Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

What Were They Thinking? More Than We Knew. - washingtonpost.com
Dog owners have long maintained that their pooches have a lot more going on between their furry ears than scientists acknowledge. Now, new research is adding to the growing evidence that man’s best friend thinks a lot more than many humans have believed.The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place.

Yup yup. I knew that.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

ScienceDaily: ‘Virus Sponge’ Could Improve Flu Treatments, Diabetes Care, Vaccine Development
Researchers at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering have created a “virus sponge” that could filter a patient’s blood in a process similar to kidney dialysis, removing the virus from the patient’s body. The concept could also be used to make vaccine production more efficient and in a pill to reduce glucose levels in diabetics, among other applications.

The virus sponge is based on a technology called molecular imprinting. In molecular imprinting, researchers stamp a molecule’s shape into a substance (in this case, a hydrogel—a sponge-like material). When the specific molecule filters through the hydrogel, it fits in the imprint hole and is trapped.

Very interesting.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Gene mutation linked to cognition is found only in humans
The human and chimpanzee genomes vary by just 1.2 percent, yet there is a considerable difference in the mental and linguistic capabilities between the two species. A new study showed that a certain form of neuropsin, a protein that plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous systems of humans and that it originated less than 5 million years ago. The study, which also demonstrated the molecular mechanism that creates this novel protein, will be published online in Human Mutation, the official journal of the Human Genome Variation Society.

Very interesting stuff. I’d be curious to see what this protein did in the other primates and in dolphins and squid.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Women have played major role in history — from the start, authors assert
Of greatest import in this book is the idea that women have always been major players – not simply baby-machines who tended to the children, rustled up roots, collected nuts and berries and relied on macho male hunters to bring home the bacon.

In fact, the authors’ spadework led them to a striking conclusion: that “female humans have been the chief engine in the unprecedented high level of human sociability; were the inventors of the most useful of tools – called the String Revolution; have shared equally in the provision of food for human societies; almost certainly drove the human invention of language; and were the ones who created agriculture.”


But of course.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Technology Review: Practical Holographic Video
The tyranny of two-dimensional computer and TV displays could soon be over. A team of MIT researchers has proposed a way to make a holographic video system that works with computer hardware for consumers, such as PCs with graphics cards and gaming consoles. The display, the researchers say, will be small enough to add to an entertainment center, provide resolution as good as a standard analog television, and cost only a couple hundred dollars.

I’m definitely getting one of these :-)

groovychk: (science)

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

First habitable Earth like planet outside Solar System discovered
Munich, Apr 23 : An international team of astronomers from Switzerland, France and Portugal have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date.

The planet has a radius only 50 percent larger than Earth and is very likely to contain liquid water on its surface.

The research team used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) 3.6-m telescope to discover the super-Earth, which has a mass about five times that of the Earth and orbits a red dwarf already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet.

Astronomers believe there is a strong possibility in the presence of a third planet with a mass about eight times that of the Earth in the system.

However, unlike our Earth, this planet takes only 13 days to complete one orbit round its star. It is also 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the Sun.

However, since its host star, the red dwarf Gliese 581, is smaller and colder than the Sun - and thus less luminous - the planet lies in the habitable zone, the region around a star where water could be liquid!

Very neat.
Circling a red sun - a heavy gravity, habitable world where the sun is giant in the sky…. Sounds like Krypton. :-)

Good thing we’ve discovered kryptonite ;-)

Better article at - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1501AP_Habitable_Planet.html

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Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal

“All people are born alike-except Republicans and Democrats,” quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

This kind of thing really does make it difficult to have hope sometimes.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Discovery Channel :: News - Animals :: Chimps More Evolved Than Humans?
A comparison of human and chimpanzee genes has revealed a startling possibility: chimps may have evolved more than humans in the 6 or 7 million years since both diverged from a common ancestor.

A study comparing human and chimp genes that appear to have evolved since we parted ways shows that humans have about 154 such genes and our nearest primate relative a whopping 233.

This implies that chimps have undergone more evolutionary changes than humans over the same period of time. It also underscores a common misunderstanding that if an animal is “more evolved” it must be smarter or superior to others in some way.


Very interesting.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

The prospect of all-female conception - Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology
Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.

Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman’s bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.


Interesting science. One more piece in the puzzle.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Really Old Stars Perhaps Ideal for Advanced Civilizations - Yahoo! News
Why are SETI scientists interested in M-Stars? As Dr. Peter Backus, Observing Programs Manager for SETI, concluded in a preliminary report on the M-Stars workshop, ‘One…aspect of M dwarfs makes them intriguing for SETI: they may be ideal hosts for advanced technological civilizations because they live an extraordinarily long time. Stars like the Sun live (i.e., they fuse hydrogen into helium) for only about 10 billion years. No M dwarf that ever formed has yet to die; no M dwarf will die for more than another 100 billion years. With such long lifetimes, there are big possibilities for these small stars.’

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Pretty darn cool. A shame Venus doesn’t get more attention. Venus Express has been in Venus orbit for awhile now.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes - New York Times
When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.
Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

Interesting stuff.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

NewsLocale - Blood Group Breakthrough: What Are Its Implications?
Blood transfusion may never be the same again if a discovery by Danish researchers is proved safe and effective in humans. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have used newly discovered enzymes to eliminate the incompatibility of blood groups A, B and AB by converting these blood groups into the universal donor group O.

The discovery raises hope that shortages of blood in blood banks for transfusions may finally be done away with. Compatibility of blood groups is a problematic issue that has to be faced by hospitals on a daily basis. If the donor’s blood type does not match with the recipient, a potentially fatal immune reaction can be triggered.


This could be very cool indeed!

groovychk: (science)

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-466789,00.html

A network of artificial nerves is growing in a Swiss supercomputer — meant to simulate a natural brain, cell-for-cell. The researchers at work on “Blue Brain” promise new insights into the sources of human consciousness.

But — has there been mental activity?

The newborn “Blue Brain” surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. “It happened entirely on its own,” says Markram. “Spontaneously.”

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

SCIENCE - washingtonpost.com
The South Pole of Mars contains enough ice to cover the planet in 35 feet of water if it melted, new radar scans have determined. The North Pole, researchers said, probably holds about as much.

Mars

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

The universe is a string-net liquid - fundamentals - 15 March 2007 - New Scientist

Herbertsmithite could be the new silicon - the building block for quantum computers.

In theory, quantum computers are far superior to classical computers. In practice, they are difficult to construct because quantum bits, or qubits, are extremely fragile. Even a slight knock can destroy stored information.

In the late 1980s, mathematician Michael Freedman, then at Harvard University, and Alexei Kitaev, then at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Russia, independently came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of storing qubits in properties of particles, such as an electron’s spin, they suggested that qubits could be encoded into properties shared by the whole material, and so would be harder to disrupt (New Scientist, 24 January 2004, p 30). “The trouble is the physical materials we know about, like the chair you’re sitting on, don’t actually have these exotic properties,” says Freedman.

Physicists told Freedman that the material he needed simply didn’t exist, but Joel Helton’s group at MIT might just prove them wrong. The material would be a string-net liquid with elementary and quasi-particles at the end of each string. Physicists could manipulate quasi-particles with electric fields, braiding them around each other, encoding information in the number of times the strings twist and knot, says Freedman. A disturbance might knock the whole braid, but it won’t change the number of twists - protecting the information.

“The hardware itself would correct any errors,” says Miguel Angel Martin-Delgado of Complutense University in Madrid, Spain.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

His energy bill is $0.00 - Yahoo! News
EAST AMWELL, N.J. - Mike Strizki lives in the nation’s first solar-hydrogen house. The technology this civil engineer has been able to string together – solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer – provides electricity to his home year-round, even on the cloudiest of winter days.

Mr. Strizki’s monthly utility bill is zero – he’s off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.

It sounds promising, even utopian: homemade, storable energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But does Strizki’s method – converting electricity generated from renewable sources into hydrogen – make sense for widespread adoption?


I’m watching and waiting for this for my own home.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Have researchers found a new state of matter?
Wen suspected that the effect could be an example of a new type of matter. Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are different. “If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid,” says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps.

It is as if the electrons are entangled. Today, physicists use the term to describe a property in quantum mechanics in which particles can be linked despite being separated by great distances. Wen speculated that FQHE systems represented a state of matter in which entanglement was an intrinsic property, with particles tied to each other in a complicated manner across the entire material.

This led Wen and Levin to the idea that there may be a different way of thinking about matter. What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at the ends of long “strings” of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a model in which such strings are free to move “like noodles in a soup” and weave together into huge “string-nets”.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Griffin maps out NASA’s moon and Mars plans up to 2057 - NASA SpaceFlight.com
‘For the sake of argument and nothing more, let us say that in 2022 we will begin a sustained lunar program of exploration and development consisting of three manned missions (two outpost crew rotations and one sortie) and one unmanned cargo mission per year, utilizing three Orion/Ares I vehicles and four Ares V launches.

‘Present projections assume a cargo capacity of six metric tons on a lander carrying four crew members, and twenty metric tons on a cargo lander, at a marginal cost of about $750 million for a human mission and $525 million for a cargo mission. The marginal cost in Fiscal 2000 dollars for this nominal lunar program will thus be about $3 billion.’

Mars also received a mention, with the timeline of the early 2020’s being noted by Griffin, who went on to project nine Mars missions within a 20 year period, all costing less than the current shuttle program.

‘By the 2020?s we will be well positioned to begin the Mars effort in earnest. The lunar campaign will have stabilized; a human-tended outpost will be well established; we will have extensive long-duration space experience in both zero - and low - gravity conditions, and it will be time to bundle these lessons and move on to Mars - which does not imply that we will bring lunar activities to an end.

‘Quite the contrary; my prediction is that the Moon will prove to be far more interesting, and far more relevant to human affairs, than many today are prepared to believe. But by the early 2020s, it will be time to assign a stable level of support for lunar activities, and set out for Mars.

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Eye Color Explained

Everything you know is wrong.

What most people know about the inheritance of eye color is that brown comes from a dominant gene (needing one copy only) and blue from a recessive gene (needing two copies). University of Queensland geneticist Rick Sturm suggests that the genetics are not so clear. “There is no single gene for eye color,” he says, “but the biggest effect is the OCA2 gene.” This gene, which controls the amount of melanin pigment produced, accounts for about 74 percent of the total variation in people’s eye color.

Sturm has recently shown that the OCA2 gene itself is influenced by other genetic components. After gene-typing about 3,000 people, Sturm found that how OCA2 is expressed—and how much pigment a person has—is strongly linked to three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or single letter variations, in a DNA sequence near the OCA2 gene. That suggests a more complicated story than the blue-recessive/brown-dominant model of eye color. “For example, among individuals carrying the SNP sequence “TGT” at all three locations on both copies of the gene, 62 percent were blue-eyed,” says Sturm’s colleague David Duffy. By contrast, only 21 percent of individuals carrying only one TGT copy at each location and 7.5 percent of those lacking the TGT entirely had blue eyes.

Depending on the particular combination of SNPs inherited, a person can have a range of OCA2 activity that lands them on the spectrum between blue and brown eyes. What about green eyes? “Green eyes probably represent the interaction of multiple variants within the OCA2 and in other genes, including perhaps the red-hair gene,” Duffy says.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/eye-color-explained

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