Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

[Dave Lane]

Originally Posted by Dick Bull

I just got through judging a multiple high school Mars colonization contest at the college. Some neat ideas, some neat presentations, but very few of both. My favorite was the kid who had the idea of bringing along kittens, dogs, and rabbits for protein instead of typical farm animals due to their high reproduction rate.

That makes great sense. Rats and Mice would probably be better than cats and dogs. Their reproduction rates are insane.

[Mr. Plow]

Hubble captures photo of supernova at its brightest

[ShortRoundChief]

Originally Posted by Dave Lane

That makes great sense. Rats and Mice would probably be better than cats and dogs. Their reproduction rates are insane.

Not much to do on Mars. Play with your food for entertainment?

[Donger]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

there is precedent. No one wants this thread to devolve into politics or religion. If you want to discuss those parts of science that go into politics and religion, take it to DC.

Are you predicting that people are going to die in this thread?






























Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Fish]

SUPERMAN MEMORY CRYSTAL: 5D NANO-GLASS TO PRESERVE DATA FOR MILLION YEARS



A research group in Britain has recorded data into a crystal of nanostructured glass. This future storage with practically unlimited lifetime and capacity exceeding Blu-Ray’s by 2,800 times might save civilization’s data for aliens if humankind is gone.

A group of scientists from University of Southampton has developed a ‘five-dimensional’ optical memory, having experimentally proven a possibility of recording data into nanostructured glass using a high speed (femtosecond) laser, which creates self-assembled nanostructures in fused quartz.

The creators of 5D memory has dubbed their invention ‘Superman memory crystal’, following the ‘memory crystals’ used in a number of movies featuring the superhero.

The method is called 5D because in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures their refraction and polarization characteristics work as two additional parameters.

The newly-developed storage promises unprecedented data capacity of 360 Terabyte for a DVD-sized disc. The maximum capacity of a latest generation quad-layer Blu-Ray DVD is “only” 128 Gigabytes. The largest heat-assisted magnetic recording hard drive (HAMR), yet to be commercially produced, will have about 20 terabytes per disc.

Glass storage could preserve data for millions of years whereas a DVD guarantees only about seven years of faultless playback.

The nanostructured glass remains stable if exposed to temperatures up to 1,000°C.

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organizations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” said the head of the project Jingyu Zhang, pointing out that museums and national archives with their huge numbers of documents are going to be the first to benefit.

A joint project of University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and Eindhoven University of Technology has presented ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass’ report at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’13) in San Jose, California.

Technology similar to polarized sunglasses

Technically speaking, the process appears as follows. A femtosecond laser that produces extremely short (280 femtoseconds – or 280 quadrillionths of a second) and intense pulses of light encrypts data file into layers of nanostructured dots inside a quartz glass. The layers are placed very close, with mere five micrometers (one millionth of a meter) between them.

These light impulses modify polarization and refraction of self-assembled dots as the light travels through the glass, somehow similar to the principle used in polarized sunglasses. Later the information encoded in dots’ 5D parameters can be read using an laser scanning device similar to the one used to read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs and an optical microscope capable of untangling the polarized light reflected by the three-bit spots.

So far there is no talk about re-writing glass discs so they are going to be write-once-read-many (WORM).

Unlike modern DVD and Blu-Ray disks which record data on up to four layers, the 5D data storage will have hundreds of layers (around 400 layers for standard 1.2 mm CD), but will be made of glass instead of plastic encasing metal spraying with data.

So far the developers reported of a successful recording and reading of a 300kb text file on three layers of glass, but this is regarded only as a technological demonstration of this ground-breaking new technology with a very bright future

[Stanley Nickels]

Originally Posted by Fish

SUPERMAN MEMORY CRYSTAL: 5D NANO-GLASS TO PRESERVE DATA FOR MILLION YEARS



A research group in Britain has recorded data into a crystal of nanostructured glass. This future storage with practically unlimited lifetime and capacity exceeding Blu-Ray’s by 2,800 times might save civilization’s data for aliens if humankind is gone.

A group of scientists from University of Southampton has developed a ‘five-dimensional’ optical memory, having experimentally proven a possibility of recording data into nanostructured glass using a high speed (femtosecond) laser, which creates self-assembled nanostructures in fused quartz.

The creators of 5D memory has dubbed their invention ‘Superman memory crystal’, following the ‘memory crystals’ used in a number of movies featuring the superhero.

The method is called 5D because in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures their refraction and polarization characteristics work as two additional parameters.

The newly-developed storage promises unprecedented data capacity of 360 Terabyte for a DVD-sized disc. The maximum capacity of a latest generation quad-layer Blu-Ray DVD is “only” 128 Gigabytes. The largest heat-assisted magnetic recording hard drive (HAMR), yet to be commercially produced, will have about 20 terabytes per disc.

Glass storage could preserve data for millions of years whereas a DVD guarantees only about seven years of faultless playback.

The nanostructured glass remains stable if exposed to temperatures up to 1,000°C.

“We are developing a very stable and safe form of portable memory using glass, which could be highly useful for organizations with big archives. At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” said the head of the project Jingyu Zhang, pointing out that museums and national archives with their huge numbers of documents are going to be the first to benefit.

A joint project of University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and Eindhoven University of Technology has presented ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Nanostructuring in Glass’ report at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO’13) in San Jose, California.

Technology similar to polarized sunglasses

Technically speaking, the process appears as follows. A femtosecond laser that produces extremely short (280 femtoseconds – or 280 quadrillionths of a second) and intense pulses of light encrypts data file into layers of nanostructured dots inside a quartz glass. The layers are placed very close, with mere five micrometers (one millionth of a meter) between them.

These light impulses modify polarization and refraction of self-assembled dots as the light travels through the glass, somehow similar to the principle used in polarized sunglasses. Later the information encoded in dots’ 5D parameters can be read using an laser scanning device similar to the one used to read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs and an optical microscope capable of untangling the polarized light reflected by the three-bit spots.

So far there is no talk about re-writing glass discs so they are going to be write-once-read-many (WORM).

Unlike modern DVD and Blu-Ray disks which record data on up to four layers, the 5D data storage will have hundreds of layers (around 400 layers for standard 1.2 mm CD), but will be made of glass instead of plastic encasing metal spraying with data.

So far the developers reported of a successful recording and reading of a 300kb text file on three layers of glass, but this is regarded only as a technological demonstration of this ground-breaking new technology with a very bright future

[Fish]

Drink up bitches, we're growing new livers soon...

Groundbreaking New Study Transforms Skin Cells Into Healthy Liver Cells

Skin cells have been transformed into human liver cells that are not only able to function within an organ, but do so inside another species and continue to operate in an animal with liver failure.

The capacity to cause easily available cells, such as those from skin, to transform into those of organs such as the pancreas, or even into neurons, has generated great hope and hype. Nevertheless what has been done is generally several steps short of being something that could be transplanted into a body when the old organ fails.

One of the necessary steps is to get cells to survive when transplanted into the body. A team from the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California San Francisco have announced success in this regard in Nature, turning skin cells into cells they describe as “virtually indistinguishable” from native liver cells.

Although the liver is the only human internal organ capable of regenerating itself, this capacity is not unlimited. Millions of people suffer liver damage from everything from too much alcohol or a paracetamol overdose to diseases such as hepatitis C. Livers for transplantation are in very short supply.

“Earlier studies tried to reprogram skin cells back into a pluripotent, stem cell-like state in order to then grow liver cells,” says Dr. Sheng Ding, one of the paper’s senior authors, and professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. Pluripotent stem cells are those with the potential to form into all three of the primary categories of body cells. However, pluripotent cells don't always make the step to the desired organ.

“Generating these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, and then transforming them into liver cells wasn’t always resulting in complete transformation,” says Ding. “So we thought that, rather than taking these skin cells all the way back to a pluripotent, stem cell-like state, perhaps we could take them to an intermediate phase.”

Cells in this intermediate phase, the endoderm, are part way to becoming constituents of the body's major organs. “The cells began to take on the shape of liver cells, and even started to perform regular liver-cell functions,” says UCSF's Dr Scholar Milad Rezvani, the paper’s other lead author. “They weren’t fully mature cells yet—but they were on their way.”

The failure of cells to proliferate in living animals when transplanted has, according to the paper's authors, “hampered efforts to recreate human liver diseases in mice.” Consequently, transplanting the cells to mice was not only a stepping stone to lifesaving transplants for humans, but a way to close in on better research tools.

Nine months after transplantation the cells continued to function and grow within the mouse livers, indicating their operation through the presence of human proteins, not normally produced in mouse livers.

“Many questions remain, but the fact that these cells can fully mature and grow for months post-transplantation is extremely promising,” adds Dr. Willenbring, associate director of the UCSF Liver Center “In the future, our technique could serve as an alternative for liver-failure patients who don’t require full-organ replacement, or who don’t have access to a transplant due to limited donor organ availability.”

[GloryDayz]

Originally Posted by Fish

Drink up bitches, we're growing new livers soon...

Groundbreaking New Study Transforms Skin Cells Into Healthy Liver Cells

Skin cells have been transformed into human liver cells that are not only able to function within an organ, but do so inside another species and continue to operate in an animal with liver failure.

The capacity to cause easily available cells, such as those from skin, to transform into those of organs such as the pancreas, or even into neurons, has generated great hope and hype. Nevertheless what has been done is generally several steps short of being something that could be transplanted into a body when the old organ fails.

One of the necessary steps is to get cells to survive when transplanted into the body. A team from the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California San Francisco have announced success in this regard in Nature, turning skin cells into cells they describe as “virtually indistinguishable” from native liver cells.

Although the liver is the only human internal organ capable of regenerating itself, this capacity is not unlimited. Millions of people suffer liver damage from everything from too much alcohol or a paracetamol overdose to diseases such as hepatitis C. Livers for transplantation are in very short supply.

“Earlier studies tried to reprogram skin cells back into a pluripotent, stem cell-like state in order to then grow liver cells,” says Dr. Sheng Ding, one of the paper’s senior authors, and professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. Pluripotent stem cells are those with the potential to form into all three of the primary categories of body cells. However, pluripotent cells don't always make the step to the desired organ.

“Generating these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, and then transforming them into liver cells wasn’t always resulting in complete transformation,” says Ding. “So we thought that, rather than taking these skin cells all the way back to a pluripotent, stem cell-like state, perhaps we could take them to an intermediate phase.”

Cells in this intermediate phase, the endoderm, are part way to becoming constituents of the body's major organs. “The cells began to take on the shape of liver cells, and even started to perform regular liver-cell functions,” says UCSF's Dr Scholar Milad Rezvani, the paper’s other lead author. “They weren’t fully mature cells yet—but they were on their way.”

The failure of cells to proliferate in living animals when transplanted has, according to the paper's authors, “hampered efforts to recreate human liver diseases in mice.” Consequently, transplanting the cells to mice was not only a stepping stone to lifesaving transplants for humans, but a way to close in on better research tools.

Nine months after transplantation the cells continued to function and grow within the mouse livers, indicating their operation through the presence of human proteins, not normally produced in mouse livers.

“Many questions remain, but the fact that these cells can fully mature and grow for months post-transplantation is extremely promising,” adds Dr. Willenbring, associate director of the UCSF Liver Center “In the future, our technique could serve as an alternative for liver-failure patients who don’t require full-organ replacement, or who don’t have access to a transplant due to limited donor organ availability.”

This article will be posted in every bar on the planet.

[Fish]

New Membrane Keeps Your Heart Beating



Here’s a cozy, sensor-bedazzled cover that’s custom-tailored for your heart. For the first time ever, scientists have found a way to make multiple cardiac measurements simultaneously across the entire surface of a beating heart.

Previous sensors, which had to be glued or sewn to the heart’s surface, could only cover small areas. This new elastic silicon sheath completely envelops the heart, allowing it to measure and map various physiological parameters -- from temperature and electrical activity to mechanical strain.

Drawing from medical imaging scans, a team led by John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used a 3D printer to create an anatomically accurate reproduction of a rabbit heart. Once they had the heart template, they embedded tiny instruments in a silicon membrane designed to fit snugly over the heart. The components include sensors that measure pH and temperature, along with LEDs for mapping and gold electrodes to stimulate the heart. The end result: a form-fitting silicon sheath that keeps sensors in place, yet remains flexible enough to not interfere with cardiac pumping.

As a proof-of-principle, the team tried out their 3D-printed membranes on isolated rabbit hearts in a perfusion chamber (that is, a heart that’s kept beating outside the body, ex vivo). They were able to conduct a variety of experiments, which include electrical stimulation and measuring heart rhythm and changes in pH and temperature (two important things to monitor during surgical procedures).



In theory, the design’s flexibility would allow operations that not only measure but also control heart function -- such as regulating heartbeats like a pacemaker in the event of an arrhythmia.

So far, the device has only been used in isolated rabbit hearts, and for long-term, implanted devices, they’d need to work out issues with power supply and wireless data communication. "You have a beautiful spiderweb mesh of devices but you have to get power in and out to activate them," Rogers tells New Scientist.

[Fish]

Every drug made in America has been tested with it. Every person who's ever had an injection has been exposed to it. Arthropod blood!! Baby blue arthropod blood!!!

The Blood Harvest

Each year, half a million horseshoe crabs are captured and bled alive to create an unparalleled biomedical technology.



The thing about the blood that everyone notices first: It's blue, baby blue.

The marvelous thing about horseshoe crab blood, though, isn't the color. It's a chemical found only in the amoebocytes of its blood cells that can detect mere traces of bacterial presence and trap them in inescapable clots.

To take advantage of this biological idiosyncrasy, pharmaceutical companies burst the cells that contain the chemical, called coagulogen. Then, they can use the coagulogen to detect contamination in any solution that might come into contact with blood. If there are dangerous bacterial endotoxins in the liquid—even at a concentration of one part per trillion—the horseshoe crab blood extract will go to work, turning the solution into what scientist Fred Bang, who co-discovered the substance, called a "gel."

"This gel immobilized the bacteria but did not kill them," Bang wrote in the 1956 paper announcing the substance. "The gel or clot was stable and tough and remained so for several weeks at room temperature."

If there is no bacterial contamination, then the coagulation does not occur, and the solution can be considered free of bacteria. It's a simple, nearly instantaneous test that goes by the name of the LAL, or Limulus amebocyte lysate, test (after the species name of the crab, Limulus polyphemus).

The LAL test replaced the rather horrifying prospect of possibly contaminated substances being tested on "large colonies of rabbits." Pharma companies didn't like the rabbit process, either, because it was slow and expensive.

So, now, the horseshoe blood test is a big business. "Every drug certified by the FDA must be tested using LAL," PBS's Nature documentary noted, "as do surgical implants such as pacemakers and prosthetic devices."

I don't know about you, but the idea that every single person in America who has ever had an injection has been protected because we harvest the blood of a forgettable sea creature with a hidden chemical superpower makes me feel a little bit crazy. This scenario is not even sci-fi, it's postmodern technology.

The only problem is that the companies need a large supply of the blood of live crabs. Horseshoe crabs live on the seafloor, near the shore. When they want to mate, they swim into very shallow water, and horseshoe crab collectors wade along, snatching the crabs out of their habitat.

The biomedical collectors are not the first to make use of the crabs' bodies. As far back as colonial times, "cancerine fertilizer" was used to enrich fields. In the 20th century, though, this became an organized industry around the Delaware Bay. The crabs were steamed and then ground into meal for the fields. Others were fed to hogs. Millions of crabs were harvested.

As we slowly killed off the horseshoe crab population, by the 1970s, the fertilizer industry declined and had died off. But harvests picked back up in the 1990s, when fishermen realized they could use the crabs as bait for catching large snails called whelk (aka conchs).

That is to say, these animals have not been treated kindly by humans. They don't inspire the kind of affection we have for, say, bunny rabbits. In the eyes of people before Fred Bang, the only merit attached to the horseshoe crab was its proximity. They like the shoreline, as do we.

And that bacteria-rich habitat is why, Bang speculated, the crabs evolved their marvelous chemical defense. Their circulatory systems work more like a spider's than like ours. If we inhale something bad, that thing has to find its way through our bodies and into our bloodstreams, fighting its way through our white blood cells along the way. But if bacteria find their way under a horseshoe crab's exoskeleton, they can roam free to do damage.

"Large sinuses exist that allow blood direct contact with tissues," the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory's history of the crab explains. "There are many wide open spaces and bacteria entering a crack in the shell of a horseshoe crab have easy access to large internal areas of the crab, a potentially deadly scenario."

The coagulogen changes the wide-open terrain of the horseshoe crab's circulatory system. When the crab blood cells sense invaders, they release granules of the chemical, which becomes a gooey physical barrier to the movement of the bacteria, preventing the spread of infection. The best metaphor might be the superpower of the X-Men's Iceman, but instead of using cold to encase enemies, the horseshoe crab instead uses its remarkable chemistry.

This trick, perhaps unfortunately for the horseshoe crab, does not work on humans.

After the biomedical horseshoe crab collectors get them back to a lab, they pierce the tissue around the animals' hearts and drain up to 30 percent of the animals' blood. The LAL is extracted from the blood, and can go for $15,000 per quart. Only five companies bleed the crabs: Associates of Cape Cod, Lonza, Wako Chemicals, Charles River Endosafe, and Limuli Labs (which does not have a website).

The horseshoe crabs are returned to the ocean a great distance from where they were initially picked up to avoid rebleeding animals. The whole process takes between 24 and 72 hours.

Continued (depressingly) at link...

[Fish]

Perspective.....



Uranus is about 4 times as wide as the Earth. It is also about 14 times as massive. Uranus is huge man...



Bonus vid. Virgo cluster!



http://www.iflscience.com/space/amaz...s-solar-system

[BigMeatballDave]

Originally Posted by Fish

Uranus is about 4 times as wide as the Earth. It is also about 14 times as massive. Uranus is huge man...

Resist obvious jokes...

[Fish]

Originally Posted by BCD

Resist obvious jokes...

http://www.space.com/3046-uranus-dark-spot.html

[BigMeatballDave]

Originally Posted by Fish

http://www.space.com/3046-uranus-dark-spot.html

Yeah, I'm a 43 yr old adolescent.

[BigRedChief]

Einstein’s lost theory uncovered

Physicist explored the idea of a steady-state Universe in 1931.



http://www.nature.com/news/einstein-...overed-1.14767


A manuscript that lay unnoticed by scientists for decades has revealed that Albert Einstein once dabbled with an alternative to what we now know as the Big Bang theory, proposing instead that the Universe expanded steadily and eternally. The recently uncovered work, written in 1931, is reminiscent of a theory championed by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle nearly 20 years later. Einstein soon abandoned the idea, but the manuscript reveals his continued hesitance to accept that the Universe was created during a single explosive event.



Evidence for the Big Bang first emerged in the 1920s, when US astronomer Edwin Hubble and others discovered that distant galaxies are moving away and that space itself is expanding. This seemed to imply that, in the past, the contents of the observable Universe had been a very dense and hot ‘primordial broth’.


But, from the late 1940s, Hoyle argued that space could be expanding eternally and keeping a roughly constant density. It could do this by continually adding new matter, with elementary particles spontaneously popping up from space, Hoyle said. Particles would then coalesce to form galaxies and stars, and these would appear at just the right rate to take up the extra room created by the expansion of space. Hoyle’s Universe was always infinite, so its size did not change as it expanded. It was in a ‘steady state’.


The newly uncovered document shows that Einstein had described essentially the same idea much earlier. “For the density to remain constant new particles of matter must be continually formed,” he writes. The manuscript is thought to have been produced during a trip to California in 1931 — in part because it was written on American note paper.
Davide Castelvecchi on the discovery of Einstein’s aborted attempt to explain the Universe



It had been stored in plain sight at the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem — and is freely available to view on its website — but had been mistakenly classified as a first draft of another Einstein paper. Cormac O’Raifeartaigh, a physicist at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland, says that he “almost fell out of his chair” when he realized what the manuscript was about. He and his collaborators have posted their findings, together with an English translation of Einstein’s original German manuscript, on the arXiv preprint server (C. O’Raifeartaigh et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0132; 2014) and have submitted their paper to the European Physical Journal.


“This finding confirms that Hoyle was not a crank,” says study co-author Simon Mitton, a science historian at the University of Cambridge, UK, who wrote the 2005 biography Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science. The mere fact that Einstein had toyed with a steady-state model could have lent Hoyle more credibility as he engaged the physics community in a debate on the subject. “If only Hoyle had known, he would certainly have used it to punch his opponents,” O’Raifeartaigh says.
Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Einstein’s correction to his erroneous calculation.


Although Hoyle’s model was eventually ruled out by astronomical observations, it was at least mathematically consistent, tweaking the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity to provide a possible mechanism for the spontaneous generation of matter. Einstein’s unpublished manuscript suggests that, at first, he believed that such a mechanism could arise from his original theory without modification. But then he realized that he had made a mistake in his calculations, O’Raifeartaigh and his team suggest. When he corrected it — crossing out a number with a pen of a different colour — he probably decided that the idea would not work and set it aside.


The manuscript was probably “a rough draft commenced with excitement over a neat idea and soon abandoned as the author realized he was fooling himself”, says cosmologist James Peebles of Princeton University in New Jersey. There seems to be no record of Einstein ever mentioning these calculations again.


But the fact that Einstein experimented with the steady-state concept demonstrates his continued resistance to the idea of a Big Bang, which he at first found “abominable”, even though other theoreticians had shown it to be a natural consequence of his general theory of relativity. (Other leading researchers, such as the eminent Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington, were also suspicious of the Big Bang idea, because it suggested a mystical moment of creation.) When astronomers found evidence for cosmic expansion, Einstein had to abandon his bias towards a static Universe, and a steady-state Universe was the next best thing, O’Raifeartaigh and his collaborators say.


Helge Kragh, a science historian at Aarhus University in Denmark, agrees. “What the manuscript shows is that although by then he accepted the expansion of space, [Einstein] was unhappy with a Universe changing in time,” he says.