Of Interest...
| Items selected for this section come from a variety of sources – including but not limited to NASA, NSF, ESA, Science (AAAS), Nature, Smithsonian, New Scientist, Live Science, Science News, and Discover Magazine – and are meant to represent the vast and ever-changing body of scientific research. Selected for their interest value, these items are neither juried nor validated by NASSMC or its member coalitions. |
+ Menopause sets humans apart from chimps: Chimps share many traits that we consider to be uniquely human, but now a new study suggests that the menopause really does set humans apart from other apes. A detailed look at long-term fertility data from six populations of chimpanzees, compared with similar data from populations of hunter-gatherer humans, shows that both chimp and human birth rates have similar patterns of reproductive decline after the age of 40. ~ via New Scientist
+ NASA spacecraft to study Moon's lumpy interior: A newly announced NASA mission will examine the Moon's interior with more than 100 times the sensitivity of previous missions. The spacecraft, due to launch in 2011, will do this by measuring irregularities in the Moon's gravity field.~ via New Scientist
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This image, taken by a transmission electron microscope, shows a single carbon nanotube protruding from an electrode. This nanotube is less than a micron long and only 10 nanometers wide, or 10,000 times thinner than the width of a single human hair. When a radio wave of a specific frequency impinges on the nanotube, it begins to vibrate vigorously. An electric field applied to the nanotube forces electrons to be emitted from its tip. This electrical current may be used to detect the mechanical vibrations of the nanotube, and thus listen to the radio waves. (The waves shown in this image were added for visual effect, and are not part of the original microscope image.)
Credit: Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley |
+ World's smallest radio fits in the palm of the hand . . . of an ant: Harnessing the electrical and mechanical properties of the carbon nanotube, a team of researchers has crafted a working radio from a single fiber of that material. Fixed between two electrodes, the vibrating tube successfully performed the four critical roles of a radio—antenna, tunable filter, amplifier and demodulator—to tune in a radio signal generated in the room and play it back through an attached speaker. ~ via National Science Foundation
+ Why skin is strong: cells stick like Velcro: Scientists have gotten their best look ever at interactions inside human skin cells, finding a Velcro-like setup that links them and makes skin strong while also supple. The cell-interior images, made with a new a technique called cryo-electron tomography, show the proteins responsible for cell-cell contacts for the first time. ~via LiveScience
+ Voyager 2 proves solar system is squashed: NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin, Voyager 1, into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars. However, Voyager 2 took a different path, entering this region, called the heliosheath, on Aug. 30, 2007. Because Voyager 2 crossed the heliosheath boundary, called the solar wind termination shock, about 16 billion kilometers (10 billion miles) away from Voyager 1 and almost 1.6 billion kilometers (a billion miles) closer to the sun, it confirmed that our solar system is "squashed" or "dented"—that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the solar wind is not perfectly round. Where Voyager 2 made its crossing, the bubble is pushed in closer to the sun by the local interstellar magnetic field. ~via NASA
+ Saturn's rings 'may live forever': Data from the Cassini probe shows these thin bands of orbiting particles were probably there billions of years ago, and are likely to be very long-lived. It means we are not in some special time - the giant planet has most likely always provided a stunning view. Previous data had led researchers to believe the rings were created just 100 million years ago, when a huge moon or comet shattered in Saturn's vicinity. ~via BBC News Science and Nature
+ Humans are still evolving - and it's happening faster than ever: Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found. The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct, although this is likely to reverse in future as populations become more mixed. ~via Guardian Unlimited
+ 'Magma P.I.' unearths clues to how Earth's crust was sculpted: About a decade ago, Johns Hopkins University geologist Bruce Marsh challenged the century-old concept that the Earth's outer layer formed when crystal-free molten rock called magma oozed to the surface from giant subterranean chambers hidden beneath volcanoes. Marsh's theory—that the deep-seated plumbing underneath volcanoes is actually made up of an extensive system of smaller sheet-like chambers vertically interconnected with each other and transporting a crystal-laden "magmatic mush" to the surface—has become far more widely accepted. This sort of system, known as a "magmatic mush column," is thought to exist beneath all of the world's major volcanic centers. ~via Science Daily
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Colonies of tens of billions of microorganisms create their own artwork as they adapt to stresses in a petri dish. Scientists add the colors and shading.
Credit: Eshel Ben-Jacob et al., Tel-Aviv University |
+ The incredible art of bacteria: Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel-Aviv University and Professor Herbert Levine of UCSD's National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics watched bacteria solve problems in the petri dish for years. In doing so, they caught bacteria in the act of creating beautiful art. ~via LiveScience
+ Physicists make ripples with their 'magic carpet': Perfectly timed for pantomime season, a team of scientists has come up with instructions for how to make a flying carpet. The magical device may owe more to Walt Disney than to The Arabian Nights, but it is not pure fantasy, according to Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his co-workers. The researchers have studied1 the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid, and find that it should be possible to make one that will stay aloft in air. ~via Nature
+ Gerbils can distinguish 'me' from 'you': If you say something to a gerbil, will it understand? Two researchers have succeeded in training gerbils to recognize human vowel sounds, and have found that they can easily distinguish, say, an 'oo' (as in 'you') from an 'ee' (as in 'me'). Joan Sinnott and Kelly Mosteller of the University of South Alabama in Mobile know, of course, that gerbils are never going to understand the semantics of human speech; they're not trying to train the gerbils to understand words or sentences. Instead, the work will feed into their interest in how humans discriminate between sounds at a very basic level, as infants do before those sounds become part of a known language. ~via LiveScience
+ A 40-hour laptop battery? Although improvements in laptop computers and other electronics continue at a torrid pace, the batteries that power them have made only modest strides in recent years. A new advance in nanotechnology could change all that. Lithium ion batteries made with tiny whiskers of silicon can store as much as 10 times the charge of conventional rechargeables, researchers report. In principle, the new technology could result in laptop batteries that run for days and electric cars that cruise for hundreds of kilometers on a single charge--but it must still clear some key hurdles to make it to market. ~via ScienceNOW
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