Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (17)

Posted: 10/3/2015

1. How societies learn to count to 10 (“The upper limits of these Australian numeral systems most often varied between three, four, and five, the team reports this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Over time, even small numeral systems sometimes lost a numeral or two, but they mainly gained numerals—yet not by plodding up the number line, one numeral after another. Surprisingly, they tended to acquire numerals in bunches, leaping from five numerals to 10 or 20, for example. The numeral five was often the tipping point—once a system reached five, it was likely to add more numerals, up to 20.”)
2. http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/09/popular-gene-editing-technique-gets-sharper-molecular-scissors (CRSPR Cas9 gets a lot crisper (pardon my pun).
3. The Secret Lives of Horses Long-term observations of wild equines reveal a host of unexpected behaviors (“Scientists have documented behaviors among free-ranging horses that upend many long-held ideas about how these animals bond and interact with one another. … As a result, the social lives of horses are nothing if not tumultuous.”)
4. Could 'Schrödinger's bacterium' be placed in a quantum superposition?
5. "Brain in a Dish" Could Replace Toxic Animal Tests Brain mimics built from stem-cell-studded hydrogels successfully predict chemicals’ neural toxicity without the use and cost of lab rats (Good news for animals)
6. Scientists Identify a Key Morphine Regulator that May Reduce Risk of Pain-Killer Abuse and Addiction (Good news for drug addicts! “The findings could lead to a new drug target for developing less-addictive pain medications and even offer a clue to the genetic predisposition of patients to addiction before treatment.”
7. Earthquakes could be triggered by sound waves that 'fluidize' faults (May explain remote aftershocks. This is about acoustic fluidization theory.)
8. How to put neutrons into a twist (About the orbital angular momentum of neutrons)
9. How the enamel that coats your teeth evolved
10. Why are some galaxies a thousand times brighter than the Milky Way? (“A new simulation suggests that these radiant beasts are not the result of galaxies smashing into each other—as some astronomers suspect—but rather the consequence of a galaxy recycling fuel to igniting hundreds of suns per year.”)
11. Researchers isolate the ‘human smell of death’ (“Ultimately, eight compounds distinguished pig and human remains from those of other animals, and five esters separated pigs from humans, the researchers report this month in PLOS ONE”)
12. Carbon research may boost nanoelectronics (This is about the making of carbyne)
13. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-09-scientists-brain-cells.html
14. Researchers solve mystery of the mutated oil palms (This could be a huge improvement benefitting the environment and humans! “Palm oil accounts for about 65% of all vegetable oil traded internationally, and demand for this resource continues to rise. Efforts are underway to try to curb the resulting rainforest destruction. One effort, begun in 1974, involved cloning the palm oil plant. Researchers took cells from leaves of the most productive trees and grew them in a lab dish to produce cloned seedlings. They expected to increase yields per hectare by 30%. But today less than 1% of the area devoted to oil palms uses clones because some of the cloned trees produced fruit that developed abnormally, appearing jagged and forming a thick outer coating. This “mantled” fruit failed to produce much oil,”)
15. A Pregnancy Souvenir: Cells That Are Not Your Own (About fetal microchimerism. “They collected tissue from 26 women who had died during or just after pregnancy. All of them had been carrying sons. ... Essentially, the scientists were looking for male cells in female bodies. ... As reported last month in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, the researchers found cells with Y-chromosomes in every tissue sample they examined. These male cells were certainly uncommon — at their most abundant, they only made up about 1 in every 1,000 cells. But male cells were present in every organ that the scientists studied: brains, hearts, kidneys and others.”)
16. Scientists are planning to bring a 30,000-year-old Siberian virus back
17. Electric switch makes helix change hands (“Electric fields can switch both the net dipole moment and the helical handedness of helical supramolecular structures, according to a theoretical study by scientists in India.”)
18. 2 Accelerators Find Particles That May Break Known Laws of Physics The LHC and the Belle experiment have found particle decay patterns that violate the Standard Model of particle physics
19. Using Technology to Break the Speed Barrier of Reading New research suggests that one of humanity’s most important inventions can be improved
20. Surprising giant ring-like structure in the universe (“The researchers found a ring of nine gamma ray bursts (GRBs)—the most luminous events in the universe—about 5 billion light years in diameter, and having a nearly regular circular shape, noting that there is a one in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance. ... "Until now GRBs are the only objects for which we know the spatial distribution in the whole observable universe. All other objects are complete only in a restricted part of the sky. Our discovery has revealed a large-scale regular feature not known before. Large scale objects like GRB groups have been known already, but such a regular circular structure was a surprise," Balazs told Phys.org. The newly-found ring-shaped feature is large enough to contradict the cosmological principle (CP), which sets a theoretical limit of 1.2 billion light years for the largest structures.”)
21. Transplant Surgeons Revive Hearts After Death A technology to keep organs alive outside the body is saving lives. And provoking ethical debates. (“The $250,000 device was developed by Transmedics, an Andover, Massachusetts-based company, and is pending approval in the U.S. It could expand the number of donated hearts by between 15 percent and 30 percent, say doctors, saving the lives of people who would otherwise die from heart failure.”)