SciNewsBlog

Video: This hot robot says she wants to destroy humans

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 08:31:00 +0000

Air Force Bugbot Nano Drone Technology (Video)

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 23:03:00 +0000

Time-Lapse: Lose Yourself in the Night Sky

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 15:00:00 +0000

Experimental drug has anti-aging effects in animals...

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sun, 15 Nov 2015 23:35:00 +0000

Faster please...

(Science Daily)- Salk Institute researchers have found that an experimental drug candidate aimed at combating Alzheimer's disease has a host of unexpected anti-aging effects in animals.
The Salk team expanded upon their previous development of a drug candidate, called J147, which takes a different tack by targeting Alzheimer's major risk factor--old age. In the new work, the team showed that the drug candidate worked well in a mouse model of aging not typically used in Alzheimer's research. When these mice were treated with J147, they had better memory and cognition, healthier blood vessels in the brain and other improved physiological features, as detailed November 12, 2015 in the journal Aging.
"Initially, the impetus was to test this drug in a novel animal model that was more similar to 99 percent of Alzheimer's cases," says Antonio Currais, the lead author and a member of Professor David Schubert's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at Salk. "We did not predict we'd see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters."
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive brain disorder, recently ranked as the third leading cause of death in the United States and affecting more than five million Americans. It is also the most common cause of dementia in older adults, according to the National Institutes of Health. Read more here...

Star Wars: The Force Awakens 60 Second TV Spot

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 16:58:00 +0000

(Mad scientist update) Backyard RAILGUN: Field Testing the 250 lb Electric Gun, 27,000 Joule (max)

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 23:28:00 +0000

Video: Declassified dogfight footage: F-14 Tomcat vs. Libyan MiG-23

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 17:22:00 +0000

Why do elephants rarely get cancer?

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 09:56:00 +0000

It's in their genes...

(Science Daily)- Why elephants rarely get cancer is a mystery that has stumped scientists for decades. A study led by researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah and Arizona State University, and including researchers from the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, may have found the answer.
According to the results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and determined over the course of several years and a unique collaboration between HCI, Primary Children's Hospital, Utah's Hogle Zoo, and the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, elephants have 38 additional modified copies (alleles) of a gene that encodes p53, a well-defined tumor suppressor, as compared to humans, who have only two. Further, elephants may have a more robust mechanism for killing damaged cells that are at risk for becoming cancerous. In isolated elephant cells, this activity is doubled compared to healthy human cells, and five times that of cells from patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, who have only one working copy of p53 and more than a 90 percent lifetime cancer risk in children and adults. The results suggest extra p53 could explain elephants' enhanced resistance to cancer.
"Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer. It's up to us to learn how different animals tackle the problem so we can adapt those strategies to prevent cancer in people," says co-senior author Joshua Schiffman, M.D., pediatric oncologist at Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah School of Medicine, and Primary Children's Hospital.

Pluto has a blue sky?

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 00:24:00 +0000

Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

It's gorgeous...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The sky over Pluto may not be sunny, but it's undoubtedly blue.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft discovered Pluto's blue sky during the historic flyby of the icy dwarf planet in July. The images of Pluto's atmospheric haze were beamed down last week and released by NASA on Thursday.
The particles in the atmospheric haze are actually red and gray, according to scientists. But the way the particles scatter blue light is what has everyone excited about the dwarf planet orbiting on the far fringes of our solar system, a twilight zone known more formally as the Kuiper Belt.
"Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It's gorgeous," Alan Stern, the principal scientist for New Horizons, said in a NASA release about the latest images.

ScienceCasts: Worlds within Worlds

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 10:16:00 +0000

Jelly Tennis - The Slow Mo Guys

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 08:45:00 +0000

Saturday Fun Video: RPG vs. 16 inches of bullerproof glass

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sat, 26 Sep 2015 09:51:00 +0000

SOFIA flies near Northern Lights (Video)

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 10:04:00 +0000

Pre-reptile first to walk upright on all fours?

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 09:55:00 +0000

Credit: Morgan Turner

This pre-reptile was about the same size as a cow

(Science Daily)- A newly published analysis of the bones of Bunostegos akokanensis, a 260-million-year-old pre-reptile, finds that it likely stood upright on all-fours, like a cow or a hippo, making it the earliest known creature to do so.
To date all of the known pareiasaurs who roved the supercontinent of Pangea in the Permian era a quarter of a billion years ago were sprawlers whose limbs would jut out from the side of the body and then continue out or slant down from the elbow (like some modern lizards). Morgan Turner, lead author of the study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, expected Bunostegos would be a sprawler, too, but the bones of the animal's forelimbs tell a different story.
"A lot of the animals that lived around the time had a similar upright or semi-upright hind limb posture, but what's interesting and special about Bunostegos is the forelimb, in that it's anatomy is sprawling-precluding and seemingly directed underneath its body--unlike anything else at the time," said Turner who performed the analysis under the supervision of Professor Christian Sidor while a student at the University of Washington. Now Turner is a graduate student at Brown University. "The elements and features within the forelimb bones won't allow a sprawling posture. That is unique."
The findings allowed Turner, Sidor and her co-authors to characterize how Bunostegos might have looked. Standing like a cow, and about the same size.
"Imagine a cow-sized, plant-eating reptile with a knobby skull and bony armor down its back," said co-author Linda Tsuji of the Royal Ontario Museum, who discovered the fossils in Niger along with Sidor and a team of paleontologists in 2003 and 2006.

NASA | James Webb Space Telescope Stands Tall

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 09:42:00 +0000

Computers in the classroom don't improve academic results

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 09:53:00 +0000

Technology is very helpful, but so can thinking for yourself...

Via Phys.org:

Computers do not noticeably improve school pupils' academic results and can even hamper performance, an OECD report said Tuesday that looked at the impact of technology in classrooms across the globe.

While almost three quarters of pupils in the countries surveyed used computers at schools, the report by the the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found technology had made no noticeable improvement in results.
Conversely, in high-achieving schools in parts of Asia, where smartphones and computers have become an integral part of people's everyday lives, technology was far less prevalent in the classrooms.
In South Korea, students used computers for an average of nine minutes at school and in Hong Kong, only 11 minutes—just a fraction of the 58 minutes spent in Australia, 42 in Greece and 39 in Sweden.
"Where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best," OECD's education director Andreas Schleicher said in a foreword to the report, the think-tank's first on the topic. Keep on reading...

Video: Did CERN See Another Dimension Today?

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 10:17:00 +0000

5 Strange Underwater Mysteries We Still Can't Explain

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 09:41:00 +0000

Magnetic wormhole created

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 09:37:00 +0000

Credit: Jordi Prat-Camps and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Faster please...

(Science Daily)- Scientists in the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have designed and created in the laboratory the first experimental 'wormhole' that can connect two regions of space magnetically. This consists of a tunnel that transfers the magnetic field from one point to the other while keeping it undetectable -- invisible -- all the way.
The researchers used metamaterials and metasurfaces to build the tunnel experimentally, so that the magnetic field from a source, such as a magnet or a an electromagnet, appears at the other end of the 'wormhole' as an isolated magnetic monopole. This result is strange enough in itself, as magnetic monopoles -- magnets with only one pole, whether north or south -- do not exist in nature. The overall effect is that of a magnetic field that appears to travel from one point to another through a dimension that lies outside the conventional three dimensions.
The 'wormhole' in this experiment is a sphere made of different layers: an external layer with a ferromagnetic surface, a second inner layer, made of superconducting material, and a ferromagnetic sheet rolled into a cylinder that crosses the sphere from one end to the other. The sphere is made in such a way as to be magnetically undetectable -- invisible, in magnetic field terms -- from the exterior.

Video: Boeing Unveils Starliner Processing Facility

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 13:46:00 +0000

Spoon-shaped formations found on Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 10:12:00 +0000

There is less gravity on Mars and this certainly allows for more exotic rock formations, but what are the odds of two spoon-shaped formations in line with each other and pointing in opposite directions?

Who is up for giant prehistoric sea scorpions?

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 10:46:00 +0000

Credit: Patrick Lynch/Yale University(Artist rendering)

Six feet long...

(Science Daily)- You don't name a sea creature after an ancient Greek warship unless it's built like a predator.
That's certainly true of the recently discovered Pentecopterus, a giant sea scorpion with the sleek features of a penteconter, one of the first Greek galley ships. A Yale University research team says Pentecopterus lived 467 million years ago and could grow to nearly six feet, with a long head shield, a narrow body, and large, grasping limbs for trapping prey. It is the oldest described eurypterid -- a group of aquatic arthropods that are ancestors of modern spiders, lobsters, and ticks.
A detailed description of the animal appears in the Sept. 1 online edition of the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
"This shows that eurypterids evolved some 10 million years earlier than we thought, and the relationship of the new animal to other eurypterids shows that they must have been very diverse during this early time of their evolution, even though they are very rare in the fossil record," said James Lamsdell, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University and lead author of the study.
"Pentecopterus is large and predatory, and eurypterids must have been important predators in these early Palaeozoic ecosystems," Lamsdell said.

Abandoned US Weapons Prototypes

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 20:53:00 +0000

US Sailors Firing the Monstrously Powerful Twin .50 M2HB + Twin M240/MK 45/ Mk38

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:47:00 +0000

Study: Omega-3 supplements do not stop cognitive decline

noreply@blogger.com (Bluegrass Pundit) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 10:16:00 +0000

This study is disappointing...

(Science Daily)- While some research suggests that a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids can protect brain health, a large clinical trial by researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that omega-3 supplements did not slow cognitive decline in older persons. With 4,000 patients followed over a five-year period, the study is one of the largest and longest of its kind. It was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Contrary to popular belief, we didn't see any benefit of omega-3 supplements for stopping cognitive decline," said Emily Chew, M.D., deputy director of the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications and deputy clinical director at the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of NIH.
Dr. Chew leads the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS), which was designed to investigate a combination of nutritional supplements for slowing age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a major cause of vision loss among older Americans. That study established that daily high doses of certain antioxidants and minerals -- called the AREDS formulation -- can help slow the progression to advanced AMD.