Posts

September 14, 2012

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8:20 PM | Watch This: Water Droplets Held Aloft By Sound Waves

To keep droplets of liquid floating in midair, the device in the video above relies on a hum of sound just above the range of human hearing. This technology, called an acoustic levitator, suspends these tiny balls of liquid using two speakers that project sound waves in opposite directions, counteracting the force of gravity. Originally, NASA developed the device to simulate microgravity. Now researchers at Argonne National Lab are using it as a way to evaporate drug compounds in midair so […]

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5:00 PM | Human Stem Cells Repair Hearing Loss in Gerbils

Researchers have found a way to use human embryonic stem cells to restore hearing to gerbils. Specifically, they were able to repair damage to the nerve that connects the inner ear to the brain, as they reported in Nature this week. This type of hearing loss, which affects many people, is currently untreatable; it isn’t helped by hearing aids or cochlear implants, both of which depend on the auditory nerve to send the final signals to the brain. Applied to humans, this research could […]

September 13, 2012

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7:39 PM | Pyrex Glass Isn’t As Shatterproof As It Once Was, Report Finds

If you’ve ever poured hot water into a Pyrex glass dish and been shocked to see it fracture before your eyes, a new report may give you some insight into what’s going on. Pyrex glassware, which came out in 1915 and was long marketed as “icebox to oven” cookware that did not expand or compress when exposed to high heat or low temperatures, is no longer made of that hardy borosilicate glass. And the new stuff, scientists publishing in the American Ceramics Society […]

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3:11 PM | A Flexible, Air-Filled Robot Tentacle With a Light Touch

While robots have long been invaluable when it comes to doing all sorts of heavy lifting, they lack a gentle touch. Hefting around auto parts is easy enough, but transporting eggs or glassware poses a significant challenge. Scientists have now, however, made a flexible plastic robot tentacle that can, among other dexterities, pick flowers without crushing them, the latest of several robot appendages made of softer materials and able to accomplish delicate tasks. The researchers control the […]

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12:30 PM | Scientists Elicit Short-Term Memory In Slices of Rat Brain

Quick: commit this to memory. There will be a quiz. Neuroscientists implanted artificial memories into slices of rat brain, they reported in Nature Neuroscience online. By jolting the rodent brain cells with electrical current, the researchers produced memory-like patterns of neuron activity that survived for around 10 seconds. This is the first time that researchers have created memory without a brain. The researchers performed these memory experiments on slices from the hippocampus, a brain […]

September 12, 2012

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4:48 PM | Newly Unearthed Letters From Fossil Hunters Include An Ode to Bones

Sprechen ze deutsch? This poem in praise of the Permian amphibian Eryops was scrawled on the back of a label now in the American Museum of Natural History by Jacob Boll, a Swiss-German fossil hunter involved in a tumultuous 19th-century paleontology feud. Graduate students and post-docs do a lot of important work in science these days, in the names of their more eminent supervisors, and there was a similar set-up in the early days of American paleontology. Many of the fossils named by and […]

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2:44 PM | How to Make A Fruit-Salad Tree

How do you get a tree that produces six or seven different fruits? Grafting, of course. The process of getting a cutting of one plant to grow on the base of another, grafting is usually used in much more mundane contexts: it’s what lets farmers grow clones of an orange tree, say, with particularly succulent fruit, for decades after the original tree dies. The vast majority of the fruit we eat comes from such clones, since letting the tree mix its genes with another might produce a […]

September 11, 2012

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4:50 PM | Meet the Newest Cyborg, A Remote-Controlled Cockroach

What has two antennae and receives radio signals? A cockroach, of course. Researchers from the iBionicS lab at North Carolina State University have created a remote-control system to stimulate and steer cockroaches, they reported at the 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society last month. In this system, described in their paper for the conference, they equip a Madagascar hissing cockroach with an electrical circuit board with wires […]

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4:37 PM | Letting Fungi Munch on Violin Wood Makes for a Better Sound

Infected wood, soon to be carpeted in white fungus File this under “news luthiers can use”: A Swiss materials scientist reports that siccing certain species of fungi on wood intended to be made into violins can result in instruments with superior sound quality, purportedly as lovely as that of a Stradivarius. While we feel compelled to point out that many sound tests have found Strads and other high-end instruments indistinguishable, it’s true that the best violins are made […]

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12:21 PM | Discovered: An Amino-Acid Deficiency That Causes Neurological Problems

Our bodies are picky eaters when it comes to amino acids, and sometimes just a small screw-up can cause larger problems down the road. Scientists recently found an association between an amino-acid depleting mutation, and neurological problems in a small sample of humans. In mice with the same mutation, nutritional supplements reversed similar symptoms, offering the possibility of a treatment for the human disorder in the future. The results appeared in the journal Science. The study came […]

September 10, 2012

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3:18 PM | On the Horizon: Corn Engineered To Survive Drought

It has been a summer of withered crops and wildfires, the U.S.’s driest in the last fifty years, during which 55 percent of the U.S. has experienced a drought. And of the land dedicated to corn production, 87 percent has been dry. Over at Technology Review, Jessica Leber wrote about an engineering solution to the problem of parched corn: seeds bred or genetically enhanced to resist drought, some of which have been tested this summer and will be sold by three big seed companies next […]

September 09, 2012

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11:56 PM | International Rock-Flipping Day

As I am sure you are aware, September 9th is International Rock-Flipping Day. What’s that? You don’t know about Rock Flipping Day? Well, no matter. It’s the day when we find a rock, carefully turn it over, and photograph the organisms we find living underneath it. Rock-flipping day is a simple biodiversity exercise designed to [...]

September 08, 2012

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5:10 PM | Primates of Kibale Forest

Uganda’s Kibale forest is such a hotspot for primate research that when our group of 40 biologists arrived this August to study ants (=definitely not primates!) we received some strange looks. Why look at insects when the trees are full of a dozen monkey species? That insects are, in fact, waaaaayyy more interesting than monkeys [...]

September 07, 2012

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6:35 PM | Watch This: Super-Strong New Gel is Also Super-Stretchy

The gel doing an impersonation of a trampoline in the video above is a new synthetic material from Harvard engineers, a substance that stretches to more than 20 times its length and can withstand more force than human cartilage, the resilient tissue that cushions our joints. This gel starts out as a powder of two different substances, whose molecules link among themselves when mixed with water. Its astounding ability to stretch without tearing comes from the two components’ different […]

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3:44 PM | Contaminated Tattoo Ink is Behind Mysterious Infections

One patient’s rash In January of this year, a string of unusual patients began to trickle into dermatologist’s offices in Rochester, NY. They had red rashes on areas where they had recently had tattoos, and the usual treatments were not working. The cases, 19 in all, were reported to the local department of public health. A team there learned that all the patients had developed the rash, which turned out to be a bacterial infection, within three weeks of getting a tattoo at a […]

September 06, 2012

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4:08 PM | Cut Down Rain Forests, Lose Your Rain

Ulva Island rain forest in New Zealand. It’s clear that cutting down rain forests to plant crops, however fulfilling in the short-term for a farmer, is a disaster for the millions of species living there. But it could also, in the long term, be a disaster for the farmer. A recent study in Nature combines rainfall data, satellite images showing tree cover, and atmospheric modeling to show that air that has passed over tropical forests often carries at least twice as much water as air […]

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1:38 PM | China’s Leading Dinosaur Hunter Has Many Feathers In His Cap

Archaeopteryx lithographica Birds are the modern descendants of dinosaurs, paleontologists think, but the exact details of the family tree are controversial. Archaeopteryx, the winged creature found in German fossil beds whose name means “first from a feather,” was long thought to be the first bird. Last summer, a Nature paper by Xu Xing, of China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, claimed that Archaeopteryx was related to birds but actually belonged on […]

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12:34 PM | Thrifty Thursday: Cat Scans on a Budget

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs taken with equipment costing less than $500. [HP deskjet F4280 printer/scanner - $99] Looking for inspiration? Or do you just enjoy medical-feline crossover puns? Either way, you can amuse yourself and your cat companion by arranging your pet on a regular desktop scanner. For more, see the Cat Scan tumblr. Some of [...]

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12:29 PM | Liar, Liar, Bottom-Signer! Signing a Form at the Top Leads to More Honest Answers

Many official forms require that you sign your name at the bottom to signify that you have, to the best of your knowledge and ability, supplied honest information. But if you really want people to be honest, a recent study in PNAS suggests, it’s better to have them sign their names at the top of the form instead, before they fill in anything else. Having people sign the top of a form made them less likely to cheat when reporting how much money they’d earned in a simple experiment, […]

September 04, 2012

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3:48 PM | Look at This: Before and After Pics from Curiosity’s Laser Drill

On the left, you see a perfectly innocent, three-inch wide section of Mars regolith, going about its business. On the right, you see the same regolith after being subjected to the ministrations of one of the Curiosity rover’s most exciting tools, a laser drill. On August 25, the laser slammed into each of the five spots visible above 50 times. Each time, it struck with a million-plus watts of power for five one-billionths of a second. This incredible power got the dust to glow, and from […]

September 01, 2012

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12:25 PM | How the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau Built a Volcano for His Peasants

Explore the history of science outreach, and you’ll discover some pretty strange episodes. One of the strangest occurred in the 1700s, when Leopold III Friedrich Franz ruled the Prussian province of Anhalt-Dessau as prince and duke. Perhaps inspired by a European tour that included a trip to Mount Vesuvius, Franz decided to recreate the famous volcano in his own backyard and enlighten his subjects, who would never have the chance to visit Vesuvius in person. At Smithsonian.com, Andrew […]

August 31, 2012

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7:03 PM | The Art of the Science Caption

I am not going to tell you what this animal is. At least, not yet. Instead, I’d like to use the absence of a caption to mention the importance of accompanying science images with the right text. Why? Artists and photographers spend enough time crafting images that it’d be a waste to lose potential viewers [...]

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5:13 PM | Cyborg Central: Researchers Combine Electronics with Synthetic Tissue

An electronic scaffold for growing cyborg tissues To craft synthetic flesh, all you need are seed cells—stem cells or cells from a specific organ—to form the basis of the material and a scaffold of biological material, which supports the cells as they grow into tissue for patching up hearts or artificial organs. But why grow boring old biological materials when you can create cyborg ones? In a new paper published in Nature Materials, researchers describe how to make synthetic […]

August 30, 2012

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7:48 PM | Watch This: 12 Years of Fires Burn Across the Globe

Fire maps show the locations all over the world where wild and man-made fires are going on, based on data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. And when you combine fire maps from the past 12 years, you get a video where flames trace recurring patterns across the globe, from summer wildfires in Canada to agricultural burning in Africa and Southeast Asia. The colors in this video, from NASA Earth Observations, indicate not intensity, but quantity: they represent the […]

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4:23 PM | 1,700 Yosemite Visitors May Have Been Exposed to Hantavirus

Humans can contract hantavirus when they inhale particles from the waste of an infected mouse Between hantavirus‘ first documented appearance in 1993 and the end of 2011, the CDC counted a total of 587 cases, with 211 deaths, more than a third of those infected. So you can see why recent visitors to Yosemite National Park were dismayed and frightened when the park recently warned that 1,700 of them might have been exposed to hantavirus while staying in the tent cabins at the park’s […]

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2:27 PM | Eat Your Words: Restricting Calories Does Not Necessarily Extend Monkeys’ Lives

A calorie-restricted diet can extend the lives of organisms from yeast to fruit flies to rodents, as well as improving their health and preventing disease. But just because cutting calories helps animals with short lifespans doesn’t mean that humans will reap similar benefits. So the 2009 discovery that calorie-restricted diets also increase the longevity of already-longer-lived rhesus monkeys was exciting news. But don’t pull out a calorie calculator quite yet. The latest word on the […]

August 29, 2012

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4:52 PM | Discovered: The First Binary Star System With Multiple Planets

Artist’s rendering of binary system Kepler-47, with outer planet Kepler-47c in the foreground and inner planet Kepler-47b in the bottom right corner Growing up in a binary star system can be tough. As the system’s two suns orbit each other, they exert strong gravitational pressures capable of pushing away young planets or sending them careening into one another. It wasn’t until last year that astronomers found the first evidence of a world orbiting two stars. Now new data has revealed […]

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2:33 PM | Pot Dependence in Adolescence is Linked to a Long-Term Drop in IQ

Compared to some of the drugs out there, cannabis can seem relatively harmless. It doesn’t have the ruinous effects of methamphetamines or even substances like synthetic pot. But there has long been suspicion that heavy use might have long-term effects on IQ, for instance [pdf]. Factors that tend to accompany cannabis consumption, such as the use of other drugs and alcohol and, in adolescents, a tendency to skip class, have made it difficult to decisively pin a dip in IQ to marijuana […]

August 28, 2012

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12:35 PM | Caught in Time: The Oldest Bugs Ever Preserved in Amber

A 230-million-year-old mite preserved in amber An insect trapped in amber, perfectly preserved for millions of years: the image is familiar to fans of Jurassic Park, but in fact, few insects got stuck in sticky tree resin until about 130 million years ago—long after the Jurassic period ended. That’s when trees first began to produce enough of it to ensnare flies and mites. Or so paleontologists believed. Three newly discovered bugs in amber may force a revision of that timeline. As a […]

August 27, 2012

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5:52 PM | Neil Armstrong, First Man on the Moon, 1930-2012

Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who took a giant leap for mankind, died on Saturday at the age of 82. Reserved and shy, Armstrong always insisted that he wasn’t a hero despite some fairly heroic acts. The unflappable commander of Apollo 11, he braved a mission that he thought had only 50-50 odds of landing on the Moon, and a decent chance of never returning home. And when he realized that the original lunar landing site was untenable, he took over from the computer to manually find a new site […]