It has been revealed that the same steroid used to bulk up livestock does not break down in the environment completely, as previously thought. These steroids do partially break down when exposed to light, but can regenerate at night. This information could completely throw out risk assessments that are currently in place.
More info: http://bit.ly/16QG82c
A particle has NOT been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics. But imagine if it did! Yesterday Ashutosh Jogalekar announced in a satirical blog for Scientific American magazinethat the Higgs Boson had won the Nobel Prize a week early, without any scientists, in an attempt to put an end to researchers fighting over credit. Although it's not true, it's caused a lot of confusion (sorry!).
As Jogalekar said: "The real point of this post was to stress the fact - through satire – that what really matters are the discoveries themselves. As Richard Feynman put it, the real prize is the pleasure of finding things out."
The REAL winners will be announced in the coming week. Who do you think will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Physics and Medicine this year?
Read more: http://bit.ly/15Fr6NB via Scientific American
BIG NEWS: For the first time in the 113 year history of the prizes, the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to the Higgs Boson ahead of the scheduled date of October 8. According to Prof. Lars Brink, the chairman of the Nobel physics committee, the decision to award the prize to a discovery rather than scientists was made to put an end to arguments over division of credit and authorship.
“The decision was gruelling, but we thought about it a long time and finally reached a consensus. We said, look, it’s not really about the theorists or the experimentalists, it’s really about the particle; this fundamental, all-encompassing particle that underpins the very existence of matter."
Read more in Ashutosh Jogalekar's excellent blog for Scientific American magazine: http://bit.ly/15Fr6NB
The discovery provides a new target for drugs that could potentially stop brain tumours from spreading. Gliomas account for about a third of brain tumours and survival rates are poor because of the disease's ability to invade the surrounding tissue and resist chemotherapy.
Read more: http://bit.ly/16plgPs
Carpenter ants (Camponotus cylindricus) are found in Borneo and expel the lethal sticky substance to defend their colony. Both ant and invader are killed in these attacks; they fall from the canopy as a pair into the leaf litter below, to eventually be eaten by something. Most of the bodies of the south-east Asian Camponotus cylindricus ants are for storage of the deadly secretion. The insects react quickly: when researchers lightly touched them with forceps their abdomen walls ruptured.
Read more: http://n.pr/18lrAKG
Late last week, a news story was going around that alien life was found in our atmosphere. Unfortunately, the paper was incredibly flawed.
After launching a balloon up into the atmosphere, a portion of a diatom was discovered. The author concluded that it had to have come from somewhere else in the cosmos and serves as definitive proof of aliens. Um, no.
Here’s a quick rundown of the flaws in the paper:
-In the paper, the authors never confirm that it had been positively identified by diatom expert. Instead, they “assume” that one would be able to confirm its identity.
-The diatom was not connected to a meteorite that would have allowed it to travel through space.
-Diatoms are abundant on Earth, but the authors are quick to dismiss possibilities that it could have remained suspended due to a dynamic atmosphere. Just because you don’t know how something got there does not mean it was aliens.
Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has more on why this story is bad science: http://slate.me/1aZkCgw
Read the original paper here: http://bit.ly/1bCf4LT
The output frequency of the caesium standard or caesium atomic clock is controlled by electronic transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms. The clocks serve as the primary standard for the definition of the second in the metric system.
Caesium fountain clocks are more precise than caesium beam clocks as slower, laser-cooled atoms are used in them; more time is available to measure the resonance frequency of the caesium atoms. Fountain clocks are referred to as such because they use a fountain-like movement of atoms to obtain improved reckoning of time.
For more on how the clock works:http://1.usa.gov/1g6tx0f
Australian scientists have developed a new type of water filter that combines microalgae with bacteria taken from soil contaminated with heavy metals to rid drinking water of arsenic. Around 137 million people are poisoned daily with arsenic in their water and food, and this effective, cheap and safe filter could put an end to the problem.
Read more: http://bit.ly/16h3GwT
Scientists extracted ear wax from the carcass of a blue whale that washed ashore a California beach in 2007. After collection, the wax was preserved – the column of wax was about 30cm long. The differing light and dark layers within the column each corresponded to about 6 months of the whale’s life, allowing the scientists to determine when the animal was exposed to particular chemicals. This particular whale had been exposed to high levels of DDT in the early stages of its life, probably through its mother’s milk.
To get more data, co-author Sascha Usenko has requested that scientists start collecting ear wax from dead beached whales the world over and mail the samples to him.
Paper in PNAS: http://bit.ly/15CXvrp
The Big Bang model postulates that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, but as yet what triggered the outburst is unknown. A team of cosmologists now suggest the Universe formed after a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole. This would explain why the Universe appears to be uniform in all directions, though the new model deviates from Planck’s observations of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background by about 4%.
Read more: http://bit.ly/1f1V9FS
Australia's hypersonic scramjet, an air-breathing engine that can reach speeds of 8,600km/hour, is set to launch any day now. The data-collection project called SCRAMSPACE will take off from Norway and give insight into hypersonic physics, hypersonic combustion, performance of materials and the future of flight. Watch this space!
Read more: http://bit.ly/1aMRHQn
Don’t get ready for Scotty to beam you up quite yet, this is the teleportation of information. Though researchers have come close in the past, previous attempts transported incomplete or inconclusive information. It’s important to note that the information isn’t really traveling, rather, it effectively exists in two places at the same time.
The experiment's success was credited to a hybridized technique that blended the technology used for teleporting light along with reducing the frequency range of qubits. The ability to teleport information means that quantum computing may be getting closer to becoming reality. Read more: http://bit.ly/15morLV
The Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois) lives on the sea floor in warmer oceans such as the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic at depths of 10 to 40 metres, burying itself into the ocean bed to wait for smaller worms and fish to come by. It has five antennae to sense its prey, which it catches with a complex feeding apparatus called a pharynx that can turn inside-out and has strong, sharp mandibles on the end. It can grow to nearly 3 metres in length and has an average diameter of 25mm.
Watch the bobbit worm in action here: http://bit.ly/15F0HoF
An innovative 37-storey building on Fenchurch Street in the City of London, which curves from a narrow base to a wider top, was originally dubbed the "Walkie Talkie" but has been re-dubbed the "Walkie Scorchie" since damaging concentrated rays of sunlight reflected from its concave mirrored façade were reported.
Cost-cutting measures may have been responsible for allowing a high-rise building to become a reflector for sunlight so strong it reportedly melted part of a Jaguar car, cracked shop tiles and was hot enough to fry an egg.
Throughout the 52 week trial, none of the volunteers experienced any adverse reactions, and they all saw a boost in antibodies. This leaves scientists encouraged that Phase 2 will also see great success.
Since it emerged, HIV/AIDS has killed over 35 million people, and 34 million are currently living with it.
More info: http://bit.ly/15yFFIn
Rocket launches at sunset or sunrise produce a light show known as twilight phenomena. It forms when unburned fuel particles and water condense, freeze, and then expand across the upper atmosphere, leaving a trail of frozen droplets that diffracts sunlight and produce colourful ribbons in pink, blue, green and orange that can be carried hundreds of kilometres away from the launch site.
Read more: http://bit.ly/1cpBKMT
