5/31/2009 PERMALINK
A major breakthrough in regenerative medicine and lifespan extension
A study led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, appears to be a major breakthrough in regenerative medicine and lifespan extension. The study proves in principle that a human genetic disease can be cured using a combination of gene therapy and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology. Although several studies have demonstrated the efficacy of this approach in mice, the Salk study offers the first proof that this technology can work in human cells. "We haven't cured a human being, but we have cured a cell," said the study's leader Juan-Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, Ph.D. "In theory we could transplant it into a human and cure the disease."

5/31/2009 PERMALINK
OLED screens that last for a lifetime
DuPont Displays today announced it has developed a new organic light emitting diode (OLED) materials technology, which has led to substantial performance gains for printable OLED light-emitting materials. A DuPont Gen 3 green OLED material achieved a record lifetime of over 1,000,000 hours -- 114 years in continuous use.

5/31/2009 PERMALINK
The Astounding World of the Future The Astounding World of the Future Best Short Film Award from the New York Comedy Film Festival.

5/31/2009 PERMALINK
The anti-aging and other benefits of fasting Researchers have previously reported that regular fasting might provoke a cell stress state similar to the state caused by a calorie restricted diet that appears to extend lifespans in animal models. Now a new study reports that fasting prior to cancer chemotherapy treatment may significantly enhance the cancer-killing effects of the drugs, while protecting healthy cells from damage. Starvation induces a protective shield around healthy cells, allowing them to tolerate a much higher dose of chemotherapy.

The results showed starving laboratory mice for two days prior to chemotherapy treatment protected them from potentially toxic high doses of the drug, and they gained back the weight they lost after treatment. Researchers say cancer chemotherapy can kill as many healthy cells as cancerous ones, but inducing temporary starvation increases the cells' resistance to stress, which may allow doctors to use higher doses of current cancer chemotherapy treatments to make them more effective.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Mice engineered with human language gene aren't talking yet, but do squeak differently
Researchers have genetically engineered a strain of mice to carry the human version of a gene called FOXP2, which has previously been linked to speech.

In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, says [Wolfgang Enard, a scientists at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the work.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Isaac Asimov on building a better belief system
From Isaac Asimov's The Roving Mind (1997), page 43:

"Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? - in ancient astronauts? - in the Bermuda triangle? - in life after death?"

No, I reply. No, no, no, and again no.

One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out 'Don't you believe in anything?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

The first step towards creating a better civilization 2.0, which can let us escape the ignorance, war, persecution, deprivation, disease and suffering of our current civilization, is to adopt a better belief system.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Breakthrough in the quantum control of light
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have demonstrated a breakthrough in the quantum control of photons, the energy quanta of light, that represents a significant advance in quantum computing and other applications. UCSB physics researchers Max Hofheinz, John Martinis, and Andrew Cleland used a superconducting electronic circuit known as a Josephson phase qubit to prepare highly unusual quantum states using microwave-frequency photons. The image shows a "quantum state with zero, three
and six photons simultaneously (theory on left, experiment on right)." A quantum computer based on this breakthrough might be able to quickly break any normal encryption scheme, like those used to protect bank transactions.

In the experiments, photons were stored in a microwave cavity, a "light trap" in which the light bounces back and forth as if between two mirrors. The research shows that states can be created in which a light trap simultaneously has different numbers of photons stored in it. Measuring the quantum state by counting how many photons are stored forces the trap to "decide" how many there are; but prior to counting, the light trap exists in a quantum superposition, with all three outcomes possible.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Flipping on your brain's addiction switch without drugs
When someone becomes dependent on drugs or alcohol, the brain's pleasure center gets hijacked, disrupting the normal functioning of its reward circuitry. Researchers investigating this addiction switch have now implicated a naturally occurring protein, a dose of which allowed them to get rats hooked with no drugs at all. "If we can understand how the brain's circuitry changes in association with drug abuse, it could potentially suggest ways to medically counteract the effects of dependency," said Scott Steffensen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University who co-authored the study.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Humanoid bot learning to show emotions for better human interface
Japan has a serious labor shortage that raises the question of how all the elderly in their rapidly aging population can be taken care of. A lot of research is being done into using bots for this purpose, and it has found that bots able to display emotions are more readily accepted by the elderly. Here is a clip of the latest effort at designing a humanoid bot that can show emotions recognizable to humans.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
First 'intelligent personal assistant' bot to run on iPhone platform
Siri, a San Jose company, announced Wednesday that it would offer an "intelligent agent" for Apple's iPhone that would, the company said, be able to find movie theaters, book restaurant reservations and airline flights, buy from online retail sites and even answer trivia questions like "How many calories are in a banana," all by understanding spoken commands. Dag Kittlaus, CEO of Siri, which emerged from stealth mode to announce the product, said, "The future of search isn't search. It is a conversation with someone you trust."

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
CNET calls Microsoft's new Bing search bot 'better than Google'
Microsoft has taken the wraps off Bing, a new search bot formerly code-named Kumo, designed to replace Microsoft's current search bot, Live Search. It's a solid improvement and says CNET's review: Bing beats Google in important areas. It's surprisingly competitive with Google. Starting on June 3, we're told, Bing will be Microsoft's new default search.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
New fast, portable, ultra-sensitive virus detector Imagine being able to detect in just a few minutes whether someone is infected with a virus. This has now become a reality, thanks to a new ultra-sensitive virus detector that has been developed by Ostendum, a spin-off company of the University of Twente. The company has just completed the first prototype and expects to be able to introduce the first version of the detector onto the market in late 2010. Not only does the detector carry out measurements many times faster than do standard techniques, it is also portable, so it can be used anywhere.

5/29/2009 PERMALINK
Connect your computer to a cloud of others to create an artificial brain
Can a cloud of computers create an artificial brain? That's the basic reasoning behind Intelligence Realm's Artificial Intelligence project. By reverse engineering the brain through a simulation spread out over many different personal computers, Intelligence Realm hopes to create an AI from the ground-up, one neuron at a time. The first waves of simulation are already proving successful, with over 14,000 computers used and 740 billion neurons modeled. Singularity Hub has an interview with the project's leader, Ovidiu Anghelidi.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Biomedical engineers teach bacteria to count Professor James J. Collins and colleagues have wired a new sequence of genes that allow the microbes to count discrete events, opening the door for a host of potential applications, which could include drug delivery and sensing environmental hazards. "This was probably the major application still to be addressed within synthetic biology: Can you count discrete events?" said Collins. "And now we've come up with two different designs to do this."

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Human 'junk DNA' found to actually let you adapt to environmental changes better VIB researchers linked to K.U.Leuven and Harvard University have now shown that stretches of DNA previously believed to be useless 'junk' DNA play a vital role in the evolution of our genome. The researchers found that unstable pieces of junk DNA help tuning gene activity and enable organisms to more quickly adapt to changes in their environments. 'Most people do not realize that all our genes only comprise about 3% of the total human genome. The rest is basically one large black box', says Kevin Verstrepen, heading the research team. 'Why do we have this DNA, what is it doing?'.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
How your brain is able to focus its attention Just as our world buzzes with distractions -- from phone calls to e-mails to tweets -- the neurons in our brain are bombarded with messages. Research has shown that when we pay attention, some of these neurons begin firing in unison, like a chorus rising above the noise. Now, a study by MIT neuroscientists found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the brain's planning center, fire in unison and send signals to the visual cortex to do the same, generating high-frequency waves that oscillate between these distant brain regions like a vibrating spring. These waves, also known as gamma oscillations, have long been associated with cognitive states like attention, learning, and consciousness.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Cloud cuts paper -- readers trust blogs over newspapers According to research by a Brigham Young University political scientist, people who closely follow both political blogs and traditional news media tend to believe the content on blogs is more accurate.

Bloggers hold the edge with shared readers on the trust factor.

- 30 percent said blogs are more accurate

- 8 percent said traditional media are more accurate

- 40 percent said they’re about equal

- 21 percent were not sure

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Scientists demonstrate all-fiber quantum logic
A team of physicists and engineers have demonstrated all-fiber quantum logic. The only quantum technology in practical use today is quantum cryptography and is currently limited in the distance over which secure communication may occur. Image is of a photonic crystal fiber.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Earth impact point of space storms can be predicted from magnetic blast waves
Using data from NASA's THEMIS mission, a team of University of Alberta researchers has pinpointed the impact epicenter of an earthbound space storm as it crashes into the atmosphere, and given an advance warning of its arrival. The team's study reveals that magnetic blast waves can be used to pinpoint and predict the location where space storms dissipate their massive amounts of energy. These storms can dump the equivalent of 50 gigawatts of power, or the output of 10 of the world's largest power stations, into Earth's atmosphere.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Global Catastrophic Risks Conference talks now available free in cloud Clips of many of the talks given at the recent Future of Humanity Institute's Global Catastrophic Risks Conference are now freely available in the cloud.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Bright future from lab advances or catastrophe from politicos spendthrift ways?
The White House and Congressional Budget Office projections of the future Federal deficits (see chart above) are completely insane to start with, but when you add in off budget items like the trillions the Federal Reserve is spending on bailouts, the mind rebels at the magnitude of the fiscal irresponsibility.

All in, the clowns in Washington will spend approximately $4 for every $1 they collect in taxes this fiscal year, and they will have to print most of the excess, because they can't afford to let interest rates rise enough to allow them to borrow that much legitimately. Such a rise in interest rates would drive up our nation's debt service costs beyond our capacity to ever pay.

BEST CASE scenario: the $5 Subway special becomes the $50 Subway special over the next five or six years.

WORST CASE scenario: a much faster and more complete collapse of the dollar's buying power, similar to the one Germany experienced shown in the image below of a family getting ready for a trip to the grocery store.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
How immune cells 'remember' how to fight a pathogen Immunology researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how immune cells, known as cytotoxic T lymphocytes, or CTLs, kill cells infected with pathogens and provide long-term protection against pathogens by "remembering" which proteins the pathogen makes. Targeting the ability of these CTLs to remember the pathogen is one way vaccines protect against infection.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Acid blockers decrease your body's ability to fend off disease An estimated 33,000 deaths a year from hospital-acquired pneumonia may result from the practice of routinely prescribing proton pump inhibitors and other acid-suppressing drugs during hospitalization to patients who don't need them. Use of acid-reducing drugs was associated with a 30% increased risk for developing pneumonia in a newly reported study.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Genetic engineering breakthrough -- glow monkeys
Last month in Japan, a very special marmoset monkey was born--one who inherited from his parents not only their marmoset DNA, but also a jellyfish gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP) that makes both the animal and his parents glow green under fluorescent light. The monkey parents aren't the first primates to fluoresce, but they are the first to pass a genetically engineered trait to their offspring.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Brain activation can predict the strategies people use to make risky decisions When faced with a difficult decision, the human brain calls upon multiple neural systems that code for different sorts of behaviors and strategies. The research provides intriguing insight into the mechanisms that help the human brain rise to the formidable challenge of adaptive decision making in the real world. Watching people's brains in real time as they handle a set of decision-making problems can reveal how different each person's strategy can be, according to neuroscientists at the Duke University Medical Center. "What sort of strategy people tended to use could be predicted, surprisingly, by how their brain responded to rewards: if there were large responses to monetary reward in a brain area called the ventral striatum, that person tended to simplify decision problems to only consider winning or losing."
"Using studies like this to build a better understanding of how our brains represent our decision strategies may someday allow researchers to use someone's personal traits -- say, an adolescent with high impulsivity, but ongoing depression -- to predict the decisions that he or she will make," Huettel said.

5/28/2009 PERMALINK
Move over rover - bots will soon take over as man's best friend
The evolution of chatbots, artificial entities designed to have interesting or entertaining conversations with us -- also named 'conversational agents' -- now has the support of a worldwide community for chatbot developers and users. Business interest in chatbots has been growing rapidly in recent months, as the economic downturn has businesses seeking to cut payroll costs in their customer service centers.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
As globalization connects us more, natural selection will favor more virulent and dangerous pathogens
Our connected, globalized world is giving viruses and other human parasites the edge over us, new research led by Geoff Wild of the University of Western Ontario concludes. "As human activity makes the world more connected," warns Professor Wild, "natural selection will favor more virulent and dangerous parasites."

The old order's globalization strategy makes humanity far more vulnerable to an extinction level biological event, either natural or man made.

Talk to any bio-weapon expert, and they will inevitably tell you that the unleashing of an incredibly virulent new bio-engineered bug is only a matter of time. New technology is just making it so easy to produce such things that it is bound to happen.

The only way to survive such a virus engineered to be especially deadly and contagious, would be to isolate your community completely for months. However, with the old order's infrastructure, designed to deliver us food from 2,000 miles away using fuel obtained from 12,000 miles away, even if we avoided the bug, we'd all starve.

Civilization 2.0 infrastructure should be multi-nucleated and Cloud based. Sharing design data with the Cloud, globally, while produce goods from that design data, locally, gives a civilization the resilience to survive that is completely lacking in our current, obsolete old order.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
Americans have experience massive climate change before, including a 15 foot rise in sea level
From 6,000 to 600 years ago, a 15 foot sea level rise due to receding glaciation flooded America's coasts and intensified hurricanes. But not having stupidly built lots of immovable infrastructure right on those coast, like modern Americans have done, the civilization of the ancient Caribbeans was resilient enough to adapt and thrive despite the radically altered climatic reality.

The 5 meter (15 foot) sea level rise was also "marked by large variation in annual rainfall and periodic intensification of hurricane activity," explains Dr Jago Cooper, of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. Yet the civilization of the ancient Caribbeans was resilient enough to cope with all those radical changes and continue to thrive.

With ice cores and sediment studies clearly showing that massive climate shifts have happened many times in our planet's past, routinely melting all the summer ice on the planet and raising coastal sea levels to levels that will flood all the world's coastal cities, why are we still building most of our most vital infrastructure in coastal zones where eventual destruction is assured?

We need to adopt a far more resilient, science-savvy and adaptable civilization model or one day an event is certain to come along that will cause the old order's aging, rigid, and obsolete model to fail catastrophically, sweeping our civilization into the dust bin of history and potentially even our species into extinction.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
The Boxhome rustic/modern urban cave/living pod
Boxhome is a small, residential project in Oslo by Norwegian architects Rintala Eggertsson, who describe the 19 square meter project as an 'urban cave.' It feature timber frame construction, clad in aluminum, with a different species of wood covering the interior walls of each room.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
New rotors could help develop nanoscale generators
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a molecular structure that could help create current-generating machines at the nanoscale. In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, scientists have investigated the rotation of molecules on a fixed surface to understand how they may help in the development of future rotor-based machinery at nanoscale level.

The research focused on rotating magnetic fields, which play an important part in machines, such as electric motors and generators. The researchers used a gold metal surface to anchor phtalocyanine molecules, which have a metallic center, in a large array. The anchor point - a single gold atom on top of the gold surface, and attached to a nitrogen atom of the molecule - allowed the molecules to rotate just off-center.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
Capturing the birth of a synapse - receptor neuron membranes like 'molecular velcro'
"We've caught two neuronal cells in the act of forming a synapse," said principle investigator Philip Washbourne, professor of biology at the University of Oregon. He describes the cell-adhesion neuroligin proteins on the membranes of receptor neurons as "molecular Velcro."


As shown in the image, receptors are needed for synapses to become functional. Neuroligin (red) on the surface of the cell is tethered to neurotransmitter receptors (mauve) that reside in intracellular vesicles. This enables both synaptic components to move together to a site of synapse formation.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
Comparison of the newly complete mouse genome to the human genome
Of the approximate 37,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome, a first comparison by Michael Zhang and his colleagues at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory found that 30,000 human genes are similar to those found in the new mouse genome. The sequencing of the mouse genome is a major milestone in modern biology as it is the only mammalian genome, other than human, to have been sequenced. The mouse genome will help the research effort to interpret the human genome sequence because the mouse carries a very similar set of genes to humans. For many human diseases, major breakthroughs have come from the study of mouse disease models.

5/27/2009 PERMALINK
Seasteading Institute announces winners of this year's design contest The old order's nation states seem a terribly flawed system. They seem to be forever spying on and infringing the rights of their citizens. They engage in costly and unnecessary conflicts and spend fortunes on things like research into bioweapons with the power to cause the extinction of our species. The services nation states deliver to citizens are routinely of inferior quality. And their efficiency is so abysmal that they turn their citizens into virtual slaves of the state by forcing them to pay taxes much higher than the 33% of their crops feudal lords took from their serfs. Moreover, instead of serving the common good, legislation and regulations often seem more targeted at serving the needs of a political connected elite, at the expense of most citizens.


Some, like the Seasteading Institure, think the best way to create a civilization 2.0 that treats humans with respect, is to avoiding the nation state model entirely by homesteading outside their jurisdiction either in outer space or on the high seas.


The images shown are from the more interesting of the winners of this year's Seasteading Institute annual design competition. The concept was created by a 22 years-old architecture student named Anthony Ling. And it illustrates an extremely interesting idea for maximizing human freedom by injecting real competition into the administration of our cities. Numerous proprietary communities of containerized living pods could be set up at sea. Community operators would be forced to provide highly efficient administration and real value for the fees paid by inhabitants, because if they failed to do so, inhabitants could just have their pods detached and moved to another better operated community.

The potential effectiveness of making governance truly competitive can be seen in the fierce competition between RV communities in places like Arizona and Florida. The highly mobile living pod inhabitants that are their customers must be given real value for their money. Imposition of the high fees or ridiculous and oppressive regulations, found in many communities with more captive populations, is made impossible by the mobility of the inhabitants.

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
A simple, extremely accurate test for determining your child's future success at age 4 to 6
We reported previously on a series of experiments where 4 to 6 year old kids were given a marshmallow and promised a second one if they could not eat the first one for 20 minutes (see Could tweaking the 'marshmallow gene' be the key to your child's future success?).


Here are additional details and some fascinating video of the kids trying to resist eating the marshmallow in this classic 'delayed gratification' experiment. In this repeat of the original experiment, kids with the capacity to wait, were once again found to be 100% successful later on in life. While kids that could not hold out, were typically much less successful. When it comes to a predictor of success for your 4 to 6 year old, the marshmallow delay gratification experiment is 100% accurate. This may well be learned behavior, but wouldn't it be fascinating if genetic differences were involved. So that a simple gene mod could boost a kid into a lifetime of success.

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
Activated stem cells trying to fix damaged tissues can cause cancer
The photo above shows a lung airway after a severe chemical injury that wiped out the normally present cells and caused the body to activate stem cell mediated repairs (clonal patches). The stem cells that respond after this severe injury appear to have been a source of rapidly dividing cells that lead to lung cancer, according to a team of American and British researchers.

The researchers used a unique whole-lung imaging method to examine and identify the location of stem cells in the lung tissue of mice, and determine the role they play in both healthy and damaged mouse lungs. They found that, while the stem cells don't appear to be involved in the normal maintenance of healthy or moderately injured lungs, they do play a vital role in repairing severely damaged lungs and cancer can result.

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
Why two billion people around the world are learning English
Answer: Opportunity. English has become the world's second language. The language of the Cloud, with which we can all communicate to find solutions to our common challenges. So many people have learned English in China, that this year China will become the world's largest English speaking country. Watch a TED talk by Jay Walker exploring the extraordinary power of the English phenomena, where good English teachers can draw stadium-sized classes.

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
Pentagon seeks to close growing 'hacker gap' with China and Russia High school and college hackers, Uncle Sam wants you and is willing to teach you how to steal data from the Cloud. The Pentagon's Cyber Challenge initiative creates new national competitions for high school and college students designed to create better cyber-warrior skills. These skills include things like mounting denial of service attacks, defending databases, stealing databases, and tracing down others that have stolen databases.

The Pentagon sees the program as necessary to close the 'hacker gap' that has developed in America as compared to Russia and China, both of which have mounted cloud attacks against organizations and countries that have displeasing their leaders.

Of course, as has happened often in the past, this program could well come back to bite us. Like when the CIA former program to train many future members of Al-Qaeda in terror tactics to help them fight the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, came home to roost at the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11/2001. Or when the F.B.I. discovered that the anthrax used to attack prominent members of the media and prominent Democrat members of Congress came from the Pentagon's own top bioweapon lab.

So now all the world's most powerful nation states appear to be competing to see who can train the most database stealing hackers. I wonder how much damage this will do to our civilization in the years ahead.

Military initiatives of this kind come back to harm and kill the citizens of the nation that created them so routinely, that nation state military/security apparatchiks even have a name for this effect. They call it blowback.

Having already helped to destroy the World Trade Center, blowback has proven itself to be a formidable force. Perhaps the training these kids are being given in stealing financial databases, might finish off what is left of the world's financial system and put the final nail in the coffin of the corrupt old order and its elites.

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
The engines of extinction - massive bot armies really are on the way
The US military's use of bots to turn the tide in Iraq's urban warfare theater has opened eyes all around the world to the possibilities of military bots. Now with Japan about to drop its restrictions on arms exports, an army of some of the best bot engineers on the planet is gearing up to cover the world with low-cost bot warriors. Companies in China and Korea are also moving to take advantage of the massive opportunity for profit that converting the world's militaries over from human to bot warriors represents. As American military research makes bot warriors ever more autonomous and formidable, Asian manufacturers will flood the world with low-cost warrior bots that improve on those cutting-edge but overly expensive designs. The burning question is can we organize a sufficiently resilient cloud-based Civilization 2.0, before the nation states and other engines of extinction of the old order bring about the demise of our species?

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
Free cloud course on creating iPhone apps is downloaded by over a million students
In a stunning example of how broadly and cheaply knowledge can be disseminated by offering courses in the cloud. Free videos of Stanford University's wildly popular course on creating applications for the iPhone and iPod touch have now been downloaded over a million times. All of the million downloads have come in just seven weeks, since the course began on April 1. Cloud, not campus, represents the future of education. See also: Is the campus obsolete - students learn better from podcast lectures than live ones

5/26/2009 PERMALINK
Breakthrough in fab of plastic, organic transistors
Some time ago researchers discovered a way to print large, flexible arrays of cheap, plastic transistors from organic materials that is much cheaper than silicon electronics. However, the performance of these organic electronics was not consistent enough for commercial use until Zhenan Bao, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University, found a way to improve it by several orders of magnitude.


"In our process we can create organic semiconducting microwires (shown in first image) with the most desirable electronic properties, flow a dispersed solution of them into a stencil, or mask, and then stamp them onto a pattern of electrodes," said Professor Bao. "Because these wires can be precisely aligned with high density, the result is high-performance transistors."

5/25/2009 PERMALINK
Why does brain plaque cause dementia in humans but not in other primates? Although the brains of other species of primates seem to get clogged with the same protein plaques that causes serious dementia in humans, only humans experience the really devastating neurological disorders like Alzheimer's. Researchers looking for the reason why this is true report having found that a "tag" molecule used to track plaque build-up, latches easily onto plaques in human brains but not in those of apes and monkeys. This suggests that there is some basic structural difference between the two types of plaque.

5/25/2009 PERMALINK
Lots more tools in a nano-engineer's tool box, but you still need a microscope to see it We have covered each of the breakthroughs in turn, but ScienceNews has an overview on the growing size of the nano-engineer's tool box that you may wish to read.

Scientists harness charge, magnetism and even DNA to guide matter's assembly into new materials.

5/24/2009 PERMALINK
Live anywhere in your customizable mobile living pod
The capability to live well anywhere, increases your resilience -- essential in our rapidly evolving times. People want to be mobile but also have the ability to relax in their own personal living pod.



The Mehrzeller mobile living pod offers you the ability to set up your own unique design. The configuration is generated by a computer using the customer's inputs, and then the final design is done by parameters from the architects to yield an attractive and practicable result.

5/24/2009 PERMALINK
'Blue brain' project to build a functional model of the brain About thirty Spanish researchers are participating in the international Blue Brain project. The project's aim is to build a functional model of the mammalian brain through computer simulations. Spain's project leaders are Javier de Felipe and UPM School of Computing professor Jose Maria Pena.

A nanotechnology microscope to be set up at the Centre of Biomedical Technology based at the UPM's Montegancedo Campus will be used for brain studies for the first time.
The use of this microscope signifies a major technological advance. The nanotech microscope outputs samples of brain tissue in just two hours, something that using other technologies, it would take two technicians a year to do.

5/23/2009 PERMALINK
New York Times article: The Coming Superbrain Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA and from Silicon Valley companies like Google as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.'s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly. (Warning: link is to clueless old media site requiring registration.)

5/23/2009 PERMALINK
Climate activists talk about keeping human hands off, but really seek scientifically controlled climate
Many climate activists seem to think that if human influences could just be eliminated from the Earth's climate, it would naturally remain as moderate as the 20th century's climate. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

From studies of ice core samples and sediments, climate scientists and geologists know that during most of the last billion years (see chart), the Earth was far warmer than it is today. So warmer that often no permanent ice existed anywhere on the planet.

Only during four unusually cool periods, labeled ice ages, has summer ice existed at our planet's polls. Ice ages have occurred between about 800 and 600 million years ago, between about 460 and 430 million years ago, between about 350 and 250 million years ago, and from 4 million years ago right up until today.

We are currently living in an ice age that has had at least 60 glacial advances and retreats during the last 2 million years. While the glaciers are currently in retreat, scientists say we are still living in an ice age period with temperatures that are well below the average for the last billion years.

Earth's natural climate swings between much warmer periods when all the polar ice melts, which will flood all our coastal cities. And ice age periods when glaciers expand and retreat, which will bury interior cities like Chicago, Berlin and Moscow, under thousands of feet of ice. The climate we think of as normal, is actually a rare state that has only been in place for a tiny percentage of the last billion years. And unless we develop sufficient scientific understanding to effectively regulate our planet's climate, it won't stay that way.


The picture above is of an ice sheet in Antarctica that shows how Chicago, Berlin and Moscow will one day look, unless humans develop the tools necessary to actively regulate our climate.

5/23/2009 PERMALINK
Mitochondrial, the power plant of your cells, imaged by researchers
Because of the diffraction resolution barrier, optical microscopes have so far failed in visualizing the mitochondrial cristae, that is, the folds of the inner membrane of this 200 to 400 nm diameter sized tubular organelle. Realizing a 30 nm isotropic subdiffraction resolution in isoSTED fluorescence nanoscopy, a team at the Max Planck Institute led by Stefan W. Hell,has imaged these essential structures in the mitochondria of intact cells. We find a pronounced heterogeneity in the cristae arrangements even within individual mitochondrial tubules.

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Big brother to track citizens by cell phone GPS to 'prevent pandemic'
Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will soon begin testing a mobile phone-based GPS tracking system that constantly monitors each individual's location and sends text alerts to participants if they cross paths with anyone who is later identified as a flu victim. The proposed system relies on mobile phone providers to constantly track the subjects' geographical locations and keep chronological records of their movements in a database.

It comes into the open. This capability exists, so don't be surprised to one day learn that your government has been secretly capturing and storing all the GPS location data from your cell phone.

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Living pod designed to operate on solar power
Alchemy Architects' WeeHouse features lighting and appliances sufficiently energy efficient to allow this living pod to operate off the grid with an add-on solar energy package if desired. The living pod comes in numerous configuration with the smaller configurations designed to require less than 260kWh per month of electric power for full operation.

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Minimalist living pod designed for quick assembly
With its clean lines and glowing surface, the Modular Dwelling embodies California's new Prefab architectural movement. These custom built living pods blend minimalist styling, industrial materials and a modernist's attention to detail. Designed to be easy to transport, quick to assemble and esthetically pleasing. The ideal blend of form and function.

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Can a space elevator climb into space using only centrifugal force?
Theoretical physicist Leonardo Golubovic and his graduate student Steven Knudsen at West Virginia University have written a paper showing that it is theoretically possible for a space elevator to climb into space without any internal power source. The physicists say that a rotating hoop could propel the space elevator upward using only centrifugal force.

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Serving your data to the world has never been easier or cheaper
The Pogoplug is a tiny computer that can connect any of your USB drives directly to the Cloud. Letting you set up to share and access your files from anywhere in the world easier than ever. Just plug in this tiny net server, run a cable to your router, slip in any USB drive and your files are good to go to any net node in the world.

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Is there really any such thing as 'junk' DNA?
A large part of the DNA of humans and other creatures that is not part of a gene has been though of as unimportant. Researchers have even labeled it junk DNA, but lately that label is falling out favor as again and again sequences of junk DNA are found to be vital to an organism. Now researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University studying the genome of a pond organism have found a junk sequence that is performing functions central to the organism growth. They have concluded that the sequence spurs an almost acrobatic rearrangement of the entire genome that is necessary for the organism to grow. Junk DNA may only define the limits of our knownledged. (Oxytricha Photo: Robert Hammersmith)

5/22/2009 PERMALINK
Modding viruses to attack only the tumor cells in your body
Scientists have been able to engineer viruses to replicate inside and kill tumors cells, but up until now have run into problems with these viruses attacking other tissues. But now thanks to work by Buck Institute researchers, a newly-understood mechanism has been found that can use cellular microRNA molecules to regulate the stability of mRNA in different cell types, providing the capability to engineer viruses for cell-specific inactivation. This allows a virus to maintain it highly potent normal power when attacking a tumor cell, while the virus can be 'turned off' in normal tissues that might otherwise be vulnerable to attack.

5/21/2009 PERMALINK
'Happy hour' gene discovery suggests cancer drugs might treat alcoholism
A class of drugs already approved as cancer treatments might also help to beat alcohol addiction. That's the conclusion of a discovery in flies of a gene, dubbed happyhour, that has an important and previously unknown role in controlling the insects' response to alcohol. Animals with a mutant version of the gene grow increasingly resistant to alcohol's sedative effects, the research shows. The researchers report further evidence that the gene normally does its work by blocking the so-called Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF) pathway. That EGF pathway is best known for its role in cancer, and drugs designed to inhibit the EGF receptor, including erlotinib (trade name Tarceva) and gefitinib (trade name Iressa), are FDA-approved for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer. Now, the researchers have shown that flies and mice treated with erlotinib also grow more sensitive to alcohol and rats given the cancer-fighting drug spontaneously consumed less alcohol when it was freely available to them. Their taste for another rewarding beverage -- sugar water -- was unaffected.

5/21/2009 PERMALINK
Scientists discover genetic defects linked with rare bearded lady syndrome
New research provides interesting genetic insight into the rare bearded lady syndrome that first appeared in the medical literature in the mid 1800s. Congenital generalized hypertrichosis (CGH) represents a group of conditions characterized by excessive hair growth over the entire body, well beyond the average limits for a particular age, sex or race. "Although it has long been believed that most people with CGH have some kind of genetic defect, the specific genetic mutations that underlie CGHT, with or without gingival hyperplasia, had not been discovered until now," explains senior study author Dr. Xue Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College in Beijing

5/21/2009 PERMALINK
Harnessing genetics to create super-soldiers?
Battalions of super-soldiers could be selected for specific duties on the basis of their genetic make-up and then constantly monitored for signs of weakness. So says a report by the US National Academies of Science. "A growing understanding of neuroscience offers huge scope for improving soldiers' performance and effectiveness on the battlefield," says the report. Genetic testing might also enable recruitment officers to determine which soldiers are best for specialist jobs.
See also: Will war in 2030 be anything like the generals think?

5/21/2009 PERMALINK
What America's founding fathers feared about organized religions
Fans of organized religion are inclined to falsely claim that America's founding fathers patterned our system of government after the principals of the Christian church. Beyond being silly on its face, since democracy was invented in Greece long before Christ was born, reading the letters that America's founding fathers wrote to each other while they were designing our nation's government gives lie to that claim. Those letters makes it crystal clear that America's founders saw organized religions as one of the greatest potential threats to human liberty and freedom. Remember, many of America's early settlers came here from Europe to escape oppressive state religions in their home country. And that is why most of America's founders tended to have a personal faith, but saw great risk in the tendency of religions to organize into large and powerful institutions that could manipulate the powers of the state to mire civilization's progress in dogmatic stagnation.

Human progress comes from constant systematic, open minded inquiry, along with a willingness to develop and try out new ideas. War, stagnation and misery result from making up your mind that all truth is contained in some ancient religious screed, and then using dogmas, perception avoidance and intellectual laziness to avoid ever seeing anything that contradicts your beliefs.

5/21/2009 PERMALINK
Bot sub to glide on ocean currents across the Atlantic
Piloted aerial gliders have used ridge effect to glide along mountain ranges for hundreds of miles. Now Rutgers University researchers have launched a small bot-controlled underwater glider off the coast of New Jersey that they hope can use ocean currents to glide across the Atlantic ocean. The glider was christened The Scarlet Knight and its unpowered, underwater gliding voyage across the Atlantic ocean is expected to take about eight-months.