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?:

[Fish]

The science of Fish piss.... chicks dig it........

Behold: The Majestic Power of Tilapia Urine

The secret to successful tilapia farming? Why, golden showers of course – why are you even asking?

A new study from the Centre of Marine Sciences at the University of Algarve in Portugal found that dominant tilapia males produce large quantities of pheromones in their urine that attract greater female attention, thus producing more babies and, ultimately, more fish tacos.

In spawning as in life, it all comes down to a pissing contest. The male tilapia, you see, is a competitive sort, especially when it comes to the mating game. When prepping for reproduction, the men first build a little spawning nest.

“It’s actually a quite interesting fish, because tilapias are highly social animals, so the males form hierarchies in a so-called spawning arena,” study leader Tina Keller-Costa told National Geographic.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, they start peeing. A lot. And it turns out that the more dominant males secrete greater amounts of a pheromone resembling a progesterone steroid, which the females totally dig. Before Gen Z is even a tinkle in her eye, she’s making a beeline (peeline?) for the alpha male and ignoring the piss-poor dude entirely.

Don’t start your lunch quite yet, because there’s more. The research team also found that the alpha males had bigger bladders, which meant not only more urine but more muscle control, allowing them to fire at will.

“They can extend the bladder, and that enables them to hold on to larger urine quantities. When they’re facing a female or when they’re facing a competitor, they’re literally, actively squeezing it all out,” said Keller-Costa. (We told you to put down that sandwich.)

So what does this have to do with tilapia farming? Well, the little pisser is the second most farmed fish in the world (the merits and drawbacks of which we’ll leave for another day). But it’s also become a dangerous invasive, easily able to elude its confines and make its way into the freshwater wilds. If the pee power of the male can be properly harnessed, it could be used to bring escape-minded females back into the farm fold.

“If we can use this pheromone that we identified to attract females into traps, [for instance, we can] see if we can in the future control these invasive populations,” Keller-Costa told the magazine.

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

First segment on interesting interaction of 'steampunk' early tech and some of the most cutting edge tech of today.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed that whole video series. As a kid, I was fascinated by Rube Goldberg devices and while this device has the appearance of one, it is actually an incredibly efficient machine for some very important math before the advent of computers. The whole design of the machine was in perfect harmony with its purpose. It is the perfect combination of imagination and common sense. Personally, it was especially cool since we do a fair amount of Fourier analysis and simulation in our research on noise biology.

The math described by this machine is the same math used to compress electronic signals in MP3s and is the same math embedded in living systems. It is just a thing of beauty.

[Fish]

[Fish]

Did you know that Uranus was once named George?



Ancient people didn't have TV or electric lights. So, when the sun went down every night, they got their entertainment by watching the sky. And it was entertaining. Without city lights to interfere, the Milky Way was spectacular. Meteors flitted across the sky. Zodiacal lights chased the sunset.

Of special interest were the five naked-eye planets, the ones you could see without a telescope. (The ancients didn't have telescopes, either.) Countless hours were spent watching Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, whose movements were thought to control the affairs of men.

Would you believe, in spite of all that watching, they missed one? There is a sixth planet you can see without a telescope, a planet named George.

"George" is not as bright as the others, but it is there, glowing like an aqua-blue star of 6th magnitude. It measures four times wider than Earth, has more than 30 moons and a dozen or so thin rings. George goes around the sun every 84 years, always spinning on its side as if something knocked it over.
George is better known as Uranus.

English astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet in 1781 during a telescopic survey of the zodiac. He promptly named it the Georgium Sidus (the Georgian Planet) in honor of his patron, King George III. Later, to the everlasting delight of schoolchildren, George was re-named Uranus, the Greek god of the sky.

Uranus had been seen many times before but mistaken for a star. The earliest recorded sighting was in 1690 when astronomer John Flamsteed cataloged it as 34 Tauri, the 34th star of Taurus the Bull. We can understand the error. Uranus is so far from the sun it looks like a star to the unaided eye. And it moves so slowly; you have to watch for decades to realize that it is a wanderer—or, in ancient Greek, a planētēs.

In modern times, Uranus has become all but impossible to see. The planet is naturally faint, and urban lights wipe it out completely. No one notices when Uranus soars overhead.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news.../11apr_george/

[Fish]

One simple kiss transfers 80 million bacteria. Blech...



One kiss 'shares 80 million bugs'

A single 10-second kiss can transfer as many as 80 million bacteria, according to Dutch scientists.

They monitored the kissing behaviour of 21 couples and found those who kissed nine times a day were most likely to share salivary bugs.

Studies suggest the mouth is home to more than 700 different types of bacteria - but the report reveals some are exchanged more easily than others.

The research is published in the journal Microbiome.


Locked lips
A team from the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) asked 21 couples a series of questions to assess their kissing habits, including how frequently they had kissed in the last year and when they last locked lips.

Scientists took bacterial samples from the volunteers' tongues and saliva before and after a strictly timed 10-second kiss.

One member of the couple then drank a probiotic drink, containing an easily identifiable mixture of bugs.

On the couple's second kiss, scientists were able to detect the volume of bacteria transferred to the other partner - on average 80 million bacteria in a single 10-second kiss.

But while bacteria in the saliva seemed to change quickly in response to a kiss, bug populations on the tongue remained more stable.

[Fish]

So... scientists are pretty confident that there are 2 additional planetoids way out past Pluto. One of them is larger than Earth. No word on lizard inhabitants...

Extreme trans-Neptunian objects and the Kozai mechanism: signalling the presence of trans-Plutonian planets

The existence of an outer planet beyond Pluto has been a matter of debate for decades and the recent discovery of 2012 VP113 has just revived the interest for this controversial topic. This Sedna-like object has the most distant perihelion of any known minor planet and the value of its argument of perihelion is close to 0°. This property appears to be shared by almost all known asteroids with semimajor axis greater than 150 au and perihelion greater than 30 au (the extreme trans-Neptunian objects or ETNOs), and this fact has been interpreted as evidence for the existence of a super-Earth at 250 au. In this scenario, a population of stable asteroids may be shepherded by a distant, undiscovered planet larger than the Earth that keeps the value of their argument of perihelion librating around 0° as a result of the Kozai mechanism. Here, we study the visibility of these ETNOs and confirm that the observed excess of objects reaching perihelion near the ascending node cannot be explained in terms of any observational biases. This excess must be a true feature of this population and its possible origin is explored in the framework of the Kozai effect. The analysis of several possible scenarios strongly suggest that at least two trans-Plutonian planets must exist.

[L.A. Chieffan]

stopped eating tilapia a while ago, disgusting trash fish

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Fish

Fish sought out picture chosen to accompany kiss/bacteria article

Mods!! - Off to DC

[Baby Lee]

Dave Loon spends his millions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/1...n_6281852.html

[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

First segment on interesting interaction of 'steampunk' early tech and some of the most cutting edge tech of today.

That may be the coolest thing I've ever seen. Highly recommend watching the entire series (no pun intended).

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Pitt Gorilla

That may be the coolest thing I've ever seen. Highly recommend watching the entire series (no pun intended).

What is amazing to me, having studied as an electrical engineer, is how much easier the relationship between the time domain and the frequency domain is, when represented mechanically.

We poor EEs get into it by advanced calculus and it's explained that it's just something you need to do to analyze signals in a different manner. But then who knows, maybe it's better to come at the matter with a more intricate and fundamental understanding based in raw math, than to see it represented visually like that at the outset. But I feel if I'd seen these videos first I'd have said 'oh yeah, so the time to frequency transformations use the Laplacian. Got it.'

For the lay person, time domain and frequency domain are dimensions in which signals are analyzed. Some are easily analyzed in one domain, others in the other. Calculus gives us the tools to traverse these domains. In these videos, the crank moves in time, while the gears plot out the frequencies of sinusoids sin[x], sin[2x], sin[3x] etc. that are contributing in time. It is visual confirmation of mathematical calculations.

[Fish]

Hospital elevator buttons host more bacteria than your average toilet. Delicious...



Elevator buttons as unrecognized sources of bacterial colonization in hospitals

Elevators are ubiquitous and active inside hospitals, potentially facilitating bacterial transmission. The objective of this study was to estimate the prevalence of bacterial colonization on elevator buttons in large urban teaching hospitals.

Methods:

A total of 120 elevator buttons and 96 toilet surfaces were swabbed over separate intervals at 3 tertiary care hospitals on weekdays and weekends in Toronto, Ontario. For the elevators, swabs were taken from 2 interior buttons (buttons for the ground floor and one randomly selected upper-level floor) and 2 exterior buttons (the "up" button from the ground floor and the "down" button from the upper-level floor). For the toilet surfaces, swabs were taken from the exterior and interior handles of the entry door, the privacy latch, and the toilet flusher. Samples were obtained using standard bacterial collection techniques, followed by plating, culture, and species identification by a technician blind to sample source.

Results:

The prevalence of colonization of elevator buttons was 61% (95% confidence interval 52%–70%). No significant differences in colonization prevalence were apparent in relation to location of the buttons, day of the week, or panel position within the elevator. Coagulase-negative staphylococci were the most common organisms cultured, whereas Enterococcus and Pseudomonas species were infrequent. Elevator buttons had a higher prevalence of colonization than toilet surfaces (61% v. 43%, p = 0.008).

Conclusions:

Hospital elevator buttons were commonly colonized by bacteria, although most pathogens were not clinically relevant. The risk of pathogen transmission might be reduced by simple countermeasures.

[Fish]

Speaking of microbes... We ingest millions-billions of microbes every day from the normal food we eat. Toxins!!!!

[Germaphobes heads explode]

The microbes we eat: abundance and taxonomy of microbes consumed in a day’s worth of meals for three diet types

Far more attention has been paid to the microbes in our feces than the microbes in our food. Research efforts dedicated to the microbes that we eat have historically been focused on a fairly narrow range of species, namely those which cause disease and those which are thought to confer some “probiotic” health benefit. Little is known about the effects of ingested microbial communities that are present in typical American diets, and even the basic questions of which microbes, how many of them, and how much they vary from diet to diet and meal to meal, have not been answered.

We characterized the microbiota of three different dietary patterns in order to estimate: the average total amount of daily microbes ingested via food and beverages, and their composition in three daily meal plans representing three different dietary patterns. The three dietary patterns analyzed were: (1) the Average American (AMERICAN): focused on convenience foods, (2) USDA recommended (USDA): emphasizing fruits and vegetables, lean meat, dairy, and whole grains, and (3) Vegan (VEGAN): excluding all animal products. Meals were prepared in a home kitchen or purchased at restaurants and blended, followed by microbial analysis including aerobic, anaerobic, yeast and mold plate counts as well as 16S rRNA PCR survey analysis.

Based on plate counts, the USDA meal plan had the highest total amount of microbes at 1.3 × 109 CFU per day, followed by the VEGAN meal plan and the AMERICAN meal plan at 6 × 106 and 1.4 × 106 CFU per day respectively. There was no significant difference in diversity among the three dietary patterns. Individual meals clustered based on taxonomic composition independent of dietary pattern. For example, meals that were abundant in Lactic Acid Bacteria were from all three dietary patterns. Some taxonomic groups were correlated with the nutritional content of the meals. Predictive metagenome analysis using PICRUSt indicated differences in some functional KEGG categories across the three dietary patterns and for meals clustered based on whether they were raw or cooked.

Further studies are needed to determine the impact of ingested microbes on the intestinal microbiota, the extent of variation across foods, meals and diets, and the extent to which dietary microbes may impact human health. The answers to these questions will reveal whether dietary microbes, beyond probiotics taken as supplements—i.e., ingested with food—are important contributors to the composition, inter-individual variation, and function of our gut microbiota.

[Fish]

Thought controlled prosthetic limbs. In use......

[Fish]

When you lose weight, where does the fat go?

Most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide, study shows

Despite a worldwide obsession with diets and fitness regimes, many health professionals cannot correctly answer the question of where body fat goes when people lose weight, a UNSW Australia study shows.

The most common misconception among doctors, dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat.
"There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.

"The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman, a physicist and Australian TV science presenter.

In their paper, published in the British Medical Journal today, the authors show that losing 10 kilograms of fat requires 29 kilograms of oxygen to be inhaled and that this metabolic process produces 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water.

Mr Meerman became interested in the biochemistry of weight loss through personal experience.

"I lost 15 kilograms in 2013 and simply wanted to know where those kilograms were going. After a self-directed, crash course in biochemistry, I stumbled onto this amazing result," he says.

"With a worldwide obesity crisis occurring, we should all know the answer to the simple question of where the fat goes. The fact that almost nobody could answer it took me by surprise, but it was only when I showed Andrew my calculations that we both realised how poorly this topic is being taught."
The authors met when Mr Meerman interviewed Professor Brown in a story about the science of weight loss for the Catalyst science program on ABC TV in March this year.

"Ruben's novel approach to the biochemistry of weight loss was to trace every atom in the fat being lost and, as far as I am aware, his results are completely new to the field," says Professor Brown.

"He has also exposed a completely unexpected black hole in the understanding of weight loss amongst the general public and health professionals alike."
If you follow the atoms in 10 kilograms of fat as they are 'lost', 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide through the lungs. The remaining 1.6 kilograms becomes water, which may be excreted in urine, faeces, sweat, breath, tears and other bodily fluids, the authors report.

"None of this is obvious to people because the carbon dioxide gas we exhale is invisible," says Mr Meerman.

More than 50 per cent of the 150 doctors, dieticians and personal trainers who were surveyed thought the fat was converted to energy or heat.

"This violates the Law of Conservation of Mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the energy in/energy out mantra surrounding weight loss," says Mr Meerman.

Some respondents thought the metabolites of fat were excreted in faeces or converted to muscle.

"The misconceptions we have encountered reveal surprising unfamiliarity about basic aspects of how the human body works," the authors say.

One of the most frequently asked questions the authors have encountered is whether simply breathing more can cause weight loss. The answer is no. Breathing more than required by a person's metabolic rate leads to hyperventilation, which can result in dizziness, palpitations and loss of consciousness.

The second most frequently asked question is whether weight loss can cause global warming.

"This reveals troubling misconceptions about global warming which is caused by unlocking the ancient carbon atoms trapped underground in fossilised organisms. The carbon atoms human beings exhale are returning to the atmosphere after just a few months or years trapped in food that was made by a plant," says Mr Meerman, who also presents the science of climate change in high schools around Australia.

Mr Meerman and Professor Brown recommend that these basic concepts be included in secondary school curricula and university biochemistry courses to correct widespread misconceptions about weight loss among lay people and health professionals.