Astronomy. Mental-Health. SyntheticLife. Physics. Insects. Science/Nature | Mirror particles form new matter. Fragile particles rarely seen in our Universe have been merged with ordinary electrons to make a new form of matter. Di-positronium, as the new molecule is known, was predicted to exist in 1946 but has remained elusive to science. Now, a US team has created thousands of the molecules by merging electrons with their antimatter equivalent: positrons. 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. 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, I think it would be easy and reductionist to make this into yet another ‘Shiite vs. Sunni’ issue, but there has always been a wide space of interpretation and widely debate even within the Sunni Muslim world about various biotechnologies including cloning.
Would it be a bit too easy and reductionist, I asked, to then say that Muslims are less inclined to take an absolutist position and instead base their judgments by weighing the risks and benefits of each case? See Also: How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? 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. Q: How much sleep is ideal? A: Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest.
Morbidity [or sickness] is also "U-shaped" in the sense that both very short sleep and very long sleep are associated with many illnesses—with depression, with obesity—and therefore with heart disease—and so forth. Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos | Wired Science. Fiery explosions, beautiful reactions, and hilarious music videos are great reasons to be excited about chemistry. Here are some of our favorites. 10. Thermite vs. Liquid Nitrogen The British science show Brainiac asked one of the greatest scientific questions of all time: can liquid nitrogen freeze molten iron?
9. Gummy Bear Dies a Fiery Death in Potassium Chlorate Melt the oxygen-supplying chemical potassium chlorate, drop in some candy, and a fantastic display of fireworks will follow. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. If you have not had enough yet, check out the brilliant collection of Edward Kent. Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language. 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.
To test the phenomenon, a team of British and English researchers asked adults and infants to focus on a briefly flashing target circle. Sometimes the target appeared in the subjects’ right visual fields – 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.
Does this mean that adults and infants see the same colors differently? But might adults see colors differently? How Believing Can Be Seeing: Context Dictates What We Believe We. 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.
It did not appear every time, but when it did appear it was displayed for just 80 milliseconds (80 one thousandths of a second). Health | Single brain cell's power shown. There could be enough computing ability in just one brain cell to allow humans and animals to feel, a study suggests. The brain has 100 billion neurons but scientists had thought they needed to join forces in larger networks to produce thoughts and sensations. The Dutch and German study, published in Nature, found that stimulating just one rat neuron could deliver the sensation of touch. One UK expert said this was the first time this had been measured in mammals.
The complexity of the human brain and how it stores countless thoughts, sensations and memories are still not fully understood. 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.
This could mean that, within a single neuron, different synapses could be storing or processing completely different bits of information. Health | Sperm clue to 'disease immunity' Sperm could provide a vital clue to how diseases like cancer and HIV spread through the body, a study suggests. UK researchers have identified markers on the surface of human sperm which prevent them being attacked by the female immune system.
The markers are also found on cancer cells and HIV-infected blood cells and may help the diseases to take hold. The study, by researchers at Imperial College London, is published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Experts say little is known about how sperm dodge immune system barriers but there are likely to be many mechanisms. 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. Sperm are also protected from harm in the testes from the male's own immune system. Sugar molecules 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.
Love And Sex With Robots - David Levy - Book Review - New York T. Science/Nature | Hidden method of reading revealed. The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists. 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. Sophisticated eye-tracking equipment allowed the team to pinpoint which letter a volunteer's eyes focused on, when reading 14-point font from one metre away.
Rather than the eyes moving smoothly over text, they make small jerky movements, focusing on a particular word for an instant and then moving along the sentence. Crossed eyes Professor Simon Liversedge, from the University of Southampton, said: "We found that in a very substantial number of fixations that people make when they read, they aren't looking at the same letter. " Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Wild Vervet. Tags: vervet monkey, Cercopithecus aethiops, sexual harassment, Nachu, Kenya, behavior, interspecies communication A young vervet monkey, Chlorocebus pygerythrus. Image: shashamane. 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. I wonder why this is occurring all of a sudden? Sources BBCNews (quotes) shashamane (image) Health | Bacteria 'do not cut life short' 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.
But a study of fruit flies kept in a bacteria-free environment showed they did not outlive their grubby siblings. The University of Southern California study appears in Cell Metabolism. The researchers admit their experiment cannot be replicated in higher organisms, which need bacteria for proper digestion and other functions. But they said the result in flies still may be relevant to human ageing research. In both flies and humans, the number of bacteria living on the organism increases with age.
The innate immune response to bacteria is similar in flies and humans, and it loses strength with age in both species. But the study suggests these factors may have nothing to do with ageing. False assumptions. Sperm - Sleek, Fast and Focused: The Cells That Make Dad Dad - N. A Sound Way To Turn Heat Into Electricity. University of Utah physicists developed small devices that turn heat into sound and then into electricity. The technology holds promise for changing waste heat into electricity, harnessing solar energy and cooling computers and radars.
"We are converting waste heat to electricity in an efficient, simple way by using sound," says Orest Symko, a University of Utah physics professor who leads the effort. "It is a new source of renewable energy from waste heat. " Five of Symko's doctoral students recently devised methods to improve the efficiency of acoustic heat-engine devices to turn heat into electricity. They will present their findings on Friday, June 8 during the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America at the Hilton Salt Lake City Center hotel. Symko plans to test the devices within a year to produce electricity from waste heat at a military radar facility and at the university's hot-water-generating plant. The research is funded by the U.S. High-testosterone people reinforced by others' anger, new s. ANN ARBOR, Mich. —Most people don't appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.
"It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for," said Oliver Schultheiss, co-author of the study and a U-M associate professor of psychology. The findings may explain why some people like to tease each other so much, he added. "Perhaps teasers are reinforced by that fleeting 'annoyed look' on someone else's face and therefore will continue to heckle that person to get that look again and again," he said. "As long as it does not stay there for long, it's not perceived as a threat, but as a reward. " Listen to the podcast > Caution: Some soft drinks may seriously harm your health - Indep.
Top Ten Accidental Discoveries. Science/Nature | Einstein was right, probe shows. Early results from a Nasa mission designed to test two key predictions of Albert Einstein show the great man was right about at least one of them. It will take another eight months to determine whether he got the other correct say scientists analysing data from Nasa's Gravity Probe B satellite. The spacecraft was launched into orbit from California, US, on 20 April 2004. The mission's chief scientist presented details at a physics meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. Gravity Probe B uses four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure two effects of Einstein's general relativity theory. One of these effects is called the geodesic effect, the other is called frame dragging. A common analogy is that of placing a heavy bowling ball on to a rubber sheet. The bowling ball will sit in a dip, distorting the rubber sheet around itself in much the way a massive object such as the Earth distorts space and time around itself.
Minute measurements Larger puzzle Unified theory. Debating the origin of life. Dubai: Many schools and universities around the world deal with the theory of evolution, and many institutions rule out its antithesis, namely creationism. In the UAE, however, the teaching of naturalist Charles Darwin's theory takes the form of "scientific familiarisation" but it will be removed from public school curricula as of next year, said a senior official at the Ministry of Education.
The two arguments, creationism and evolution, are widely labelled as religion vs science and the two concepts have been debated for decades. According to Abdul Qader Eisa, Senior Supervisor of Biology at the Curriculum Development Centre in the Ministry of Education, the evolution theory is included in the curriculum for Grade 12 pupils in public schools but will be removed for the next academic year. This requires the replacement of the evolution theory, he told Gulf News.
The lesson on evolution theory also includes the viewpoints of Islamic scholars and a section on religion and science. Health | Mosquitoes target exhaled breath. Health | 'Race role' in tobacco smoke risk. Science/Nature | 248-dimension maths puzzle solved. Study shows why exercise boosts brainpower.
Science/Nature | Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears& Liberalism and neurology | Free to choose? | Economist.com. Chester expects virgin birth | Special reports | Guardian Unlimi. Urban Legends Reference Pages: Youngest Mother. The Rudiments of Wisdom Cartoon Encyclopedia. Memory Drug ...on 60 Minutes;