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New Data Point To Huntington's Disease Hope

A study being published Monday offers hope for those with Huntington's disease. The Archives of Neurology has a report about... more

atomiclegion
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Cannabis Beneficial for Multiple Sclerosis Patients, Study Finds

(NaturalNews) A systematic review conducted by The Global Neuroscience Initiative Foundation found that five of six controlled... more

JackHerer
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Urban Seed Bombs Would Take Guerilla Gardening To Next Level

South Korean designer Jin-wook Hwang came up with this design for a completely new kind of seed bomb: one that could be used on a... more

atomiclegion
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Former Coal Mines Turned Into Beekeeping Havens

By federal law, coal companies have to restore the land they used back to an as-good-or-better condition than it was in when they... more

atomiclegion
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Dads may pass on infertility to test-tube babies

A new study has found that boys conceived through IVF treatment involving a single sperm being directly injected into a female egg... more

TravG73
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Lap Dances For Haiti? Ohio Strip Club To Donate To Relief Efforts

Marilyn's On Monroe, a nude dance club in downtown Toledo, Ohio, is raising money to send to the Haiti relief efforts, CNN... more

atomiclegion
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Babies are born pre-polluted. Let’s change that. Watch the video.

"When passed, the Act declared safe some 62,000 chemicals already on the market, even though there were little or no data to... more

lookatmypix
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Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.

The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Of course, Darpa’s up against some vexing, fundamental laws of nature — not to mention bioethics — as they embark on the lab beast program. First, they might want to rethink the idea of evolution as a random series of events, says NYU biology professor David Fitch. “Evolution by selection is nota random process at all, and is actually a hugely efficient design algorithm used extensively in computation and engineering,” he e-mails Danger Room.

Even if Darpa manages to overcome the inherent intelligence of evolutionary processes, overcoming inevitable death can be tricky. Just ask all the other research teams who’ve made stabs at it, trying everything from cell starvation to hormone treatments. Gene therapy, where artificial genes are inserted into an organism to boost cell life, are the latest and greatest in life-extension science, but they’ve only been proven to extend lifespan by 20 percent in rats.

But suppose gene therapy makes major strides, and Darpa does manage to get the evolutionary science right. They’ll also have a major ethical hurdle to jump. Synthetic biology researchers are already facing the same questions, as a 2009 summary from the Synthetic Biology Project reports:

The concern that humans might be overreaching when we create organisms that never before existed can be a safety concern, but it also returns us to disagreements about what is our proper role in the natural world (a debate largely about non-physical harms or harms to well-being).

Even expert molecular geneticists don’t know what to make of the project. Either that, or they’re scared Darpa might sic a bio-bot on them. “I would love to comment, but unfortunately Darpa has installed a kill switch in me,” one unnamed expert tells Danger Room.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagon-looks-to-breed-immortal-synthetic-organisms-molecular-kill-switch-included/The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of... more

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4 days ago

Physicists Prove Teleportation of Energy Is Possible

Over five years ago, scientists succeeded in teleporting information. Unfortunately, the advance failed to bring us any closer to... more

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4 days ago

Andrew Wakefield, Scientific Censorship, and Fourteen Monkeys - AGE OF AUTISM:

A Statement from Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey

Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent an historic study from being published that for the first time looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated primates and compares health outcomes, with potentially devastating consequences for vaccine makers and public health officials.

It is our most sincere belief that Dr. Wakefield and parents of children with autism around the world are being subjected to a remarkable media campaign engineered by vaccine manufacturers reporting on the retraction of a paper published in The Lancet in 1998 by Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues.

The retraction from The Lancet was a response to a ruling from England’s General Medical Council, a kangaroo court where public health officials in the pocket of vaccine makers served as judge and jury. Dr. Wakefield strenuously denies all the findings of the GMC and plans a vigorous appeal.

Despite rampant misreporting, Dr. Wakefield’s original paper regarding 12 children with severe bowel disease and autism never rendered any judgment whatsoever on whether or not vaccines cause autism, and The Lancet’s retraction gets us no closer to understanding this complex issue.

Dr. Wakefield is one of the world’s most respected and well-published gastroenterologists. He has published dozens of papers since 1998 in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals all over the world. His work documenting the bowel disease of children with autism and his exploration of novel ways to treat bowel disease has helped relieve the pain and suffering of thousands of children with autism.

For the past decade, parents in our community have been clamoring for a relatively simple scientific study that could settle the debate over the possible role of vaccines in the autism epidemic once and for all: compare children who have been vaccinated with children who have never received any vaccines and see if the rate of autism is different or the same.

Few people are aware that this extremely important work has not only begun, but that a study using an animal model has already been completed exploring this topic in great detail.

Dr. Wakefield is the co-author, along with eight other distinguished scientists from institutions like the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Washington, of a set of studies that explore the topic of vaccinated versus unvaccinated neurological outcomes using monkeys.

The first phase of this monkey study was published three months ago in the prestigious medical journal Neurotoxicology, and focused on the first two weeks of life when the vaccinated monkeys received a single vaccine for Hepatitis B, mimicking the U.S. vaccine schedule. The results, which you can read for yourself HERE, were disturbing. Vaccinated monkeys, unlike their unvaccinated peers, suffered the loss of many reflexes that are critical for survival.
http://bit.ly/apwUwlA Statement from Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent an historic study from... more

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5 days ago

Science of gun duels

In the gun duels of Hollywood Westerns, the one who draws first (usually the bad guy) always tends to lose. Why? Decades ago,... more

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5 days ago

Scientists Keep Water Liquid Far Below Zero Degrees

Despite what you may have heard, water doesn't always freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. A team of scientists in Israel has... more

atomiclegion
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5 days ago

Mr. Clean Goes To Court, Pleads the Fifth

Household cleaner giants want to keep chemical ingredients secret. For more than a year, Procter & Gamble, Colgate... more

love_is_my_religion
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5 days ago

Do we want brain scanners to read our minds?

As 'vegetative' patients ‘talk’ to scientists, Professor Colin Blakemore assesses the profound implications... more

unimatrix0
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5 days ago

Double Hubble Sequence Shows Galaxies Go Spiral

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes. But in the past, the various galaxy shapes used to be more diverse and "peculiar" than they are now. Over time, according to a new study, galaxies tend to become spirals. "Six billion years ago, there were many more peculiar galaxies than now — a very surprising result," said Rodney Delgado-Serrano, lead author of a new paper. "This means that in the last six billion years, these peculiar galaxies must have become normal spirals, giving us a more dramatic picture of the recent Universe than we had before."

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a team of astronomers created the first demographic census of galaxy types at two different points in the Universe's history, putting together two Hubble sequences from different eras that help explain how galaxies form. The results showed that the Hubble sequence six billion years ago was very different from the one that astronomers see today.

The top image represents the current — or local — universe, and the bottom image represents the make up of the distant galaxies (six billion years ago), showing a much larger fraction of peculiar galaxies. In sampling 116 local galaxies and 148 distant galaxies, the researchers found that more than half of the present-day spiral galaxies had so-called peculiar shapes only 6 billion years ago.

Edwin Hubble invented the Hubble Sequence, sometimes called the Hubble tuning-fork diagram. The diagram divides galaxies into three 3 broad classes based on their basic shapes: spiral, barred spiral, and elliptical.

"Our aim was to find a scenario that would connect the current picture of the Universe with the morphologies of distant, older galaxies — to find the right fit for this puzzling view of galaxy evolution," said François Hammer of the Observatoire de Paris who led the team of astronomers.

The astronomers think that these peculiar galaxies did indeed become spirals through collisions and merging. This is contrary to the widely held opinion that galaxy mergers result in the formation of elliptical galaxies, but Hammer and his team propose a "spiral rebuilding" hypothesis, which suggests that peculiar galaxies affected by gas-rich mergers are slowly reborn as giant spirals with discs and central bulges.

Crashes between galaxies give rise to enormous new galaxies and, although it was commonly believed that galaxy mergers decreased significantly eight billion years ago, the new result implies that mergers were still occurring frequently after that time — up to as recently as four billion years ago.

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/02/04/double-hubble-sequence-shows-galaxies-go-spiral/Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes. But in the past, the various galaxy shapes used to be more diverse and "peculiar"... more

pjacobs51
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5 days ago

Evidence builds on color of Dinosaurs

Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.

“This is actual science, not ‘Avatar,’ ” said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study published in Science.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.

That discovery prompted British and Chinese scientists to examine some fossils of dinosaurs that are covered with featherlike structures. The 125-million-year-old species Sinosauropteryx, for example, has bristles on its skin. When the scientists examined a piece of its tail, they found melanosomes in the bristles. They concluded that the dinosaur had reddish-and-white rings along its tail.

The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports earlier research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. “We had a dream: to put colors on a dinosaur,” said Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale.

Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs, which it may have used to glide from trees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/science/05dino.html?hpUntil last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence... more

current89
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25 comments

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6 days ago

Pig lung transplants for humans move closer

Animal organ transplants in humans are now a step closer to reality: Scientists have successfully combined animal lungs with human... more

unimatrix0
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27 comments

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6 days ago

Amazing Photos of Fluid Motion, Winners

Basically, these scientists are using advanced concepts of science and technology to take some very visually pleasing pictures of... more

MauriceCastillo
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6 days ago

Vegetative state patients can respond to questions

Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts. The research,... more

ras_menelik
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9 comments

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6 days ago

'President Obama's JFK moment' by Buzz Aldrin

Thank you, Mr. President.

That's what we should say to President Barack Obama in light of his Fiscal Year 2011 space budget for NASA. The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons.

The Aldrin cycler (which I proposed two decades ago), your time has finally come! Those technologies will sustain long term, deep space exploration in the years ahead-just like my concept for a cycling spaceship moving between Earth and Mars. For that, we don't need the Moon!

But this change in direction will not be easy - like turning a big ship around in a small space. For those who will think about opposing this new plan, let me explain why I think it's a necessary step forward, not back. Having walked on the Moon, I know something about what we need to explore, really explore, space.

For the past six years America's civil space program has been aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That's the plan announced by President George W. Bush in January of 2004. That plan also called for developing the technologies that would support human expeditions to Mars, our ultimate destination in space. But two things happened along the way since that announcement, which became known as the Vision for Space Exploration. First, the President failed to fully fund the program, as he had initially promised. As a result, each year the development of the rockets and spacecraft called for in the plan slipped further and further behind. Second and most importantly, NASA virtually eliminated the technology development effort for advanced space systems. Equally as bad, NASA also raided the Earth and space science budgets in the struggle to keep the program, named Project Constellation, on track. Even that effort fell short.

To keep the focus on the return to the Moon, NASA pretty much abandoned all hope of preparing for Mars exploration. It looked like building bases on the Moon would consume all of NASA's resources. Yet despite much complaining, neither a Republican-controlled nor a Democratic-controlled Congress was willing or able to add back those missing and needed funds. The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when. At the same time, there was no money to either extend the life of the Space Shuttle, due to be retired this year, or that of the International Space Station, due to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean in 2015, a scant handful of years after it was completed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.htmlThank you, Mr. President. That's what we should say to President Barack Obama in light of his Fiscal Year 2011 space... more

current89
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