Office workers glued to their computer screens have an increased risk of potentially fatal blood clots, a world-leading New Zealand study has found. The study, by Professor Richard Beasley of the Medical Research Institute in Wellington found that 34 per cent of patients admitted to hospital with blood clots had been seated at work for long periods
Scientists are developing an artificial vein for use in patients with circulation problems. The device, which encourages blood to flow in its natural spiralling fashion, has produced highly promising results in clinical trials. The developers hope it will offer surgeons carrying out bypass operations an alternative to relying on blood vessels taken from the patient’s body. It is hoped it could be made available to patients within a year
Plants can do it: they simply grab carbon dioxide out of the air and covert it into biomass. In this process, known as photosynthesis, the plants use light as their energy source. Chemists would also like to be able to use CO2 as a carbon source for their synthetic reactions, but it doesn’t work just like that. A team headed by Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces has now taken an important step toward this goal. They have successfully activated CO2 for use in a chemical reaction by using a special new type of metal-free catalyst: graphitic carbon nitride
Australian researchers say they have found a previously undiscovered species of taipan. The young snake has been found in the central deserts of Western Australia as part of a biodiversity survey. It was initially thought to be a brown snake, but Professor Steve Donellan from the South Australian Museum says DNA testing revealed it to be an unknown species of taipan. He says there are only two other known species of taipan in Australia, and the last one was found 125 years ago
Scientists from the Northern Territory Menzies School of Health Research say they have discovered an effective treatment for the strain of malaria found in the Asia-Pacific region. The treatment combines a Chinese herbal extract and a longer-acting anti-malarial drug used to combat the more deadly strain of the disease found in Africa
A new DNA test will help police in the UK solve rape cases even when the attacker has not left any traces of sperm. The test looks for the genetic hallmark of other cells present in semen, such as skin and immune cells. Its developers at Birmingham’s Forensic Science Service say the test will help provide DNA evidence in a further 90 sexual assault cases a year
Launched in 2001, A123 leveraged research initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to commercially develop lithium-ion batteries that incorporate nanotechnology in the electrodes. The result is a new generation of batteries that deliver up to 10 times longer cycle life, five times more power and dramatically faster charge times over conventional high-power battery technology
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created the world’s first material that reflects virtually no light
. This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs and smarter
light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space
Our closest invertebrate relative, the humble sea squirt, can regenerate its entire body from just tiny blood vessel fragments. The entire regeneration process, which in part resembles the early stages of embryonic development, can produce an adult sea squirt in as little as a week. The finding could illuminate not only the evolutionary origins of regeneration in all organisms, but also subsequent changes to it during vertebrate evolution
A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth’s crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean — a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works. The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle — the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick — is exposed on the sea floor. Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an open wound
on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution
Scientists at the University of Manchester have created the world’s thinnest substance, a sheet of carbon one atom thick. Called graphene
, the substance will revolutionise the computer industry, allowing transistors to be built on a far smaller scale than today. The team has already used the substance to build a transistor for single electrons
Emergency workers attending the scene of a dirty
bomb or nuclear blast could soon have a drug to help protect them
Australia’s first commercial wave-generated power station will in weeks begin supplying homes south of Sydney with electricity and fresh drinking water, courtesy of the sea. Lying anchored just 100 metres (yards) off a popular surf beach near Wollongong, a city of around 200,000 people just south of Sydney, the 485-tonne plant will power 500 homes along the local grid. Electricity is generated when waves wash into a funnel facing the ocean, driving air through a pipe and into a turbine capable of pumping 500kw of clean power each day into the local grid. The A$6 million (US$4.7 million) floating plant, built to withstand a 1-in-100 year storm, can also desalinate 2,000 litres of drinking water each day for almost as many homes as it powers
An antiviral drug widely used to treat hepatitis B causes some people with HIV to become rapidly resistant to their medication. The finding could have major implications for over four million people worldwide who are jointly infected with hepatitis B and HIV
New technology developed by Keio University researchers that creates artificial bacterial DNA that can carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence. The researchers claimed that they encoded e= mc² 1905!
on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis. The bacteria-based data storage method has backup and long-term archival functionality
The Citizenr company will install a solar generator on your roof, completely for free. You then buy power from it, instead of a regular power company, at a fixed rate that’s likely to be lower than the usual power fees. The company will make money on these usage fees, as well as credits from the federal government for spreading the use of solar power. If it sounds too good to be true to you, you’re not alone. A number of financial analysts have warned people away from the company — via Slashdot
There have been direct observations of chimps in the west African savannah modifying sticks to create spears. They then use these spears to kill small mammals and eat them. It is the first time that an animal other than a human has been directly observed in crafting a weapon for the purpose of hunting or killing
Magnificently sophisticated geometric patterns in medieval Islamic architecture indicate their designers achieved a mathematical breakthrough 500 years earlier than Western scholars. By the 15th century, decorative tile patterns on these masterpieces of Islamic architecture reached such complexity that a small number boasted what seem to be quasicrystalline
designs, Harvard University’s Peter Lu and Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt wrote in the journal Science. Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry
SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers’ home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project… that is until today. One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife’s stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, I always knew that a geek would make a great husband
— Slashdot
Today, about 90 percent of the world’s electricity is created through an indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and released. But now, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but if it can scale up to mass production it may lead to a new and inexpensive source of energy
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