Space shuttle Atlantis displayed its power and majesty one final time, rocketing into space from Kennedy Space Center at 11:26 a.m. ET Friday morning despite threatening weather — marking the final launch after 30 years for NASA’s storied fleet of shuttles. Seven million pounds of thrust from the shuttle’s rocket booster carried the vehicle into orbit one last time, at …Continue Reading
Record snowfall, killer tornadoes, devastating floods: There’s no doubt about it. Since Dec. 2010, the weather in the USA has been positively wild. But why? Some recent news reports have attributed the phenomenon to an extreme “La Niña,” a band of cold water stretching across the Pacific Ocean with global repercussions for climate and weather. But NASA climatologist Bill Patzert …Continue Reading
The European Space Agency says it has completed what it calls the largest digital camera ever built for a space mission – a one billion pixel array camera that will help create a three-dimensional picture of the Milky Way Galaxy. Read more here
California researchers have created a tissue-engineered small-scale small intestine in mice, a breakthrough for regenerative medicine and a step toward growing new intestines for humans. The process re-creates all the layers of cells that make up a functioning intestine. Read more here
The naked mole rat isn’t a particularly handsome devil, but there’s more to life than being pretty–like living ten times longer than other mammals your size, withstanding extremely harsh conditions without breaking a sweat, or beating cancer. The naked mole rat does all of these things without really trying, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that British researchers are sequencing the un-cuddly rodent’s …Continue Reading
The field of education is contentious and resistant to innovation or change. There seems to be a growing sense that the problems that education systems face is just too difficult and multifaceted to fix. Most importantly, the focus is on how to “fix education infrastructure” (improve teachers, reduce class size, improve curriculum, develop alternative school models, etc.) rather than to …Continue Reading
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have turned an acoustic phenomenon familiar to those who have visited the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building or St. Paul’s Cathedral in London into a high-resolution nanoparticle detector. Using a ring-shaped micro-laser, the sensor can detect and count individual viruses or synthetic and biological nanoparticles with single particle resolution. Read more here
Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers at The University of Western Ontario from The Centre for Brain and Mind can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed. Read more here
You still can’t use Flash on it, but at least the iPad now allows you to swipe, pinch, and scroll through the entire human genome. A new app from the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMi) at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia lets users travel through the entire human genome–all 3 billion base pairs of it.
A targeted snip through DNA’s double helix cantake out a mutated gene that causes hemophilia, curing mice of the disease, a new study found. It’s the first study to use this form of genome editing in a living animal, and it could have implications for genetic treatment of other diseases, notably AIDS. Scientists say the research is a major step …Continue Reading