Paralyzed People Using Computers, Amputees Controlling Bionic Limbs, With Microelectrodes On (Not In) Brain

Photo: Microwires emerging from the green and orange tubes connect to two arrays of 16 microelectrodes. Each array is embedded in a small mat of clear, rubbery silicone. The mats are barely visible in this image. These microelectrode arrays sit on the brain without penetrating it, a step toward longer-lived, less invasive versions of "neural interfaces" that in recent experiments elsewhere have allowed paralyzed people to control a computer cursor with their thoughts. The new microeletrode arrays were placed in two patients at the University of Utah who already were undergoing brain surgery for severe epilepsy. The larger, numbered, metallic electrodes are used to locate the source of epileptic seizures in the brain, so the patients allowed the micoelectrodes to be placed on their brains at the same time. (Credit: University of Utah Department of Neurosurgery)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — Experimental devices that read brain signals have helped paralyzed people use computers and may let amputees control bionic limbs. But existing devices use tiny electrodes that poke into the brain. Now, a University of Utah study shows that brain signals controlling arm movements can be detected accurately using new microelectrodes that sit on the brain but don't penetrate it.

"The unique thing about this technology is that it provides lots of information out of the brain without having to put the electrodes into the brain," says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering and coauthor of the study. "That lets neurosurgeons put this device under the skull but over brain areas where it would be risky to place penetrating electrodes: areas that control speech, memory and other cognitive functions."

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Tropical Rainfall Moving North

The band of heavy precipitation indicates the intertropical convergence zone. The new findings are based on sediment cores from lakes and lagoons on Palau, Washington, Christmas and Galapagos islands. Credit: University of Washington

From Live Science:

Earth's most prominent rain band, near the equator, has been moving north at an average rate of almost a mile (1.4 km) a year for three centuries, likely because of a warming world, scientists say.

The band supplies fresh water to almost a billion people and affects climate elsewhere.

If the migration continues, some Pacific islands near the equator that today enjoy abundant rainfall may be starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner, researchers report in the July issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

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How Trivial DNA Changes Can Hurt Health

From Scientific American:

Small changes to DNA that were once considered innocuous enough to be ignored are proving to be important in human diseases, evolution and biotechnology.

Biologists long thought they understood how genetic mutations cause disease. But recent work has revealed an important twist in the tale and uncovered surprising—even counterintuitive—ways that alterations in DNA can make people sick. The classic view assumed that what are termed “silent” mutations were inconsequential to health, because such changes in DNA would not alter the composition of the proteins encoded by genes. Proteins function in virtually every process carried out by cells, from catalyzing biochemical reactions to recognizing foreign invaders. Hence, the thinking went, if a protein’s makeup ends up being correct, any small glitches in the process leading to its construction could not do a body harm.

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High Levels Of Cycling Training Damage Triathletes' Sperm

From Brightsurf:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: The high-intensity training undertaken by triathletes has a significant impact on the quality of their sperm, the 25th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology heard today (Monday 29 June). Professor Diana Vaamonde, from the University of Cordoba Medical School, Cordoba, Spain, said that the triathletes who did the most cycling training had the worst sperm morphology.

Professor Vaamonde's team has previously shown that both high exercise intensity and high exercise volume may be detrimental to sperm quality. They decided to take a more profound look at the sportsmen who seemed to show the greatest alteration - the triathletes - and assess the correlation between the volume of training in each activity and sperm quality. Of the three modalities, only cycling, the activity for which triathletes undertake the most training, showed a clear correlation with sperm quality. The more cycling training the sportsmen undertook, both in time and kilometres, the worse their sperm quality became.

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From Haiti, A Surprise: Good News About AIDS

In this May 7, 2009 photo, patients with HIV/AIDS wait to be attended at the Partners in Health hospital in Cange, in central Haiti. Haitian infection rates dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent among expectant mothers in the last 15 years. Researchers recently switched to a new methodology that tests all adults, which puts Haiti's official rate at 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

From Yahoo News/AP:

BLANCHARD, Haiti – When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin.

Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.

"I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."

In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.

Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

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Why You Can’t Keep Your Foot Out of Your Mouth

From Wired:

It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of human nature: The harder we try not to say or do or think something, the more likely we are to slip — and often at the worst possible time. But maybe science can help.

More than a decade after the inability of a Dostoevsky protagonist to stop thinking about a white bear inspired his first experiments, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner has become one of the world’s foremost experts on what are now known as ironic processes.

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Can American Farms Make Bamboo the Next Big Cash Crop?

Could bamboo forests like these revive Mississippi Delta agriculture? (Photograph by David Sanger/Getty Images

From Popular Mechanics:

Bamboo has come into vogue as a green, sustainable resource that's used for everything from cutting boards to clothing to wood floors. But until now, almost all of the bamboo in products sold here has come from overseas. That could change soon, as new planting techniques may lead to millions of new acres of bamboo shoots in the American South.

Could the Mississippi Delta become America's bamboo belt, the breadbasket of a new class of homegrown structural building components? Earlier this June in Greenville, Miss., a group of engineers, manufacturers, bureaucrats and farmers gathered to discuss how land formerly cultivated for cotton might be converted to produce bamboo on a massive scale. Teragren, the world's largest bamboo building products manufacturer, has engineered new structural joists made of imported Moso, a bamboo species with the tensile strength of steel. Teragren VP Tom Goodham says a domestic Moso source is the key to renewable structural timber becoming mainstream and affordable: "The whole bamboo building-products category is just on the cusp of critical mass."

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NASA Reconsiders Its Moon Plans

Ares Rocket : courtesy of NASA

From Popscicom:

The Constellation system, which includes the Ares rocket and Orion crew module, could lose favor to a cheaper, more DIY approach to launching orbital craft post-Space Shuttle.

Next year, 33 years after its maiden flight, the space shuttle will retire. What happens after that has become subject to fierce debate within the space agency. The designated successor program, named Constellation, was the darling of previous NASA administrator Michael Griffin, but a new review now has the space agency looking elsewhere for a ride back into the firmament.

The centerpiece of the Constellation program was the Ares rocket. However, that rocket needs billions of dollars more in funding to reach operational status, and has been plagued by numerous engineering problems. Now, some are proposing an alternative rocket system that makes use of already existing shuttle parts.

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Late Blight -- Irish Potato Famine Fungus -- Attacks U.S. Northeast Gardens And Farms Hard

Leaf lesions due to late blight.
(Credit: Copyright College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 5, 2009) — Home gardeners beware: This year, late blight -- a destructive infectious disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s -- is killing tomato and potato plants in gardens and on commercial farms in the eastern United States. In addition, basil downy mildew is affecting plants in the Northeast.

"Late blight has never occurred this early and this widespread in the U.S," said Meg McGrath, associate professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology.

One of the most visible early symptoms of the disease is brown spots (lesions) on stems. They begin small and firm, then quickly enlarge, with white fungal growth developing under moist conditions that leads to a soft rot collapsing the stem.

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Even Cockroaches Get Fat On Bad Food

Gromphadorhina portentosa--the Madagascar hissing cockroach.
Credit: Natural History Museum, London

From Live Science:

Cockroaches may be tiny enough to slip through the smallest of cracks, but just like humans, these eternal pests can get fat on an unhealthy diet.

As part of a decade's worth of research on cockroaches, Patricia Moore of the University of Exeter studied how female cockroaches change their mating behavior in response to their diet, specifically what they eat when they are young.

"We already knew that what they eat as adults influences reproductive decisions," Moore said. But just how the food they consumed early in life shaped these decisions wasn't known.

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Can Aging Be Solved?

Credit: UCSF

From Technology Review:

At the World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics later this week in Paris, amid sessions on Alzheimer's disease, elderly care, and osteoporosis is a session provocatively titled "Ageing Is No Longer an Unsolved Biological Problem." It's organized by Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco.

In the 1960s, Hayflick discovered that human cells grown in a dish will multiply a finite number of times--a property now known as the Hayflick Limit. These cells later helped ignite the search for the cellular sources of aging, and Hayflick, a former president of the Gerontological Society of America, has since become well known for his skepticism toward claims that human longevity can be significantly lengthened through science.

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Web In Trouble? The Hidden Cables Under A Cornish Beach Feeding The World's Internet

Pictured above is the Atlantic's newest and most advanced submarine cable system. It is so powerful that it could carry the entire internet content in both directions

From The Daily Mail:

Hastily snapped on a camera-phone, the picture below shows where the internet feeds into Britain from New York. The super-high-speed cable is now hidden under six feet of Cornish beach - which is just as well, because if it were discovered and damaged, the entire web in Britain could turn to treacle. Warren Pole reports on the fragile network of ocean cabling that keeps the modern world turning, the madcap economics of internet supply - and why it will run out of space by 2014 unless scientists think of something... fast

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Revealed: How Pandemic Swine Flu Kills

From The New Scientist:

As the H1N1 swine flu pandemic continues to spread around the world, most cases are still mild. But reports are starting to emerge of people who sicken and die very quickly of what appears to be viral pneumonia. Now two independent groups of scientists have now found out why – and it's all down to where the virus binds within the body.

H1N1 swine flu comes from pigs, so it binds well to cell-surface molecules in the respiratory tracts of other mammals, including humans. But there are slight differences in the way different flu proteins bind to these receptors.

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What Did Einstein Know, And When Did He Know It?

Albert Einstein

From Newsweek:

What newly released papers reveal about the physicist.

On July 22 the Einstein Papers Project, located at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, will release the 12th volume of letters written or received by Albert Einstein—791 of them—plus transcripts of several notable lectures and interviews the physicist gave, covering the year 1921. It was a momentous 12 months. You might think there are no new revelations to be made about him, but for Einstein groupies the current volume addresses at least one key question: what did Einstein know about an 1887 experiment that discovered that the speed of light is invariant, regardless of the observer's speed or direction of motion—an idea that forms the core of special relativity and that Einstein did not mention when he laid out the theory of special relativity in a 1905 paper?

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Climate Change And The Mystery Of The Shrinking Sheep

Milder winters are causing Scotland's wild breed of Soay sheep to get smaller, despite the evolutionary benefits of possessing a large body. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2009) — Milder winters are causing Scotland's wild breed of Soay sheep to get smaller, despite the evolutionary benefits of possessing a large body, according to new research.

The new study provides evidence for climate change as the cause of the mysterious decrease in the size of wild sheep on the Scottish island of Hirta, first reported by scientists in 2007. The researchers believe that, due to climate change, survival conditions on Hirta are becoming less challenging, which means slower-growing, smaller sheep are more likely to survive the winters than they once were. This, together with newly-discovered so-called 'young mum effect' whereby young ewes produce smaller offspring, explains why the average size of sheep on the island is decreasing.

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The Strange Ingredients In Fireworks

Copper produces blue sparks. Barium, also used in rat poison and glassmaking, makes green. A mix of strontium salts, lithium salts and other stuff makes red. Aluminum and titanium put the white stars in an aerial flag. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Fireworks for the 4th of July are all about light, color and sound. But inside, there are some bizarre ingredients, from aluminum to Vaseline and even the stuff of rat poison.

An ancient mix of black powder, essentially gunpowder little changed from its invention in China a millennia ago, gets each rocket in the air by creating pressure in gas trapped in a tube, or mortar.

Two fuses are lit at once: one to ignite the black powder, and another that burns slower, creating a well-timed explosion high in the sky.

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Marie Curie Voted Greatest Female Scientist

Marie Curie has been voted the greatest woman scientist of all time. Photo: PA

From The Telegraph:

Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist has been voted the greatest woman scientist of all time.

The Polish-born researcher, who discovered radiation therapy could treat cancer, won just over a quarter of the poll (25.1 per cent) - almost twice as much as her nearest rival Rosalind Franklin (14.2 per cent), the English biophysicist who helped discover the structure of DNA.

Only two modern role models made the top ten - astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell came fourth (4.7 per cent) and Dr Jane Goodall, the world famous primatologist, was tenth (2.7 per cent).

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Hunting For Life In Alien Worlds

An artist's impression of the exoplanet HD 189733b transiting its sun. Astronomers have detected both water vapour and methane in its atmosphere. Image: ESA - C.Carreau.

From Plus Magazine:

Two of the most fundamental questions asked by people, and as yet still unanswered by science, are how life emerged on the Earth, and whether we are alone in the cosmos: does life exist in extraterrestrial locations as well? These deeply important questions form the core of a new kind of science, one that recently has been rapidly gathering momentum. Astrobiology is supported by a flood of new information from studies on the origins of terrestrial life, and our deep-space probes and telescopes exploring the Universe around us. The science incorporates everything from understanding the survival of life in the most extreme environments on Earth and looking for the earliest evidence of cells in the ancient rocks of our planet, to exploring the alien worlds of our solar system to determine if they have ever provided an environment suitable for life of their own.

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Vegetarian Diet 'Weakens Bones'

A vegetarian salad. Australian researchers have said that people who live on vegetarian diets have slightly weaker bones than their meat-eating counterparts. (AFP/File/Jay Directo)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

SYDNEY (AFP) – People who live on vegetarian diets have slightly weaker bones than their meat-eating counterparts, Australian researchers said Thursday.

A joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between the bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found that vegetarians had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters, said lead researcher Tuan Nguyen.

The issue was most pronounced in vegans, who excluded all animal products from their diet and whose bones were six percent weaker, Nguyen said.

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Don't Look Down: Terrifying View From Glass Box Balcony Jutting Out From Skyscraper's 103rd Floor

Long way up: Even the floor of the platforms are glass - few
were brave enough to look straight down

From The Daily Mail:

If you're scared of heights, it may be time to look away now.

Not content with having the tallest building in America, the owners of Sears Tower in Chicago have installed four glass box viewing platforms which stick out of the building 103 floors up.

The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet in the air and jut out four feet from the building's Skydeck.

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My Comment: This is so cool.