There are benefits to getting your own back. Especially if it is blood.
The bigger the operation, the more blood gets spilled. In procedures like open heart surgery and major trauma, blood loss can be so great that large quantities need to be replaced.
Blood transfusions are often the preferred option. But in a minority of cases there can be adverse reactions.
And then there is the cost. As Professor Terry Gourlay puts it: Blood is not cheap — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Semachrysa jade new lacewing species, originally uploaded by Guek Hock Ping.
One day in May of 2011, Shaun Winterton was looking at pictures of bugs on the Internet when something unusual caught his eye.
It was a close shot of a green lacewing — an insect he knew well — but on its wing was an unfamiliar network of black lines and a few flecks of blue.
Winterton, a senior entomologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, has seen a lot of bugs. But he hadn’t seen this species before.
I sent the link to a few colleagues of mine,
Winterton told The Picture Show. They hadn’t seen it either. And I realised: This thing’s new
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hands up who remembers The Curiosity Show?
The South Australian production ran on Nine from for 18 years, from 1972 to 1990.
Presenters Dr Rob Morrison and Deane Hutton will reunite tonight and across the weekend atScience Alive!
in Adelaide, part of National Science Week — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Even though your teeth are largely composed of a mineral softer than that found in sharks, new tests reported in the Journal of Structural Biology suggest that they’re just as tough. In sharks, the material coating the teeth is largely composed of fluoroapatite, a fluoridated phosphate mineral that in its pure form is harder than the hydroxyapatite found in the enamel of human teeth. But by pressing tiny metallic pyramids into the surfaces of teeth from a shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus, shown) and a tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier), researchers found that the enameloid coating on shark teeth is no harder than that of the enamel on a human wisdom tooth. The teeth are, in fact, of comparable hardness because their surfaces aren’t pure mineral but instead are made of mineral crystals bound together with proteins so that the material doesn’t shatter under a sudden impact — via redwolf.newsvine.com
While Americans worry every year about getting a flu shot or preventing HIV/AIDS, the deadlier silent is actually Hepatitis C; killing over 15,000 people yearly in the US since 2007 and the numbers continue to increase as the carriers increase in age. While there is no vaccine, there is hope in nanoparticle technology.
The breakthrough came from a group of researchers at the University of Florida, creating a nanozyme
that eliminates the Hep C 100% of the time; before now, the six-month treatment would only work about half the time. The particles are coated with two biological agents, the identifier and the destroyer; the identifier recognises the virus and sends the destroyer off the eliminate the mRNA, which allows Hep C to replicate — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.
Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,
says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology1 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you ever wondered about the post-coital habits of squid, today is your lucky day.
It turns out that squid are a lot like humans, except for a few minor details like their customary three-hour athletic sexual abilities.
Scientists of the University of Melbourne collected dumpling squid from the wild and forced the squid — both males and females — to swim to exhaustion in a flume.
According to this article in the Los Angeles Times, the researchers then allowed the squid to mate, and performed the same swimming experiment.
This is what happened: after sex, both males and females could swim only half as long as normal. If they were allowed 30 minutes of recovery time after sex, however, they could swim normally.
So far, this is hardly shocking information, considering squid mating sessions last up to three hours and are apparently extremely vigorous — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new treatment for Alzheimer’s could halt deterioration in people with early symptoms of the disease, a limited human trial has shown. The treatment, called the most exciting drug in development
by scientists, is currently prescribed to people with immune system problems but could have a significant impact on the quality of life of Alzheimer’s sufferers, the trial suggests.
The drug, intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg), prevented the decline in cognitive skills, memory and the ability to live independently, among patients with mild to moderate symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Those who took a placebo continued to decline. The small number of patients who took the highest dose of the drug for three years showed no decline in memory.
Medical experts said the drug could be used to treat Alzheimer’s within a decade and was probably the most exciting drug we know about that is currently in the late stages of research
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
After a lot of theorising, postulating, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the US. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases.
The first of these implants, Argus II developed by Second Sight, is already available in Europe. For around $115,000, you get a 4-hour operation to install an antenna behind your eye, and a special pair of camera-equipped glasses that send signals to the antenna. The antenna is wired into your retina with around 60 electrodes, creating the equivalent of a 60-pixel display for your brain to interpret. The first users of the Argus II bionic eye report that they can see rough shapes and track the movement of objects, and slowly read large writing.
The second bionic eye implant, the Bio-Retina developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs less — around the $60,000 mark — and instead of an external camera, the vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anaesthetic — via redwolf.newsvine.com
DARPA is showing off a new system that can put out flames using only sound. It’s part of the US defence agency’s Instant Fire Suppression
program.
At the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have published the video alongside details of how the technique was achieved in their labs back in December 2011.
The team arranged two speakers either side of a liquid fuel flame to demonstrate how fire can be controlled by amping up an acoustic field. The sound increases air velocity, which then thins the area of the flame where combustion occurs, known as the flame boundary. Once the boundary area is thinned, the flame is easier to extinguish. At the same time, the acoustics are disturbing the pool of fuel and creating higher fuel vaporisation — this widens the flame, thinning it out so it is less concentrated and cool enough to extinguish.
Even better, the sound does not even need to be offensively loud to achieve any of this — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers at MIT have taken a significant step toward battery-free monitoring systems — which could ultimately be used in biomedical devices, environmental sensors in remote locations and gauges in hard-to-reach spots, among other applications.
Previous work from the lab of MIT professor Anantha Chandrakasan has focused on the development of computer and wireless-communication chips that can operate at extremely low power levels, and on a variety of devices that can harness power from natural light, heat and vibrations in the environment. The latest development, carried out with doctoral student Saurav Bandyopadhyay, is a chip that could harness all three of these ambient power sources at once, optimizing power delivery.
The energy-combining circuit is described in a paper being published this summer in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists have discovered a new molecule that will make your teeth cavity-proof and may change dental care forever. They have appropriately named it Keep 32 — for your 32 teeth — and it can kill the bacteria that produces cavities in 60 seconds flat.
José Córdoba — a researcher at Yale University — and Erich Astudillo — from the Universidad de Santiago, Chile—claim that this molecule can be added to any dental care product, from toothpaste to mouthwash. In fact, they say it can be added to anything, even candies and chewing gum.
As long as the product stays in your mouth for 60 seconds, it will eliminate the dreadful Streptococcus Mutans, making your teeth cavity proof for a number of hours — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The ultra-conservative American Tradition Institute has expanded its legal pursuit of climate scientists, using transparency laws to try to flush out potentially damaging emails.
The strategy — used to seek records from prominent scientists such as Michael Mann — is seen by scientists as an excuse to try to dig up embarrassing or damaging communications that could be used to discredit climate science.
Now for the first time the media is being drawn in as well, with ATI seeking the release of scientists’ communications with specific journalists. The list of news organisations targeted by the request includes the New York Times, the Associated Press, Frontline and the Guardian — via The Guardian
Scientists say they have discovered why dogs love to eat meat and bones.
Ancient canines adopted pack-living about eight million years ago, to hunt larger prey, according to researchers.
The resulting evolution of their jaws gradually turned the ancestors of modern wolves, and ultimately our own pets, into hypercarnivores
.
Dr Joao Munoz-Doran presented the findings at the First Joint Congress for Evolutionary Biology in Ottawa, Canada. — via BBC News
A wily parasite well known for influencing the behaviour of its animal hosts appears to play a troubling role in humans, increasing the risk of suicide among women who are infected, new research shows.
Chances are you or someone you know has been infiltrated by the parasite, called Toxoplasma gondii. Researchers estimate that T gondii is carried by 10% to 20% of Americans, who can get it by changing litter used by infected cats or eating undercooked meat from an animal carrying the bug.
Despite its prevalence in humans, the protozoan is most famous for the strange effect it has on the brains of rats and mice — via redwolf.newsvine.com
You can make these super fun, easy, and cheap rockets from stuff you probably have around the house. All you need are paper matches, a paper clip, a pin or needle, and a scrap of aluminium foil.
I used to spend hours making these when I was young, and I had just as much fun launching them for this video.
Read more about them and get a template to turn a matchbook into a pocket rocket factory at Grathio Labs
Studies suggest that infants who grow up with dogs in their home are less likely to develop asthma. Researchers may now have found one reason why. Pets, dogs in particular, may protect infants from the effects of a common virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Infants with severe RSV infections have an increased likelihood of developing childhood asthma.
The researchers think that exposure to certain microbes in early infancy changes the early composition of an infant’s intestinal flora and this sets the tone for how the developing immune system will respond later in childhood — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists successfully reversed diabetes in mice by transplanting mice human stem cells into mice in a discovery that may lead to way to finding a cure for a disease that affects 8.3 percent of the US population.
Researchers say that the latest study, published in the journal Diabetes, was the first to show that human stem cell transplants can successfully restore insulin production and reverse type 1 diabetes in mice — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo test a new theory that suggests how ancient Easter Islanders may have used ropes to “walk” the moai to their platforms — via National Geographic
Tractor beams, a staple of science fiction, may be moving closer to science fact. In a paper published earlier this spring, physicists have proposed a structure that may enable light to pull objects.
Normally, light pushes on objects, albeit weakly. In the field of optical manipulation optical tweezers employ this pushing force to move microscopic objects from atoms to bacteria. The ability to pull as well would increase the precision and scope of optical manipulation. For spaceflight, engineers have proposed sails to capture the force exerted by light.
Rather than towing space vessels, the newly proposed tractor beam might be more useful in biology or medicine. If you want to pull something towards you, you just reduce the pressure,
says Mordechai Segev, a physicist at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, who describes his team’s idea in an April Optics Express paper. You make a little bit of vacuum,
he adds. The problem is that in sensitive medical applications, such as lung surgery, it is important not to change the pressure or introduce any new gases. Here, the light will be the suction device,
he says, so the pressure would not change at all. It is just the light
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
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