Life: Why do living things die. New spin on antifreeze: Researchers create ultra slippery anti-ice and anti-frost surfaces. A team of researchers from Harvard University have invented a way to keep any metal surface free of ice and frost. The treated surfaces quickly shed even tiny, incipient condensation droplets or frost simply through gravity. The technology prevents ice sheets from developing on surfaces -- and any ice that does form, slides off effortlessly. The discovery, published online as a just-accepted-manuscript in ACS Nano on June 10, has direct implications for a wide variety of metal surfaces such as those used in refrigeration systems, wind turbines, aircraft, marine vessels, and the construction industry. "The lack of any practical way to eliminate the intrinsic defects and inhomogeneities that contribute to liquid condensation, pinning, freezing, and strong adhesion, have raised the question of whether any solid surface (irrespective of its topography or treatment) can ever be truly ice-preventive, especially at high-humidity, frost-forming conditions," Aizenberg said.
Arapaima: Eating A Living Fossil (Paiche) | finChin. Arapaima: Eating A Living Fossil (Paiche) A fish which does not use gills. No lungs either, although it breathes air. A living fossil. An evolutionary dead-end unchanged from 23 million years old fossils. Shares the river with piranhas. Armored with scales that can break the teeth of a piranha. No predator threatened it in millions of years– until humans came along. And, Morimoto will cook it for you. Arapaima: Monster of the Shallows In a recent episode of Iron Chef America, Chef Morimoto and his challenger faced an unfamiliar secret ingredient: paiche, a South American river fish you will not find at the supermarket. Typical arapaima lives in the Amazon river and grows to 7 feet and weighs around 200 pounds. Life of a Sea Monster Amazon’s water has low levels of oxygen. The low oxygen level is a boon to arapaima. Should a hungry piranha become desperate enough to attack an arapaima, it will have broken teeth for its efforts.
Arapaima feeds on other fish and reaches maturity in 4-5 years. Piranha-proof fish: Secret to better armor? - Technology & science - Science - DiscoveryNews.com. An ancient Amazonian fish with thick piranha-proof scales may hold the secret to building better bullet-proof body armor, puncture resistant gloves or even safety goggles and CD cases. Researchers at several institutions have been looking at engineering new materials that contain some of the same properties as these fish scales; they’re light, flexible and often transparent. Now some are taking a step forward and actually building these materials. NEWS: Piranhas Attacking Beachgoers in Brazil At the University of California, San Diego, materials science professor Marc Myers has been studying the scales on the massive freshwater arapaima, which use two layers of scales to repel bites from the predatory piranha. Piranha normally don’t attack the arapaima, which can grow to nearly 8 feet long and weigh more than 500 pounds.
However, when food supplies are low and water levels drop in the Amazon basin, everything in the water is considered a meal, Myers said. © 2012 Discovery Channel. Henrietta Gains Immortality, Saves A Million Lives | finChin. Henrietta Gains Immortality, Saves A Million Lives Henrietta Lacks died young. Tragically, cancer claimed her when she was 30.
Her cells were special. They made the polio vaccine possible, contributed to cancer and AIDS research. Tens of thousands of patents and projects owe Henrietta their success. Her family never even knew about the legacy of Henrietta Lacks for decades. Henrietta Lacks: Her Cells & Her Story Henrietta Lacks was a child of African-American tobacco farmers in Virginia. In 1951, when she was 30 she contracted cervical cancer, she went to John Hopkins, the only hospital nearby to accept African-American patients in those times. Before her death, Henrietta received radiation treatment at John Hopkins, and the physicians removed healthy and tumorous parts of her cervix– not for treatment, but for research. Henrietta’s cells were unlike any other before.
HeLa: The Unique Cells of Henrietta What was different about Henrietta Lacks’ cells? Medical Advances Highly recommended. The Largest Penis in the World. We, humans, may not be endowed by nature with great physical abilities: powerful muscles or weaponry like fangs, claws, horns and so on. But there is one chapter where we excel: sex. I'm not talking about sexual activity - at it has been proved that bonobo (which is also wrongly named "dwarf chimpanzee") has more sex and much varied than the human being - but about penis size.
Man is the ape, the monkey and the primate with the biggest penis! Gorilla males, which dwarf humans in size, have minute penises compared to ours, no thicker and longer than a pencil. In some African countries, saying that one is 'hung like a gorilla' is considered an insult. That's about us, but which is the largest penis in nature? Well, despite the huge size of penises in elephants and odd hoofed mammals (like rhinos and horses), the biggest penis indeed belongs to the biggest animal: the blue whale. Accurate measurements are difficult to be made because the whale's erect length can only be observed during mating. Pacific Refuges for Devastated Corals | Global Warming & Coral Bleaching. Global warming is expected to have devastating effects on coral reefs, but recent research points to a few exceptions. Warming in the equatorial Pacific may actually create refuges for corals around a handful of islands, even as it bleaches, or kills, corals elsewhere, suggests new research that predicts increased upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water in these places.
"These little islands in the middle of the ocean can counteract global trends and have a big impact on their own future, which I think is a beautiful concept," said study researcher Kristopher Karnauskas, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist, in a press release issued by the institution. If predictions made by Karnauskas and colleague Anne Cohen are accurate, warming around the Gilbert Islands will be slower than elsewhere, giving the corals and their symbiotic algae a better chance to adapt. Corals are animals that host tiny plants, or algae, that feed them using photosynthesis. Periodic Table of Elements [Interactive] 13 more things that don't make sense. Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively.
To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs 13 more things that don't make sense (Image: Loungepark / The Image Bank / Getty) Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us. Axis of evil Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern Dark flow Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed Eocene hothouse Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C.
Fly-by anomalies Hybrid life Morgellons disease. We Can Survive Killer Asteroids — But It Won't Be Easy | Wired Science. The chances that your tombstone will read “Killed by Asteroid” are about the same as they’d be for “Killed in Airplane Crash.” Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities — more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks — comets and asteroids — that wander interplanetary space in search of targets. Most asteroids are made of rock. The rest are metal, mostly iron. But some do. Every few decades, on average, house-sized impactors collide with Earth. One killer asteroid we’ve been monitoring is Apophis, which is large enough to fill the Rose Bowl. If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, we would be the laughing stock of aliens in the galaxy Some people would like to blow potentially hazardous rocks out of the sky with a nuclear bomb.
Saving the planet requires commitment. Opinion Editor: John C.
Brain Scanner Records Dreams on Video. Just a few weeks ago, we posted about how brain patterns can reveal almost exactly what you're thinking. Now, researchers at UC Berkeley have figured out how to extract what you're picturing inside your head, and they can play it back on video. The way this works is very similar to the mind-reading technique that we covered earlier this month. A functional MRI (fMRI) machine watches the patterns that appear in people's brains as they watch a movie, and then correlates those patterns with the image on the screen. With these data, a complex computer model was created to predict the relationships between a given brain pattern and a given image, and a huge database was created that matched 18,000,000 seconds worth of random YouTube videos to possible brain patterns.
Comparing the brain-scan video to the original video is just a way to prove that the system works, but there's nothing stopping this technique from being used to suck video out of people's heads directly. Mad science News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. About 60 years late to the party on dreaming that one up, friend. :-) in short...solar power is inefficient, and electrolysis of water to create hydrogen is energy intensive, which means it wastes a lot of energy to create that hydrogen to be used as an energy source. IIRC electrolysis is at best 50% energy efficient, with solar being 20% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, which has a decent, but low yield in the first place. A meter square of solar cells intercepts ~1200 watts of power. This returns only 20%, so 60w, 50% of which is lost for electrolysis, so we're down to 30W of power stored. Fuel cells convert something like 60% of stored energy into actual mechanical, lets get this thing moving energy...so we're down to 19.2W of energy used via hydrogen fuel cells filled using every square meter of solar cells we use.
We could do it, but as you can see we lose a lot of energy in the process. Neuroscience News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Neuroscience News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Neuroscience News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. The Elements by Theodore Gray. My book The Elements is based on photographs I've been collecting at my website periodictable.com for many years. The website includes not just pictures, but also more detailed descriptions than we could fit in the book, and most importantly, it includes full 360-degree rotating videos of almost all the objects.
You really won't find this kind of resources anywhere else for any other subject, so please enjoy. If you don't have the book yet, please don't think this is page is a substitute for the real thing. Aside from the fact that people buying the book (and my other photo periodic table products) is what pays for me being able to continue hosting the website, there's really no substitute for a paper book in your hands.
The book also makes a fabulous gift, and you can't give a website as a gift! For the convenience of people who have the book, I've listed all the samples found on each page in the book, so you can easy look them up. Video: A Trillion-Frame-Per-Second Camera Captures Individual Photons Moving Through Space. Here at PopSci we love super-fast cameras and super slow-mo video, so you can imagine our glee when we heard that MIT researchers have built a camera with a visual capture rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to watch photons travel the length of a one-liter bottle in the video below. In other words, absolutely nothing in the universe looks fast to this camera.
But it's not so simple as pressing "record. " The rig is built as a "streak camera," a fairly new innovation in which the aperture of the camera is a narrow slit. The result is a frame captured very quickly, but it is only one-dimensional, at least from a spatial standpoint. So how do they produce the 2-D video below? In other words, the world's fastest video camera is also very slow, as it must first accumulate hundreds of thousands of data sets before it can cobble together a short video of a scene like the one seen below. [MIT News] Chemistry News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Interesting — when I was in the Army, it was called CBR (chemical, biological, radioactive).
I wonder why they changed the order and the initials? Pressure from Jay Leno? NBC was for Nuclear, Biological, Radiological. I think it might have been for memory's sake, which might have something to do with the tv studio indeed - but maybe just for giggles. The military does not always make sense. When were you in? I was in back in the late 70s. I remember atropine was one of the drugs that was used to treat the immediate effects of nerve gas exposure. And we're supposed to believe that our benevolent government has truly decided to destroy all our VX stockpiles. I dunno, we've got much more targeted, devastating methods of wiping ourselves off the planet these days.
I was in in the 90's. The husband, Mr. 100 Greatest Discoveries: Chemistry" Did the orientation of the continents hinder ancient settlement of the Americas? In an intriguing original look at the history of the first Americans, a new study finds evidence that the north-south orientation of the American continents slowed the spread of populations and technology, compared to the east-west axis of Eurasia. The research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, is part of a special section which explores who the first Americans were and how they were able to settle in the last great unexplored habitat. The research, by Sohini Ramachandran and Noah Rosenberg, from Brown University and Stanford University respectively, uses genetic information to explore the effects of continental axes and climates on human migration and adaptation across the Americas.
"It has been proposed that the east-west orientation of the Eurasian landmass aided the rapid spread of ancient technological innovations, while the north-south orientation of the Americas led to a slower diffusion of technology there," said Ramachandran. Tyrannosaurus Rex, Warrior Or Wimp ? (BBC) Video. FYI: Can Anything Move Faster Than Light? How to Hack Your Brain. Full Length Science Documentaries - Cynthia's News Posterous.