news story // Current TV

Five more U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan

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BillCorcoran
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Roger Boyes Journalist gets unfortunate article assignment

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Darren_Lowe
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The Stupid Virus

When a lab-monkey declares that President Obama wasn't born in America, he... more

SuperNews
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Technology Review: Mimicking the Building Prowess of Nature

Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist at Harvard University, has scoured the natural world for clues to biological building codes. She aims to decipher some of Mother Nature’s unique designs, including dirt-resistant sea urchins and sea sponges made of super-strong light-conducting glass, to develop novel materials that, like these organisms, can self-assemble and sense and respond to their environment.

“We try to identify biological systems that have unusual and sophisticated properties, such as optical, structural, or magnetic properties, to make extremely sophisticated, efficient, and highly potent devices and materials,” says Aizenberg, who is also a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “Then we take these principles and try to integrate them with what we already know in materials science--incorporating them into existing materials or fabricating a new generation of materials based on biological principles.” The work could result in better fiber optics, paint that changes color in response to temperature or light, and new ways of delivering drugs or clearing arterial plaques.

This collection of striking images explores some of Aizenberg’s new materials, as well as the organisms that inspired them.

Nanodreadlocks: “One specific feature that interests me more than anything else at the moment is how nature creates adaptive materials that optimize performance in response to changing environmental cues,” says Aizenberg. “The systems I am trying to replicate in my lab are the surfaces of sea urchins. They cover their bodies with an array of microflowers that constantly open and close, protecting the body from contamination.”

Taking inspiration from sea urchins, Aizenberg’s team has developed nanobristles that spontaneously curl into a precise array of helical bundles when immersed in an evaporating liquid. Aizenberg likens the phenomena to the way wet, curly hair clumps together and coils to form dreadlocks. The bristles shown here are made of an epoxy resin and are approximately 100 nanometers in diameter--about one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23933/?nlid=2503Joanna Aizenberg, a materials scientist at Harvard University, has scoured the natural... more

remanns
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A CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN? - -R'RIGHT !

As many of Obama’s critics noted during the 2008 campaign, “change”... more

akamaial [removed]
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Sans Papiers

Sans Papiers

The youth of our age, surrounded by a swarm of difficulties and problems is in search of a solution, but what he eventually finds is more and more of difficulties and disappointments. When unemployed and poverty numbs all his senses, paralyzes all his muscles, he feels life is nothing but a futile effort, a bottomless pit of poverty and indigence. According to one estimate, in past 10 years, around 10 thousand Pakistanis have been killed by security forces, crossing Greece-Turkey border illegally. In pursuit of an ever evading happiness, who are these ill-informed people and who are the traffickers involved in this heinous trade of human trafficking. The real issue is how come the educated ones of our country fall prey to these human traffickers. Poverty and related problems are the main reasons behind human trafficking and illegal immigration. Your pursuit of happiness can bring this much misery and suffering, one can only know by meeting the people under Custody of FIA, who have recently been deported from the Turkey Border. It seems an obvious enough advice to have a safe albeit simple life at home, than to a have risky prosperous life abroad. But mired deeply in the troubled waters, it’s only dreams of a happy living that make these people go through all sorts of troubles.

I just pray that my country Pakistan finds a leader, a person who can improve the situation in our country, so that no one thinks about leaving this country and going through this humiliation This heinous crime of Illegal immigration, despite efforts by the State, is flourishing. One obvious contributors of this crime are the people who become a victim of agents’ treacherous promises, lost their lives’ savings and became a victim of dark alleys.

The question that haunts us all is till what time these traffickers would dupe the gullible of their livelihoods and till what time the carcasses of the youth of our country would be feasted by the beasts in unknown wildernesses.

Directed and Produced By
Kazim Raza
Masmedia Productions
Pakistan
923333705114Sans Papiers The youth of our age, surrounded by a swarm of difficulties and... more