“This study provides a simple and cost-effective technology for direct water splitting that may generate hydrogen fuels by scavenging energy wastes such as noise or stray vibrations from the environment,” the authors write in a new paper, published March 2 in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. “This new discovery may have potential implications in solving the challenging energy and environmental issues that we are facing today and in the future.”

IF you understand this next part then you are a better man, and obviously quite a better woman (I’m male), than I am. I can probably use a dip bar more efficiently than you though.

The researchers, led by UW-Madison geologist and crystal specialist Huifang Xu, grew nanocrystals of two common crystals, zinc oxide and barium titanate, and placed them in water. When pulsed with ultrasonic vibrations, the nanofibers flexed and catalyzed a chemical reaction to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Let’s be frank here. Neither you, nor I even knew this was a real thing until just now, but science of the odd is always worth a bit more of a read yes? Of course.

The research, which involved studying rare naturally occurring chickens with white (male) plumage on one side and brown (female) plumage on the other, sheds new light on the sexual development of birds.

It was previously thought that sex chromosomes in birds control whether a testis or ovary forms, with sexual traits then being determined by hormones. Oh no…not the case my friends.

The researchers, however, identified differences between male and female cells that control the development of sexual traits. The scientists have named the phenomenon, cell autonomous sex identity (CASI).

The study from The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, which receives key funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is published in the journal Nature. You can find them on the net if you ever took advantage of laptop deals.

Dr Michael Clinton, who led the study, said: “This research has completely overturned what we previously thought about how sexual characteristics were determined in birds. We now believe that the major factors determining sexual development are built into male and female cells and derive from basic differences in how sex chromosome genes are expressed. Our study opens a new avenue for our understanding of sexual development in birds.

“It also means we must now reassess how this developmental process occurs in other organisms. There is already some evidence that organs such as the heart and brain are intrinsically different in males and females and birds may provide a model for understanding the molecular basis for these gender differences.”

OK…obviously the moon isn’t the easiest thing to study being in space and all, but it is just surprising that we still find such things there when we have actually landed on it. Yes we did conspiracy whackos.

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice.

“The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,” said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.”

Get your nordic track promotion code out, it is time to go moon skiing .

The article published in the Journal of Human Evolution and dumbed down for us mortals here four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a primate like humans, apes and monkeys, as the 2009 research claimed.

What does this mean? Creationists win! Sorry, had to do it. To me it means literally nothing other than it gives crazy people something to hang their hats on. Time to check your
home security systems to make sure they stay outside.

“Many lines of evidence indicate that Darwinius has nothing at all to do with human evolution,” says Chris Kirk, associate professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. “Every year, scientists describe new fossils that contribute to our understanding of primate evolution. What’s amazing about Darwinius is, despite the fact that it’s nearly complete, it tells us very little that we didn’t already know from fossils of closely related species.”

His co-authors are anthropologists Blythe Williams and Richard Kay of Duke and evolutionary biologist Callum Ross of the University of Chicago. Williams, Kay and Kirk also collaborated on a related article about to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reviews the early fossil record and anatomical features of anthropoids — the primate group that includes monkeys, apes, and humans.

Morten Rasmussen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues, have discovered that the Greenlander, they call him Inuk, seems to have origins different from the natives that have been discovered before in North America, and Greenalnd in particular. His nuclear genome indicates that his father’s ancestors came from northeastern Siberia.

This means that he is not related to native North Americans, and that he displays a closer genetic link to three other civilizations. Three modern hunter-gatherer groups in that region — the Nganasans, Koryaks and Chukchis area closer match than the natives. Since we can;’t get a strivectin sd interview from the guy this is about as good a chance to figure this out as you can get.

Danish-led excavations more than 20 years ago unearthed four fragmentary bones and several hair tufts belonging to this ancient man, dubbed Inuk. His remains were found at a site from the Saqqaq culture, the earliest known people to have inhabited Greenland. Saqqaq people lived in Greenland from around 4,750 to 2,500 years ago. One popular hypothesis traces Saqqaq ancestry to Native American groups that had settled Arctic parts of Alaska and Canada by 11,000 years ago.

Inuk’s strong genetic ties to Siberian populations raise a different scenario. “We’ve shown that this ancient individual was not related to Native Americans but derived from an expansion of northeastern Asians into the New World and across to Greenland,” says geneticist and study coauthor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen.

Scientists after a collision of gold atoms traveling at the speed of light took this temperature from a formation of a dense glob of matter. The matter was meaured at an estimated 4 trillion degrees Celsius, which equates to about 250,000 times hotter than the sun’s interior, and higher than any temperature ever reached in a laboratory, researchers reported February 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. No msm nutritional supplement is going to make you lose the kind of weight that heat would.

“We hope experiments of this kind give windows into new phases of matter,” comments physicist Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who was not involved in the work. “There is something new to study.”

The gold-gold collisions created a blob of the material that was about a trillionth of a centimeter across, and existed only for a little more than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So scientists couldn’t stick a thermometer in it, says Barbara Jacak of Stony Brook University in New York, who worked on the temperature measurement.

Mind=BLOWN.

The conversions (taken from WikiAnswers):

To go from Fahrenheit to Celsius:

* Begin by subtracting 32 from the Fahrenheit number.
* Divide the answer by 9.
* Then multiply that answer by 5.

For example- if it is 70 degrees F outside, and you want to know the temperature in C:

* 70-32=38
* 38/9 =4.2
* 4.2 x 5 = 21.1

It is about 21 degrees Celsius outside

To go from Celsius to Fahrenheit:

* Begin by multiplying the Celsius temperature by 9.
* Divide the answer by 5.
* Now add 32.

The Saturn Moon Prometheus has a very interesting look. The picture here shows that it appears to be oblong, and looks much like a Great White Whale (under the proper lighting conditions ). This new 3-D image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft (click on that link for many more images taken by the craft including the Death Star moon, Mimas) with an amazing clarity as it flies towards the viewer.

Besides having an odd look for a moon, Prometheus most likely has a violent history. Well…almost any moon orbiting around Saturn in a rings of giant space debris probably does, but the many craters on this moon suggest a bit more than others. This moon is so odd looking. It reminds me of “The Marker” from the video game Dead Space for some reason. Yeah…I’m weird. Look at all the markings on it…it looks like an alien artifact…lol

Prometheus is one of Saturn’s innermost moons. It orbits Saturn at a distance of about 140,000 kilometers (86,000 miles) and is 86 kilometers (53 miles) across at its widest point. The porous, icy world was originally discovered in images taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft back in 1980.

That image wasn’t nearly as beneficial as it took an image of one of the short sides of the moon. This image is simply amazing. Between the Marker and the Death Star there is something real fishy going on out there by Saturn. Might be something out there that wants to show you the benefits of colon cleansing at some point .

EDIT: no pun intended with that “fishy comment…More likely those things will show you the

“My commitment to NASA is unwavering,” Obama said on a video-conference with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Speaking from the White House, Obama called the outpost orbiting 200 miles above the Earth “a testimony to human ingenuity.”

They were Obama’s first public comments on NASA since his administration submitted a $19 billion budget to Congress for the agency that would kill the Constellation lunar program begun under former President George W. Bush. Guess we won’t ever find out whether Maybe we can find out does alli work?

Instead, Obama’s budget would spend $6 billion over five years to turn over space transportation to commercial companies (I like this), as well as billions of dollars on technology development and extending the life of the space station.

I am up in the air about a lot of the NASA projects in this current state of the economy. While I feel many are important, it is hard to say if we really should be funneling resources that way at the moment. Of course I’m sure arguments can be made for future discoveries.

They found more than 400 different mutations in 139 genes that play a role in people’s risk of catching viruses. This could help them figure out why some people are more susceptible to viruses such as the flu, while others seem to just avoid it altogether.

“We found that these genes had been selected — and from this concept we can extrapolate that many of these genes might make you more or less susceptible to viruses,” Manuela Sironi, who led the work, said in a telephone interview.

Sironi made sure to stress that the work was “very preliminary” and would need to be replicated by others and tested in the lab.

She also said a similar method to the one her team used could be used to find genes that boost or cut the risk of infections from other bugs such as bacteria. You can find more on the study here as well as side effects of diet pills as another read.

Dr. Lana Skirboll, director of the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health, called the change technical and said it would be posted in the federal register for comment.

“We are making what I think is a relatively small technical change to the definition of human embryonic stem cells,” Skirboll said in a telephone interview.

“This changes none of the ethical requirements in the guidelines.”

U.S. President Barack Obama (Yeah…he does some good things.) lifted some restrictions on the federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research soon after he took office last year but the NIH imposed strict ethical requirements and a review process for funding.

The details are a bit fuzzy so far until you can see it on the register, but at least we are moving a little bit in the right direction. Now only if best testosterone creams could garner more study .