2010-11 Sci-Tech

"Studies have shown that taking the birth control pill after the age of 40 can reduce your risk of ovarian cancer by half. It can also help you fight colon, uterine and breast cancers.... among other reasons." Click article to read more. - Lit from Bookmarklet

"1. It Cuts Your Risk of Ovarian Cancer in Half Ovarian cancer is the most deadly of the gynecologic cancers. More than half of the women who get it die from it. We have no screening test for ovarian cancer and no way to detect it early. Ovarian cancer most commonly starts from the cells that line the surface of the ovary. Every month when a woman ovulates, these cells breaks out of the... more... - Lit

"Science in 2011: Triumphs, disasters and climaxes – in pictures There were extraterrestrial shenanigans, female orgasms, sabre-toothed squirrels and sperm-spattered squid; there was meltdown at Fukushima, the last flight of the space shuttle and a possible glimpse of the Higgs boson. Relive the defining scientific stories of the past 12 months" - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

""We don't call it the 'God particle', it's just the media that do that," a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday. "Well, I am the from the media and I'm going to continue calling it that," said the journalist - and continued to do so. The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix. "I hate that 'God particle' term," said Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN's ATLAS team of so-called "Higgs hunters" - an epithet they do not reject." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"A multi-purpose optical chip which generates, manipulates and measures entanglement and mixture -- two quantum phenomena which are essential driving forces for tomorrow's quantum computers -- has been developed by researchers from the University of Bristol's Centre for Quantum Photonics. This work represents an important step forward in the race to develop a quantum computer." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Robot wardens are about to join the ranks of South Korea's prison service. A jail in the eastern city of Pohang plans to run a month-long trial with three of the automatons in March. The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behaviour. Researchers say they will help reduce the workload for other guards. South Korea aims to be a world leaders in robotics. Business leaders believe the field has the potential to become a major export industry. The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material. The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes. The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has "extraordinarily high energy absorption" properties. Potential uses include next-generation batteries and shock absorbers. The research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the latest edition of Science. "The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said lead author Dr Tobias Schaedler." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information. Such chips could eventually enable communication between artificially created body parts and the brain. It could also pave the way for artificial intelligence devices. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses - the connections between neurons that allow information to flow - with many other neurons. This process is known as plasticity and is believed to underpin many brain functions, such as learning and memory." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"It’s been an interesting and awkward autumn for physicists. They’ve been presented with an experimental finding that threatens to blow their vision of the universe to smithereens. A team of scientists in Europe announced in September that they’d clocked tiny particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Which is heresy. Nothing goes faster than light. Einstein said so; a century of experiments have backed him up." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real. “I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — When Nancy Grace and her partner danced a lively rumba to Spandau Ballet's 1980's hit, "True," on a recent "Dancing With the Stars," more was going on in the legal commentator's brain than worry over a possible wardrobe malfunction." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"team of scientists from the University of Southampton have developed a revolutionary ultrasonic attachment for taps, which massively enhances the ability of water to clean. Currently, industry uses excessive water, power and additives for cleaning. For example, it can take up to 100 tonnes of water to produce 1 tonne of clean wool after shearing. Many industrial processes also generate large quantities of contaminated run-off. The water from hosing down an abattoir represents a real health risk and cannot be allowed to enter the water supply. Purifying run-off is costly – each cubic metre of water used for cleaning in the nuclear industry can cost around £10,000 to subsequently treat. Professor Tim Leighton and Dr Peter Birkin’s device works with cold water, minimal additives and consumes as much electrical power as a light bulb. Its application will be wide – licenses have already been sold to a number of industries to look at cleaning in food preparation, hospitals, manufacturing and the home. The new technology consumes less water and power than the established competitor technologies." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"A few pig cells, a single surgery and a rigorous daily workout: They’re the three ingredients that patients will need to re-grow fresh, functional slabs of their own muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that’s already being used to rebuild parts of people. The research team behind the project, based out of the University of Pittsburgh, has made remarkably swift progress: Mere months after starting their first-ever clinical trial, they’ve already operated on four soldiers and are now training groups of surgeons from across the country in perfecting the approach. If progress continues at this pace, the trial will wrap in 24 months and the technique will become “a standard of care for orthopedists and trauma surgeons,” according to Dr. Stephen Badylak, head of the initiative." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"At the University of Nottingham, a team of researchers is spearheading an ambitious project that could pull synthetic biology out of its niche and into the mainstream. With help from researchers elsewhere in the U.K., the U.S., Israel, and Spain, the team is trying to create a “reprogrammable cell” that can act as the in vivo cell equivalent to a computer’s operating system. In other words, they are trying to create cellular software that would let researchers alter living cells without changing their hardware. The project, if successful, would mark a huge leap forward for synthetic biology as a field. Scientists could easily and quickly program cells to perform all kinds of tasks as well as create wholly new forms of life not found in nature customized for various uses. That’s another way of saying the “operating system” would allow for rapid prototyping of life forms, saving the time and energy currently consumed by returning to the drawing board each time researchers need a cell with a new function." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"In the emerging field of synthetic biology, engineers use biological building blocks, such as snippets of DNA, to construct novel technologies. One of the key challenges in the field is finding a way to quickly and economically synthesize the desired DNA strands. Now scientists from Duke University have fabricated a reusable DNA chip that may help address this problem by acting as a template from which multiple batches of DNA building blocks can be photocopied. The researchers have used the device to create strands of DNA which they then folded into unique nanoscale structures. They will present their findings at the AVS Symposium, held Oct. 30 – Nov. 4, in Nashville, Tennessee." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Few science policy issues today are as complex or divisive as climate change. For that very reason a team of researchers is using the topic as part of a project that seeks to better understand and solve challenging society-level problems by leveraging the collective intelligence of Internet users worldwide" - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Wisdom does comes with old age, a study has recently found out. Canadian researchers studied 24 young people aged 18 to 35 and a group of ten older people aged 55 to 75, all of whom are still employed." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Against all the odds, Andrea Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion power plant passed its biggest test yesterday, producing an average of 470 kilowatts for more than five hours. (A technical glitch prevented it from achieving a megawatt as originally planned). The demonstration was monitored closely by engineers from Rossi's mysterious US customer, which was evidently satisfied and paid up. The energy was output in the form of heat, measured by the quantity of water boiled off. The results are reported in NyTeknik and Pure Energy Systems News, who both had reporters present for the test. Associated Press also sent a correspondent who should be filing a story in the next few days (one suspects his editors might have some questions). But this does not mean we can crack open the champagne and celebrate the end of fossil fuels quite yet. Skeptics have plenty of grounds to doubt whether the new test really takes us any further forwards. For a start, the US customer remains anonymous. In other words, a group of unknown, unverifiable people carried out tests which cannot be checked." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"'At 85 I had a crisis. I looked at myself in the mirror, and saw an old man. I was overweight, my posture was terrible and there was skin hanging off me. I looked like a wreck'" - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

Whoa. "People have been brainwashed to think that after you're 65, you're finished. We're told that old age is a continuous state of decline, and that we should stop working, slow down and prepare to die. I disagree. To me, a 65-year-old is young." - 少年革命ミカエル

Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new nanomaterial that can "steer" electrical currents. The development could lead to a computer that can simply reconfigure its internal wiring and become an entirely different device, based on changing needs. As electronic devices are built smaller and smaller, the materials from which the circuits are constructed begin to lose their properties and begin to be controlled by quantum mechanical phenomena. Reaching this physical barrier, many scientists have begun building circuits into multiple dimensions, such as stacking components on top of one another. - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Cray Inc. has signed a $97 million contract to upgrade the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” supercomputer located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to a new Cray XK6 supercomputer, nicknamed “Titan.” The Titan system upgrade, targeted to be completed in 2011, will have a peak performance between 10 and 20 petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) of high-performance computing power, Cray said in a statement, making it potentially the world’s fastest supercomputer. The current world’s fastest supercomputer is Japan’s K computer, with 8.162-petaflop performance The XK6 will feature a powerful blend of general-purpose central processing unit (CPU) and graphic processing unit (GPU) technologies. In the second phase, expected to be completed in the second half of 2012, the hybrid Titan system will combine AMD Opteron processors with “Kepler” NVIDIA Tesla graphic processing unit (GPU) technologies, allowing Cray XK6 customers to run applications with... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"In the late 1960s, medical researchers developed a way to find genetic defects in a fetus as young as 15 weeks, early enough to terminate a pregnancy with an abnormal fetus. Despite the need to have a long needle inserted into the uterus, many expectant mothers gratefully embraced amniocentesis, the now familiar genetic test. “It is truly a miracle,” a new mom told The New York Times in 1971. The woman’s three sisters had Down syndrome, and she had been terrified of passing on the disorder but got a null result. “I never thought I could have normal, healthy children.”" - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say that losing the ability to make a particular kind of sugar molecule boosted disease protection in early hominids, and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, the genus Homo. The findings, published in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are among the first evidence of a novel link between cell surface sugars, Darwinian sexual selection, and immune function in the context of human origins Sialic acids are sugar molecules found on the surfaces of all animal cells, where they serve as vital contact points for interaction with other cells and with the surrounding environment, including as targets for invasive pathogens. For millions of years, the common ancestors of humans and other apes shared a particular kind of sialic acid known as N-glycolylneuraminic acid or Neu5Gc. Then, for reasons possibly linked to a malarial parasite that... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"The grand challenge of neuromorphic computation is to develop a flexible brain-like architecture capable of a wide array of real-time applications, while striving towards the ultra-low power consumption and compact size of the human brain—within the constraints of existing silicon and post-silicon technologies. To this end, we fabricated a key building block of a modular neuromorphic architecture, a neurosynaptic core, with 256 digital integrate-and-fire neurons and a 1024X256 bit SRAM crossbar memory for synapses using IBM’s 45nm SOI process. Our fully digital implementation is able to leverage favorable CMOS scaling trends, while ensuring one-to-one correspondence between hardware and software. In contrast to a conventional von Neumann architecture, our core tightly integrates computation (neurons) alongside memory (synapses), which allows us to implement efficient fan-out (communication) in a naturally parallel and event-driven manner, leading to ultra-low active power consumption... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"In 2009, at the AGI-09 Artificial General Intelligence conference in Washington DC, Seth Baum, Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel gave the attendees a survey on the theme of “How Long Till AGI?” This was a complex, carefully wrought “expert assessment” style survey, where we asked the participants to specify statistical confidence intervals corresponding to variety of assertions. The results were written up in an H+ Magazine article and also an academic paper in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Responses to the survey were all over the map, but a fairly large percentage of respondents foresaw the advent of human-level AGI before the middle of this century. Obviously, the attendees at AGI-09 were a highly biased and self-selected population! However, the survey results are worthwhile as a demonstration of the existence of a population of serious research scientists and engineers who believe that human-level AGI is likely no more than decades away. Fast-forward a... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"“Fingers!” Gerwin Schalk sputtered, waving his hands around in the air. “Fingers are made to pick up a hammer.” He prodded the table, mimicking the way we poke at computer keyboards. “It’s totally ridiculous,” he said. But for Schalk — and many others in the field — the ultimate goal is not music. It’s language. Schalk dreams of letting people speak with their neurons, issuing silent commands to their machines. You could imagine the word “cat,” say, and it would pop up on your computer screen. The areas involved with imagined speech take up just a few centimeters in the brain. With better implants, Schalk said, he might be able to pick up a word that his volunteer beams at the computer. Even with today’s implants, he and his colleagues are getting closer. One epilepsy patient moved a ball across a computer screen simply by imagining either an “ooh” sound or an “aah” sound. It marked one more step toward telepathy with machines." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"You have to wonder what's going on in the DNA of Harvard genetics professor George Church. What extra bit of code does he have that the rest of us don't? If genes tell the story of a person's life, then some altered sequence of 'A's, 'C's, 'G's and 'T's must be at play, because his brain works like almost no one else's. About 30 years ago, Prof Church was one of a handful of people who dreamed up the idea of sequencing the entire human genome - every letter in the code that separates us from fruit flies as well as our parents. His lab was the first to come up with a machine to break that code, and he's been working to improve it ever since. Once the first genome was sequenced, he pushed the idea that it wasn't enough to have one sequence, we needed everyone's. When people pointed to the nearly $3bn price tag for that first one, he built another machine." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Scientists' predictions about the mysterious dark matter purported to make up most of the mass of the Universe may have to be revised. Research on dwarf galaxies suggests they cannot form in the way they do if dark matter exists in the form that the most common model requires it to. That may mean that the Large Hadron Collider will not be able to spot it. Leading cosmologist Carlos Frenk spoke of the "disturbing" developments at the British Science Festival in Bradford. The current theory holds that around 4% of the Universe is made up of normal matter - the stuff of stars, planets and people - and around 21% of it is dark matter. The remainder is made up of what is known as dark energy, an even less understood hypothetical component of the Universe that would explain its ever-increasing expansion." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Over-fished commercial stocks of plankton-eating fish have been replaced in several locations by jellyfish species. This appears to be something of a paradox because fish move quickly and can see their prey, which suggests their capture of prey should be much more efficient than for jellyfish that move slowly and have to make contact with their prey to know they are present. Now a team of scientists in Spain and the US have discovered he jellyfishes' success is partly based on their large body size and its energy efficiency. The team studied previously published data on jellyfish species and found that their relatively large body size, long tentacles, and their habit of pulsing their bodies to draw plankton-laden water past their tentacles, all increase the chances of capturing nearby prey, and this body design enables them to compete successfully with the plankton-eating fish such as anchovies and sardines, even though a larger body size is less efficient for swimming." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet