Science2.0
Tunable Transparency And Wettability: New Adaptive Material Inspired By Tears
Researchers have designed a new kind of adaptive material with tunable transparency and wettability features - imagine a tent that blocks light on a dry and sunny day, and becomes transparent and water-repellent on a dim, rainy day. Or highly precise, self-adjusting contact lenses that also clean themselves.
The new material was inspired by natural dynamic, self-restoring systems, such as the liquid film that coats your eyes - tears. Individual tears join up to form a dynamic liquid film with an obviously significant optical function that maintains clarity, while keeping the eye moist, protecting it against dust and bacteria, and helping to transport away any wastes – doing all of this and more in literally the blink of an eye.
The Chicken And The Egg Problem - A View Of Evolution
It is surprisingly obvious yet one wonders what has contributed to its longevity and its countinued appearance in various arguments.
Why obvious? Well, let's consider the premises. Unless one is predisposed to believing that animals simply appear, then we must reject the premise that a chicken can exist as a fully formed adult without any previous existence. As a result, the only element left to examine is the egg. Yet, an egg doesn't spring into existence fully formed either.
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Epigenetic Studies Claim Benefits To Drinking Milk Throughout Lifetime
Animal and dairy scientists presenting at the Lactation Biology Symposium in Phoenix, Arizona have discovered that drinking milk at an early age can help mammals throughout their lives. The presentations focused on epigenetics, or how gene expression changes based on factors like environment or diet. Epigenetic changes modify when or how certain traits are expressed.
But understanding exactly how milk affects the body is a complicated story of hormones, antibodies and proteins, as well as other cells and compounds researchers have not yet identified.
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How Fast Do Whiskers Grow? (in Seals And Sealions)
The whiskers of participant seals and sea lions were stable-isotope-labeled with Carbon 13 and Nitrogen 15, and whisker growth rates were measured over a period of more than two years.
The results:
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Low-Premium Insurance Patients Don't Just Focus On Cheapest Cost
Health plans that offer low premiums and high deductibles believe that patients with deductibles of $1,000 or more for individual coverage (or twice that for family coverage) will shop around for the best price to get their health care.
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One Man Bravely Stands Against Science, Big Donors And His Party To Oppose Keystone XL
The Looming Population Implosion
A model based on global population data spanning the years from 1900 to 2010 has caused a research team to predict the opposite of what Doomsday Prophets of the 1960s and beyond insisted would happen - the number of people on Earth will stabilize around the middle of the century and perhaps even start to decline.
The results coincide with the United Nation's downward estimates, which claim that by 2100 Earth's population will be 6.2 billion, if low fertility and birth rate continues on its current path, below the 7 billion we are at now.
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SN UDS10Wil: Hubble Pushes Supernova Record Back 350 Million Years
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the farthest supernova so far. Supernova UDS10Wil, nicknamed SN Wilson after American President Woodrow Wilson, exploded more than 10 billion years ago.
SN UDS10Wil is a Type Ia supernovae. These beacons can be used as a yardstick for measuring cosmic distances. One of the debates surrounding Type Ia supernovae is the nature of the fuse that ignites them. This latest discovery adds credence to one of two competing theories of how they explode. Although preliminary, the evidence so far favors the explosive merger of two burned out stars; small, dim, and dense stars known as white dwarfs, the final state for stars like our Sun.
The Secret Ingredient In Primordial Soup
If objects from space kindled life on Earth, how did it happen?
The terrestrial or extra-terrestrial case for important ingredients that led to the building blocks of life is a hot debate. A new paper says that adenosine triphosphate, similar to what is now found in all living cells and vital for generating the energy that makes something alive, could have been created when meteorites containing phosphorus minerals landed in hot, acidic pools of liquids around volcanoes, which were likely to have been common across the early Earth.
Hallucinations Of Musical Notation: The Neural Basis
Building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000, which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations), a new paper in Brain outlines case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations.
While ffytche believes that hallucinations of musical notation are rarer than some other types of visual hallucination, Professor Oliver Sacks M.D. details eight examples of people who have reported experiencing hallucinations of musical notation, including:
11 Electron Neutrinos In T2K!
The appearance of electron neutrinos in a muon neutrino beam is a very important oscillation signal of neutrinos, that allows the measurement of the parameter theta_13, one of the so far less-well known parameter of the neutrino mixing matrix.
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Breathprint: Now Your Breathing Has A Fingerprint Too
Bodily fluids contain lots of information about the health of people, that is why medical doctors routinely have blood and urine analyzed.
But bodily fluids can do more than mark infectious diseases or cancer and organ failure, researchers at ETH Zurich and at the University Hospital Zurich have shown they can take advantage of modern high-resolution analytical methods to provide real-time information on the chemical composition of exhaled breath.
Yes, your breath has an identifiable individual chemical pattern. Call it a a 'breathprint'?
30 Billion Cosmic Ray Events Measured By Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer - But Still No Dark Matter
The first published results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) physics experiment on the International Space Station were announced today and though the result is the most precise measurement to date of the ratio of positrons to electrons in cosmic rays, we still have not caught our first glimpse into dark matter.
The AMS experiment, constructed at universities around the world and assembled at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), is the world's most precise detector of cosmic rays. It was installed on the Space Station May 19th, 2011 after having been brought into orbit on the last flight of NASA's space shuttle Endeavour. To date it has measured over 30 billion cosmic ray events.
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Maybe We Need A McDonald's For Healthy Foods
Food so cheap that poor people can be fat is a miracle only dreamed about by philosophers ad economists throughout history. It was previously believed that the labor force needed to produce enough food would outstrip the food they could produce, something like how trying to exceed the speed of light adds too much mass.
Amyloid Proteins May Be Getting Too Much Blame In Alzheimer's
Amyloids
are the quintessential bad boys of neurobiology.
These clumps of misfolded proteins found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders muck up the seamless workings of the neurons responsible for memory and movement, and researchers around the world have devoted themselves to devising ways of blocking their production or accumulation in humans.
Understanding how amyloids form requires an understanding of the biology of proteins, which are essentially strings of smaller components called amino acids attached end to end. Once they're made, these protein strings twist and fold into specific three-dimensional shapes that fit together like keys and locks to do the work of the cell.
PubMed Central Competes With, Undermines Journal Usage
PubMed Central is costing biomedical journal sites readership and that effect is increasing over time.
The bulk of modern biomedical studies are controlled by the government, which means taxpayer-funding, so it makes sense that the results would be available to the public, but Phillip M. Davis writing in The FASEB Journal says that PubMed draws readership away from the scientific journal even when journals themselves are providing free access to the articles.
Sexual Dimorphism And The Evolutionary Consequences Of Infidelity
Male and female blue tits look a lot alike to us but in the UV-range, visible to birds, the male is much more colorful.
Cthulhu Lives!
Two new symbionts living in the gut of termites have been discovered. These single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, help termites digest wood. And now they have a name inspired by science fiction.
Current And Future Prospects For Biosimilars
The current situation and future prospects for biosimilars is similar to that of small molecule drugs, according to an analysis by Research and Markets: they get to benefit from patent expiry. On this basis, prospects for biosimilars might look good, with the vast majority of leading originator brands in the global biologics market expected to lose some degree of protection by 2019.
Symbol Grounding And Symbol Tethering
Sloman equates "symbol grounding" with concept empiricism, thus rendering it impossible. However, I don't see the need to equate all symbol grounding to concept empiricism. And what Sloman calls "symbol tethering" may be what I call "symbol grounding," or at least a type of symbol grounding.
Firstly, as Sloman says about concept empiricism [1]:
Kant refuted this in 1781, roughly by arguing that experience without prior concepts (e.g. of space, time, ordering, causation) is impossible. -->
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