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Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic
It's not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last May's Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic. Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing. Editor's note: There are two high school students who have discovered plastic-consuming microorganisms.
Intellect and Academic
Nobody expected a great surprise. Genetic testing of the little finger of an early hominin child found in the Siberian Denisova Cave, Kostenki, in the middle of archeological remains pertaining to Upper Paleolithic culture, would almost for sure confirm DNA similar to ours. There was a slim change that the pinky belonged to a Neanderthal from the neighborhood that got lost, but everything pointed at a an unequivocal member of the advanced group of hominins responsible for introducing symbolic art all over the world, the so-called anatomically modern humans (AMH). The collection of personal adornments and artifacts suggestive of symbolic behavior from the Early Upper Paleolithic deposits of Denisova Cave, Altai, is one of the earliest and the most representative of the Upper Paleolithic assemblages from Northern and Central Asia.
Denisova Cave and the Mystery of the mtDNA Phylogenetic Tree « Rokus Blog
Nanotechnology Basics
Home > Introduction > Nanotechnology Basics Nanotechnology Basics Last Updated: Saturday, 27-Jun-2009 22:35:47 PDT
Artificial Robotic Hand Transmits Feeling To Nerves
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 20 of October , 2009 at 12:50 am DEKA’s prosthetic robot arm is commonly referred to as the “Luke” arm, but this new robotic hand may be more appropriate for that title, at least as far as the movie goes. Not only is this artificial hand, called the SmartHand, controlled directly by the brain (as opposed to actuated by muscle movements), but it provides some degree of feedback to the nerves of the user, including pressure and even texture (!). So this guy can actually feel things through the robot hand. It’s a neural interface.
@ ledzep23 : "I was referring to the effects of particles combining after the Big Bang!(If any) That's one of the things they're trying to do, right?" Particles combine(d) in different ways at different times after the Big Bang. The LHC is working at an energy scale that is close to the Big Bang but not close enough for quantum gravity effects to be significant. "They're trying to find the Higgs Boson and something that has to do with Anti Matter, etc."
The Ultimate Field Guide to Subatomic Particles
7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics
Odds are pretty good that some of you are reading this on an LCD screen while the rest of us are trying to make it out on the 13-inch monochrome monitor that came with our garage sale Commodore 64. But even with the LCD, some laptops still weigh over 10-pounds. And while that doesn't seem like much, the level of muscle atrophy experienced by the average Warcraft addict makes that weight a thousand times heavier. However, elastic conductors could fix that and make smuggling your porn collection into church even easier. Also, oooohhh. Elastic conductors are made of "ionic liquid" mixed with carbon nanotubes.
List of common misconceptions
This incomplete list is not intended to be exhaustive. This list pertains to current, widely held, erroneous ideas and beliefs about notable topics which have been reported by reliable sources. Each has been discussed in published literature, as has its topic area and the facts concerning it. Note that the statements which follow are corrections based on known facts; the misconceptions themselves are referred to rather than stated.
What would happen if I drilled a tunnel through the center of th"
Want to really get away from it all? The farthest you can travel from home (and still remain on Earth) is about 7,900 miles (12,700 kilometers) straight down, but you'll have to journey the long way round to get there: 12,450 miles (20,036 kilometers) over land and sea. Why not take a shortcut, straight down? You can get there in about 42 minutes -- that's short enough for a long lunch, assuming you can avoid Mole Men, prehistoric reptiles and underworld denizens en route. Granted, most Americans would end up in the Indian Ocean, but Chileans could dine out on authentic Chinese, and Kiwis could tuck into Spanish tapas for tea [sources: NOVA ; Shegelski ].
Why are past, present, and future our only options?
About "For instance, because you can't cross things in 2-d, neurons wouldn't be able to cross one another, and brains (or anything like it) would be very, very limited." Just to mention there IS a way to cross neurons or at least logical signals in the Planiverse. It requires 3 XOR gates, each made of 4 NAND's, which can be imagined in 2D as shown in [www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu]Robert Lanza, M.D.: Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone
Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history." Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet. In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future.
Public release date: 13-Oct-2004 [ Print | E-mail | Share ] [ Close Window ] UK CONTACT - Claire Bowles claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk 44-207-611-1210 New Scientist Press Office, London US CONTACT – Toni Marshall toni.marshall@newscientist.com 617-558-4939 New Scientist Boston office The cosmos was born in a churning fluid 300 million times hotter than the sun. We've recreated this hell, and it's not just hot, it is also very, very strange, says Amanda Gefter ( science writer based in London).
Liquid universe
10 Strange Things About The Universe
The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around. Theoretically, the lowest temperature that can be achieved is absolute zero, exactly ?273.15°C, where the motion of all particles stops completely.<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-36211" title="Tracks from CMS collisions" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/09/Tracks-from-CMS-collisions.png" alt="" width="660" height="372" /> After nearly 6 months of smashing particles, the Large Hadron Collider has seen signs of something entirely new. Pairs of charged particles produced when two beams of protons collide seem to be associated with each other even after they fly apart. “It is a small effect, but it is very interesting in itself,” said physicist Guido Tonelli , spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment . Tonelli and colleagues announced the results in a seminar at CERN September 21 and in a paper submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics .
LHC Detects Evidence of New Physics | Wired Science
NASA and NSF-Funded Research Finds First Potentially Habitable Exoplanet A team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of a planet with three times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone." This discovery was the result of more than a decade of observations using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, one of the world's largest optical telescopes. The research, sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation, placed the planet in an area where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface.
NASA and NSF-Funded Research Finds First Potentially Habitable Exoplanet
We have been increasingly using Flash animations for illustrating Physics content. This page provides access to those animations which may be of general interest. The animations will appear in a separate window. The animations are sorted by category, and the file size of each animation is included in the listing. Also included is the minimum version of the Flash player that is required; the player is available free from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ .