After an 8-year-long court battle, Welsh activists have finally been allowed to released a Russian study showing an increased cancer risk linked to eating genetically modified potatoes. While the victory of the Welsh Greenpeace members in the courtroom would seem to vindicate the work of the Russian scientists that did the original research, there are still serious questions to be answered. The trials involved rats being fed several types of potatoes as feed. The rats who were fed GM potatoes suffered much more extensive damage to their organs than with any other type; just the same, serious questions remain about the validity of the findings. The Welsh group wants to use this information to stop the testing of GM crops in the UK, tests currently slated for the spring of this year
Scientists have shown what happens when an infection-fighting antibody attacks a gap in HIV’s formidable defences. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases-led team say the work could aid HIV vaccine development. They have published an atomic-level image in Nature showing the antibody, b12, attacking part of a protein on surface of the virus. HIV avoids attack by constantly mutating, but this protein segment is a weak spot because it remains stable
A123 Systems claims to have invented a Lithium Ion battery that not only can discharge at very high rates of current but can be recharged very quickly without damage to the cells or overheating. A unique feature of A123Systems’ M1 cells is their ability to charge to high capacity in 5 minutes or less. That’s a significant improvement over traditional Li Ion, which typically requires more than 90 minutes to reach a similar level of charge. Using this technology, General Motors has announced a plug-in hybrid SUV
New images of a craggy, fissure-filled canyon on Mars provide evidence of long-term underground water flows that may have provided a suitable environment for microbial life, scientists say. The new findings show light-coloured features cutting across dark bands in an area known as Candor Chasma. Dr Okubo and his colleagues believe they are looking at places where rock has been chemically altered by water flowing across the fractures
Enormous deep-sea squid emit blinding flashes of light as they attack their prey, research shows. Taningia danae’s spectacular light show was revealed in video footage taken in deep waters off Chichijima Island in the North Pacific
Doctors at a Texas military base are testing a procedure on wounded Iraq veterans that may allow them to regrow portions of lost fingers. The procedure involves treatments with a fine powder called extracellular matrix, which is taken from the bladders of pigs. The substance is what cells latch on to in mammals to allow them to divide and grow into tissue. Scientists who developed the procedure say the substance appears to activate latent biological processes in humans that encourage healing and tissue regeneration. They said the processes are active in human fetuses, which have the ability to regenerate and grow new parts, but the ability becomes dormant after birth
A European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the Night Wind
project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy
A computer that carries out calculations using tiny bubbles instead of electricity has been developed by US researchers. The microfluidic
computer performs calculation by squeezing bubbles through tiny channels etched into a chip. It can perform all of the logical operations needed to make a general-purpose computer. In practise, such a computer would be much bigger than a PC and about a thousand times slower. Nevertheless, the bubble-based computer could lead to improved microfluidic technology for chemical analysis
A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms, US researchers have shown. The technique could ultimately be used for advanced computing devices or gravity detectors. The experiments demonstrate physicists’ increasing ability to manipulate light. Being able to control it in this way could be useful for optical or quantum computers — via Warren Ellis
Reintroducing wild wolves to the Scottish Highlands would help the local ecosystem, a study suggests. Wolves, which were hunted to extinction in Scotland in the late 1700s, would help control the numbers of red deer, the team from the UK and Norway said. This would aid the re-establishment of plants and birds — currently hampered by the deer population, they write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Kodak’s revolutionary new ink can quickly create prints with an archival life of 100 years, versus standard inkjet photos that go the way of toilet paper after 15. And the ink costs half the price
A team of scientists from Washington, Wisconsin, and Germany combined a ceramic barium titanate and white-hot molten tin with an ultrasonic probe. The new material was, in some tests, almost 10x more resistant to bending than diamond. As the material cools, its crystal structure changes, causing its volume to expand. Because they are held inside the tin matrix, strain builds up inside the barium titanate, at a particular temperature that energy is released to oppose a bending force
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine the IPCC major climate change report. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — via Warren Ellis
Given some jelly mixed according to standard procedures and a vertical wall, it is not possible to nail the former to the latter and have it stay there for any significant amount of time. Furthermore, these experiments were conducted by nailing the jelly to a horizontal surface which was then gradually tilted. Nailing jelly to a wall while the wall is vertical is an intractable problem in itself due to the difficulty in picking up jelly with the hands without it disintegrating — via Improbable Research
One of the main challenges in developing microscale robots lies in miniaturising their power and propulsion. Now, researchers in the US may have found a solution to this problem, by exploiting the natural movement of bacteria to propel micro-objects through water
More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, have been identified in South Africa — via Bruce Sterling
A data cable made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system. The modified cells should form better connections with human tissue than the metal electrodes currently used for purposes such as remotely controlling prosthetics — via Warren Ellis
Scientists have built a tiny memory chip that uses new technology to pack a relatively large amount of information into a square about one-2,000th of an inch on a side. Although the chip is modest in capacity — with 160,000 bits of information — the bits are crammed together so tightly that it is the densest chip ever made. The achievement points to a possible path toward continuing the exponential growth of computing power even after current silicon chip-making technology hits fundamental limits in 10 to 20 years
Bird flu hasn’t gone away. The discovery, announced last week, that the H5N1 bird flu virus is widespread in cats in locations across Indonesia has refocused attention on the danger that the deadly virus could be mutating into a form that can infect humans far more easily
Synthetic spider silk, like lycra in many ways, has a number of unique properties. The MIT lab that created it is being monitored by military elements, keenly interested in applications of this material to front-line technologies. The secret of spider silk’s combined strength and flexibility, according to scientists, has to do with the arrangement of the nano-crystalline reinforcement of the silk as it is being produced — in other words, the way these tiny crystals are oriented towards and adhere to the stretchy protein. Emulating this process in a synthetic polymer, the MIT team focused on reinforcing solutions of commercial rubbery substance known as polyurethane elastomer with nano-sized clay platelets instead of simply heating and mixing the molten plastics with reinforcing agents
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