Video Shows What Happens To Hamburger In Stomach Acid It’s become a bit of a fad to experiment with junk food, for example leaving out burgers and fries from Maccy D’s for months on end just to see what happens (not a lot, as it turns out). Now, as part of a series of experiments to showcase the effects of various elements and chemicals, researchers from the University of Nottingham decided to see how a McDonald’s burger would fare when dunked into concentrated hydrochloric acid. And it’s preeeeeetty disgusting: Hydrochloric acid is found in your stomach, and is involved in the digestive process. While the burger in the video turns into a stomach churning black sludge, it isn’t fully broken down.
Like cling wrap, new biomaterial can coat tricky burn wounds and block out infection Note to journalists: Please report that this research will be presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10, 2014 — Wrapping wound dressings around fingers and toes can be tricky, but for burn victims, guarding them against infection is critical. Today, scientists are reporting the development of novel, ultrathin coatings called nanosheets that can cling to the body’s most difficult-to-protect contours and keep bacteria at bay. The researchers are speaking about their materials, which they’ve tested on mice, at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. The meeting features nearly 12,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics and is being held here through Thursday. Yosuke Okamura, Ph.D., explains that existing wound dressings work well when it comes to treating burns on relatively flat and broad areas.
Dazzling Beams of Light Map Invisible Wi-Fi Networks Wireless networks are normally invisible to the human eye, but a magic touch of creative photography can turn them into vibrant and colorful beams of light. With the help of an instrument called the Kirlian Device, Luis Hernan, a Ph.D. student of architecture and interaction design at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, has found a way to breathe digitalized life into invisible wireless networks, creating colorful and ghostly images. So, how does it work? The Kirlian Device constantly scans for wireless networks and translates signal strength into LEDs (light-emitting diodes). The instrument then captures the networks using long-exposure photography, mapping them as vibrant beams of light. "Through these colors, you can see how the wireless network is behaving," Hernan told Live Science. "The idea is that the colors allow you to see the differences in signal strength," he said.
Retailers Who Take Bitcoin Love It If you've been following the news about Bitcoin, you've probably come away with the idea that the currency is unstable, potentially lucrative and more of a novelty than an actual payment method that people use on a daily basis. Retailers who take Bitcoin say something different. For them, the currency is a viable, preferable alternative to credit cards that don't carry the same risk of fraud and have lower transaction fees. Merchants say bitoin payments aren't a huge part of their business, but the niche is growing steadily. "It's really been fantastic," says Chris Nichols, CEO of GameTimeZone, an online seller of games and gaming consoles. GameTimeZone began taking bitcoin payments last October. "It's limited to a very small community of tech-savvy people," says Vinny Lingham, CEO and cofounder of online gift card service Gyft, which First Data bought last week for an undisclosed sum It's not growing as fast as people would like. It's not growing as fast as people would like.
Underwater Ocean Turbines: A New Spin on Clean Energy? A new technology that harnesses the power of ocean currents could provide a clean and limitless form of renewable energy, some scientists say. A group of scientists and engineers who describe themselves as "nerds in wetsuits and flippers" has launched a crowdfunding campaign, called Crowd Energy, to do just that. Their idea is to use giant underwater turbines to capture the energy from deep-ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream off the coast of Florida. While energy generated from these turbines may not be able to completely replace fossil fuels, as the group claims, the devices could still be an important source of clean energy, experts say. [See images of ocean turbine prototypes] Ocean currents are one source of natural energy that no one has tapped before, either because they weren't aware of it or didn't have the technology to capture it, said Todd Janca, founder of Crowd Energy, and the man behind the idea to develop ocean turbines. Clean currents Limitless energy? First, do no harm
Got Jet Lag? Food Choices Can Help -- And Here's How, According To New Study Has science found a new way to beat jet lag? A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that what you eat may affect your internal circadian rhythms -- the built-in "biological clock" that determines when you feel sleepy and when you're wide awake. Ordinarily, the human biological clock is in sync with a standard 24-hour day. Traveling across time zones can throw it out of whack -- as legions of jet-lagged travelers know all too well. For their study, the researchers switched a group of 16 mice from a nighttime feeding schedule to a daytime feeding schedule. Half of the mice were injected with a compound called S961, which blocks the activity of insulin. What happened? Other studies have shown that when you eat and what you eat affect your biological clock. “This is just saying that we are looking at food as a strong regulator of circadian rhythm and [if we understand] exactly how it works … we can take advantage of this,” Dr.
Llevar el móvil en el bolsillo afecta a los espermatozoides | Jorge Dotto Todos los días, cuando salimos de nuestras casas, agarramos la billetera, el móvil y, si eres mujer, la cartera. El móvil ha pasado a ser una herramienta de comunicación muy importante en nuestras vidas. De hecho, es mucho más que un teléfono, es una computadora, un objeto de uso masivo. Se estima que la población del mundo es de 7 billones de personas y, como promedio, casi cada una de ellas tendría un móvil. En Argentina, por ejemplo, somos alrededor de 40 millones y hay más de 60 millones de líneas móviles activas. Los hombres generalmente no tienen un bolso y, aunque algunos usan un portafolio o una mochila, muchos tienen la costumbre de llevar el móvil en el bolsillo del pantalón, ya sea un modelo sport, traje o pantalón vaquero. Pero además de ser molesto llevar el móvil en el bolsillo del pantalón, el asunto es mucho más complejo: hacerlo implica una consecuencia que afecta a la salud.
Mysterious Amazon 'Rings' Predate The Rainforest Itself, Study Finds A series of square, straight and ringlike ditches scattered throughout the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon were there before the rainforest existed, a new study finds. These human-made structures remain a mystery: They may have been used for defense, drainage, or perhaps ceremonial or religious reasons. But the new research addresses another burning question: whether and how much prehistoric people altered the landscape in the Amazon before the arrival of Europeans. "People have been affecting the global climate system through land use for not just the past 200 to 300 years, but for thousands of years," said study author John Francis Carson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Blemished Amazon? For many years, archaeologists thought that the indigenous people who lived in the Amazon before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492 moved across the area while making barely a dent in the landscape. Ancient landscape Questions answered
This Jaw-Dropping Video Reveals How To Make Things Invisible How can you make something invisible, that is, without using a cloak? This easy experiment just might be the "solution." A new YouTube video from At-Bristol, a science center in England, shows how you can use light to make something disappear in the blink of an eye. Just check it out above. All you need is a couple of pyrex glasses and a sweetener called glycerol -- if you can't find that, vegetable oil and baby oil will also work. You might want to grab a pair of gloves too, because the experiment can get a bit sticky. "Here I have a beaker full of glycerol," science educator Ross Exton says in the video. Awesome. But as Exton explains, the reason for this isn't magic. That's because the beaker and the water have different so-called refractive index, meaning light travels through them at different speeds. What makes glycerol so special is it has the same refractive index as pyrex glass -- so when light passes through a beaker full of glycerol, it doesn't change speed and direction.
Big Picture Science Monday 23 September 2013 You can’t see it, but it’s there, whether an atom, a gravity wave, or the bottom of the ocean … but we have technology that allows us to detect what eludes our sight. When we do, whole worlds open up. Without telescopes, asteroids become visible only three seconds before they slam into the Earth. Plus, why string theory and parallel universes may remain just interesting ideas … the story of the woman who mapped the ocean floor … and why the disappearance of honeybees may change what you eat. David Morrison – NASA space scientist and Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute May Berenbaum – Entomologist, University of Illinois Scott Ransom – Astronomer, National Radio Astronomy Observatory Lee Smolin – Theoretical physicist, Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, Canada, author of Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe Hali Felt – Author of Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
8 Apps That Let You Visit Museums Without Leaving Your Home Posted 09/20/2013 at 4:52pm | by AJ Dellinger Sept. 28 marks this year's Museum Day, an event during which participating museums open their doors to the public for free to anyone presenting a promotional ticket. While we fully encourage you to appreciate the arts in person and support your local institutions, we know it might not be easy to do so. 1 of 8 Virtual Museum Apps View the full image The Louvre is home to some of the most famous creations throughout history, and is the most visited museum in the world. Art isn't limited to a canvas or a sculpture.
Where Are We Going to Get New Energy? | Cadell Last The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be releasing the world's foremost climate report on September 30. The report is bound to spark fierce, polarizing, and annoying debate over the effects our energy economy is having on the planet's climate. But whatever your opinion on the science of anthropogenic climate change, my advice is to wait and read the report for yourself when it is released. For me, I don't want this report to cloud a fact everyone needs to accept: we need a new energy economy. Our current system ultimately derives its energy from fossils fuels (e.g., coal, oil, natural gas). Too much energy flows through our system at the expense of the total energy available for the biosphere Basing a global energy economy on a finite resource is unsustainable (obviously) If we did burn all of the fossil fuels available on our planet, Earth would start to look a lot like its sister-planet So what are we to do? First, let's try and contextualize the problem.