In 48 years wildlife populations in the tropics, the region that holds the bulk of the world's biodiversity, have fallen by an alarming 61 percent, according to the most recent update to the Living Planet Index.
Between 1970 to 2008, species abundance in the tropics fell by 44 percent on land, 62 percent in the oceans, and 70 percent in freshwater environments, culminating in an average loss of 1.25 percent every year since the baseline was set in 1970. Wildlife populations are declining due to a number of large-scale human impacts including ongoing deforestation, habitat degradation, overexploitation for food or medicine, pollution, agricultural, overfishing, invasive species, disease, climate change, dams, mining, and other industrial projects. 
Rockefeller University researchers have remotely activated genes inside living animals, a proof of concept that could one day lead to medical procedures in which patients’ genes are triggered on demand. The researchers used radio waves to switch on engineered insulin-producing genes in mice.
Jeffrey Friedman, a molecular geneticist at the Rockefeller University in New York and lead author of the study, says that in the short term, the results will lead to better tools to allow scientists to manipulate cells non-invasively. But with refinement, he thinks, clinical applications could also be possible. Friedman and his colleagues coated iron oxide nanoparticles with antibodies that bind to a modified version of the temperature-sensitive ion channel TRPV1, which sits on the surface of cells.
They injected these particles into tumors grown under the skins of mice, then used low-frequency radio waves to heat the nanoparticles. In turn, the nanoparticles heated the ion channel to its activation temperature of 42 °C. Opening the channel allowed calcium to flow into cells, triggering secondary signals that switched on an engineered calcium-sensitive gene that produces insulin. Via Wildcat2030 
Alan Friedman was out capturing this super image of a super Sun from his back yard in Buffalo, NY!
Read more: http://alanfriedman.tumblr.com/ Via Leopoldo Benacchio 
Blood tests convey vital medical information, but the sight of a needle often causes anxiety and results take time. A new device developed by a team of researchers in Israel, however, can reveal much the same information as a traditional blood test in real-time, simply by shining a light through the skin.
This optical instrument, no bigger than a breadbox, is able to provide high-resolution images of blood coursing through our veins without the need for harsh and short-lived fluorescent dyes. Via Anne Osterrieder 
Biomaterial could one day power electronics using our body movements. Squishing a stack of virus sheets generates enough electricity to power a small liquid crystal display. With increased power output, these virus films might one day use the beating of your heart to power a pacemaker, the researchers behind them say.
Piezoelectric materials build up charge when pushed or squeezed. These materials may be familiar to you: they generate the spark in a gas lighter, and motors powered by such materials vibrate some cell phones. Piezoelectric materials made of metals or polymers require large inputs of energy to build up a charge. Bone, DNA, and protein fibers are weakly piezoelectric, but it’s hard to efficiently organize these materials on a large scale to yield electricity.
To handle this organizational issue, Seung-Wuk Lee, of the University of California in Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleagues looked for a biomaterial that had intrinsic order and was easy to make. They settled on the M13 bacteriophage, a rod-shaped virus that only infects bacteria. One bacterium can produce one million copies of the virus within four hours, so starting material isn't a problem. And the virus neatly arranges itself in stacked rows when spread on a surface. 
In an effort to avoid blindness, Cory Poole (a science and math teacher), captured pictures of the event through a specially filtered telescope. He then took those images (all 700 of them), and created a time-lapse video.
The anterior insular cortex is a small brain region that plays a crucial role in human self-awareness and in related neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type – the von Economo neuron (VEN) – is located there. For a long time, the VEN was assumed to be unique to humans, great apes, whales and elephants. Henry Evrard, neuroanatomist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, now discovered that the VEN occurs also in the insula of macaque monkeys. The morphology, size and distribution of the monkey VEN suggest that it is at least a primal anatomical homolog of the human VEN. This finding offers new and much-needed opportunities to examine in detail the connections and functions of a cell and brain region that could have a key role in human self-awareness and in mental disorders including autism and specific forms of dementia. 
Scientists have for the first time confirmed pigment in two fossilized ink sacs from cuttlefish-like animals living about 160 million years ago, a new study says. The ancient ink's similarity to modern squid ink suggests this defensive weapon hasn't evolved much since the Jurassic period (prehistoric time line). The brownish-black fossil pigment—a type of melanin called eumelanin—is widespread in the animal kingdom, for example in bird feathers, squid ink, and human hair and skin. The substance has various functions, including protection from the sun and camouflage. 
Stem cells have fascinated biologists for years. They are unique amongst all other cells of the body in two ways; their capacity for self-renewal, and their ability to give rise to many different cell types. Since embryonics stem cells are controversial, researchers turned to adult stem cells. While adult stem cells are not as versatile as embryonic stem cells, they do have the potential to direct the development of certain cell lineages. For example all the different layers of your skin have ancestral skin stem cells.
In the case of skin tissue transplantation, the stem cells can be derived from the patient who will receive the cultured tissue, thus removing the chance of complications arising due to donor incompatibility. Skin grafts have been performed on burn victims for quite some time, but with variable success. And this is of course where the genius of the skin gun, and its inventor Joerg C. Gerlach, comes in -- it bypasses the need for the in vitro tissue culturing. Skin stem cells that had been destroyed in the burn are replaced, and then the tissue is allowed to heal. As in the case of tissue culture in a lab, these cells require a sterile and nutrient rich environment to thrive. After the initial spraying, the wound is covered with a dressing that contains a synthetic circulatory system that brings nutrients to the infant skin and removes any toxins and waste products.
The speed and effectiveness of this treatment is astounding. The patient in the video didn’t even have a scar after his treatment. Perhaps the spray gun as a means of stem cell delivery is unique to skin regeneration, but there are a couple of features that should be transferable to other transplants, particularly the ability to enrich a patients own stem cells and re-apply them to damaged tissue. 
Physicists in Germany have developed a new technique for making tiny magnets that involves picking up and placing individual iron atoms using a microscope tip. The nanometre-sized magnets can be made in a range of different shapes, while the same microscope tip can also be used to measure their magnetic properties. After comparing their results with elaborate computer simulations of the nanomagnets, the researchers found deviations that could point to hitherto unknown atomic-scale magnetism effects.
This work is the result of the powerful operational qualities of the tip of a spin-polarised scanning tunnelling microscope that helps to pick up and move around the individual iron atomic magnets and arrange them into linear chains or more complex forms, on a non-magnetic copper surface. These atomic magnets interact through the well known RKKY exchange interaction. This interaction is basis of the giant magneto-resistance phenomenon. This works allowed the team to compare the curves of the variation of the manetic field as a function of the inter-atomic distance with the calculations of the Ising model as a function of the intensity of the applied magnetic field. Water Masers --Galactic "Geysers" Observed Spewing Clouds of Water at 100's of Kilometers per Second
The radio image above shows the water masers and the continuum emission in NGC 1052 --an elliptical galaxy that shows evidence of nuclear activity -- to detect motions of masers and continuum "blobs".
The battle over distance records sets up a fascinating race to be the first to teleport to an orbiting satellite. 
A startup in Germany has developed a new kind of solar panel made of small, organic molecules deposited on polyester films. The technology is similar to what's used for OLED displays for phones and flat-screen TVs. The panels are flexible, and far lighter than conventional solar panels, yet in some locations—particularly where it's hot or cloudy—they can generate just as much electricity as a conventional solar panel.
Heliatek, based in Dresden, is funded by Bosch, BASF, and others, and has raised 28 million euros so far. The company, which recently started making its panels on a small, proof-of-concept production line, hopes to raise an additional 60 million euros, part of which will be used to build a 75-megawatt factory. This is fairly small for a solar panel factory—at such a small scale, Heliatek's panels will cost more per watt than conventional solar panels |
What would life be like if Wikipedia disappeared forever? It would be awful -- and the only solution is to make a mirror.
Wikipedia, being the awesome site that it is, provides complete dumps of each of its encyclopedias to make the mirroring process quite simple. With a little bit of developery know-how, you can set up your very own Wikipedia mirror, accessible and editable by the public, just like Wikipedia itself. Even if you’re just a normal web surfer without geek credentials, you can set up a local version of Wikipedia right on your computer, accessible at any time, irrespective of blackouts or shutdowns. 
A Chinese manufacturer has introduced the Model MK802, a $74 USB thumb-drive sized computer, liliputing reports, beating the FXI Cotton Candy PC on a stick to market (it will be available soon for $200).
The MK802 is available from AliExpress for $74, or less if you order in bulk. It has a 1.5 GHz Allwiner A10 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, USB port, microSD card slot, and HDMI port. It also features 802.11b/g WiFi and support for HD video playback in a variety of media formats. 
Dark matter in the Universe is distributed as a network of gigantic dense (white) and empty (dark) regions, where the largest white regions are about the width of several Moons on the sky. We can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we can’t even interact with it… but dark matter may very well be one of the most fundamental physical components of our Universe. The sheer quantity of the stuff – whatever it is – is what physicists have suspected helps gives galaxies their mass, structure, and motion, and provides the “glue” that connects clusters of galaxies together in vast networks of cosmic webs. 
A fundamental prediction of superconductivity theory has been demonstrated in the lab for the first time. An international team of physicists has observed coherent quantum phase slip, a phenomenon similar to the well-known Josephson effect in which magnetic flux takes the place of electric charge. Its discovery has fundamental implications for our understanding of macroscopic quantum systems and could also lead to intriguing applications, including a possible way to produce a qubit in a quantum computer.
In 1962 the British physicist Brian Josephson developed a theory of how superconducting electrons tunnel across a thin insulating layer between two superconductors – a structure now called a Josephson junction. This was quickly verified in the lab and Josephson was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics. The Josephson junction has become an important technology in its own right. For example, superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) that, depending on their design, use either one or two Josephson junctions are among the most sensitive magnetometers to have been invented. The devices have also shown promise as possible quantum bits (qubits) in quantum computers. 
From Copernicus to Ancient Korea, or what the Chinese concept of change has to do with Aztec astrology. Via Sakis Koukouvis 
Over the past several decades, paleontologists have found ample evidence to prove that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, everything from the way they lay eggs in nests to the details of their bone anatomy. In fact, there are so many similarities that most scientists now agree that birds actually are dinosaurs, most closely related to two-legged meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor.
Hints of long-extinct creatures, echoes of evolution past, occasionally emerge in real life—they’re called atavisms, rare cases of individuals born with characteristic features of their evolutionary antecedents. Whales are sometimes born with appendages reminiscent of hind limbs. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail.
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a “Chickenosaurus”.
A new initiative aims to build a grand tree of life that brings together everything scientists know about how all living things are related, from the tiniest bacteria to the tallest tree. Thanks to a three-year, $5.76 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, a team of scientists and developers from ten universities aims to take on this project.
Figuring out how the millions of species on Earth are related to one another isn't just important for pinpointing an aardvark's closest cousins, or determining if hagfish are more closely related to sand dollars or sea squirts. Information about evolutionary relationships has helped scientists identify promising new medicines, develop hardier, higher-yielding crops, and fight infectious diseases such as HIV, anthrax and influenza.
If evolutionary trees are so widely used, why has assembling them across all of life been so hard to achieve? It's not for lack of research, or data. Thanks in large part to advances in DNA sequencing, thousands of new phylogenetic trees are published in scientific journals each year —most of them focused on isolated branches of the tree of life, for everything from birds to botflies.
Further reading: http://opentreeoflife.wordpress.com/ 
A method for repeatedly encoding, storing and erasing digital data within the DNA of living cells, using natural enzymes adapted from bacteria — the genetic equivalent of a bit — has been developed by Stanford University scientists in the Department of Bioengineering, a joint effort of the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine.
The team of researchers calls its device a “recombinase addressable data” module, or RAD for short. They used RAD to modify a particular section of DNA with microbes that determines how the one-celled organisms will fluoresce under ultraviolet light. The microbes glow red or green depending upon the orientation of the section of DNA. Using RAD, the engineers can flip the section back and forth at will. 
Adrian Bachtold and colleagues at the Catalan Institute of Technology in Barcelona have made the most sensitive mass sensor ever. Capable of weighing a single proton – which has a mass of 1.7 yoctograms, or about 10–24 g – the device is made of a suspended carbon nanotube. It consists of a single suspended carbon nanotube that resonates at a certain frequency. The sensor could be used to detect single molecules or to study chemical reactions as they happen, and could even provide insights into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. 
Hypersonic flight is a particularly intense engineering challenge both in the mechanical forces placed on the structure of the plane and in the physics of the sophisticated engines that need to operate in the extremes of the upper atmosphere where the planes would fly. Some of the world’s fastest computers are now being used to model the complexities of hypersonic flight, and could one day lead to planes that fly at seven to 15 times the speed of sound. 
At the heart of the device are silicon nanowires covered by a thin cap of gold. By adjusting the ratio of metal to silicon – a technique the engineers refer to as tuning the geometries – they capitalize on favorable nanoscale physics in which the reflected light from the two materials cancel each other to make the device invisible. 
Centaurus A, which is a sprawling elliptical galaxy located about 12 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). The peculiar galaxy emits strong radio emissions and is the most prominent radio galaxy in the sky, according to officials from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Centaurus A was discovered in 1826 by British astronomer James Dunlop using the Parramatta observatory in Australia. Its radio emissions were not discovered until the 1950s, when the first radiotelescopes became available. Astronomers believe that the bright nucleus, strong radio emissions and jets streaming out from the galaxy are produced by a supermassive black hole, about 100 million times the mass of Earth's sun, at its center. |
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