Scientist creates lifelike cells out of metal Scientists trying to create artificial life generally work under the assumption that life must be carbon-based, but what if a living thing could be made from another element? One British researcher may have proven that theory, potentially rewriting the book of life. Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow has created lifelike cells from metal — a feat few believed feasible. Even more remarkable, Cronin has hinted that the metal-based cells may be replicating themselves and evolving. "I am 100 percent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology," he said. The high-functioning "cells" that Cronin has built are constructed from large polyoxometalates derived from a range of metal atoms, like tungsten. The metallic bubbles are certainly cell-like, but are they actually alive? Cronin's team has also created bubbles inside of bubbles, which opens the door to the possibility of developing specialized "organelles." The early results have been encouraging.
Mad science News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9 About 60 years late to the party on dreaming that one up, friend. :-) in short...solar power is inefficient, and electrolysis of water to create hydrogen is energy intensive, which means it wastes a lot of energy to create that hydrogen to be used as an energy source. IIRC electrolysis is at best 50% energy efficient, with solar being 20% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, which has a decent, but low yield in the first place. A meter square of solar cells intercepts ~1200 watts of power. This returns only 20%, so 60w, 50% of which is lost for electrolysis, so we're down to 30W of power stored. Fuel cells convert something like 60% of stored energy into actual mechanical, lets get this thing moving energy...so we're down to 19.2W of energy used via hydrogen fuel cells filled using every square meter of solar cells we use. We could do it, but as you can see we lose a lot of energy in the process.
Stem Cell Basics: Introduction Laboratory studies of stem cells enable scientists to learn about the cells’ essential properties and what makes them different from specialized cell types. Scientists are already using stem cells in the laboratory to screen new drugs and to develop model systems to study normal growth and identify the causes of birth defects. The Elements by Theodore Gray My book The Elements is based on photographs I've been collecting at my website periodictable.com for many years. The website includes not just pictures, but also more detailed descriptions than we could fit in the book, and most importantly, it includes full 360-degree rotating videos of almost all the objects. You really won't find this kind of resources anywhere else for any other subject, so please enjoy. If you don't have the book yet, please don't think this is page is a substitute for the real thing. Aside from the fact that people buying the book (and my other photo periodic table products) is what pays for me being able to continue hosting the website, there's really no substitute for a paper book in your hands. For the convenience of people who have the book, I've listed all the samples found on each page in the book, so you can easy look them up. Click on a page icon below to get a list of the samples on that page. Sort pages: By Atomic Number | Alphabetically | Text Listing
Brain Scanner Records Dreams on Video Just a few weeks ago, we posted about how brain patterns can reveal almost exactly what you're thinking. Now, researchers at UC Berkeley have figured out how to extract what you're picturing inside your head, and they can play it back on video. The way this works is very similar to the mind-reading technique that we covered earlier this month. A functional MRI (fMRI) machine watches the patterns that appear in people's brains as they watch a movie, and then correlates those patterns with the image on the screen. With these data, a complex computer model was created to predict the relationships between a given brain pattern and a given image, and a huge database was created that matched 18,000,000 seconds worth of random YouTube videos to possible brain patterns. Comparing the brain-scan video to the original video is just a way to prove that the system works, but there's nothing stopping this technique from being used to suck video out of people's heads directly.
Video: A Trillion-Frame-Per-Second Camera Captures Individual Photons Moving Through Space Here at PopSci we love super-fast cameras and super slow-mo video, so you can imagine our glee when we heard that MIT researchers have built a camera with a visual capture rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to watch photons travel the length of a one-liter bottle in the video below. In other words, absolutely nothing in the universe looks fast to this camera. But it's not so simple as pressing "record." The result is a frame captured very quickly, but it is only one-dimensional, at least from a spatial standpoint. So how do they produce the 2-D video below? In other words, the world's fastest video camera is also very slow, as it must first accumulate hundreds of thousands of data sets before it can cobble together a short video of a scene like the one seen below. [MIT News]
Chemistry News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9 Interesting — when I was in the Army, it was called CBR (chemical, biological, radioactive). I wonder why they changed the order and the initials? Pressure from Jay Leno? NBC was for Nuclear, Biological, Radiological. I think it might have been for memory's sake, which might have something to do with the tv studio indeed - but maybe just for giggles. The military does not always make sense. When were you in? I was in back in the late 70s. I remember atropine was one of the drugs that was used to treat the immediate effects of nerve gas exposure. And we're supposed to believe that our benevolent government has truly decided to destroy all our VX stockpiles. I dunno, we've got much more targeted, devastating methods of wiping ourselves off the planet these days. I was in in the 90's. The husband, Mr.
We Can Survive Killer Asteroids — But It Won't Be Easy | Wired Science The chances that your tombstone will read “Killed by Asteroid” are about the same as they’d be for “Killed in Airplane Crash.” Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities — more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks — comets and asteroids — that wander interplanetary space in search of targets. Most asteroids are made of rock. But some do. Every few decades, on average, house-sized impactors collide with Earth. One killer asteroid we’ve been monitoring is Apophis, which is large enough to fill the Rose Bowl. If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, we would be the laughing stock of aliens in the galaxy Some people would like to blow potentially hazardous rocks out of the sky with a nuclear bomb. The odds-on favorite solution, however, is the gravitational tractor. Opinion Editor: John C.
13 more things that don't make sense Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively. Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs 13 more things that don't make sense (Image: Loungepark / The Image Bank / Getty) Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us. Axis of evil Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern Dark flow Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed Eocene hothouse Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Fly-by anomalies Space probes using Earth's gravity to get a slingshot speed boost are moving faster than they should. Hybrid life Morgellons disease