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NASA

2nd SpaceX Demo Flight Slated For Feb. 7 42

Posted by timothy from the makes-me-grin dept.
TheNextCorner writes with the news that "Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)'s second Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration flight will be Feb. 7, 2012. Pending completion of final safety reviews, testing and verification, NASA also has agreed to allow SpaceX to send its Dragon spacecraft to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) in a single flight." Update: 12/10 06:41 GMT by T : Reader BenJCarter adds a link to an L.A. Times article on the ISS rendezvous (with a great photo).
Medicine

Microsoft and GE Partner On Healthcare 157

Posted by Soulskill from the blue-screen-of-actual-death dept.
theodp writes "Microsoft and General Electric are forming an as-yet-unnamed new health-care technology company. Based near Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, the company will be established next year with about 750 employees drawn from GE, Microsoft and elsewhere. 'High-quality, affordable healthcare is one of the biggest challenges facing every nation, but it's also an area where technology can make a huge difference,' said Steve Ballmer. 'Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable health platforms and software expertise with GE's experience and healthcare solutions will create exciting opportunities for patients and healthcare providers alike. Working together, GE and Microsoft can help make healthcare systems more intelligent and cost efficient while improving patient care.' Has someone been watching those iPad Healthcare case study videos?"
Science

You Really Are What You Know 188

Posted by Soulskill from the i-am-a-kung-fu dept.
jd writes "There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people's, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn't simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they're quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly."
Science

LHC To Narrow Search For Higgs Boson 99

Posted by Soulskill from the maybe-it's-with-all-those-moon-rocks dept.
New submitter mraudigy sends this quote from Physorg: "CERN scientists say their data from two main experiments using CERN's $10-billion Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border will be made public next Tuesday, but any firm discovery will have to wait until next year. They say the data helps narrow the region of the search because it excludes some of the higher energy ranges where the Higgs boson might be found, and shows some intriguing possibilities involving a small number of 'events' at the lower energy ranges."
Moon

NASA Missing Hundreds of Moon Rocks 132

Posted by Soulskill from the maybe-you-should-go-get-more dept.
New submitter Minion of Eris writes "It seems NASA can't keep track of its goodies. A recent audit discovered that moon rocks have been missing for 30 years, loaned displays have gone unreturned, and book-keeping has been generally poor. From the article: 'In a report issued by the agency's inspector general on Thursday, NASA concedes that more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970. That includes 218 moon samples that were stolen and later returned and about two dozen moon rocks and chunks of lunar soil that were reported lost last year. NASA, which has lent more than 26,000 samples, needs to keep better track of what is sent to researchers and museums, the report said. The lack of sufficient controls "increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost," the report concluded.'"
Space

Tycho Deep Space: a DIY, Open Source, Manned Spacecraft 85

Posted by Soulskill from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.
misterbarnacles writes "Can space travel be democratized? Kristian von Bengtson and Copenhagen Suborbitals think so, and they're building a DIY manned suborbital spacecraft to prove it. 'Bengtson describes the craft as "a half sized Apollo-shaped space capsule with a diameter of 2 meters capable of serving one (or two) persons." When complete, Bengtson hopes the suborbital craft will convey a human passenger higher than 62 miles above sea level, allowing him the rare opportunity to escape Earth’s bonds and view the heavens from the ionosphere.'"
Science

Rats Feel Each Other's Pain 200

Posted by Soulskill from the no-wonder-my-rat-gladiator-farm-never-took-off dept.
sciencehabit writes "Empathy lets us feel another person's pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether nonhuman animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people."
Medicine

17-Year-Old Wins $100K For Creating Cancer Killing Nanoparticle 255

Posted by samzenpus from the does-this-count-as-extra-credit? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "17-year-old Angeloa Zhang was recently awarded the $100,000 Grand Prize in the Individual category of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. Her project was entitled 'Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.' The creation is the so-called 'Swiss army knife of cancer treatment,' which allows a nanoparticle to be delivered to a tumor where it proceeds to kills cancer stem cells."
Science

Earliest Human Beds Found In South Africa 102

Posted by samzenpus from the earliest-to-bed dept.
sciencehabit writes "A team working in South Africa claims to have found the earliest known sleeping mats, made of plant material and dated up to 77,000 years ago—50,000 years earlier than previous evidence for human bedding. These early mattresses apparently were even specially prepared to be resistant to mosquitoes and other insects."
IBM

IBM Watson To Battle Patent Trolls 93

Posted by samzenpus from the battle-of-the-ages dept.
MrSeb writes "IBM's Watson is made of many parts: speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining. All of these factors were perfectly combined to beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy, and now each of these components are slowly finding their way into other applications. Health plan company WellPoint, for example, is using Watson to investigate patient records to improve diagnosis, and in a self-referential, possibly universe-destroying twist, IBM itself is using Watson to help sell Watson (and other IBM products) to other companies. Now, using Watson's data mining and natural language talents, IBM has created the Strategic IP Insight Platform, or SIIP, a tool that has already scanned millions of medical patents and journals for the sake of improving drug discovery — and in the future, it's easy to see how the same tool could be used to battle patent trolling, too."
Mars

NASA's Gypsum Find Clear Evidence There Was Water On Mars 162

Posted by timothy from the plaster-of-mars-would-be-really-expensive dept.
First time accepted submitter RCC42 writes "The Opportunity rover has found evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars, through the discovery of gypsum — a mineral that can only be formed in the presence of water. Though other evidence in the past has suggested highly acidic water on Mars, this is the first evidence for water with a pH suitable for life as we know it."
NASA

Genome of Controversial Arsenic Bacterium Sequenced 56

Posted by timothy from the there's-gotta-be-some-arsenic-somewhere dept.
Med-trump writes "One year ago a media controversy was ignited when Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues held a press conference to announce the discovery of a bacterium that not only survived high levels of arsenic in its environment but also seemed to use that element in its DNA. Last week, the genome of the bacterium, known as GFAJ-1, which gets its name from the acronym for 'Give Felisa a Job.' (No joke!), was posted in Genbank, the public repository of DNA sequences for all who care to take a look. But it doesn't settle the debate over whether arsenic is used in DNA."
Medicine

Supreme Court Legitimizing Medical Patents? 251

Posted by samzenpus from the prior-broken-arm-art dept.
RobinEggs writes "A case before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday addressed the legality of medical patents. From the article: 'The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient's blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical "indicate a need" to raise or lower the drug dosage. The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn't act on the patent's recommendations.'"
China

Bill Gates To Help China Build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor 467

Posted by samzenpus from the power-to-a-billion-people dept.
First time accepted submitter BabaChazz writes "Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates says he is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new kind of nuclear reactor. During a talk at China's Ministry of Science & Technology Wednesday, the billionaire said: 'The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste.' Gates backs Washington-based TerraPower, which is developing a nuclear reactor that can run on depleted uranium."
NASA

Voyager 1 Exits Our Solar System 341

Posted by samzenpus from the so-long-farewell-auf-wiedersehen-goodbye dept.
eldavojohn writes "The first man-made craft to do so is now entering a 'cosmic purgatory' between solar systems and entering an interstellar space of the Milky Way Galaxy. With much anticipation, Voyager 1 is now 'in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system. Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back.' After three decades the spacecraft is still operating and apparently has enough power and fuel to continue to do so until 2020. The first big piece of news? 'We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity. We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us. We are evidently traveling in completely new territory. Scientists had suggested previously that there might be a stagnation layer, but we weren't sure it existed until now.' This process could take months to years to completely leave the outer shell but already scientists are receiving valuable information."
Power

GE To Turn World's Biggest Civilian Plutonium Stockpile Into Electricity 241

Posted by samzenpus from the use-it-or-lose-it dept.
First time accepted submitter ambermichelle writes "GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has proposed to the U.K. government to build an advanced nuclear reactor that would consume the country's stockpile of radioactive plutonium. The technology called PRISM, or Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, would use the plutonium to generate low-carbon electricity. The U.K. has the world's largest civilian stockpile of plutonium. The size of the stockpile is 87 tons and growing. Nuclear reactors unlock energy by splitting atoms of the material stored in fuel rods. This process is called fission. For fission to be effective, neutrons – the nuclear particles that do the splitting and keep the reaction going – must maintain the right speed. Conventional reactors use water to cool and slow down neutrons, keeping fission effective. But water-cooled reactors leave some 95 percent of the fuel's potential energy untapped."
Science

Quantum Coherence Found Fueling Photosynthesis 135

Posted by samzenpus from the spooky-energy dept.
A user writes "Ars Technica has posted an interesting article about new findings regarding quantum physics and photosynthesis. Their excerpt for the article: 'Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fueling photosynthesis. Multiple experiments in recent years have suggested as much, but it has been hard to be sure. Quantum effects were clearly present in the light-harvesting antenna proteins of plant cells, but their precise role in processing incoming photons remained unclear.' Here's a little background info for those unaware of what coherence and quantum coherence are."
Space

New All-Sky Map Shows the Magnetic Fields of the Milky Way 41

Posted by samzenpus from the discerning-eye dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With a unique new all-sky map, scientists at MPA have made significant progress toward measuring the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Specifically, the map is of a quantity known as Faraday depth, which among other things, depends strongly on the magnetic fields along a particular line of sight. To produce the map, data were combined from more than 41,000 individual measurements using a novel image reconstruction technique. The work was a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), who are specialists in the new discipline of information field theory, and a large international team of radio astronomers. The new map not only reveals the structure of the galactic magnetic field on large scales, but also small-scale features that provide information about turbulence in the galactic gas."
Science

Earth's Core Made In Miniature 175

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the evil-geniuses-for-a-molten-tomorrow dept.
ananyo writes "A 3-meter-tall metal sphere full of molten sodium is about to start work modeling the Earth's core. The gigantic dynamo, which has taken researchers ten years to build, 'will generate a self-sustaining electromagnetic field that can be poked, prodded and coaxed for clues about Earth's dynamo, which is generated by the movement of liquid iron in the outer core.'"
Games

Video Gamers Advancing Genetic Research 23

Posted by Soulskill from the just-slap-a-few-achievements-in-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "From McGill's news site: 'Thousands of video game players have helped significantly advance our understanding of the genetic basis of diseases such as Alzheimer's, diabetes and cancer over the past year. They are the users of a web-based video game developed by Dr. Jérôme Waldispuhl of the McGill School of Computer Science and collaborator Mathieu Blanchette. Phylo is designed to allow casual game players to contribute to scientific research by arranging multiple sequences of coloured blocks that represent human DNA. By looking at the similarities and differences between these DNA sequences, scientists are able to gain new insight into a variety of genetically-based diseases.'" Hopefully Phylo will be as successful as Foldit.

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