I am fascinated by some of the things we've accomplished..Mind blowing stuff imo. Here is a little intro to get things going..You guys post any interesting stuff you find.
According to wiki. "Voyager 1 is now in the heliosheath, which is the outermost layer of the heliosphere. On June 15, 2012, NASA scientists reported that Voyager 1 may be very close to entering interstellar space and becoming the first manmade object to leave the Solar System."
http://immenseknowledge.blogspot.nl/2006/10/50-interesting-science-facts.html --- Some pretty cool facts. I'll upload some vids later on.
Drug helps put bad memories to rest Experiment in sleeping mice may suggest strategy for treating PTSD By Laura Sanders Web edition : Thursday, October 18, 2012 A+ A- Text Size NEW ORLEANS — Fearful associations can be knocked back during sleep, research in mice shows. After receiving an injection of a drug, a nasty link between a scent and a painful foot shock faded as the mice slumbered. The results are preliminary but may ultimately show how to get around a roadblock in treatments for people with post-traumatic stress disorder: Traumatic associations can be weakened in a doctor’s office, but those memories can flood back when triggered by specific events in everyday life. The new finding suggests that the hazy world of sleep, lacking any particular real-world context, might be a better place to diminish such memories. Neuroscientist Asya Rolls of Stanford University and colleagues taught mice that when they smelled jasmine, a foot shock was not far behind. A day later, as the mice slept, the researchers wafted the smell over the animals, strengthening and solidifying the scary link between jasmine and pain. A day after that, the mice froze in fear when they caught a whiff of jasmine, even though the animals were in an entirely new room unassociated with the original shock. But Rolls and her team could interrupt this sleep-strengthening process with the antibiotic anisomycin, injected into the amygdala—a brain structure involved in memory storage. Before the mice were exposed to jasmine during sleep, the researchers injected some of them with the drug. The next day, these mice didn’t freeze as much as the mice that didn’t get the drug. The results suggest that during sleep, traumatic memories, such as the kind that plague people with PTSD, can be effectively weakened. During sleep, the mind is not rooted in any particular environment. So the effect of curbing traumatic memories in someone who is fast asleep wouldn’t be linked to any specific setting, such as a doctor’s office. This could protect a person from re-experiencing the trauma in other situations, Rolls said in a briefing October 16 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. What’s more, because sleep is a brain state outside of conscious control, it may offer access to memories that are locked up tight during waking hours, Rolls said. And reactivating traumatic memories during sleep may be less painful for people, sparing them the difficulty of reliving a traumatic experience while awake. Recently, Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues found that people’s fearful memories get strengthened during sleep (SN: 2/25/12, p. 8), work that implied that keeping someone awake could prevent the formation of unpleasant memories. The new study “puts an interesting twist on our work,” she says. Instead of losing sleep, people could lose the fear memory and still get a good night’s sleep. It’s too early to say how such an intervention would work in people. The drug used in the study was chosen because it targets protein production in cells, a process that strengthens memory during sleep. But the drug has side effects, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to inject it into people’s brains, said Rolls. Still, there might be other safe ways to destroy harmful memories during sleep in people, she says. “I think this has huge potential.”
Pulsing blob makes memories sans brain Slime molds navigate using their own gooey trails By Susan Milius Web edition : Tuesday, October 9, 2012 A+ A- Text Size ENLARGE MAKING TRACKS As a slime mold extends its tendrils across the growth medium of a petri dish, it avoids an already explored region (left) that was crisscrossed in previous journeys. Courtesy of Audrey DussutourA dollop of living yellow ooze has aced a test of navigation, showing that you don’t really need a mind to make spatial memories. The egg-yolk-colored slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without any nervous system. But this blob of a creature uses its slime trails as a form of external spatial memory, says complex systems biologist Chris R. Reid of the University of Sydney. Smears of goo left behind as a slime mold crawls act as records of past paths. Given a choice, slime molds won’t crawl over their old slime, Reid and his colleagues found. These simple external “memories” work quite well. When lured into a U-shaped dead-end in front of a sugar treat, slime molds were able to escape. Instead of just throbbing futilely against the closed end of the U or crawling around in circles, 23 out of 24 managed to ooze their way back out of the blind alley and creep to the treat by an outside route, Reid and his colleagues report October 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s the first time any spatial memory system has been found in an organism without a brain,” Reid says. Ants, which Reid also studies, lay trails of scents as they scurry to food sources, and these scents can function as external memories of the whole colony. Ants do have brains though. “A slime mold is just a little bag of goo,” Reid says, though with evident affection. The big crawling cells form when two spores of compatible types burst to life, meet and fuse. “It’s like a sperm cell meeting an egg,” Reid says. The resulting entity, called a plasmodium, engulfs debris and grows, with its nuclei dividing but no split in the cell. The little bits of living tissue making up this big cell pulse independently, speeding up or slowing down depending on what they nudge in their immediate environment. Like birds in a flock or fish in a school, pulsing bits can influence the motion of their immediate neighbors, a way of passing information through the organism. Although technically one cell, a slime mold plasmodium acts like a collective. “It’s alien stuff,” as Reid puts it. As a brainless blob it can solve some remarkable problems. Given some time, a single slime mold oozing through a maze tends to consolidate into strands along the shortest paths. Given a surface with food flakes placed at important population centers or other points of interest, a slime mold eventually forms a pattern similar to road maps of real countries (such as Spain) or real subway systems (such as Tokyo). Navigation by avoiding slime trails has been predicted for these remarkable organisms by Inbal Hecht of Tel Aviv University in Israel and her colleagues. Using a computer simulation of a cell wandering a maze, researchers predicted that avoiding past paths would be enough to succeed. That’s basically what the new paper shows. “I am so thrilled to see it come true,” says Hecht.
very interesting.. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412042,00.asp flawless invisibility cloack too bad this shit will be used in every negative way possible
very interesting.. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412042,00.asp flawless invisibility cloack too bad this shit will be used in every negative way possible
"Getting to second base, the holy grail for hormonal boys, is now science: New research has shown that squeezing breasts could prevent malignant breast cells from causing cancer. This doesn’t give pervy dudes license to grope you on the subway, ladies, but it does mean boob-grabbing should be a regular part of your self-care routine (yes, absolutely try it DIY-style). Experiments found that physical pressure led cells back to normal growth patterns, and that even after compression was no longer applied, the malignant cells stopped growing. Spread the word, boob-lovers of the world." Ferhatovic, i mean Ferboobovic, get out there and squeeze some boobies. You too, anticule.
Highway of the future is seriously smart How a Dutch design lab could make roads cleaner, safer and weirder The Dutch design lab Studio Roosegaarde invents weird things. And now, the brains behind clothing that becomes transparent while the wearer is getting, ahem, intimate and a room that contracts and expands based on how hard you dance in it would like to redesign Europe’s entire system of highways and roads. So they did. According to Studio Roosegaarde the highways of the future are safer, cleaner and more environmentally sound. The lab has developed solar powered glow-in-the-dark roads that charge during the day to illuminate your evening drive, dynamic asphalt paint that transforms in response to road conditions like ice and sleet, and car lanes that double as electric car chargers by using magnetic fields under the asphalt. These ideas might seem far out, but they’re already being implemented in Holland. If all goes well during the piloting program, there are talks of implementing these upgrades across Europe. Why reinvent the road and not the car? As Studio Roosegaarde’s Emina Sendijarevic told Popular Science, it’s about changing the landscape from the ground up. By focusing on highways instead of cars, we’re innovating the Dutch landscape to make ‘smart driving’ possible for everyone. It’s about safety, creating awareness but also making roads energy-neutral in terms of lighting, and most of all: creating the experience of an icon, the Route 66 of the future.
I've said numerious times how i hate twitter and other social networking sites(as Dado already explained, way too much drama, insecure people and so on)..Anyways, once in awhile though i visit Alyssa Milano's twitter and i always find something interesting (she's always posting something).. TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post introducing the video, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation! The term "cybernetic organism," or "cyborg" for short, conjures up a futuristic world of science fiction. Perhaps because this was how the term was introduced when sci-fi writers Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined it in 1960 to mean a being composed of both biological and artificial parts. But to Amber Case, the transition of humans to cyborgs is here and now. Just look around. Amber sees our culture holistically and asks to what extent the technology that we carry in our pockets has evolved, and more importantly, how we, as humans, are evolving because of it. Watch her TEDTalk above to dive into cyborg anthropology and what it means to care for our "second selves" online. Can these devices that alienate those around us, actually make us more human? Amber argues that our phones are wormholes in our pocket, connecting us in a practical and efficient way with loved ones. - Greg GageFor several decades, the field of biomedical engineering has developed and deployed cyborg technologies fervently to help us restore lost human functions. Deep Brain Stimulation electrodes are used to restore natural movements, cochlear implants can help restore hearing, and brain machine interfaces can be used to bring back vision or motor functions. Earlier this month, Andy Schwartz and his team at the University of Pittsburgh published a paper in the Lancet about Jan Scheuermann, a quadriplegic woman, who used a brain-machine interface to reach, grasp, and feed herself with the assistance of robotic arm driven from neurons recorded from 96 electrodes in her motor cortex. Photo by permission of UPMC. It is clear that these advances in medical technologies fit the definition of a cyborg. Even beyond the medical field, our organization now sells living cyborgs (half cockroach/half machine) to teach school kids and the public about neuroprosthetic devices. But can the cyborg definition of "a symbiotic fusion of human and machine", be broadly applied to all of us? The march of personal electronics has continued unabated for the past 50 years, with 2012 ushering in new phones and tablets from Microsoft to compete with ubiquitous smart devices from Apple and Android. One needn't look much further than the person across from you on the metro or cafe to see the impact these devices have on the way we communicate with each other. We consult our devices at all times. Not just for directions, but also socially, during family gatherings, meet-ups with friends, even on dates. Amber's talk makes us think more carefully about our "second selves" on Facebook and other social sites. The point is our "second self" stays online even when we are not there. And this raises the unusual question of how living this dual life impacts our ability to self-reflect and engage in real life situations. Can these devices that alienate those around us, actually make us more human? Amber argues that our phones are wormholes in our pocket, connecting us in a practical and efficient way with loved ones. But the idea of digital or "ambient intimacy" -- that we use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as a way to feel closer to people whom we care for, but are unable to participate as closely as we'd like to in real life -- is the last thing some of us want. In fact, the debate of virtual communities and relationships remains hotly contested, even polarizing in families. Perhaps we aren't all cyborgs yet. Pause and think of where technology will go in the near future, and how this will shape our interactions with each other. Three states have now passed laws permitting driverless cars (being developed and tested by Google). How will this change the way we work, and how we spend time with others on the road? Will we drive more now that we are more productive? Will we consult new location services for information about who is around us to determine where to go or where to avoid? Will Siri and other voice-based services create a more human-like interaction with devices that change our perceptions of technology? As our life and our devices becomes more integrated, I can see Amber's prediction coming true. So the next time you have that feeling that a part of you is missing when you forget your phone at home... at least you will know why. Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TEDWeekends will highlight some of today's most intriguing ideas and allow them to develop in real time through your voice! Tweet #TEDWeekends to share your perspective or email tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com to learn about future weekend's ideas to contribute as a writer.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-5...tool-to-kill-deadly-drug-resistant-superbugs/ Hospital-acquired infections have become a major killer in the United States, mainly because the drug-resistant "superbugs" that cause them have proven nearly impossible to stop. But now IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology say they have come up with what they're calling an antimicrobial hydrogel that can successfully fight the superbugs that are behind killers like MRSA. In an announcement today, IBM Research and its partner on the project said that their antimicrobial hydrogel was designed to cut through diseased biofilms and almost instantly kill off drug-resistant bacteria. The collaborators on the project said that the the synthetic drug is meant for combating the growing infection problems plaguing American hospitals, because it is non-toxic, biocompatible, and biodegradable.