in 1951.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mirror particles form new matter
A Beginner's Guide to Muslim Bioethics | Wired Science from
When Sunni and Shiite scholars disagreed over the ethics of cloning animals , I wondered whether there were other bioethical conflicts in the Muslim world. Are Muslims split over stem cell research and genetically engineered crops? Generally speaking, do they approach biotechnologies in the same way — or variety of ways — as Western cultures? I posed the question to a handful of Muslim bioethicists. The first to respond was Brown University anthropologist Sherine Hamdy . Wrote Hamdy,
How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? - TIME
Sleep is one of the richest topics in science today: why we need it, why it can be hard to get, and how that affects everything from our athletic performance to our income. Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif., has looked at the most important question of all. In 2002, he compared death rates among more than 1 million American adults who, as part of a study on cancer prevention, reported their average nightly amount of sleep. To many, his results were surprising, but they've since been corroborated by similar studies in Europe and East Asia. Kripke explains.If all other fields can go 2.0, incorporating collaboration and social networking, it’s about time that science does too. In the bellwether journal Science this week, a computer scientist argues that many modern problems are resistant to traditional scientific inquiry. "There is an enormous success story for Science 1.0," Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer science professor said. "But the Internet is changing both the methods we use and the things we need to study. The challenge for the next 400 years is to understand how trust and empathy work." In an editorial titled, " Science 2.0 ," Shneiderman argues that studying the interactions between people will be more important than studying the interactions between particles in bringing scientific solutions to big problems like disaster response, health care and energy sustainability.
The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method | Wired Science f
Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos | Wired Science from Wired.com
Fiery explosions, beautiful reactions, and hilarious music videos are great reasons to be excited about chemistry. Here are some of our favorites. When flammable powders are dispersed in the air, they can explode. Throughout history, that phenomenon has lead to explosions in grain storage facilities. In this case, the scientist ignites a cloud of lycopodium spores.
When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain’s language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them. How does that switch take place? And does it affect our subjective experience of color? Such tantalizing questions, their answers still unknown, are raised by this developmental shift in color categorization, described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . – roughly speaking, the right half of a person’s field of vision, which is transmitted from the eyes to the brain’s left hemisphere, where language processing also takes place.
Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language
ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2008) — Scientists at UCL (University College London) have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study reveals that the context surrounding what we see is all important -- sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren't really there. The paper reveals that a vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to 'see' imaginary shapes in the shadows when the light is poor. Eighteen observers were asked to concentrate on the centre of a black computer screen. Every time a buzzer sounded they pressed one of two buttons to record whether or not they had just seen a small, dim, grey 'target' rectangle in the middle of the screen.
How Believing Can Be Seeing: Context Dictates What We Believe We
BBC NEWS | Health | Single brain cell's power shown
The brain has 100 billion neurons but scientists had thought they needed to join forces in larger networks to produce thoughts and sensations. Researchers believe connections between individual neurons, forming networks of at least a thousand, are the key to some of its processing power. However, in some creatures with simpler nervous systems, such as flies, a single neuron can play a more significant role.
BBC NEWS | Health | Sperm clue to 'disease immunity'
If aggressive cancers and pathogens are using the same system of universally-recognisable markers to trick the immune system into thinking they're harmless, we need to work out exactly how this interaction works The female reproductive tract is a "hostile environment" for foreign cells which are readily attacked by the immune system but sperm move through apparently undetected. The Imperial College team says it has found specific sugar molecules on the surface of sperm which seem to be responsible for evading the immune response. These glycoproteins are universally recognised by all human immune systems, regardless of the individual, say the researchers.Innovation: Fire, Penicillin, YouTube — Add to Our Timeline of H
Changing the world is simple: It takes just one groundbreaking idea, one novel invention, even just a really stellar upgrade. As the timeline below shows, each new innovation builds on the last in a snowball of technology that, over millennia, has transformed us from creatures at nature's mercy to active shapers of our world. The astounding thing is that this process has no end. The richness of physical reality and the subtlety of human imagination ensure that somebody, somewhere, will always come up with something new.
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Mummified dinosaur may have outrun T Rex - Yahoo! News
Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case. In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously. At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hidden method of reading revealed
News : Russian scientists discover radiation- absorbing mineral
Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important scientific discovery. They've found a new mineral which absorbs radiation. It does not yet have an official name and is known only as number 27-4. It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste. “It can extract radioactive substances from any water-based solution and so has a very important practical significance,” said Yakov Pakhomovsky, the head of the Kolsky Research Institute. After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe.Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Wild Vervet
If you live in the small village of Nachu in Kenya, watch out, because a group of approximately 300 marauding monkeys is out to steal your food, sexually harass your women and attack and kill your livestock! In a truly amazing incidence of interspecies communication, a group of vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus , is using sexual harassment to intimidate women and children, who are responsible for growing maize, potatoes, beans and other crops for their farming community, causing them to lose their main food supply so they now are dependent upon famine relief to survive. The monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, with the bolder individuals throwing stones and chasing the women from their farms.Fruit flies share some characteristics with humans The theory that bacteria hasten our death has been questioned by research suggesting living in a sterile world would not boost life expectancy. It has been thought that the immune system response provoked by even harmless bacteria speeds up the ageing process by using up vital energy. The question is, if it's not bacteria that limit life span, then what is it?