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The Earth's core is out of sync with the outer crust of the planet, frequently speeding up and slowing down from decade to decade.
Unlike most exoplanet discoveries, which are inferred from analysis of data, the planets of the HR8799 system are directly visible from Earth. The planets were discovered in 2008 using the Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii. The star HR8799, about 1.5 times the size of the sun and about five times brighter, lies 130 light years from Earth. Each of the star's four known planets is larger than any planet in our solar system. The star formed only 30 million years ago and is a variable star, meaning that its luminosity changes over a period of about half a day. By studying light reflected from planet HR8799c, astronomers have found water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere.
short documentary that follows the challenges of attempting to feed 2,200 people in the Sydney Opera House audience of TEDxSydney 2013 using only home grown & locally grown food.
Keith Ward is a wetland ecologist, who works at the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority. This presentation focuses on his 23 years working in the ...
How Australia hopes to improve communication, productivity and environmental management using satellites. New policy released today.
Calories, percent daily values, proteins, fats, and carbs. We see these on nearly everything we eat. How did they come up with these numbers?
ScienceShot: An Algal Bloom for the Record Books - ScienceNOW (An Algal Bloom for the Record Books - ScienceNOW http://t.co/plxyeh4LDa Eutrophication in lake Erie #Science)...
Nasa mission controllers will put Curiosity through basic moves in cautious return to active service after it went into safe mode (RT @GuardianUS: Mars Curiosity rover to continue roving after technical glitch http://t.co/akzDIbefJ7 DELETE,...
Pressure changes cause precious metal to deposit each time the crust moves.
Researchers mix cells from human adult gum tissue with tooth-inducing cells from mouse embryos to grow new hybrid teeth complete with roots. Cells taken from adult human gums can be combined with cells from the molars of fetal mice to form teeth with viable roots, according to research published this week in the Journal of Dental Research. The method remains a long way from clinical use, but the findings represent a step toward the goal of growing bioengineered replacements for lost teeth. Teeth develop when embryonic epithelial cells in the mouth combine with mesenchymal cells derived from the neural crest. Previous studies have shown that these cells can be combined in the lab to formal normal teeth, but the challenge was to find non-embryonic source of the cells that could be used in the clinic. To test one such source, a team lead by King’s College London stem cell biologist Paul Sharpe extracted epithelial cells from the gums of adult humans, cultured them in the lab, and mixed them with mesenchymal tooth cells derived from embryonic mice. After a week, the researchers transplanted this mixture into the protective tissue around the kidneys of living mice, where some of the cells developed into hybrid human/mouse teeth containing dentine and enamel, and with growing roots. The research showed that the epithelial cells from adult human gum tissue responded to tooth-inducing signals from the embryonic mouse tooth mesenchyme, making the gum cells a realistic source for clinical use, said Sharpe in a press release. He added that “the next major challenge is to identify a way to culture adult human mesenchymal cells to be tooth-inducing, as at the moment we can only make embryonic mesenchymal cells do this.”
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
3D printing technology has helped replace 75 percent of a patient's skull with the approval of U.S. regulators. The 3D-printed implant can replace the bone in people's skulls damaged by disease or trauma, according to Oxford Performance Materials. The company announced it had received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its skull implant on Feb. 18, 2013— a decision that led to the first U.S. surgical operation on March 4. "We see no part of the orthopedic industry being untouched by this," said Scott DeFelice, president of Oxford Performance Materials. DeFelice's company is already selling 3D-printed implants overseas as a contract manufacturer. But the FDA decision has opened the door for U.S. operations using the implants. [Video: A 3D Printer of Your Own] 3D printing's advantage comes from taking the digitally scanned model of a patient's skull and "printing" out a matching 3D object layer by layer. The precise manufacturing technique can even make tiny surface or edge details on the replacement part that encourage the growth of cells and allow bone to attach more easily. About 300 to 500 U.S. patients could use skull bone replacements every month, according to DeFelice. The possible patients include people with cancerous bone in their skulls, as well as car accident victims and U.S. military members suffering from head trauma.
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
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Australia is famous for its natural beauty: the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kakadu, the Kimberley. But what about the places almost no one goes?
This is how Neptune's Great Dark Spot and rings may have looked in 1989 from a position just beneath Neptune's ring plane. The outermost Adams ring is near the top of the frame, and beneath that is the much broader and diffuse Lassell ring. Further in toward Neptune and abutting the Lassell ring is the thin LeVerrier ring, and beyond that is the diffuse Galle ring. The Great Dark Spot is believed to be a storm similar to, but only half the size of, Jupiter's Great Red Spot. While Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been raging for at least 400 years, subsequent observations of Neptune's Great Dark Spot in 1994 by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that this storm has since disappeared. The Great Dark Spot was a very dynamic weather system, generating massive, white clouds similar to high-altitude cirrus clouds on Earth. Unlike cirrus clouds on Earth however, which are composed of crystals of water ice, Neptune's cirrus clouds are made up of crystals of frozen methane. Neptune's clouds are driven by winds of 1,200 mph, the fastest winds of any planet in the Solar System. How such high-velocity winds come to be on a planet so far from the Sun is still a mystery.
NASA engineers are building the largest rocket ever constructed — one that will eventually take us beyond the moon — using 3D-printed materials. Creating this rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), is a top priority at the agency because it has a big date: Obama wants to get humans to an asteroid and then on to Mars by the mid 2030s. To speed up the construction process, NASA is relying on a form of 3D printing to fabricate some of its engine parts virtually out of thin air. The machine, called selective laser melting, uses a laser to build a component. Unlike traditional rocket building, which relies on welding together disparate parts, 3D printing starts with an empty table. That space fills up with a completed component, built one layer at a time, out of NASA's 3D-printing material of choice. What used to take weeks to build now only takes hours. "We were looking at a way to save costs, be more efficient and reduce weight. That's how we got here," says NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr. "The big thing about 3D printing is that there are no welds with seams, no places for stuff to leak in a component," he tells Mashable. "It starts from nothing and grows into what you want in one fell swoop."
Water on the Moon came from the same source as our water on Earth, a new study suggests.
RT @_BTO: BIG NEWS! Cuckoo Chance is back in the UK! Last heard of near Newcastle on his way back to Scotland http://t.co/rL99JEeZOI #heardacuckoo
A 15-unit apartment building has been constructed in the German city of Hamburg that has 129 algae filled louvered tanks hanging over the exterior of the south-east and south-west sides of the building—making it the first in the world to be powered exclusively by algae. Designed by Arup, SSC Strategic Science Consultants and Splitterwerk Architects, and named the Bio Intelligent Quotient (BIQ) House, the building demonstrates the ability to use algae as a way to heat and cool large buildings.
To make use of the algae, which the team retrieved from the nearby Elbe river, it was put into large thin rectangular clear cases. Inside, the algae live in a water solution and are provided nutrients and carbon dioxide by an automated system. Each tank was then affixed to the outside walls of the building onto scaffolding that allows for turning the tanks towards the sun—similar to technology used for solar collectors. As the algae grows—mostly in the summer—it provides more shade for the building, helping to keep it cool (and serves as a sound buffer as well). Excess heat that builds up in the water in the tanks is transferred to saline water tanks underneath the building for use later. When the amount of algae growth in the tanks reach a certain point, some is harvested and taken to a processing facility inside the building. There the biomass is converted to biogas which can be burned to provide heat in the winter. Thus, the building makes use of both solar thermal and geothermal energy allowing it to be heated and cooled without using any fossil fuels.
The design and construction of the BIQ has taken three years and has cost approximately €5 million, all funded by Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) as part of the ongoing International Building Exhibition – 2013. The BIQ House is one of 16 projects undertaken by the group, with the goal of proving that cost effective ways of making bio-friendly buildings are available today. To highlight the building, the team has painted its exterior green and has added a giant cartoon-like bubble on one side with the word "Photosynthesis?" in it.
The building is to serve as a test case and will be studied by various architects and engineers from around the world to determine if the design is feasible and if so, to perhaps serve as a model when erecting buildings in other cities.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-algae-powered-hamburg.html#jCp
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Flu viruses are always unpredictable. H7N9 could go big-or not. (Opinion: Too Early to Panic Over Bird Flu http://t.co/IyB3VgGkfB)
Three-dimensional printer uses water and oil to create lipid networks that mimic biological feats.
Altered patterns seen over past two decades. (RT @trakgalvis: Oceans continue to warm, especially the deeps | Ars Technica http://t.co/hOTFTdFfEf)
When the mind is at rest, the electrical signals by which brain cells communicate appear to travel in reverse, wiping out unimportant information in the process, but sensitizing the cells for future sensory learning, according to a study of rats conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The finding has implications not only for studies seeking to help people learn more efficiently, but also for attempts to understand and treat post-traumatic stress disorder―in which the mind has difficulty moving beyond a disturbing experience. During waking hours, brain cells, or neurons, communicate via high-speed electrical signals that travel the length of the cell. These communications are the foundation for learning. As learning progresses, these signals travel across groups of neurons with increasing rapidity, forming circuits that work together to recall a memory. It was previously known that, during sleep, these impulses were reversed, arising from waves of electrical activity originating deep within the brain. In the current study, the researchers found that these reverse signals weakened circuits formed during waking hours, apparently so that unimportant information could be erased from the brain. But the reverse signals also appeared to prime the brain to relearn at least some of the forgotten information. If the animals encountered the same information upon awakening, the circuits re-formed much more rapidly than when they originally encountered the information. “The brain doesn’t store all the information it encounters, so there must be a mechanism for discarding what isn’t important,” said senior author R. Douglas Fields, Ph.D., head of the Section on Nervous System Development and Plasticity at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute where the research was conducted. “These reverse brain signals appear to be the mechanism by which the brain clears itself of unimportant information.”
When a school teacher writes her name on a blackboard on the first day of class, what she's really doing is crushing the skeletons of terribly ancient earthlings into a form that spells out the name "Mrs. ...". A piece of chalk, when you think about too much, is a miracle. What is it, exactly? Well, if you look under a microscope, as British naturalist Thomas Huxley did in the 1860s, what you see is this (see figure). Chalk is composed of extremely small white globules. They look, up close, like snowballs made from brittle paper plates. Those plates, it turns out, are part of ancient skeletons that once belonged to roundish little critters that lived and floated in the sea, captured a little sunshine and carbon, then died and sank to the bottom. There still are trillions of them floating about in the oceans today, sucking up carbon dioxide, pocketing the carbon. Over the millennia, so many have died and plopped on top of each other, the weight of them and the water above has pressed them into a white blanket of rock, entirely composed of teeny skeletons. Scientists call these ancient plates "coccoliths." Technically, they are single-celled phytoplankton algae. Chalk doesn't proclaim itself. It is usually out of view, buried in the ground below. Every so often, when a highway is being carved through a mountain, or when the sea and wind erode the side of a hill, that's when the green cover comes off, then you can see it. The White Cliffs of Dover are all chalk, piled hundreds of feet high. In 1853, when the transatlantic cable was being laid, engineers would occasionally yank thick loops of wire up 10,000 feet from the ocean bottom, and every time, they found the same coating of white muck: chalk again. It turns out, writes biologist Bernd Heinrich, "the Atlantic mud, which stretches over a huge plain thousands of square miles, is raw chalk." “A great chapter of the history of the world is written in chalk. Since then geologists have found a chalk layer stretching 3,000 miles across Europe into Asia. It's under France, Germany, Russia, Egypt, Syria. How did it get there? That, said Thomas Huxley (who first saw those teeny skeletons under his microscope) is one of the "most startling conclusions of physical science." In 1868, he gave a lecture to the "working men of Norwich" where he declared that "a great chapter of the history of the world is written in chalk."
Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
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Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Gravity-powered floor lamps use simple yet amazing technology. Visit HowStuffWorks to learn all about gravity-powered floor lamps.
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Child genius...