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[AaronW]

Nice job, blacks

[DMM]

Beautiful

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Oh my God...

I wish I could slow it down, though. Also, I wonder how much time is passing in each of those sequences. Also, I wonder what the green stuff is.

[sdsichero]

Oh my God...

I wish I could slow it down, though. Also, I wonder how much time is passing in each of those sequences. Also, I wonder what the green stuff is.

You probably could download it and in a dedicated video player, slow it down.

The green stuff is ectoplasm, so you know what the next Ghostbusters is about.

Nah, I think it is aurora.

[sdsichero]

Scientists Point to Link Between Missing Synapse Protein and Abnormal Behaviors

ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2011) — Although many mental illnesses are uniquely human, animals sometimes exhibit abnormal behaviors similar to those seen in humans with psychological disorders. Such behaviors are called endophenotypes. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that mice lacking a gene that encodes a particular protein found in the synapses of the brain display a number of endophenotypes associated with schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders.

The new findings appear in a recent issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, with Mary Kennedy, the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Biology at Caltech, as the senior author.

The team created mutations in mice so that they were missing the gene for a protein called densin-180, which is abundant in the synapses of the brain, those electro-chemical connections between one neuron and another that enable the formation of networks between the brain's neurons. This protein sticks to and binds together several other proteins in a part of the neuron that's at the receiving end of a synapse and is called the postsynapse. "Our work indicates that densin-180 helps to hold together a key piece of regulatory machinery in the postsynaptic part of excitatory brain synapses," says Kennedy.

In mice lacking densin-180, the researchers found decreased amounts of some of the other regulatory proteins normally located in the postsynapse. Kennedy and her colleagues were especially intrigued by a marked decrease in the amount of a protein called DISC1. "A mutation that leads to loss of DISC1 function has been shown to predispose humans to development of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder," Kennedy says.

[sdsichero]

Whole article this time...

'Graphene Earns Its Stripes': New Nanoscale Electronic State Discovered On Graphene Sheets

ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2011) — Researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) have discovered electronic stripes, called 'charge density waves', on the surface of the graphene sheets that make up a graphitic superconductor. This is the first time these stripes have been seen on graphene, and the finding is likely to have profound implications for the exploitation of this recently discovered material, which scientists believe will play a key role in the future of nanotechnology. The discovery is reported in Nature Communications, 29th November.

Graphene is a material made up of a single sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick, and is found in the marks made by a graphite pencil. Graphene has remarkable physical properties and therefore has great technological potential, for example, in transparent electrodes for flat screen TVs, in fast energy-efficient transistors, and in ultra-strong composite materials. Scientists are now devoting huge efforts to understand and control the properties of this material.

The LCN team donated extra electrons to a graphene surface by sliding calcium metal atoms underneath it. One would normally expect these additional electrons to spread out evenly on the graphene surface, just as oil spreads out on water. But by using an instrument known as a scanning tunneling microscope, which can image individual atoms, the researchers have found that the extra electrons arrange themselves spontaneously into nanometer-scale stripes. This unexpected behavior demonstrates that the electrons can have a life of their own which is not connected directly to the underlying atoms. The results inspire many new directions for both science and technology. For example, they suggest a new method for manipulating and encoding information, where binary zeros and ones correspond to stripes running from north to south and running from east to west respectively.

[sdsichero]

Body Rebuilding: Researchers Regenerate Muscle Tissue in Mice

ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2011) — A team of scientists from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and CellThera, a private company located in WPI's Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, have regenerated functional muscle tissue in mice, opening the door for a new clinical therapy to treat people who suffer major muscle trauma.

The team used a novel protocol to coax mature human muscle cells into a stem cell-like state and grew those reprogrammed cells on biopolymer microthreads. The threads were placed in a wound created by surgically removing a large section of leg muscle from a mouse. Over time, the threads and cells restored near-normal function to the muscle, as reported in the paper "Restoration of Skeletal Muscle Defects with Adult Human Cells Delivered on Fibrin Microthreads," published in the current issue of the journal Tissue Engineering Part A. Surprisingly, the microthreads, which were used simply as a scaffold to support the reprogrammed human cells, actually seemed to accelerate the regeneration process by recruiting progenitor mouse muscle cells, suggesting that they alone could become a therapeutic tool for treating major muscle trauma.

[sdsichero]

What's That Sparkle in Cassini's Eye?

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — The moon Enceladus, one of the jewels of the Saturn system, sparkles peculiarly bright in new images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The images of the moon, the first ever taken of Enceladus with Cassini's synthetic aperture radar, reveal new details of some of the grooves in the moon's south polar region and unexpected textures in the ice. These images, obtained on Nov. 6, 2011, are the highest-resolution images of this region obtained so far.

The area on Enceladus observed by Cassini's radar instrument does not include the famous "tiger stripes," fissures that eject great plumes of ice particles and water vapor, but covers regions just a few hundred miles away from the stripes. Scientists are scrutinizing an area around 63 degrees south latitude and 51 degrees west longitude that appears to be very rough, a texture that shows up as very bright in the radar images.

"It's puzzling why this is some of the brightest stuff Cassini has seen," said Steve Wall, deputy team lead of Cassini's radar team, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "One possibility is that the area is studded with rounded ice rocks. But we can't yet explain how that would happen."

[sdsichero]

First Molybdenite Microchip

ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2011) — Molybdenite, a new and very promising material, can surpass the physical limits of silicon. EPFL scientists have proven this by making the first molybdenite microchip, with smaller and more energy efficient transistors.

After having revealed the electronic advantages of molybdenite, EPFL researchers have now taken the next definitive step. The Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) has made a chip, or integrated circuit, confirming that molybdenite can surpass the physical limits of silicon in terms of miniaturization, electricity consumption, and mechanical flexibility.

"We have built an initial prototype, putting from two to six serial transistors in place, and shown that basic binary logic operations were possible, which proves that we can make a larger chip," explains LANES director Andras Kis, who recently published two articles on the subject in the scientific journal ACS Nano.

In early 2011, the lab unveiled the potential of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), a relatively abundant, naturally occurring mineral. Its structure and semi-conducting properties make it an ideal material for use in transistors. It can thus compete directly with silicon, the most highly used component in electronics, and on several points it also rivals graphene.

[sdsichero]

Scientists Propose New Names for Elements 114 and 116

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) have recommended new proposed names for elements 114 and 116, the latest heavy elements to be added to the periodic table.

Scientists of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-Dubna collaboration proposed the names as Flerovium for element 114 and Livermorium for element 116.

[sdsichero]

oh boy...porn application writers are interested I bet...

A Touch Screen That Touches Back

How would you like it if whenever you touched the screen of your smart phone, tablet or television, the screen touched you back?

Haptic tech company Senseg is developing a system that does exactly that, having recently unveiled a prototype tablet that may soon revolutionize the way we interact with our devices.

Senseg calls their new project Feel Screens and says any touch interface device can deliver high-fidelity tactile sensations. For example, if you have an image of sandpaper, you would be able to feel sandpaper when touching the screen.

[David Bird]

First Habitable-Zone Super-Earth Discovered in Orbit Around a Sun-Like Star

I've never really appreciated that they call these 'earth like.' At more than twice our size we couldn't live on it.

[sdsichero]

I've never really appreciated that they call these 'earth like.' At more than twice our size we couldn't live on it.

We just have to work out more. I think they just mean not s supergiant (like Jupiter) and in the Goldilocks Zone.

[David Bird]

I think they're trying to make it relatable, and I can support that, but it gives a false impression. Most people just scan the headlines and articles.

[Strict31]

I think they're trying to make it relatable, and I can support that, but it gives a false impression. Most people just scan the headlines and articles.

Yeah, they only thing they can say for certain about the planet's composition is that it's warm enough to have liquid water. It's a headline meant to grab attention from the common person. It could be more like Venus than Earth.

But apart from its distance of 600 LY, I don't think the gravity would be so great that humans would find it uninhabitable. It would be like having a fat man sitting on your chest everywhere you went, but pilots deal with those sorts of forces. Inhospitable, but it's within human tolerances for short amounts of time.

Making rough guesses, based on the planet size, of course.

And given the composition remains unknown, this is all pointless speculation anyway. Still...a cool discovery.

[CountD]

Long Sought After God Particle

from yahoonews http://news.yahoo.com/long-sought-god-p ... 02981.html

Physicists are closer than ever to hunting down the elusive Higgs boson particle, the missing piece of the governing theory of the universe's tiniest building blocks.

Scientists at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, announced today (Dec. 13) that they'd narrowed down the list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs, (also called the God particle) and even see some indications that they're hot on its trail.