Stem Cells Are More Flexible Than Previously Thought, Research Suggests

Human embryonic stem cell growing on a layer of supporting cells (fibroblasts). Micrograph by Annie Cavanagh and Dave McCarthy. (Photo From UCSC)

From The Telegraph:

Thousands of patients could benefit from a new discovery that could widen the use of stem cells in groundbreaking medical treatments.

Research by British scientists has shown the body is more flexible in its production of stem cells than previously thought.

The discovery widens the possibilities for the use of such cells in surgical procedures for treating damaged tissue and organs.

Last week surgeons in Spain created the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant using a windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells. The patient, 30-year-old mother-of-two Claudia Castillo, needed the transplant to save a lung after contracting tuberculosis. Scientists from Bristol had helped to grow the cells.

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"Screaming Mummy" Is Murderous Son of Ramses III?

An Egyptian mummy preserved with a pained facial expression (above) could be Prince Pentewere, suspected of plotting the murder of his father, Pharaoh Ramses III, according to a new analysis.Recent examinations of the mummy, found in 1886 and now located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, have helped archaeologists piece together a story of attempted murder, suicide, and conspiracy. Photograph by Alex Turner/Atlantic Productions

From National Geographic:

An Egyptian mummy who died wearing a pained facial expression could be Prince Pentewere, suspected of plotting the murder of his father, Pharaoh Ramses III, according to a new analysis.

Recent examinations of the mummy, found in 1886 and now located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, have helped archaeologists piece together a story of attempted murder, suicide, and conspiracy.

"Two forces were acting upon this mummy: one to get rid of him and the other to try to preserve him," said Bob Brier, an archaeologist at the University of Long Island in New York who examined the body this year.

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Forgotten But Not Gone: How The Brain Re-learns

Store room for future learning: nerve cells retain many of their newly created connections and if necessary, inactivate only transmission of the information. This makes relearning easier. (Credit: Image: Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology / Hofer)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2008) — Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new?

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The Reality of Mysterious Medical Maladies

From Live Science:

A recent governmental panel composed of scientists and veterans concluded that Gulf War Syndrome is real, the symptoms likely caused by neurotoxins that veterans were exposed to during the war.

About 60,000 of the nearly 700,000 Gulf War veterans began reporting health problems in the months and years following their military service. Complaints include insomnia, irritability, hair loss, chronic fatigue, muscle spasms, skin rashes, memory loss, diarrhea, headaches, and unexplained aches and pains. Some veterans believe that the disease is also responsible for birth defects and cancer.

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Material Slicker Than Teflon Discovered By Accident

A piece of steel (left) coated with a thin layer of the super-slippery material just 2 to 3 micrometers thick - such coatings provide a kind of eternal lubrication to reduce friction and save energy
(Image: US DoE Ames Lab)

From The New Scietist:

A superhard substance that is more slippery than Teflon could protect mechanical parts from wear and tear, and boost energy efficiency by reducing friction.

The "ceramic alloy" is created by combining a metal alloy of boron, aluminium and magnesium (AlMgB14) with titanium boride (TiB2). It is the hardest material after diamond and cubic boron nitride.

BAM, as the material is called, was discovered at the US Department of Energy Ames Laboratory in Iowa in 199, during attempts to develop a substance to generate electricity when heated.

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My Comment: The article does not examine the military applications, but its applications from enhancing protective vests to protecting machinery and vehicles from explosives is obvious. this .... if it works out .... has applications that will significantly protect the soldier when in the battlefield.

Extraordinary Speaker Addresses High School Students

When you want to complain, watch this video

The Physics Of Teardrops

Teardrop physics involve viscosity, surface tension and gravity. Now researchers have learned that tear fluid can move across the center of the eye, which was not thought possible. Credit: Dreamstime

From Live Science:

A lot can change in the blink of an eye. In fact, the entire surface layer of your eye changes every time you blink.

In about a quarter of a second, fluid pours into the eye, it is swept over the surface to leave a new, thin coating, and the excess is drained. Though the system may sound simple, the physics gets quite complicated. Scientists now are using mathematical computer models to try to understand how the fluid travels through the eye and leaves as teardrops.

"The reason why we're interested in studying this is because it's a highly dynamical system," said Kara Maki, a mathematics grad student at the University of Delaware. "If we can try to understand and gain insight into tear film dynamics, we can aim at trying to find better treatments for dry eye."

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Mysterious Fireball Lights Up Western Canadian Sky

CTV Edmonton security cameras caught the meteor approach and then create a massive flash in the skyline on Thursday evening, Nov. 20, 2008.

From CTV News:

A mysterious fireball has lit up the sky in western Canada and may have been a meteorite which slammed into central Alberta, according to local reports.

While it's still unknown what caused the bright light, residents from northern Saskatchewan to southern Alberta have reported seeing it, the RCMP said.

MyNews user Dan Charrois, who lives about 50 kilometres north of Edmonton, said security cameras set up at his home managed to capture some grainy footage showing a big flare in the night sky.

"It happened so fast I don't think anyone would have had the reaction time to get it," he told CTV.ca, adding that his computer software business has written programs which track meteors.

Though Charrois didn't see the fireball himself, he decided to check the security tapes after his friends and neighbours called him to find out where the light may have came from.

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New Strain Of Deadly Ebola Virus Discovered

A Medecins Sans Frontieres team takes a blood sample from a man suspected of carrying the Ebola virus in Bundibugyo following an Ebola outbreak in Uganda in 2007. Scientists said Friday an outbreak of Ebola that killed 37 people in Uganda last year was sparked by a hitherto unknown species of one of the world's most notorious viruses. (AFP/Medecins Sans Frontieres /File/Claude Mahoudeau)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

PARIS (AFP) – Scientists said Friday an outbreak of Ebola that killed 37 people in Uganda last year was sparked by a hitherto unknown species of one of the world's most notorious viruses.

The strain -- provisionally named Bundibugyo ebolavirus after the district where the outbreak occurred -- joins four other known species of the pathogen, they said.

More than one in three of patients infected with Bundibugyo died, according to their study, appearing in the US journal PLoS Pathogens, published online by the open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS).

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Regenerating A Mammoth For $10 Million

An intact skeleton of a woolly mammoth that is on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. S. C. Schuster

From The New York Times:

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.

The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA.

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How To Save And Purify The World's Water Supply: Experts Weigh In

From Popular Mechanics:

Clean water is one thing that most Americans take for granted. But with aging infrastructure, climate change and an accelerating world population, keeping clean water running from our taps is a growing challenge, both physically and politically. While pumping and purification systems try to keep up, neighboring farms, cities, states and even countries are on the verge of even more contentious battles over water rights. Four water experts came to the Hearst Tower in New York City yesterday, for a panel moderated by PM science editor Jennifer Bogo, to discuss how the country can deal with the water crisis, why global warming will exacerbate the problem and what will happen if we do nothing.

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Scientists Take A Step Closer To An Elixir Of Youth

From the Anti-Aging Blog

From The Telegraph:

A naturally occuring substance that can create "immortal cells" could be the key to finding a real elixir of youth, scientists claim.

Researchers believe boosting the amount of a naturally forming enzyme in the body could prevent cells dying and so lead to extended, healthier, lifespans..

The protein telomerase helps maintain the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes which act like the ends of shoelaces and stop them unravelling.

As we age, and our cells divide, these caps become frayed and shorter and eventually are so damaged that the cell dies. Scientists believe boosting our natural levels of telomerase could rejuvenate them.

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Evidence Of Vast Frozen Water Reserves On Mars: Scientists

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image released in 2005 shows Mars. NASA scientists have discovered enormous underground reservoirs of frozen water on Mars, away from its polar caps, in the latest sign that life might be sustainable on the Red planet.
(Photo from Breitbart)

From Breitbart/AFP:

NASA scientists have discovered enormous underground reservoirs of frozen water on Mars, away from its polar caps, in the latest sign that life might be sustainable on the Red planet.

Ground-penetrating radar used by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals numerous huge glaciers up to one half-mile thick buried beneath layers of rock and debris. Researchers said one glacier is three time the size of Los Angeles in area.

"All together, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps," said John Holt, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a report about the discovery, which appears in the November 21 issue of the journal Science.

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Power Of The Future: A Timeline To Energy Independence

From Live Science:

President-elect Barack Obama has plans to invest $150 billion in clean energy technology over the next 10 years. With similar initiatives in other countries, when might we expect exciting alternative technology to deliver true energy independence?

The predictions are all over the map.

In July of this year, Al Gore made probably the most ambitious forecast: we can get all our electricity from solar, wind and other clean carbon-free sources in just 10 short years.

"This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative," he said.

Many others think it will take longer.

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Life’s Amazing Photo Archive On View At Google

The “Migrant Mother,” Florence Thompson. (Credit: Dorothea Lange/LIFE)

From Gadgetwise/New York Times:

For those looking to feed their idle photo printers, one of the most magnificent photo archives of the past century is now available on Google.

It’s the Life magazine collection, some 10 million images all together, from Marilyn Monroe and JFK to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Following the deal between Google and the keepers of the Life archive, a vast chunk is now up on line at Google Image Search.

“Only a small percentage of these images have ever been published” said a statement from Google. “The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings and prints.” A spokeswoman for Time Inc. said that the archives in their entirety would be available in the first quarter of next year.

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Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science

From Science News:

A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.

When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.

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Clump Of Dark Matter May Loom Near Solar System

This handout picture shows scientists launching a balloon from Williams Field in Antarctica in December 2005 that is carrying a scientific instrument that detected possible evidence of so-called dark matter in space. It spotted an unexpected amount of very high energy cosmic ray electrons coming from an unknown source within about 3,000 light years of the solar system -- relatively close in astronomical terms. One explanation is that the electrons may have been spawned as dark matter particles collided with one another, triggering their mutual annihilation. Scientists think perhaps 25 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, which is invisible and poorly understood. (T. Gregory Guzik/Handout/Reuters)

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A balloon-borne instrument soaring high over Antarctica has found evidence of a possible large clump of mysterious so-called dark matter relatively close to our solar system, scientists said on Wednesday.

It detected an unexpected amount of very high energy cosmic ray electrons coming from an unknown source within about 3,000 light years of the solar system. A light-year is 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.

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'Oh Great': Astronaut Loses Tool Bag During Spacewalk

In this image from NASA TV, a tool kit bag, center, as seen through the helmet camera of astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, floats away from the International Space Station after she lost hold of it during a procedure during a 6 1/2-hour scheduled space walk outside the space station, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008. (AP Photo/NASA TV)

From FOX News:

HOUSTON — A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday after a grease gun inside it exploded, and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away.

It was one of the largest items ever to be lost by a spacewalker, and occurred during an unprecedented attempt to clean and lube a gummed-up joint on a solar panel.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was just starting to work on the joint when the mishap occurred.

She said her grease gun exploded, getting the dark gray stuff all over a camera and her gloves. While wiping off herself, the white, backpack-size bag slipped out of her grip, and she lost all her other tools.

"Oh, great," she mumbled.

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More News On Space Shuttle Endeavor

Endeavour astronaut loses tools in space -- AFP
Lost tool bag forces changes to planned spacewalks -- AP
Astronaut loses tools during spacewalk -- The Guardian
When It's Lost in Space, It's Really Lost -- ABC News
Endeavor astronaut loses tools in space -- Space Daily
Lost tool bag forces changes to planned spacewalks -- My Way News

Indian Space Agency Isro To Roll Out A Rival To Google Earth

Bhuvan will use a network of satellites to create a high-resolution, bird's-eye view of India ? and later, possibly, the rest of the world
(NASA/GSFC/NOAA/USGS Reuters)

From Times Online:

Emboldened by its first mission to the Moon, India is to take on a target closer to Earth: Google.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which is based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of the sub-continent, will roll-out a rival to Google Earth, the hugely popular online satellite imagery service, by the end of the month.

The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), will allow users to zoom into areas as small as 10 metres wide, compared to the 200 metre wide zoom limit on Google Earth.

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Hi-Tech Weaponry Battles Piracy On The High Seas

This Saudi Arabian oil tanker, the Sirius Star, was captured by pirates on 16 November 2008, off the coast of Somalia (Image: Caters News / Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

SVEN ERIK PEDERSEN accelerated his 9900-tonne ship to full speed and swung the helm hard over - not the usual way to treat a luxury cruise liner, but then the captain was in an unusual situation. His vessel, the Seabourn Spirit, had just been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. One of his crew had been wounded by shrapnel, 151 passengers were in danger, and heavily armed pirates in two fast motor boats were attempting to board his ship...

If you imagined that maritime piracy died out with Captain Kidd and the other seafaring scoundrels of the 18th century, the recent attack on the Seabourn Spirit should put you straight. And forget silly notions of wooden legs, treasure maps and grog. Modern-day pirates come equipped with supercharged speedboats, large-calibre weaponry and all the radio intercept technology they need to identify and locate valuable ocean-going booty.

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