The end of the galaxy as we know it? Our Milky Way galaxy is an anomaly in more ways than one.
And now, NASA scientists say they know exactly when it will come to an end. In a universe that is forever spreading apart, the Milky Way has been moving closer to celestial neighbor the Andromeda galaxy. Sc215.
Saturn's Largest Moon Seen in Unprecedented Detail. The iceman gets his genome mapped. Talk about a cold case: the corpse of the world's oldest murder victim, "Oetzi the Iceman," has undergone the ultimate investigation: a mapping of his complete genome.
The findings were published in the science journal Nature Communications. Ready, Set, Download the Universe. Download the Universe brings together 15 of the Internet's top science folks in an online forum that guides readers through the vast world of digital science e-books, texts and apps.
It was born last month, after a group of writers and scientists had started gathering at Science Online to discuss the rapid growth of e-books. They saw a blissful future for science books - but how would readers be able to find out about them? If you spend too much time on the Internet, you've probably noticed that science e-books do not get reviewed often, nor are they picked up by blogs.
On Download the Universe, these 15 smart scientists have dedicated their time to reviewing books about science that only exist in the digital universe. Those may include self-published PDF manuscripts, Kindle Singles about science, or even apps with games in them. But why a website dedicated to only science e-books? The idea of a scientific e-review comes from Carl Zimmer, who writes about science for the New York Times.
Scientists Build a 'Perfect' Single-Atom Transistor. Scientists from the University of New South Wales have created a single-atom transistor using a repeatable technique — a world first.
Using a scanning-tunneling microscope (STM), the scientists were able to precisely manipulate hydrogen atoms around a phosphorus atom on a silicon wafer inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber. Scientists Create Gas Colder Than Absolute Zero. Until recently, the coldest temperature a gas could get to was "absolute zero" on the Kelvin scale — a beyond-freezing minus 273 degrees Celsius (-460 degrees Farenheit).
Physicists at Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have achieved a temperature colder than absolute zero. Such a discovery could help scientists understand concepts such as dark energy. In the mid-19th century, mathematical physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin created the absolute temperature scale, and determined that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. When particles are in absolute zero temperatures, they cease movement and have no energy. Research on Deadly Bird Flu to Be Published in Full. What Does the Data Say? Hans Rosling Breaks Down the Impact of Foreign Aid. See a Video of the Dark Side of the Moon for the First Time. One of NASA's twin GRAIL spacecrafts has captured a video of the Moon's far side for the first time.
Earth's tidal forces have slowed down the Moon's rotation so that it always presents one side to us. The other side, although receiving as much light as the front side, is called the far (or, more poetically, dark) side of the Moon, notably giving the name to one of Pink Floyd's most successful albums. The far side of Earth's only natural satellite has been photographed before (by Apollo 16, for example), but there has been no ground exploration there and no video was ever taken. The GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) project consists of two identical spacecraft orbiting the moon - Ebb and Flow - each carrying a special camera called MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students.)
Thousands of fourth to eighth graders selected areas on the lunar surface to be photographed by the MoonKAM, and the imagery will be sent back to them to study. Image credit: NASA. Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic. Plastic is possibly the greatest commercial creation of last 150 years.
It's made it into tupperware, saran wrap, toys, car parts, computer parts, smartphones, and shopping bag all over the world. The only problem is that polyurethane is not biodegradable, and recycling plastic can be equated to just turning it into another product, so all that plastic already in landfills will stay there for centuries to come. Scientists have not found a single way to break down polyurethane--luckily, nature has found a way on its own.
Yale scientists recently found a fungus in the Amazonian rainforest that naturally eats polyurethane. [Hello, visitors from StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Hacker News! Time in Space May Alter Astronauts' Genes. Spending long periods at low gravity may alter genes, suggests a new experiment involving a magnet-powered trick used on Earth to simulate weightlessness in space.
Subjected to magnetic levitation that generated an effect similar to microgravity experienced by astronauts orbiting Earth, fruit flies experienced changes in crucial genes. Humans won’t necessarily respond like fruit flies, but the system is considered an useful model for probing the effects of permanent free-fall on biology. Is Genetically Modified Food Dangerous? A controversial Atlantic article called “The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Food” drew 15,000 Facebook “Likes” and an inferno of flames from science bloggers, with Scientific American calling it “scare-mongering” and Slate dubbing it “paranoia.”
The timing of the article was particularly incendiary, since the FDA is currently weighing approval of fast-growing, genetically modified salmon critics call “frankenfish.” Read about the 13 worst foodborne illness outbreaks in U.S. history Can GM food harm your health? Many scientists and doctors have raised concerns about the potential health threats of GM food. Based on animal studies, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) reports that these risks may include infertility, immune system disorders, accelerated aging, GI system changes, problems with insulin regulation, and allergies. Learn which foods can boost your immune system What’s GM food—and are you eating it? GMOs: Food-supply savior or health hazard? Sugar Should Be Regulated As Toxin, Researchers Say.
A spoonful of sugar might make the medicine go down.
But it also makes blood pressure and cholesterol go up, along with your risk for liver failure, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases. Speed Limits on the Evolution of Enormousness. If you’ve ever wondered whether mammalian evolution has a speed limit, here’s a number for you: 24 million. That’s how many generations a new study estimates it would take to go from mouse- to elephant-sized while operating on land at the maximum velocity of change.
The figure underscores just how special a trait sheer bigness can be. “Big animals represent the accumulation of evolutionary change, and change takes time,” said evolutionary biologist Alistair Evans of Australia’s Monash University. Evans and co-authors revisit a fossil record dataset of mammal body size during the last 70 million years, in a study published Jan. 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Physicists Discover Quantum Speed Limit. By Matthew Francis, Ars Technica The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit, according to physicists’ best understanding: No information can be carried at a greater rate, no matter what method is used. But an analogous speed limit seems to exist within materials, where the interactions between particles are typically very short-range and motion is far slower than light-speed.
How to Picture a Black Hole. U.S. Asks Journals to Censor Articles on Bird Flu Virus.