Nanoboxes

Researchers at Washington University in St Louis have developed tiny gold cubes called nanoboxes which could deliver drugs to precisely targeted areas of the body. How? These boxes only open up and spill their drug contents when exposed to light.

The nanoscale boxes will come packed with a drug, and then release it when hit by a laser. To do this, nanoscale gold boxes are created, and then coated with a polymer called poly(N-isopropylacrylamide). The polymers cling to the outer walls of the cube like hairs on a muppet, and seal the pores on the cube, thus preventing any of the payload from leaking. When the gold is hit by light of a resonant frequency, it absorbs it and converts it to heat, and when the polymer is warmed, it shrinks and collapses, releasing the medicine. Once the light is turned off, the polymers stand on end again, re-sealing the boxes.

According to Dr. Jingyi Chen, one of the principal investigators on the technology, the opening and closing is nearly instantaneous. The nanocubes heat up "from a nanosecond to a femtosecond, [the drugs] are released a little bit slower, that takes around a millisecond." They cool down at the same rate, which allows for extremely fine targeting of dosage. The really cool part is that both the gold and polymer can be fine tuned to work under specific conditions. By thickening the gold walls, the wavelength of light that it can absorb shifts. In this case, they're aiming for the 750-900 nanometer range. Why this wavelength? Because at this point it can penetrate the human body very easily, and can travel inches into the body, as the muscle and blood doesn't easily absorb this wavelength of light. The polymer is then tuned to react to a level of heat that won't kill any cells, but is still above the normal temperature of the body. In trials, the boxes were exposed to a laser of the correct frequency, releasing their dose, and then closing up once the light was turned off. Researchers used the boxes as a way of delivering targeted chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics to a controlled area.

Synthetic Skin

If you're dealing with open wounds, once you flush out any possible bacteria, you need to deal with the realities of closing the flesh. In situations where an injury is over a certain size, it can't be relied on to close normally. Through the use of collagen extracted from skin, doctors can induce new skin to grow by giving it a framework over which to expand. The collagen can be extracted and grown from a variety of sources, such as donated skin, baby's foreskins (apparently up to four football fields worth, which is an utterly disturbing mental image), or from non-human sources, such as mammal organs or reptile skin. The collagen can also be impregnated with other ingredients, such as silver, which is naturally antibiotic. For anything from burns to bedsores, this skin scaffolding can lead to impressive regrowth and healing.

Nerve Regeneration

With spinal injuries, on the other hand, growth is a major problem. The creation of scar tissue around damaged areas of the central nervous system can prevent nerves from healing and regaining function. Previously, the enzyme chrondroitinase ABC (chABC) was used to reduce the scar tissue, but it functioned poorly at body temperature. Within an hour of being injected, it loses half of its potency, and the rest within a few days. Due to this a catheter or pump has to be installed, so that the enzymes can be repeatedly delivered over the two weeks required for it to be effective. Researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered away to reduce the thermal sensitivity of the enzyme, so it can stay in your body effectively for weeks, by bonding the chABC with the sugar trehalose. They also developed a new way to deliver the drug, via an injection of hydrogel filled with microtubes, which allowed deeper penetration than catheters, and slowly releases the drugs over a two week period. This means that the spinal scar tissue can be effectively reduced by a single injection, rather than weeks of constant exposure, and without requiring invasive implants.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

Of course, making a black hole isn't the world's most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland's ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. "With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing...we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships." Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. "Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy."

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. "Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards", say Crane and Westmoreland, so it's merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future

Researchers at the University of Leeds report that kissing plays an important role in human reproduction. It's not just that kissing can eventually lead to the reproductive act; it's the germs that come with that comes with swapping spit. Perhaps most importantly, when a man kisses a female partner, he passes a small amount of his cytomegalovirus to her. If the cytomegalovirus is introduced into a woman's system during pregnancy, it can damage or even potentially kill the fetus. But, if a woman kisses the same partner repeatedly, she eventually develops an immunity to his particular cytomegalovirus, decreasing the chances of infection during pregnancy. The study authors say that six months of kissing should yield optimum immunity.

It's just as well, then, that the whole cootie shot thing was a sham.

[Daily Mail via Popular Science]

Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute recorded and carefully observed the mating habits of 60 fruit bats she captured in the wild. To her surprise, she found that, in 70 percent of the sexual encounters, the female bat would lick the shaft of her partner's penis. This makes fruit bats the only known species besides humans to engage in regular fellatio.

So why are these bats so batty for fellatio? Tan has a few theories. For one thing, sexual encounters that involved oral stimulation lasted, on average, 100 seconds longer than those that didn't, something that could be conducive to fertilization. Or the female bat could be occupying her mate for as long as possible so that a rival female doesn't snatch him away. The reasons could also be hygenic, as male bats lick their own penises after sex to clear away bacteria and fungi. Or, she could be looking for chemicals that indicate whether the male is a suitable mate, so that she knows whether to reject his sperm or look for a better partner next time around.

As an example, the researchers kindly provided a rather NSFW video that illustrates their findings, complete with frenetic mood music:

[Science Blogs]

Carbon nanotubes have been proposed for use in everything from space elevators to synthetic muscles to sports equipment. But a new study shows that they can severely damage lungs if inhaled. There have long been fears that the nanotubes might cause mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the lungs, because of their structural similarity to asbestos fibers. Now research has shown significant health risks from the tubes, which confirms previous studies about the dangers of this comparatively simple nanotech.

The research comes out of North Carolina State University, and is published in this month's Nature Nanotechnology. It showed that within a day of exposure, mice's lungs were reacting to the particles, with clusters of immune cells gathering on the outer walls (pleura) of their lungs. Within two weeks, fibrosis, or localized scarification, had occurred. This same scarring occurs after exposure to asbestos. Three months after this single exposure, the scarification and immune response had dissipated. However, chronic exposure might lead to a different result, with cancer as one possible outcome. And chronic exposure is exactly what humans have to worry about, when carbon nanotubes are rolled out for use in a variety of technologies. Workers may be exposed to the tiny tubes every day.

Previous studies out of the UK and Japan show similar results: that the nanotubes have a nasty habit of reaching the outer tissue of your lungs, the same location where asbestos causes cancer. The Japanese study from 2007 is particularly damning, as researchers were able to induce mesothelioma in mice using the carbon nanotubes.

Given the already-existing issues with asbestos remaining in the environment, and the unknown ecological impact of carbon nanofibers, this raises very troubling issues for the tube's long term effects. As useful as they may be, what will happen if they have a tendency to hang around in the local ecosystem for a very long time? Will its potentially damaging side effects overrule the mammoth benefits it may have in modern production? What about the safe disposal of objects containing nanotubes? If they do become ubiquitous, getting rid of the things may be a major problem. For all the fears of grey goo, it might just be one of the simplest forms of nanotech that does us in.

via Nature Nanotechnology

According to the journal Nature:

Nicholas Roberts and colleagues discovered that the wave plate in the mantis shrimp's eye has an elegant design which includes an incredible level of achromaticity, meaning that it performs well at all visible wavelengths, ranging from blue to red — a task that has eluded man-made designs. The wave plate is formed in the photoreceptors in the mantis shrimp's eye, which contain a densely packed bundle of specially designed tubes. The study reveals that it is this specific geometry and material of the tubes that lead to the incredible performance of the wave plate.

By emulating this structure, technology developers could create what the study authors call "an entirely new category of optical devices."

via Nature Photonics

A study at the University of California at Irvine studied the affect of a certain variant of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene on driving. The gene supports communication in the brain cells and is associated with keeping memory strong. For people with a certain variant of the BDNF gene, this process works less than optimally, and those people are less likely to recover from a stroke. Roughly 30 percent of Americans possess that less optimal variant.

The researchers had 29 participants, 22 without the less optimal variant of the gene and seven with it, take a simulated driving test. In the simulator, participants had to loop a track and gradually learn its nuances. They then had them drive the same simulated track days later. Participants with the gene variant performed worse on the driving test; they did not stay on the course as well as the participants and remembered less about the track during the second test.

But even if this genetic variant does make you a worse driver, it has certain advantages. Some studies have found that people with the variant retain greater mental sharpness when faced with neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, Huntington's and multiple sclerosis.

[Physorg]

Despite the critters' 30-year lifespans, naked mole rats have never been found with tumors, and are the only known mammals that don't get cancer. Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York added cancerous cells to naked mole rat cells in order to observe the mechanism that inhibits cancerous growth. The growth of cancer cells in humans is inhibited by a gene known as p27, a gene that the naked mole rat also employs to inhibit cancer growth. But the gene primarily responsible for inhibiting cancer cell growth in naked mole rats is p16-ink4a, a gene humans also possess, but which plays no role in inhibiting cell growth in humans.

And the benefits for naked mole rats go beyond avoiding cancer. Unlike humans, naked mole rats have an active mechanism for cell division, called telomerase. Developing human cells divide using the same mechanism, but the mechanism is switched off in mature cells, likely to avoid cancer. Vera Gorbunova, who led the study, believes that because naked mole rats can inhibit cancerous cell division, the mechanism doesn't need to be switched off in mole rat cells as it does in human cells. This may grant a longer lifespan to naked mole rat stem cells, aiding in the repair and upkeep of their tissues.

We're still a long ways away from harnessing the naked mole rat's powers for human health, but Gorbunova believes that further study of unusual mammals, like the naked mole rat, will open up more doors than confining our medical studies to rats and mice.

The Life Span of a Rodent May Aid Human Health [NY Times]

Creepy animal experiments

Pig Powder
From the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine, comes regenerative powder. Cells are scraped from the lining of a pig's bladder, the tissue is decellulised, and then dried. From this they managed to regrow a finger. There is something chilling about the idea that dried pig organs will be used to regrow human limbs.
Source: PubMed

Pit of Despair
Psychologist Harry Harlow induced clinical depression in monkeys by taking young macaques that had bonded with their mother, and placing them in complete isolation, in a darkened cage, for up to ten weeks. Within a few days they became psychotic, and most could not be treated.
Source: American Journal of Psychiatry


Russians re-attaching dog heads
This infamous propaganda film from 1940 shows Soviet Dr Sergei S. Bryukhonenko removing the head of dogs, and keeping them alive on a heart-lung machine. While possibly a Soviet fake, it produced a major stir in the west.
Source: Time Magazine

Spider Goat
Nexia Biotechnologies developed a transgenic goat whose milk contains proteins like that of spider silk. The milk can then be refined into superstrong biosteel polymers. We crossed spiders with goats, with no idea of how these could impact the ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, DARPA funded it.
Source: Science

Horrifying human experiments

THN1412 Drug Trial
In 2007, drug trials started for THN1412, a leukemia treatment. It had been tested previously in animals, and was found completely safe. Generally a drug is deemed safe to test on humans when it is found to be nonfatal to animals. When testing began in human subjects, the humans were given doses 500 times lower than found safe for animals. Nevertheless this drug, safe for animals, caused catastrophic organ failure in test subjects. Here the difference between animals and humans was deadly.
Source: New Scientist

A human brain - trapped in a mouse!
Researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla discovered how to grow human brain cells by injecting embryonic stem cells into fetal mice. This combines the twin horrors of stem cells and transgenic research to give us either supersmart squirmy mice babies, or people with rodent brains.
Sources: Salk Institute and Washington Post

Implantable Identity Code
The first RFID implant in a human was in 1998, and since then it's been an easy option for people wanting to be a little bit cyborg. Now companies, prisons, and hospitals have FDA approval to implant them into individuals, in order to track where people are going. A Mexican attorney general got 18 of his staff members chipped to control who had access to documents. The prospect of a business forcing its employees to receive an implant of any type is creepy and totalitarian.

Stanford Prisoner Experiment
Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prisoner experiment took place in the 1970s. The psychiatrist took 24 undergraduates and assigned them roles as either prisoners or guards, in a mock prison on campus. After just a few days, 1/3 of the guards exhibited sadistic tendencies, two prisoners had to be removed early due to emotional trauma, and the whole experiment only lasted six of the planned 14 days. It showed just how easily normal individuals can become abusive, in situations where it is encouraged.
Source: Stanford University

Milgram Experiments
The infamous "shock" experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s showed just how far people would go, when ordered to hurt somebody else by an authority figure. The well-known psychological study brought in volunteers who thought they were participating in an experiment where they would deliver shocks to another test subject. A doctor requested that they deliver greater and greater shocks, even when the "test subject" started to scream in pain and (in some cases) die. In reality, the experiment was to see how obedient people would be when a doctor told them to do something that was obviously horrific and possibly fatal. Many participants in the experiments were willing to shock the "test subjects" (actors hired by Milgram) until they believed those subjects were injured or dead. Later, many participants claimed they were traumatized for life after discovering that they were capable of such inhumane behavior.
Source: Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

Hofling Hospital Experiment
In a similar vein is the Hofling hospital experiment, which involved nurses being told to administer a dangerous dose of a drug to a patient. In the Milgram experiment, it could be argued the participants didn't really know the danger of what they were doing. With Charles Hofling's work, the nurses knew exactly how toxic the dose would be, yet 21 of the 22 would still have performed the injection.
Source: Hofling CK et al. (1966) "An Experimental Study of Nurse-Physician Relationships". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 141:171-180.

Historical atrocities

Sigmund Freud and the case of Emma Eckstein
In the late nineteenth century, Eckstein came to Freud to be treated for a nervous illness. He diagnosed her with hysteria and excessive masturbation. His friend Willhelm Fleis believed that hysteria and excessive masturbation could be treated by cauterizing the nose, so he performed an operation on Eckstein where he essentially burned her nasal passages. She suffered horrific infections, and was left permanently disfigured as Fleiss had left surgical gauze in her nasal passage. Other women suffered through similar experiments.
Source: Freud, Surgery, and the Surgeons (via Google Books)

Nazi Experiments
The medical atrocities performed by the Nazis are well-documented, and undeniably horrifying, with Josef Mengele's work on twins being especially disturbing. What's also terrifying is how useful this information was to medical science. A large amount of our knowledge about how hypothermia and cold effect humans is based on this data. Many have raised questions about the morality of using data gathered under such horrific circumstances.
Source: JLaw

Unit 731
Slightly less well known than the Nazi experiments were the ones inflicted on the native Chinese population by the Japanese in WWII. These included vivisection without anaesthesia, induced gangrene, live weapons testing, germ warfare infections, and worse. General MacArthur granted immunity to these doctors in exchange for helping America with biological warfare research.
Source: New York Times

The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, 399 impoverished African-American farmers in Tuskegee, Alabama, with syphilis were recruited into a free program to treat their disease, but were denied effective treatment (penicillin) even after it existed. This was done as an experiment by scientists who wanted to see how the disease would progress if untreated. The leaking of this event lead to major changes in American laws on informed consent in medical experiments.
Source: Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved

Mind control

Optogenetics
A biotech system that allows scientists to turn neurons in your brain on and off using different colors of light. The technique, which requires brain implants, already works in rodents, who can be compelled to turn in a specific direction. Imagine what would happen if optogenetics were used to regulate human behavior.
Source: Wired

Stimocever
José Delgado, a Professor at Yale, invented the Stimocever, a radio implanted in the brain to control behavior. Most dramatically, he demonstrated its effectiveness by stopping a charging bull with the implant. Except this thing could control peoples actions. In one case, the implant caused erotic stimulation for a woman, who stopped looking after herself and lost some motor functions after using the stimulator. She even developed an ulcer on her finger from constantly adjusting the amplitude dial.
Source: Pain journal

MK-ULTRA
MK-ULTRA was a code name for a series of CIA mind-control research experiments, heavily steeped in chemical interrogations and LSD dosing. In operation Midnight Climax, they hired prostitutes to dose clients with LSD to see its effects on unwilling participants. The very concept of a Governmental agency trying to control minds, both to boost the mental abilities of its friends, and destroy those of its enemies, is suitably horrific.
Source: CIA Library

Our new robot overlords

Robo-Rats and Cyber-Beetles
Ready for remote controlled animals to keep an eye on you? Researchers have already found ways to create cybernetic rats and beetles, both controllable via remote. If the concept of beady eyed rats watching form the shadows doesn't scare the hell out of you, then flying bugs might. Of course, the army is very, very interested in both.
Source: Technology Review and Nature

Robots That Eat
The EATR robot (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), is a DARPA funded robot meant to forage for itself, by devouring biomass. While the developers swear it's strictly vegeterian, that's hardly comforting in the face of inevitable robot intelligence, and it possibly eating all our forests.
Source: Gizmodo

The Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV)
This robot is a cluster of warheads on a single vehicle, each of which uses jets to hover, track, and then destroy incoming missiles. Just watch the YouTube video of the test of its hovering abilities, and imagine that thing coming after you.
Source: Missile Defense Agency

Self-Replicating Replicators
The RepRap project seems relatively innocent - it's just a cheap and easy program that allows hobbyists to build 3D printers. But it's main goal is to become a self-replicating device: A replicator that replicates itself. A self-replicating system, which can create mechanical objects? This could get ugly.
Source: Rep Rap Homepage

Evolving Robots
Take a bunch of cute, round robots, give them a generation lifespan two minutes, and after a few hundred generations, they evolve to cooperate, find food, and avoid pitfalls. These robots can evolve communication and intelligence, to some degree. Incredibly short lived, with the ability to evolve greater intellect. Just wait till they break out of the lab.
Sources: Technology Review and Science Direct

It could destroy the fabric of space-time . . . or not!

The Demon Core
During experiments with a sphere of plutonium nicknamed the "demon core" at Los Alamos laboratory, scientist Louis Slotin died when a screwdriver slipped and the sphere went supercritical. After the room grew hot and was suffused in a 'blue glow,' he saved the lives of seven other people, but died from severe radiation exposure.
Sources: Trinity Atomic Website and Wikipedia

The Death Ray
In his last years, mad scientist Nikola Tesla was working on a death ray (sometimes called a "peace ray"). It was a particle beam weapon that supposedly could bring down a fleet of 10,000 airplanes at 200 miles. He tried to sell the weapon, which he claimed ran via "teleforce," to the USA and a number of European countries, but none of them would take it. When your death ray is too terrifying for the US military to take, you know that's worrying.
Source: New York Times and Nikola Tesla's scientific proposal about the weapon.

Time Machine
Physicist Ronald Mallett's work is based on using a ring laser to create closed timelike curves, which may allow time travel. Possibly you would only be able to travel back in time to the point when the device was turned on. What could go wrong?
Source: Mallett's proposal for the time machine [PDF]

Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located in an underground facility in Switzerland, is the world's largest particle accelerator, designed to ram protons or lead nuclei into each other at ludicrous speeds. The LHC has suffered a series of delays, and is meant to be back online in November 2009. Physicists admit there is an infinitesimal chance that it will generate a black hole that could destroy the Earth - or possibly another kind of anomaly that would eat the universe. Two scientists have even put forth the theory that the LHC is sabotaging itself from the future, to prevent us unearthing the elusive Higgs Boson particle; others have sued in the hope that they can shut down the LHC before it destroys the world.
Source: Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Additional reporting by Tim Barribeau.

Ohio State professor Kimberly Rios Morrison polled Stanford University students about what they thought about students drinking alcohol. What she discovered was that the students with the most extreme pro-alcohol stance expressed their opinions most readily, in general because they believed that they were voicing the majority opinion. But polls showed that the majority of students had a moderate to anti-alcohol stance. When pro-alcohol students were shown evidence that most people didn't support their views, they were far more reluctant to express their extreme opinions.

Said Morrison:

It is only when they have this sense that they are in the majority that extremely pro-alcohol students are more willing to express their views on the issue.

Sounds like this study explains internet trolling and flame wars too. People with extreme views who are extremely loud about them manage to delude themselves into thinking everybody agrees. Morrison added:

You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.

No word yet on how to break the cycle, especially with trolls, who may not care whether the majority agree with them or not. But we can only hope further research will lead to a simple way to cure extremists of their belief that everybody shares their opinions and wants them to keep talking.

via Ohio State

Chorost's article is about the dawning of the age of "optogenetics," a field where scientists stimulate neurons (such as those in your brain) to fire or stop firing by genetically-engineering those neurons to respond to light. Thus, optogenetics: optics plus genetics. An inserted algae gene makes neurons fire when exposed to blue light; an inserted bacterial gene stills them when they're exposed to yellow light. Imagine being able to make the neurons responsible for chronic depression or Parkinsons stop firing with the flick of a switch. That's the dream of the scientists who are working in this field.

You've probably heard about a few optogenetic experiments over the past couple of years. Chorost describes one of the more famous ones, where students got a mouse to run counterclockwise by exposing a few neurons in its brain to blue light using fiber optic wires. He writes:

The counterclockwise-running mouse was something new - a triple fusion of animal, plant, and technology - and the students knew it was a harbinger of unprecedentedly powerful ways to alter the brain. For curing diseases, to begin with, but also for understanding how the brain interacts with the body. And ultimately for fusing human and machine.

Mice with Parkinsons symptoms who underwent optogenetic treatment also saw dramatic improvement.

And Chorost is quick to point out that Parkinsons treatments are just the beginning. Optogenetics open the door for two-way traffic between computers and the human brain. He explains:

No matter how good they get, one-way prostheses can't close the loop. In theory, two-way optogenetic traffic could lead to human-machine fusions in which the brain truly interacts with the machine, rather than only giving or only accepting orders. It could be used, for instance, to let the brain send movement commands to a prosthetic arm; in return, the arm's sensors would gather information and send it back. Blue and yellow LEDs would flash on and off inside genetically altered somatosensory regions of the cortex to give the user sensations of weight, temperature, and texture. The limb would feel like a real arm. Of course, this kind of cyborg technology is not exactly around the corner. But it has suddenly leapt from the realm of wild fantasy to concrete possibility.

Of course, there are darker fantasies that lurk here too, of perfect mind control and memory suppression. Indeed, optogenetic devices could one day lead to the consumer-grade memory-eating devices in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Or to Google implants in your brain.

You have to read this mind-blowing, brilliantly-written article.

via Wired

The spider was discovered in South Africa, and a group of researchers officially described the species in a paper published in PLoS One yesterday evening. Spiders in the Nephilia family all exhibit what's called extreme sexual size dimorphism - in other words, the females are a lot larger than the males, and usually eat the males after mating with them. You can see from these images that the males of N. komaci really are so small compared to the females that they could be mistaken for a post-coital snack.

The researchers also analyzed the evolution of these spiders, and concluded that what we're seeing is a tendency towards female gigantism rather than male dwarfism. Because the female spiders survive better the larger they get, they have evolved to be huge. The males, on the other hand, wind up passing along their sperm to the next generation if they mature early (i.e. when they are smaller) and can climb really well. And thus, you get tiny males and giant females.

via PLoS One

A Duke University study, conducted on November 4th, 2008, measured voters' testosterone levels before and after the winner was announced. Participants were asked to chew a piece of gum at 8pm, when the polls in North Carolina closed, and then again at 11:30pm after Obama's election was announced. By analyzing the spit samples in the gum, the researchers were able to analyze the testosterone levels of the participants.

Men generally experienced a slight drop in testosterone over the course of the night, but the participants who voted for Obama did not experience a drop in testosterone. Male voters who voted for McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr, however, experienced a significantly greater drop in testosterone than would be expected. Female voters did not show a significant change in testosterone, regardless of whom they voted for.

Duke neuroscientist Kevin LaBar was excited by the indication that voters are physiologically so affected by election outcomes, and plans to perform a similar experiment involving sports instead of politics. He figures studying Duke basketball fans is a good place to start.

[Physorg]

A team of scientists in Italy and Sweden have been developing a sophisticated robotic hand, with fingertip sensors that feed directly into the arm's nerves. The overall look of the hand may be more like Nina Sharp's in Fringe than Luke Skywalker's in The Empire Strikes Back, but it does allow the wearer to actually feel the objects the hand touches. Just as the brain transmits data to robotic limbs — ordering them to grasp and release — so do the receptors feed data back to the brain. It not only returns to the wearer the sensation that they had lost, it likely also makes grabbing and manipulating objects an easier and more precise task.

You can see the robotic hand in action below, as a 22 year-old who lost his hand to cancer tries out the hand and its sensitive fingertips for the first time:

New robotic hand 'can feel' [BBC]

According to an article in the New York Times, Moholy-Nagy was one of the least well-regarded members of Germany's Bauhaus school during his life, but The New Vision, his posthumous book on the future of art, design education, and the new media of photography and film, helped change that. And now he's being hailed as an important forefather to today's digital artists.

So what does the Light-Space Modulator do? It allows you to study the motion of light. Moholy-Nagy explains:

This piece of lighting equipment is a device used for demonstrating both plays of light and manifestations of movement. The model consists of a cube-like body or box, 120 x 120 cm in size, with a circular opening (stage opening) at its front side. On the back of the panel, mounted around the opening are a number of yellow, green, blue, rot, and white-toned electric bulbs (approximately 70 illuminating bulbs of 15 watts each, and 5 headlamps of 100 watts). Located inside the body, parallel to its front side, is a second panel; this panel too, bears a circular opening about which are mounted electric lightbulbs of different colors. In accordance with a predetermined plan, individual bulbs glow at different points. They illuminate a continually moving mechanism built of partly translucent, partly transparent, and partly fretted materials, in order to cause the best possible play of shadow formations on the back wall of the closed box. (When the demonstration occurs in a darkened space, the back wall of the box can be removed and the color and shadow projection shown on a screen of any chosen size behind the box.) The mechanism is supported by a circular platform on which a three-part mechanism is built. The dividing walls are made of transparent cellophane, and a metal wall made of vertical rods. Each of the three sectors of the framework accommodate a different, playful movement study, which individually goes into effect when it appears on the main disc revolving before the stage opening.

Image by HC Gilje on Flickr. [New York Times]

A team led by Gero Miesenbock of the University of Oxford has been working to identify and manipulate brain cells linked to associative learning, where an animal learns to associate a certain cue with a specific outcome. There are just 12 cells in the fly brain linked with associative learning.

To determine which cells are associated with bad memories, the researchers sought to trigger those cells and, at the same time release an odor. If the fly avoided the odor in the future, they new that they had successfully rewritten the fly's memory to associate that odor with a bad experience.

They modified neurons in the flies' brains by adding a receptor that is activated by ATP. They then injected the brains with ATP placed inside a light-activated cage. They then targeted a laser at the appropriate cells, causing the release of the ATP and activating the receptors. At the same time they flashed the laser, the researchers released the odor.

Sure enough, when presented with two odors placed at equal distances from the flies, the flies who had received the laser flash avoided the odor they had been programmed to associate with bad memories. The flies effective "remembered" that something bad was associated with the smell, even though they had never experienced it themselves.

And Miesenbock believes that this could have implications for human brains as well. Researchers may be just understanding how animals learn from and adapt to mistakes, but he has every expectation that the mechanism for humans will be, on a fundamental level, the same as the mechanism for flies.

Bad memories written with lasers [BBC]

A study published this week in PLoS One showed that chimps would share tools with each other, but usually only if requested. Which raises interesting questions about why humans are so easygoing, and free with our assistance.

The experiments focused on two chimps in adjoining cages. Either both apes had a tool the other needed, or just one had the object their neighbour required: a stick to get at a juice box, or a straw to drink from a container of juice. Even when there was no reciprocal trade, the chimpanzees gave the tool, but usually required a request. How does an ape signal that it wants what you have? Vocalizing, clapping, beating against the wall, and reaching through the barrier between walls.

Professor Shinya Yamamoto, of Kyoto University, and head of the experimental unit said:

Communicative interactions play an important role in altruism in chimpanzees. While humans may help others without being solicited, the chimpanzees rarely voluntarily offered an effective tool to a struggling partner. Indeed, simple observation of another's failed attempts did not elicit voluntary helping in chimpanzees.

Why do humans, and some other animals (like capuchin monkeys), offer help spontaneously, yet an animal we're so closely related to does not? As always, no one really knows, but there are a lot of theories.

Even though half the experimental couples were non-related chimps, they were just as likely to hand over the tool, so it's not a straight out family link. If food was at stake, then the chance one chimp would share with the other plummeted from 80-90% likelihood to down around 30%.

One significant factor may be the chimps' difficulty in understanding another being's point-of-view. But from a social perspective, requested altruism makes a huge amount sense. In a situation of limited resources, be they food, tools, or anything else, unnecessary assistance can lead to wasted goods. Evolving an "altruism on request" system is a way to ensure that the "help" offered is actually helpful, and minimizes unnecessary behaviour.

So why do humans behave differently? Chimpanzees function at a level very similar to a hunter-gatherer tribe. They make and modify tools to aid in their endeavours, getting most of their calories from gathering, but with the occasional hunting boost.

Humans, on the other hand, evolved into agricultural societies several thousand year ago. There's a huge body of literature based on the premise that, among humans, the food surpluses brought about by the shift to agriculture allowed for the creation of cities and complex hierarchical societies as we understand them. Could agriculture have made humans more altruistic than their hand-to-mouth chimp brethren?

If that were the cause of the change, then we would have developed our current style of offering help whenever we thought it appropriate in the last 10,000 years or so. Maybe the change happened when we shifted from the trees into the grasslands, a situation of higher predation which would require greater teamwork within a group. While this is purely speculation, further studies of altruism in apes will perhaps provide a better idea of why this discrepancy exists.

How many universes are in the multiverse? [arxiv.org via Universe Today]

IEEE has posted this cool video explaining the bot, and showing how it moved about a year ago. Newer prototypes include sensors and better range of motion.

IEEE writes:

Researchers from iRobot and the University of Chicago discussed their palm-sized soft robot, known as a chemical robot, or chembot, at IROS yesterday. It's "the first demonstration of a completely soft, mobile robot using jamming as an enabling technology," they write in a paper.

The concept of "jamming skin enabled locomotion" is explained quite nicely in the video. The polymer used for the bot's stretchy skin is off-the-shelf silicon two-part rubber.

By controlling the parts of the blob that "inflate," the researchers can make it roll.

When I see this, all I think is that it's the prototype of a robotic tentacle arm.

via IEEE

Nanoparticles, objects less than 100 nanometers long in any direction, are already in use commercially and in medicine. Manufacturers integrate nanoparticles into socks to fight bacteria and odor (possibly poisoning wildlife in the process), and medical professionals use them in cancer research, brain imaging, and artificial hearts. But it looks like the era of nanoparticle-based drugs is just dawning, as one of the first such drugs has just passed animal testing.

So what does the first of these new wonder drugs treat? Erectile dysfunction. Researchers are working on a topical cream that employs nanoparticles to treat ED with fewer side effects. Nanoparticles are wrapped around traditional ED medications, allowing those medications to remain in their gaseous form until they are applied directly to the affected area. This allows the ED to be treated without the side effects that come with pills delivering the same medications, such as headaches, nausea, and dizziness.

Treating erectile dysfunction may not be on the same level as treating cancer, but the principles the researchers believe that the principles involved in their topical cream will apply to future nanoparticle-based drugs down the line. They have just finished a successful test of the cream on rats and plan a human trial some time in 2011.

The Era of Nanoparticle Drugs Begins With Erection Cream [Discover Magazine via Reddit]

A new article in the Miami Herald raises a terrifying prospect for nanotech warfare:

Jane's, the London-based research group that publishes the industry standard Jane's All the World's Aircraft, warns that nanotechnology can be used to create entirely new hazards such as miniaturized nuclear weapons that are smaller, lighter, easier to transport and hide and smuggle into unsuspecting countries. It says nano techniques designed to deliver medicines in a more-targeted way also can deliver toxic substances in a form of bioterrorism.

Nanotechnology, in which materials are machined on a molecule-by-molecule, or atom-by-atom basis, could produce super-nukes that are so tiny, they don't technically qualify as weapons of mass destruction, Jane's has warned in past articles.

In one 2003 article, Jane's warns that "some advanced technology, such as superlaser" could trigger a relatively small thermonuclear explosion involving a deuterium-tritium mixture, in a device weighing no more than a few kilograms. The device could go from a fraction of a ton to "many tens of tons" of high-explosive equivalent yield, and because they use little to no fissionable materials, they would have "virtually no radioactive fallout." Self-replicating nanotech could also produce conventional weapons in such quantities that they would become WMDs.

Are you scared yet?

Seven-year old Lucas Murray has learned to "see" objects around him by clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth and listening to the sounds that come back to him. Although he may not get the full Daredevil effect, he can identify the distance, shape, density and position of objects around him, as well as whether an object or person is coming or going. Being able to identify objects in this way is a great boon to his independence, and he can navigate a room or a playground — and even shoot a basketball into a hoop unaided.

Although Murray is reportedly the first person in the UK to use this technique (earning him the nickname "Batboy" in the press), it's not something he learned on his own. Daniel Kish, founder of the World Access for the Blind, has been developing the technique and taught it to Murray, and other children have successfully learned the method as well.

[The Press Association via Reddit]

Don't break out the face masks just yet. Right now, the research is not mature enough to say one way or the other whether you can infect your friends and family with chronic fatigue. But scientists have discovered that two-thirds of people suffering chronic fatigue are also infected with the retrovirus XMRV, which is related to mouse leukemia.

Chronic fatigue is a disease which affects human organs, resulting in feelings of exhaustion, and it affects about 1 million Americans.

According to Science:

Vincent Lombardi and colleagues uncovered the human retrovirus XMRV, which bears a genetic resemblance to a mouse leukemia virus, in 68 of 101 blood samples taken from patients with CFS, while identifying the retrovirus in only eight samples from 218 healthy patients. The researchers show that the XMRV is infectious and can provoke an immune response.

The researchers caution that XMRV does occur commonly in humans, and that there is currently no evidence that there is a causal link between the retrovirus and chronic fatigue. There is, however, enough evidence to merit further investigation.

via Science Express

The dust storm accomplished something that geoengineers call "ocean fertilization." When the storm hit Sydney, it dumped an estimated three million tonnes of Australian desert dust into Sydney Harbour and the Tasman Straight. That dust brought nitrogen and phosphate to the waters, providing food to microscopic phytoplankton, whose population numbers rapidly tripled (which is what you see in the image above). And that in turn may rapidly expand the population of local fish, too. Boosting the lower levels of the food chain can easily lead to population growth at the higher rungs.

But ocean fertilization isn't just a way to help the fishing industry, and feed hungry Australians. There are some even more interesting results that come from rapidly hurling piles of dirt into the ocean - results that could slow climate change.

Ocean fertilization can trap atmospheric carbon. First, the excess algae absorb carbon dioxide; then, when the algae dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the carbon it has absorbed is isolated from the atmosphere for a few thousand years. Of course, the effectiveness of this is hotly disputed. An article recently published in Nature tracked a natural influx of high levels of iron into the ocean around the Crozet Islands, and the carbon uptake was 50 times lower than previously estimated. This study, as most others on the subject, focused on iron rather than nitrogen, and there is some argument that natural intake will produce different effects than deliberately dumping tonnes of the material into the ocean. Geoengineering could promote different phytoplanktons to develop. The location of the experiment also has a lot to do with what grows and how much carbon it traps.

The final effect that this explosion of algae could produce? It could help cool the planet. Certain plankton species produce dimethyl sulfide, which works its way into the atmosphere, and eventually transforms into clouds, increasing the reflectivity of the Earth, and lowering its temperature.

So, by taking tonnes of desert dirt (something Australia is in no way short of), and flushing it into the ocean, we can potentially rejuvenate flagging fish populations, trap atmospheric carbon dioxide and lower the Earth's albedo. That's a hell of a way to hack the planet. Except no-one's sure if it actually works yet, with iron or nitrogen.

Now Australian geoengineers Ian Jones and Associate Professor Rob Wheen, both of Sydney University, want to inject 2.5 tonnes of nitrogen-rich urea into a controlled area of the sea and try to replicate the effect. They claim that nourishing a 20km wide patch of water could significantly boost catch numbers for small-scale artisanal fishing industries.

The process still very controversial, and the act of massively changing the makeup of the biosphere is practically begging for algae to take over the ocean as we know it and start belching sulfurous fumes into the air. Jones is also the head of the Ocean Nourishment Corporation, a private group who are attempting to use urea to boost phytoplankton numbers, and gain carbon credits to sell, which perhaps makes him a less than unbiased figure to ask about the whole topic.

Still, the Sydney dust storms have given us the first solid evidence that ocean nourishment can affect algae blooms. And as far as geoengineering goes, ocean fertilization uses techniques and technology readily available. If the mechanisms of action are shown to be effective, Jones and Wheen's project could be rolled out easily. The research on it is already underway, and it's now a working concept. Your oceans could be massively reengineered soon, without requiring significant hardware developments.

Dust storm triggers ocean bloom [ABC Science]

A paper published this week in Trends in Ecology and Evolution reviewed a series of recent studies about the impact of halting women's ovulation on partner selection. Alexandra Alvergne and Virpi Lumma of the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield discussed each of the recent findings and their impact on partner selection and reproduction. They note studies that ovulating women tend to prefer men with more "masculine" features who favor dominance and male-male competitiveness. A study published last year also found that women not on the pill preferred the scent of men with immune profiles dissimilar from their own, while women on the pill preferred the scent of men with immune profiles more similar to their own. The paper authors also note that some studies have found that men can unconsciously detect whether a woman is ovulating, and prefer ovulating women to non-ovulating women.

Their conclusion, cited in EurekaAlert, is that the pill might be causing individuals to select otherwise less-preferred partners, and could be causing humans to have less healthy offspring:

Taken together, an increasing number of studies suggest that the pill is likely to have an impact on human mating decisions and subsequent reproduction. "If this is the case, pill use will have implications for both current and future generations, and we hope that our review will stimulate further research on this question," concludes Dr. Lummaa.

So is the pill really having an impact on which mates we choose? Maybe not. The New Scientist analyzes the claims in the paper and notes that even if the studies have some merit, they don't necessarily reflect real world conditions. One study, for example, asked men to rate women's walks, a signal for attractiveness, but one that we don't pay much attention to. And a study that found lap dancers earn more during the most fertile period of their cycle (winner of one of last year's Ig Nobel Prizes) also found that dancers on the pill and those off the pill earned similar tips during their non-fertile periods. As for the issue of scent (something that may have kept women from mating with close relatives when humans lived in smaller populations), it might be overrated as an indicator of mate selection. A separate study involving speed dating found that while women might prefer the scent of certain men, those aren't necessarily the men they ultimately select as partners.

Unnatural selection: Birth control pills may alter choice of partners [EurekaAlert]
Has the pill changed the rules of sexual attraction? [New Scientist]

Researchers believe that the estrogen levels in breast tissue are an early indicator of breast cancer risk. So they've devised a special chip, smaller than a credit card, to extract the estrogen from breast tissue so doctors can study it. Electricity coaxes liquid to move across the chip, based on the science of "digital microfluidics." As the liquid travels, it dissolves the dried tissue sample, then moves along to another reservoir containing a second liquid, and then on to a third reservoir where it circulates and removes contaminants and other biological components. What's left is a purer sample of estrogen, which can indicate your level of cancer risk.

Here's a handy diagram:

[via EurekAlert]

Laser eye treatment is two decades old, and adept surgeons have gone far beyond giving patients 20:20 vision. Times Online has profiled several such doctors, who offer to tailor their clients' eyesight to their occupation.

Julian Stevens, who practices at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, has given special forces members and fighter pilots the aforementioned ability to see a thousand meters in the dark, and he notes that taxi drivers could benefit from a similar procedure. Stephen Trokel, who helped pioneer laser eye surgery, operated on a soprano who wanted to be able to read the music in the front row of the orchestra, as well as a New York Yankees catcher who needed to be able to see the ball coming out of the light. Another group that favors the occupational ocular enhancements? US presidential candidates, several of whom have received "monovision," which allows them to easily read with one eye and see far away with the other. This combination eliminates the need for reading glasses or bifocals, and some politicians hope it creates a sense of youthfulness.

What do we have to thank for this custom technology? The space program. Wavefront technology, which was developed by NASA to improve the focus of the Hubble Space Telescope, has translated neatly to the human eye. The technology allows physicians to map the cornea and iris, enabling surgeons to make small, specific tweaks to the eye that result in custom eyesight made to order.

Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual's life and career [Times Online via Reddit]

New research, led by UC Berkeley's Irina Conboy, has proven that older muscle doesn't just not react well to sudden exercise (regenerating four times slower than younger muscle), but that it can react badly to it, creating scar tissue instead of renegerating. As Conroy explains,

The old muscle also didn't recover as well with exercise... This emphasizes the importance of older populations staying active because the evidence is that for their muscle, long periods of disuse may irrevocably worsen the stem cells' regenerative environment... It's like a Catch-22.

However, the research discovered the existence of an enzyme in the human body called mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), which regulates a muscle-growth-triggering receptor called Notch. In older bodies, MAPK levels were so low that Notch didn't become active, according to Conroy, but luckily science can fix that; the scientists cultured old human muscle in the lab, artificially activated MAPK and saw the muscle's regenerative ability soar. For Conroy, this discovery is just the start:

In practical terms, we now know that to enhance regeneration of old human muscle and restore tissue health, we can either target the MAPK or the Notch pathways... The ultimate goal, of course, is to move this research toward clinical trials.

And then, we hope, defeat the aging process altogether. Or, at least, find a way to reverse my male pattern baldness.

Clock Turned Back on Aging Muscles, Researchers Claim [LiveScience]

The Ig Nobels are an annual event at Harvard full of bizarre opera singing, extremely silly behavior from actual Nobel Prize winners (including our scifi nerd homeboy Paul Krugman), and much throwing of paper airplanes. The prizes are awarded for the best scientific research that makes you laugh - and think.

As the organizers noted after the event, which many of us watched via streaming video:

The evening also featured numerous tributes to the evening's theme of "Risk." The one-minute-long keynote address was delivered by Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who showed how financial markets are fraught with wildness and risk (and who also invented fractals). Throughout the entire ceremony, Professor Mandelbrot and the ten Nobel laureates took turns playing in a poker game on stage . . . [Also present was] Dan Meyer (co-author of a study about the medical effects of sword-swallowing). During the ceremony, Mr. Meyer set a new world's record for how many Nobel laureates can simultaneously withdraw a sword from the throat of a sword-swallower.

So let's take a look at the winners, shall we? Here are the prize winners and citations to relevant research, as explained by the Ig Nobel Prize committee itself . . .

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
REFERENCE: "Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production," Catherine Bertenshaw [Douglas] and Peter Rowlinson, Anthrozoos, vol. 22, no. 1, March 2009, pp. 59-69. DOI: 10.2752/175303708X390473.

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining - by experiment - whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42. DOI:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks - Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland - for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa - and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid - specifically from tequila.
REFERENCE: "Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila," Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M. Castano, 2008, arXiv:0806.1485.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand - but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand - every day for more than sixty (60) years.
REFERENCE: "Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol. 41, no. 5, 1998, pp. 949-50.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.
REFERENCE: "Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins," Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature, vol. 450, 1075-1078 (December 13, 2007). DOI:10.1038/nature06342.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country - Prawo Jazdy - whose name in Polish means "Driving License".

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a "Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks."

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers - from very small to very big - by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).
REFERENCE: Zimbabwe's Casino Economy - Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gideon Gono, ZPH Publishers, Harare, 2008, ISBN 978-079-743-679-4.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.
REFERENCE: "Microbial Treatment of Kitchen Refuse With Enzyme-Producing Thermophilic Bacteria From Giant Panda Feces," Fumiaki Taguchia, Song Guofua, and Zhang Guanglei, Seibutsu-kogaku Kaishi, vol. 79, no 12, 2001, pp. 463-9. [and abstracted in Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering, vol. 92, no. 6, 2001, p. 602.]

via Ig Nobel Ceremony 2009

A team of researchers in the UK explored the role of a protein known as S6K1, which turns out to play an extraordinary role in aging and age-related disease. When the researchers grew mice lacking the gene to produce S6K1, their mice lived significantly longer (see chart - the red lines are mice without S6K1). They also developed fewer age-related debilitating conditions.

Female mice without S6K1 lived slightly longer than their male counterparts, and over 160 days longer than the control group. That means the female mouse lifespan increased by twenty percent.

Mice without S6K1 also lost weight, even if they ate more than ordinary mice. In other words, a substance that could block the expression of S6K1 would trick the body into thinking that you'd gone on a very rigorous diet. And it would make you healthier into an older age. The best part?

In their paper, the researchers conclude:

It might be possible to develop drug treatments that manipulate S6K1 and AMPK to achieve improved overall health in later life. Indeed, short-term rapamycin treatment reduces adiposity in mice, and metformin treatment [often used against type 2 diabetes] extends lifespan in short-lived mice.

This is good news, because often when researchers make discoveries related to longevity there is no immediate pathway to manufacturing a life-extending drug. For all of us who want to stay healthy in old age while still eating sugar and fat once in a while, let's hope this research team starts testing a drug based on their S6K1 discovery - and soon.

via Science

Charles Darwin, recognizing the similarities between humans and chimpanzees, postulated that we might someday find fossils of a "missing link," a creature that represented the evolutionary break between humans and chimps. The discovery of Ardi, however, suggests that when we do find that evolutionary break, the fossils we find will not be a blend of human and chimpanzee.

Researchers discovered Ar. ramidus near Aramis, Ethiopia, and have dated it as 4.4 million years old, considerably older than Lucy, who at 3.2 million years old was considered humanity's oldest relation. It's not clear whether humans are directly descended from this particular hominid, but it makes it clear that bipedal hominids are considerably older than previously thought.

The paleobiologists studying Ardi identify hers as an "intermediate" form, one that is bipedal, but at the same time capable of walking on all forms and traveling through trees. Still, although she represents a point past hominids' evolutionary break with gorillas and chimpanzees, she is very different from modern apes. For example, Ardi's had flat hands and feet and flexible wrists, and engaged in a form of locomotion called palmigrady, which is a trait of ancient apes and unlike gorillas and chimpanzees, which are stiff-wristed knuckle-walkers. This suggests that gorilla and chimp ancestors developed their knuckle-walking long after their evolutionary break with hominids.

In a paper in the upcoming issue of Science, which outlines the discovery, researchers will explain what Ardi's dissimilarity from modern apes means for our picture of human and chimp evolution:

Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees but rather through a series of progenitors starting from a distant common ancestor that once occupied the ancient forests of the African Micoene.

Genetic material is passed on through sperm via long strains of DNA. But one disadvantage of these strands is their giant size when unwound. As a response to this disadvantage, the body has developed a method for packing DNA strands up for easy transport. The DNA is bound up around molecules called histones and made into a dense genetic material called chromatin. This winding process is achieved by proteins grabbing onto tags distributed throughout the chromatin.

Of course, as compact as this material is, these little sperm cells try to get every advantage they can. That's where this newly discovered protein, Brdt, comes in. After the histones bind with this special protein, the sperm cell goes through a process of hypercompaction. When this protein is absent, the hypercompaction doesn't take place. The scientists, from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, aren't sure if this is because of the special nature of Brdt or because Brdt is merely the last protein in the histone-binding sequence.

Scientists hope to use this new information about sperm development, released this week in Nature magazine, to find the link between hypercompaction and infertility. But it makes sense: if this extra phase of compaction transforms sperm from the fat kids at the pool who always belly-flop off the diving board into little Michael Phelpses, it's pretty clear why mice lacking this Brdt protein are infertile.

Putting the squeeze on sperm DNA [PhysOrg]

(Image: an X-ray crystallography image of the Brdt tags (the cyan strands) settled into the Brdt binding site. Also visible are two less-compact chromatin clumps, top left in blue, and two hypercompact versions, bottom right. Image from EMBL/IBS.)

If you aren't a fan already of the hardware hackers at Adafruit, this educational video will win you over. They've done a little research, and turned the DHS's million-dollar weapon into a $250 home electronics project called the Bedazzler.

This has got to be the greatest mad science project ever. If you build one of these, I fully expect you to shine it on your frenemies, take video, and post it here.

via Adafruit Industries (Thanks, Phil Torrone!)

In a paper published yesterday on PLoS One, a group of international researchers described how they examined the fossils of several T-Rex specimens, and found ten separate individuals who showed signs of trichomonosis - a parasitic infection that eats through the jawbones of birds. The parasites cause lesions on the throat and lower jaw in birds, eventually eating into the bones. Birds of prey are particularly vulnerable to trichomonosis. But birds also possess a unique form of white blood cell called heterophil that isolates infections like trichomonosis to one region of the body and prevents them from spreading. So the birds don't actually die from the disease - instead, they starve to death because so much of their jaws and throats are eaten away that they can no longer swallow.

You can see the telltale lower jaw bone holes caused by trichomonosis in these T-Rex fossils. The researchers speculate that many dinosaurs died of the disease, and that T-Rex probably spread it during fights when they commonly bit each other on the head. Cannibalism is another possible way they spread the disease (birds today often get it from eating infected pigeons).

Paleontologist Ewan Wolff, who contributed to the paper, said:

The holes in tyrannosaur jaws occur in exactly the same place as in modern birds with trichomonosis. The shape of the holes and the way that they merge into the surrounding bone is very similar in both animals. The cause of these holes in tyrannosaurs has previously been attributed to tooth gouges from biting or bacterial infections, but we think a trichomonosis-type disease is much more likely given the position and nature of the holes.

Added his fellow researcher Steven Salisbury:

It's ironic to think that an animal as mighty as [T-Rex fossil] ‘Sue' probably died as a result of a parasitic infection. I'll never look at a feral pigeon the same way again.

Read the scientific paper via PLoS One

A new paper from Davide Cassi at the Università di Parma, published this month in Physical Review E, explores how targets might be annihilated by "random walkers." These walkers might be any moving organism that can eliminate a target, but LiveScience notes that zombies are the perfect analogy for these "walkers" — organisms that meander without purpose and destroy any human they happen to come across.

The paper examines the likelihood of the targets surviving — that is, never coming into contact with these "random walkers" — if they remain immobile within various types of structures. One of Cassi's findings is that the more complex the hideout, the less likely a random walker is to encounter a target. This means that hiding out in a building filled with twisting corridors, such as a mall or a school, offers a better chance of survival than hiding out in the open or in more open structures.

Of course, all bets are off if your particular breed of zombie has a talent for sniffing out live humans — or if it's driven by an instinctive need to shop.

The Best Approach for Avoiding Zombies [LiveScience]

A team of researchers at University College London showed volunteers a series of words with positive, negative, and neutral connotations. Each word was shown too quickly for the viewer to consciously perceive it, but the researchers asked the viewers to identify whether the word had an emotional value. Viewers correctly identified negative words as having an emotional value 77 percent of the time, while they correctly identified positive words as having an emotional value just 59 percent of the time.

The researchers believe that this superior subliminal perception of negative words is tied to a primal tendency to be more alert to threats than to non-threats. Thus, words that create a sense of fear or anxiety are more acutely perceived by the human brain and are more likely to trigger an emotional response. That suggests that, if advertisers are looking to utilize subliminal messages, it's less effective to tout your product's virtues than it is to bash the competition.

Power of the hidden message revealed [The Independent]

In the most recent issue of Neuron, Jack Gallant and Thomas Naselaris of the University of California, Berkeley describe their process for reconstructing images from brain scans. While previous studies have used fMRI technology to identify an image a subject has recently viewed, those studies involve a subject viewing a specific picture from a limited set and then showing them all the pictures in that set to see which one they previously viewed. Gallant and Naselaris' research is focused on reconstructing visual information based solely on readings from the brain.

The researchers have worked on identifying which parts of the brain are associated with certain types of visual information. For example, different regions are active when viewing a face or a crowd of people or a building. They believe as their understanding of these regions grow more sophisticated, they will better be able to pin point from fMRI scans what a subject has seen. Currently, they are able to get a rough idea of what a subject is looking at and then pull a corresponding image from a vast database of images. It's not quite a reconstruction yet, but it is close and will improve with further research.

An article from Wired notes that full visual reconstruction is still decades away, but could have implications for devices that read dreams or machines controlled through thought. However, as fMRI technology is so often used now in court cases (arguably prematurely given the current technology), it seems likely that one of the first applications we could see from this technology will be in justice system.

[Wired]