Posts
May 23, 2013
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The 3-D Printed Trachea Splint Image courtesy of University of Michigan Health System The infant's 3-D printed trachea will fully absorb into his body in two to three years. We've seen plenty of 3-D printed medical implants for patients that require replacement tissues, but this use of 3-D printed biopolymer to augment and correct an existing tissue highlights just how amazing the convergence of 3-D printing and medicine is (and will be). Kaiba Gionfriddo was born apparently a normal, healthy
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Ellesmere Island Wikimedia Commons Bacteria discovered at -15ºC, the coldest temperature bacteria have ever grown in, could indicate bacteria survive under similar conditions on Mars. A team of researchers in the Canadian Arctic is reporting on an interesting find: bacteria that thrive at -15 degrees Celsius. That is the coldest environment bacteria have ever been found to grow in. The McGill University researchers traveled to Ellesmere Island in (far, far) north Canada. There they collected
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Axolotl via Treehugger Regeneration, salamander-style In an attempt to recreate the plot of multiple recent superhero movies, a team of Australian scientists is looking into the regenerative properties of salamanders--and into how humans can pull off the same trick. Salamanders, specifically the axolotl, are vertebrates that can regenerate limbs and organs, which sure would be a useful technique for humans to have, too. So researchers, led by James Godwin, of the Australian Regenerative
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8:30 PM | Scientists Train People To Not Be Jerks
The Dalai Lama Friends of Tibet/Pankaj Mistry To be excellent to one another, just try out some Buddhist meditation. If you're kind of a jerk, but at least concerned about your jerk-ness, take heart: researchers say they've shown it's possible to increase compassion in adults. The University of Wisconsin-Madison actually has a whole department dedicated to this kind of thing, the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, and researchers there set up an experiment recently
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A postcard from 1899 imagining French Police in the year 2000 Instead, the police are on the ground and asking people to use social media for searches. wikimedia commons French police have abandoned in-progress searches for missing adults and will no longer accept new search requests. Instead, families should turn to social media, the government announced. An almost century-old program in France is coming to an end. "Searches in the interest of the family" became a function of French police
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A tiny channel of canals directs water away from where it shouldn't be. We've seem some neat ideas for water-repellant materials that suggest sweat stains will one day be as dead as dial-up. Here's one more: Researchers at the University of California, Davis, are developing a fabric that acts like human skin, channeling and releasing excess moisture. Beads of sweat form and fall when there's excess water on the body, and the idea behind this project is similar: hydrophilic threads are
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Army Battery Charger U.S. Army It charges eight batteries and two USB devices at once. Battery chargers are finally getting a military upgrade. This is big! Not in a literal sense-that honor goes to the previous battery charger used by the U.S. Army, which was the size of a suitcase and either vehicle-mounted or left to rest on a table. It was hardly something a soldier could carry into the battlefield or on patrol. Now, the military has downsized to a charger smaller than a shoebox. Dubbed,
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Space Hotel Mobilona It's got a wind tunnel! Also: a zero-gravity spa! Last week, the U.S.-based consortium Mobilona unveiled plans for this crazy building: a futuristic "space" hotel filled with stuff you associate with ideas about the future from, like, the 1930s. The 984-foot, 1.5 billion euro ($1.9 billion) building would include a vertical wind tunnel, a 24-hour shopping mall, a marina for parking yachts, and a zero-gravity spa (not even totally clear how that works). It would all be
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Scratching Wing-Chi Poon At long last, researchers have identified what happens in the nervous system as an itch begins. What really causes itching, and how it works, is surprisingly little understood. But researchers at the National Institutes of Health will publish a paper tomorrow in Science that details the discovery of a small molecule released in the spinal cord that triggers the sensation of itching in mice. The culprit molecule is called natriuretic polypeptide b, or Nppb. Itching was
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5:30 PM | 8 Ridiculous Nutrition Myths Debunked
Eggsellent Pier/Getty Images From calorie counting to high-protein diets There is a lot of incompetence in the area of nutrition and health. Even health professionals seem to constantly contradict each other. Here are 8 ridiculous nutrition myths, thoroughly debunked. 1. A Calorie is a Calorie It is a common myth that all that matters for weight loss is calories in, calories out. Of course, calories matter. But the types of foods we eat are also important. Here are 3 examples of how "a calorie
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5:00 PM | Big Pic: Eruption Of Alaska's Pavlof Volcano, As Seen From The International Space Station
Pavlof Volcano Eruption, May 18, 2013 NASA The crew aboard the International Space Station managed to snap these three striking images of Alaska's Pavlof Volcano a few days ago, which capture (via their oblique angles) just how far these plumes can stretch and how huge they can be (we usually see these images from directly above, so it's hard to tell just how big they really are). Pavlof is in the Aleutian Island arc, some 625 miles southwest of Anchorage. It began erupting last week, spewing
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An MQ-9 Reaper, precision bombs and air-to-ground missiles at the ready USAF In a major counterterrorism address today, President Obama is expected to announce a significant shift in the drone policy that has been the cornerstone of his war on terror. At 2 p.m. ET today, President Obama will address a crowd at National Defense University in D.C. to spell out some of the biggest vagaries of his administration--policies that are central to America's security and foreign policy that, nonetheless,
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White tigers in Chimelong Safari Park in China Chimelong Safari Park And it's our fault that they're super inbred. Science may not be totally sure how the tiger got its stripes, but at least they've got this figured out. One team of biologists says it has uncovered the genetic mutation responsible for white tigers. White tigers have black or brown stripes, white fur, blue eyes, pink noses and pink paw pads. They're not albino, as they have black-brown pigment in their eyes and in their fur.
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Single human SCNT blastocyst OHSU Photos An anonymous commenter has pointed out four different problems in last week's breakthrough paper. A week ago, scientists from Oregon Health and Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center announced that they had successfully used human skin cells to clone embryonic stem cells. In the few days since the researchers' work came online, though, the research has been found to contain a few key errors. An anonymous online commenter on
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Lego's life-size X-wing fighter Dan Bracaglia How'd they do it? Click here to enter the gallery This morning, Lego opened up a gigantic box in Times Square. Inside: a full-scale replica of an X-wing fighter made entirely of Lego bricks. It's the single-largest Lego sculpture in history, claiming more than 5.3 million bricks and weighing nearly 46,000 pounds. Last week, far away from the mayhem of midtown Manhattan, we had the chance to preview the sculpture, learn about the engineering
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The explanation for the infestation. Magicicada is a plague unlike any other, here in the northeast. And it is a plague with a reason: emerging in absurd, over-the-top, biblical numbers is the cicada's bizarre--but effective--means of survival. The Magicicada, the genus of cicada that's about to blanket the northeast United States, is a very odd creature. It is, in the animal kingdom, a very tasty treat, which is unfortunate for the cicada, but not so odd. What's odd is that it has literally
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Minty fresh Dreamstime And which gum gives you the sweetest-smelling breath? You're driving home from a first date, and it went great: You didn't sweat too much, your jokes worked 50 percent of the time, and she didn't get an "emergency phone call" in the middle of dinner. Only one thing stands in the way of your impending make-out session: the garlic bread you just ate. What's your move? Gum. But can you be sure it will work? Science says yes, as long as the garlic is the worst of your
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Scan Eagle A remotely piloted aircraft, seen here launched by catapult. U.S. Navy via wikimedia commons Infrared eyes and remote pilots have a lot to offer forest firefighters. Remote-controlled drones are much better at flying through smoke than human pilots: their infrared eyes can track the edge of a fire even through the thickest air. When the Forest Service asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to use unmanned aerial systems to monitor wildfires, the FAA said no, but
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May 22, 2013
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Pro and Con Images from Clean Water Portland (left) and Healthy Kids Healthy Portland (right) So when is Portlandia going to do a skit about this? Residents of Portland, Oregon, voted down, yet again, an effort to add fluoride to their tap water. With 80 percent of the expected ballots counted, Mayor Charlie Hales "conceded defeat," the Associated Press reported. Portland is the largest U.S. city not to have added fluoride in the water, nor any plans to add it, the Associated Press reported.
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Triton on the Tarmac, May 21, 2013 U.S. Navy photo courtesy of Northrop Grumman by Chad Slattery The long-range maritime drone will give the U.S. unprecedented surveillance of the world's oceans. For the U.S. Navy and Northrop Grumman, it's shaping up to be a banner year in unmanned flight. While the carrier-based autonomous X-47B continues to hit milestones aboard the USS George H.W. Bush somewhere off the East Coast, out west in Palmdale, Calif., today the Navy flew its MQ-4C Triton maritime
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MRSA CDC Antibacterial clays can kill antibiotic-resistant E. coli and MRSA, researchers found. The colloquial medical advice "rub some dirt in it" appears to have some merit. Researchers at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have been experimenting with different clays, and it appears in research presented in the journal PLoS ONE that they've come across a family of antibacterial clays capable of killing pathogens ranging from E. coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus,
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Oklahoma City Tornado bschjoth A disaster by the numbers. Monday's tornado in the Oklahoma City area killed at least 24 people and leveled a massive number of homes and businesses. The L.A. Times quoted weather officials as saying the twister "was at least in the same league" as the harrowing tornado that struck the same area in 1999, while one local meteorologist called it "the worst tornado in the history of the world." There's no single measurement that totally describes the destructive
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Nanoflower 4 Wim L. Noorduin Harvard researchers grew these lovely microscopic gardens using delicate chemical reactions. Click here to enter the gallery A nanorose may not smell as sweet as an organic one, but the red petals on this micron-scale flower are unquestionably just as beautiful. At Harvard University, materials scientists have perfected an underwater chemical reaction that results in these gorgeous, self-assembling nanoflowers. The microscopic structures are crystals that build
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The Award-Winning, Manipulated Photo Fred Hansen In the wake of the scandal around the winner of the World Press Photo award, which was found to have been manipulated significantly with Photoshop, it seems like the right time to discuss this sort of editing. Our sister publication, American Photo, has an excellent interview with Fred Ritchin, a professor at NYU, author, photojournalist, and activist against unannounced digital manipulation of images. Check out the full interview here.
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6:37 PM | The Moore, Oklahoma Tornado, From Space
The Full Disk Here's a full-on "disk" shot of the planet, taken by NOAA's GOES-13 satellite. (Fun fact: NOAA is pronounced like the name "noah.") You can see the storm over the central part of the US. NASA/NOAA GOES Project, Dennis Chesters What the destructive tornado looked like from satellites high above. Click to launch the gallery. Satellites from NASA, NOAA, and others captured the devastating tornado that this week destroyed many towns and houses and claimed the lives of several (the
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Illustration of a Generic Flu Virus Centers for Disease Control and Prevention A synthetic biology method proves its chops. A copy of the genetic code of an H7N9 avian flu-similar to, but not exactly the same as the flu that has killed 36 people in China-arrived in a lab in Boston Easter Sunday, 2011. By Saturday, scientists had made a vaccine against it, the Boston Globe reported. That turnaround time is weeks faster than the current best vaccine-making methods. The new shot-making strategy
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'Joe's' multi-round-ready 3-D printed Lulz Liberator For $25, a Wisconsin engineer has produced a more durable version of Defense Distributed's 3-D printed pistol on an inexpensive, consumer-grade printer. Defense Distributed's plastic, 3-D printed "Liberator" single-shot handgun was here for a moment and then it was gone in more than one sense. For one, the news cycle turned over. Moreover, the State Department came down on Defense Distributed asking it to pull the CAD file for
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foc.us Headset foc.us For when you just HAVE to beat everyone at Call of Duty. Foc.us is a company that makes headsets for gamers. Those headsets, starting to ship in July, send electricity through your brain. This is their pitch: Overclock your brain using transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to increase the plasticity of your brain. Make your synapses fire faster. Faster Processor, Faster Graphics, Faster Brain! If that sounds a little sketchy to you, that's because it probably
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A Waffle House in Fort Worth, under sunnier skies Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia No we're not kidding, and yes that's a good thing. Moore, Okla., is currently running at Waffle House Index Level Yellow, and that's not a joke. Craig Fugate, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has created his own informal system of rating disasters in a humanizing way, using the status of the local Waffle House as a measure of the impact of a natural disaster on a region or neighborhood. And if that
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Twister OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) A warming world pulls the two factors of tornado formation in opposite directions. Scientists generally agree that climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme weather events, but the jury is still out on how tornadoes will fare in a warming world. Tornadoes are fickle beasts, and it remains tough to predict a tornado a week from now, much less what they might be like over the next few years. "The most common finding is a
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