"Two French scientists who discovered the AIDS virus and a German who found the virus that causes cervical cancer were awarded the 2008 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology on Monday." - imabonehead
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"Luc Montagnier, director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur won half the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) for discovering the deadly virus that has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the 1980s." - imabonehead
"Harald zur Hausen of the University of Duesseldorf and a former director of the German Cancer Research Center shared the other half of the prize for work that went against the conventional wisdom about the cause of cervical cancer." - imabonehead
"The oldest-known tracks of a creature apparently using legs have been discovered in rock dated to 570 million years ago in what was once a shallow sea in Nevada.
Scientists think land beasts evolved from ancient creatures that left the sea and evolved lungs and legs. If the new finding is real - the discoverer says will fuel skepticism - it pushes the advent of walking back 30 million years earlier than any previous solid finding." - imabonehead
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"The aquatic creature left its "footprints" as two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter. Scientists said today that the animal must have stepped lightly onto the soft marine sediment, because its legs only pressed shallow pinpoints into that long-ago sea bed.
The tracks were made during what is called the Ediacaran period, which preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved. Scientists had once thought only microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, said Ohio State University Professor Loren Babcock." - imabonehead
"The "foundation" highlighted in the new study is a low-frequency signal created by neuronal activity throughout the brain. This signal doesn't switch off even in dreamless sleep, possibly to help maintain basic structure and facilitate offline housekeeping activities." - David Young
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"First there was the theoretical Big Bang that got the universe going. Several billion years passed. Then a Little Bang birthed our solar system." - Kol Tregaskes
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A large-scale, multi-dimensional analysis of the genomic characteristics of glioblastoma, the most common primary brain tumor in adults, provides new insights into the roles of several genes and defines core biological pathways altered in tumor development. - Walter Jessen
"Astronomers have captured images of a powerful collision of galaxy clusters and say it may shed light on the behavior of dark matter." - imabonehead
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"They can see a clear separation between dark and ordinary matter, answering a crucial question about whether dark matter interacts with itself other than via gravitational forces, the researchers said on Wednesday.
"Dark matter makes up five times more matter in the universe than ordinary matter," said Marusa Bradac of the University of California Santa Barbara, who led the work." - imabonehead
"On Sept. 18, the news from CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, was that an electrical problem involved with a cooling system caused a helium leak that would keep the mammoth particle accelerator out of commission for a day or so. A couple of days later, the estimate had stretched into two months: The machine would need to be warmed back up, which will take three to four weeks, before a full investigation could be done." - Jason R. Hunter
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On Friday, a failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees.
The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.
Cern spokesman James Gillies said on Saturday that the sector that was damaged would have to be warmed up from its operating temperature - of near absolute zero - so that repairs could be made, and then cooled down again." - Jason R. Hunter
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"A Chinese astronaut on Saturday performed the nation's first-ever spacewalk, the latest milestone in an ambitious program that is increasingly rivaling the United States and Russia in its rapid expansion." - imabonehead
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"Good-bye, Large Hadron Collider. Hello, Black Mesa.
That's the reader's choice in Wired Science's Large Hadron Collider Renaming Contest, announced last week to fill the vast gulf between the LHC's scientific magnificence and utterly wonky name.
Since then, an electrical problem has shuttered the mammoth atom smasher until 2009 -- making Black Mesa, a reference to the bestselling computer game Half Life, a timely choice." - Jason R. Hunter
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"Three people with a rare, incurable form of hereditary blindness regained some sight after receiving experimental gene therapy, a new report says." - imabonehead
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"Some of Professor Michael Reiss's recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society's Director of Education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the Society's reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the Society, he will step down immediately as Director of Education a part time post he held on secondment." - David Young
"Infectious prion proteins from hamsters can change normal proteins from mice into new, infectious forms of prion - simply by mixing the proteins together in a test tube." - imabonehead
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"To find out, a team of chemists led by Lin Feng of Tsinghua University in Beijing peered at the petals with a scanning electron microscope. What they saw was a carpet of minuscule bumps covered with even tinier ridges. To confirm that those structures — and not the chemical makeup of the petals — are what grip the water droplets, Feng's team made a plastic cast of the petal surface. As with the original petal, water droplets stuck to the cast, even when it was turned upside down." - imabonehead
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"It's the texture, then, that does the trick. Texture is also important in the so-called "lotus effect," which causes water to bead up and roll off many plants' leaves and petals, clearing away dust and debris. The difference: on drop-shedding surfaces, the tiny bumps have wax-coated tips and are separated by narrower troughs, so they make less contact with water." - imabonehead
