In the new issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine will detail their findings in penile tissue regeneration. Using twelve New Zealand White rabbits with damaged penises, the team engineered replacement tissues using each rabbit's own erectile tissues. They then injected these replacement cells into scaffold made from rabbit penises that had been stripped of their cells; the scaffold act as support for the developing cells. The scaffolds were then implanted in the rabbits, after which the organized tissues began to form.

Once the penises were fully formed, the rabbits were just as sexually active as rabbits with non-reconstructed genitals, mating with female rabbits within a moment of introduction. The team also found that the rabbits' sexual performance was fully functional, and several female rabbits became pregnant and produced healthy offspring as a result of the encounter.

Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest University Baptist, believes that the same technique can be applied to human males who have erectile cells, but have damaged or deformed penises — as well as men looking to upgrade their current equipment. The procedure probably wouldn't require scaffolding from another penis, however. Researchers are currently looking into printable structures made from collagen and other materials.

Artificial Penis Tissue Proves Promising in Lab Tests [LiveScience]

A BBC scuba diving crew grabbed a video of the smalleye, which is the largest and one of the rarest of the 70 species of stingray. The smalleye, which can grow to be more than two meters wide, was first discovered in 1908 and has been found alive only off the coast of Tofo, a small town in Southeastern Mozambique.

You can see the video at the BBC's website, and the footage will also be part of the BBC Two documentary Andrea: Queen of the Mantas this Wednesday.

First film of a 'giant' stingray [BBC]

According to the UM researchers, this discovery may make sense of previously unexplained earthquakes, such as 2008's Sichuan quake, that registered 7.9 on the Richter scale; the theory is that earthquakes farther from fault lines may be aftershocks of much earlier movements along the fault line, with the further the distance meaning the later the quake:

The study, reported in the journal Nature, found that aftershocks near to tectonic boundaries continue for only a few years but further away they can occur over a timescale of decades and centuries. Recent earthquakes in Canada's Saint Lawrence valley, for instance, may be the aftershocks of an earthquake that occurred in 1663.

Similarly, a magnitude 7 earthquake that occurred near a town called New Madrid in Mississippi in 1811 is still causing aftershocks that can be felt in the American mid-west because these shocks are the result of movements that are 100 times slower than the movements that occur near to a tectonic fault line.

Scientists hope to use this discovery to work out where future earthquakes may occur. Evil scientists hope to use this discovery to annex California and create a base of operations from which they can destroy Superman once and for all.

Scientists unearth evidence of centuries-old aftershocks [Independent.co.uk

The Blackout
One thing I love more than "versus" movies (man versus beast, beast versus monster, monster versus monster versus man) is holiday themed horror flicks. And The Blackout has both. It's monsters versus humans pegged with a Christmas Eve time stamp. The official synopsis is:

When an apartment building's lights go out mysteriously, all of the tenants put aside their problems and band together to get to the bottom of the city-wide blackout. Deep in the basement of the high-rise, a hideous breed of monster hatches and begins to wreak havoc. Everyone must find a way to kill the blood-thirsty creatures and survive the darkness before it destroys the world.

Here's the poster...


For release dates check out the official site.

Gladiators V. Werewolves: Edge of Empire
Here is some bananas concept art from Rob Green's werewolf flick. No one is cast in it, but it's supposed to be released in 2010. I think we all know what it's about...

Synopsis:

The film takes place in Roman occupied Britain, where captured werewolves are pitted against the land's best warriors in Gladiatorial games. But the werewolves are far more cunning then they let on, as they are using the games to infect and turn their enemies into their own werewolf army.

Here's some additional art, check out Geek Tryant for even more.

Ice

Vampire Bill is getting into the disaster porn spirit. The makers of the Day of The Triffids are coming out with another TV Movie titled Ice starring Stephen Moyer and we're really really really hoping he plays a scientist who know the world is about to end but no one will believe him. Joining him is Claire Forlani, Ben Cross, Petrick Bergin, Simon Callow and Sam Neill (hooray Jurassic Park).

Official Synopsis:

It is 2020. Findings by environmental scientist Professor Thom Archer suggest that Halo, the corporate energy company drilling on the Greenland Glacier are causing it to melt. Archer's warnings are ignored, so he heads to the Arctic to find indisputable evidence. Upon arrival, he realizes humankind is under immediate threat, and races home to save his family. The glacier collapses, with devastating consequences. Astonishing weather patterns emerge and plunge the world's temperatures into steep decline.

It's currently filming, come on VAMPIRE SCIENTIST BILL.

Shorts:

Ataque de Pánico (Panic Attack):

Here's a quickie short from Uruguay. Created by Federico Álvarez and Mauro Rondán, see what happens when giant robots are set lose on their home town. The entire thing is below and it took two years to complete, well done!

[Via Scifi Latino]

Singing Head Band

This is what all beat boxing should be like. All of it. Check out Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratory footage.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

FISH!

It's been a while since I posted some sexy nature-centric news over here. And while looking for new inspirational animal friendly films to watch at 3 AM, I found this beauty. This is Kuroshio Sea the 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world, which is in Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, Japan.

The main tank called the "Kuroshio Sea" holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world's second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.

Do yourself a favor and watch it in HD. The song is "Please Don't Go" from Barcelona.

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

The Power Beaming Challenge was founded in 2005 (and seeded with $2 million in prize money by NASA) to discover the remotely-powered robot that could best ascend a cable as quickly and safely as possible; this year's winner, built by a team from Seattle's LaserMotive, was the first ever to complete the climb at a speed greater than 2 meters per second, and therefore the first to win one of the Challenge's two prizes (The remaining $1.1 million is for any robot that can climb faster than 5 meters per second; the top speed of LaserMotive's robot was 3.9 meters a second).

While the space elevator dream remains a long-term dream, NASA say that there are much closer goals for wireless power beaming, including powering solar powered lunar vehicles when they're in areas where solar energy is unavailable.

'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize [New Scientist]

The Guardian reports that scientists from the University of Bristol placed cobalt-chromium nanoparticles on one side of a cellular barrier specifically grown for the experiment, with human fibroblast cells on the other side of the barrier. Despite the nanoparticles not actually coming into contact with the fibroblasts, the fibroblast DNA was, on average, "10 times more damaged" than under control conditions as a result of the experiment; according to Patrick Case, who led the tests:

When we measured the damage on the other side of the barrier, to our great surprise, not only did we see damage on the other side of the barrier but we saw as much damage as if we'd not had the barrier at all and had put the materials in contact with the cells underneath.

The results raise questions not only about how damaging nanotechnology may be in practice, but also about the validity of the experiment. In addition to being unsure how the test results would transfer to a human body, Case admitted that the tests also used an amount of nanoparticles thousands of times higher than anyone is likely to come into contact with in reality:

We used high doses of them because we wanted to make sure that the dose we used would cause damage to cells if the cells were exposed.

So what we're left with is the possibility that nanoparticles may be damaging to human DNA, and that they also don't need to come into physical contact with the DNA in order to damage them... But we don't know for sure. Am I the only one not comforted by this?

Nanoparticles could damage DNA at a distance, study suggests [Guardian.co.uk]

Scientists have long thought that the Earth wasn't formed with a lot of organic matter, due to the planet's proximity to the sun, but were unsure where we got the necessary chemical compounds for life to thrive on the planet. Now scientists believe that the answers may lie on meteors and comets passing through Earth's atmosphere.

New Scientist reports on experiments carried out by Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and Seiji Sugita of the University of Tokyo, Japan, which suggest that, although organic compounds on the objects would get burned up on atmospheric entry, that's not the end of the story. Schultz:

The idea in the past has been, 'Any of this stuff coming through the atmosphere would be heated to the point where it would get wasted... What this new work did was to show that we might actually revive these compounds.

What Schultz and Sugita believe is that the flashes resulting from objects burning up on entry produces cyanide, which they believe could have reacted with the Earth's already existant compounds to form more complex, carbon-containing molecules that would ultimately prove essential to Earth-based life. It's not as dramatic as cylons and humans landing on our planet, but it's a possible answer to a long-standing question... and an appropriately cosmic origin for life on the planet.

Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes? [New Scientist]

According to NASA, whose researchers first wrote about this lingering smog bank on Oct. 30:

A temperature inversion may be responsible for the build up of pollution over eastern China. Normally, air cools with altitude, but occasionally, a layer of cool air will be trapped beneath a layer of warm air. Since the cool air is more dense than the air above it, the two layers don't mix and pollutants build up in the cool air near Earth's surface.

Temperature inversions develop most often during the winter, when long, cool nights chill the ground. The cold land cools the air nearest the ground, leaving the air at higher altitudes warmer. The two layers of air do not easily mix, and the temperature inversion can last for days if winds are calm.

So far it has lasted for more than a week. Is this the future of weather?

via NASA

A group of researchers in the United States decided to do an experiment with water striders, in which they observed the mating success of prudent, "nice" males versus aggressive, "psychopathic" males. The latter group tried often to mate with the females very aggressively, and in previous experiments they had the most reproductive success. But these scientists discovered that the success of the psychopaths depended on very specific laboratory conditions

It turned out that other studies of sex among water striders had kept the population contained in a limited area, where females had access to very few males. When the researchers opened up the insects' habitat, allowing the females to roam freely, they discovered that the less aggressive males attracted the highest number of mates.

According to a release about the research, published yesterday afternoon in Science:

"The presence of psychopaths dramatically reduced the productivity of the population," [biologist David Sloan] Wilson said. "When all the males were gentlemen, the females laid about three times more eggs than they did when all the males were psychopaths. And yet within each group the psychopaths were doing better than the gentlemen. How do the gentlemen persist if they're disadvantaged within the group?"

Once the females could move between groups, the researchers had their answer. [Researcher Omar Tonsi] Eldakar and Michael J. Dlugos, then also a Binghamton graduate student, devised a wading pool equipped with special doors that could restrict movement between groups or allow the insects to move freely.

"When they opened the doors, the females would leave whenever a psychopath came around," Wilson said. "The whole thing resulted in a heterogeneity in which the females were clustered with the gentlemen. It's the movement of individuals that creates these differences between groups that favor nonaggressive males."

Who knows how much research into sexual selection has been flawed because researchers forgot the crucial ingredient of female freedom?

Ultimately, what's interesting about this study is that it shows why isolated populations might engage in a different mode of sexual selection than a free-ranging population that has a lot of contact with outside groups.

via Science

CERN is reporting that the Large Hadron Collider has been shutdown yet again after a piece of bread fell into the outdoor machinery. That part of the LHC's circuit normally operates at 1.9 Kelvin, but, thanks to the bread bomb, rose to 8 Kelvin, nearly causing the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets to cease superconducting. The incident could have crippled the LHC yet again — and caused significant physical damage to the lab had the LHC been fully operational at the time — but CERN claims that it won't delay the full reactivation of the device, scheduled for later this month.

Technicians believe that a passing bird dropped the bread into the machinery, just the LHC's latest run-in with Murphy's Law.

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber [The Register via Popular Science]

According to New Scientist:

The magma inside the volcano did not reach the surface and erupt as a fountain of lava – instead, it was diverted into the continental rift underground. The magma cooled into a wedge-shaped "dike" that was then uplifted, rupturing the surface and creating a 500-metre-long, 60-metre-deep crack . . . Eventually it could reach the east coast of Ethiopia and fill up with seawater. "At some point, if that spreading and rifting continues, then that area will be flooded," says Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study.

Ebinger says this won't happen any time soon – it would take around 4 million years for the crack to reach the size of the Red Sea.

[via New Scientist]

To boost sales of a product called OP-1 Implant with a bone-setting filler called Calstrux. The mixture was not approved by the FDA, and in fact OP-1 was only supposed to be used on a rare bone disease, not on people who simply needed to have their bones knit together fast. Surgeons were urged by Stryker to shape the OP-1/Calstrux paste into a "tootsie roll" or "vienna sausage" shape and implant it. Unfortunately, the substance often broke down and drifted through patients' bodies. Bids of sprouting bone that looked like "oatmeal" or "white sesame seeds" would appear far from the site of injury where the substance had been implanted.

According to NPR:

When those wayward bits bit landed in places they shouldn't have, bone sprouted and, in some patients, had to be surgically removed. According to the papers, then-president of the company, Mark Philip, touted the combination at sales meetings as "perfect" even while knowing it wasn't FDA approved and that the company was receiving complaints about nasty side effects.

The indictment say the president and sales team continued to promote the illegal mixture for two more years, until Feb. 2008, without informing surgeons of the side effects to keep sales rolling.

Stryker and some of its partners have been indicted on several counts of wire fraud and conspiracy.

via NPR (thanks, Kle!)

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]

Many dinosaur species are experiencing a second extermination — death by reclassification. Thanks to new technologies that allow paleontologists to analyze the tissues in dinosaur fossils, many paleontologists are discovering that dinosaurs we once thought of as separate species are actually part of the same species, simply at different stages of their development. For example the Nanotyrannus, supposedly a diminutive cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex is probably just a juvenile version of the latter species. Similarly, the Torosaurus and the Dracorex hogwartsia have been stricken from the books, as they are likely members of previously discovered species.

In this week's issue of PLoS, Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman estimates that a third of dinosaur species currently listed are actually members of other speicies. So how were these creatures mislabeled for so long? As paleontologists are better able to determine the growth stage of dinosaur fossils, they are finding that many species retain their juvenile characteristics longer than previously believed, and as dinosaurs age, their characteristics undergo drastic changes.

So, Hogwarts may be losing its dinosaur, but its parent species, Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, is gaining a child.

New Analyses Of Dinosaur Growth May Wipe Out One-third Of Species [Science Daily]

New Scientist reports that a team of scientists at University of Wyoming in Laramie extracted messenger RNA from glue-secreting cells of the glands of golden orb-web spiders, and used them to identify the genes they believe are responsible for the creation of the super-sticky solution. Using this information, the team - led by Omer Choresh - hopes to create a synthetic adhesives for use in surgeries and other medical situations. Although, personally, I'm still pulling for that "web-shooters" option.

Sticky future for the spider suture [New Scientist]

Continuing the week of Halloween Smackdown (and classic Halloween costume favorites), we're bringing in the Misfits Of Science. No, not the shortlived 1980s TV show, but characters like Frankenstein's Monster, Mister Hyde and Seth Brundle - The classic idea of science overreaching, ignoring morality with terrible consequences that happen to include a monster we can all root for - I mean, against. Well, kind of. What happens when witchcraft comes up against something that spits in the face of all that's natural?

Yup, we're splitting the poll today, giving Mutations and Creations their own chances to duke it out with Witches, not only because Frankenstein's Monster is a different beast than Mister Hyde in many ways, but also because we're thinking that maybe the completely unnatural creations have some kind of edge over the mutated, in some entirely imaginary "What if magic is more effective against that which is naturally supposed to exist" sense. But what do we know about magic? We lost track of The Lord Of The Rings movies long before Cate Blanchett showed up.

Tomorrow: The final showdown! Today's winner versus the ghouls you've been expecting all along! Until then, the poll remains open until midnight PST tonight, so vote vote vote.

Over at Astrobiology magazine, Aaron Gronstal describes new scientific work that led to the creation of this map. What you see here is the landmass which included a land bridge over the Bering Strait - the same bridge that allowed animals and humans to wander from Northern Europe into North America without being hindered by the Arctic Sea. The timeframe here is the Pleiocene and Pleistocene Eras - between 5.3 million to 12,000 years ago - when ice sheets and glaciers covered most of the northern hemisphere. And yet at the same time, some of the iciest parts of today's warmer world were at that time ice-free and full of life. How did that happen?

Gronstal sums up the research:

Temperatures were still low in Beringia during these epochs, but a lack of moisture due to the rainshadow of the surrounding mountain ranges prevented large-scale formation of ice. As the authors [of the new study] put it, "The interior of Yukon and Alaska was cold enough to support ice sheets but too dry for extensive glaciation." Because of this, Beringia was a key location for life during the Pleistocene, when the Earth's climate fluctuated between ice ages and glaciers often covered large portions of the globe.

As the Earth's climate varied, so did sea levels. This ebb and flow of the sea exposed a land-bridge across the Bering Straight between Alaska and Siberia. Not only was this an important route for the migration of animals between the continents of Asia and North America, it also expanded the ice-free land mass of Beringia. This provided a large area that was relatively rich in food – which was a lifesaver for those struggling to survive in the Earth's frozen North. Beringia was by no means a tropical paradise for life, but the cold, wind-swept desert was an important ecological refuge for plants and animals when glaciation of the Earth was at its peak.

This map is a perfect demonstration of how complicated the results are when we see massive weather shifts on Earth. Some areas that were uninhabitable become habitable in unforeseen ways.

via Astrobiology

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]

I love this news report about the K.C. Space Pirates, and "Maryann," their climbing robot, which uses solar panels, and energy beamed from the ground via a laser beam shot through a special telescope, to climb half a mile up, on a cord attached to a helicopter hovering overhead. The D.I.Y. enthusiasm among these part-time innovators is breathtaking, and you gotta love an inventor who says things like:

So we'll be beaming more energy to our robot in this competition than has ever been beamed to a remote moving device ever. We'll be setting a variety of world records as we proceed in this competition.

This $2 million prize is for wireless power transmission, the second half of the Space Elevator Games — the first half being a "Tether Challenge" to create a material strong enough to carry materials into space.

Here's the somewhat cheesy news report on the Space Pirates and their quest for the $2 million space "booty":

Space Elevator image above by FlyingSinger on Flickr. [Fox4KC.com]

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