Bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City are starting to engineer living heart tissues to fix these damaged hearts. Their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin
Researchers at Ohio State University may have identified a new and unusual tumour suppression gene that could effect cancers of the lung, head, and neck. The gene, known as TCF21, is silenced in tumour cells through a chemical change known as DNA methylation, a process that is potentially reversible
Spiders, centipedes and scorpion-like critters are among the 27 new animal species that biologists have discovered in the dark, damp caves of two Central California national parks — via digg
The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don’t glue ourselves together when we cut ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibres in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft’s skin with hollow fibres containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility
The first magnetic levitation elevators could hit the market as soon as 2008. The Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corporation has stated that the same technology used to develop high speed trains will soon be available in their elevators
Several researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, led by principal investigator Susan Rempe, are part of a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team developing a nano-size battery that one day could be implanted in the eye to power an artificial retina — via Warren Ellis
The future of humanity could lie within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. The facility is designed to hold around 2 million types of seed, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. The Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels and earthquakes
Stan Howard faces prosecution for felling endangered trees as his brother, brother of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, prepared to host a major six-nation conference on climate change
This hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There’s just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics — via Warren Ellis
If you are scuba diving, be sure not to swim anywhere near any ship or installation that has been protected by the Raytheon Corporation’s new swimmer denial
system. Otherwise you will very quickly feel extremely sick and probably drown. Raytheon’s underwater sensors detect any unwelcome presence and trigger an underwater sound system that emits extremely powerful pulses of low frequency audio. The pulse rate and audio frequency are chosen to make human organs resonate like organ pipes, causing swimmers to vomit into their masks or suffer internal ruptures — via Warren Ellis
ApNano has tested armour said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear. Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material. Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail. They said the nano-based armour, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact — via Warren Ellis
The UK government has been accused of compiling a national DNA database by stealth as police reported a rapid increase in genetic profiling
Australia had its hottest year on record in 2005, with meteorologists saying the rising temperatures were due to global warming. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said temperatures were on average 1.09°C higher than normal in 2005, making it the hottest year since records were first kept in 1910. Meteorologist Mike Coughlan said previous record hot years in 1988, 1998 and 2002 were caused by El Nino events, where warmer waters in the South West Pacific lead to lower rainfall and hotter weather in Australia. But there was no El Nino in 2005
Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask What is your most dangerous idea? The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond — and that’s just the D’s! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial
GM crops under test in the UK have cross pollinated to weeds, giving them the same resistance to herbicide as the GM crops. This has been reported as occurring in Canada, which like the US is well past the test stage and allows widespread use of GM crops. What’s worse, in Canada crop rotation has conferred multi-herbicide resistance to some of the weeds
Miniature gyroscopes are often found in missile guidance systems, but they are now being used to attack a very different type of target, by diagnosing cancer and other diseases. The micro-gyroscopes consist of a chip with a vibrating disc the size of a sand grain which is highly sensitive to acceleration, allowing it to detect motion. Now the technology is being used to weigh
proteins and identify those produced by cancer cells. What’s more, the detector will be much faster than conventional biosensors
In a delightful example of common sense, Judge John Jones of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled that intelligent design — which bills itself as a scientific theory and states that life shows signs of being the work of an intelligent designer — is in fact reworked creationism and the loony fundies trying to inflict their insanity on students are blatant liars — via The Pagan Prattle
A remarkable humanitarian programme is under way in Havana, which aims to restore the sight of six million people through free eye surgery. Launched in July by the 79-year-old Cuban President, Fidel Castro, and Venezuela’s Socialist leader, President Hugo Chavez, Operation Miracle has brought daily planeloads of the poor from across Latin America and the Caribbean to Havana for surgery. Cuba provides the medical skills, Venezuela the petro-dollars
In a world first, German scientists, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, say they have reconstructed a key sequence in the genome of the woolly mammoth that shows the extinct beast’s closest modern relative is the Asian elephant
A sub-orbital mission to determine whether spider-like robots could construct complex structures in space is set to launch in January
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