NASA Report Details Columbia Disaster

sea-maid submitted, created time 6 days 40 minutes (www.time.com)

Seat restraints, pressure suits and helmets of the doomed crew of the space shuttle Columbia didn't work well, leading to "lethal trauma" as the out-of-control ship lost pressure and broke apart, killing all seven astronauts, a new NASA report says. At least one crew member was alive and pushing buttons for half a minute after a first loud alarm sounded, as he futilely tried to right Columbia during that disastrous day Feb. 1, 2003.

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Beer marinade cuts steak cancer risk

sea-maid submitted, created time 6 days 50 minutes (www.newscientist.com)

IF YOU are frying a steak and mindful of your health, then marinate it in either beer or red wine. So say food scientists who measured amounts of a family of carcinogens found in fried steaks after steeping them in booze.

Cooking food increases levels of cancer-causing compounds called heterocyclic amines (HAs). Fried and grilled meat are particularly high in these compounds, because fiery temperatures convert the sugars and amino acids in muscle tissue into HAs

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Mystery stone circles may point to water on Mars

sea-maid submitted, created time 6 days 1 hour (www.newscientist.com)

Using cameras on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Matt Balme of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and his colleagues mapped the Elysium Planitia, a region near the equator. They saw rings up to twenty-three meters across made up of stones sorted by size into concentric bands.

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Bright lights, not-so-big pupils

piggy submitted, created time 6 days 7 hours (www.eurekalert.org)

A team of Johns Hopkins neuroscientists has worked out how some newly discovered light sensors in the eye detect light and communicate with the brain. The report appears online this week in Nature.

These light sensors are a small number of nerve cells in the retina that contain melanopsin molecules. Unlike conventional light-sensing cells in the retina—rods and cones—melanopsin-containing cells are not used for seeing images; instead, they monitor light levels to adjust the body's clock and control constriction of the pupils in the eye, among other functions

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The gold standard: Biodesign Institute researchers use nanoparticles to make 3-D DNA nanotubes

piggy submitted, created time 6 days 7 hours (www.eurekalert.org)

Arizona State University researchers Hao Yan and Yan Liu imagine and assemble intricate structures on a scale almost unfathomably small. Their medium is the double-helical DNA molecule, a versatile building material offering near limitless construction potential.

In the January 2, 2009 issue of Science, Yan and Liu, researchers at ASU's Biodesign Institute and faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, reveal for the first time the three-dimensional character of DNA nanotubules, rings and spirals, each a few hundred thousandths the diameter of a human hair

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Nothing to Sneeze At: Real-time Pollen Forecasts

piggy submitted, created time 6 days 7 hours (www.sciencedaily.com)

Researchers in Germany are reporting an advance toward development of technology that could make life easier for millions of people allergic to plant pollen. It could underpin the first automated, real-time systems for identifying specific kinds of allergy-inducing plant pollen circulating in the air.

In the study, Janina Kneipp and colleagues explain that current pollen counts and allergy warnings are based on visual identification of the specific kind of pollen by examining pollen grains under a microscope

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Clear skies, but not because the skies were cleared

Darkfrog submitted, created time 6 days 22 hours (www.nature.com)

After the September 11 grounding of commercial traffic over the U.S., scientists and the public alike toyed with the idea that contrails and other side effects of air travel could affect the weather. New analyses, however, suggest that we may have jumped the gun and that the variations in temperature that were recorded on those days could be accounted for by other factors.

It isn't that contrails don't have an effect on climate, say scientists, but that their effect on those three particular days may have been exaggerated

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Fat cells also linked to prion infection

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 week 1 day (www.sciencenews.org)

Researchers have confirmed that adipose cells can carry prions, or at least that healthy test animals injected with infected fat cells become sick.

Prions are small, non-living chunks of misfolded proteins that can cause diseases such as scrapie and mad cow disease.

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Engineered bacteria create high-energy biofuel

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 week 1 day (www.sciencenews.org)

Researchers have designed an entire molecular assembly line in bacterial cells that pieces together a kind of alcohol that isn’t normally made by known living organisms. This alcohol could serve as a biofuel that, unlike ethanol, has a high energy density and could be used in gasoline and jet fuel

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An Artist Develops a New Image--With Aid of Bacteria

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 week 1 day (www.sciencemag.org)

Nearly five years ago, molecular biologist Edward Marcotte recalls, a high school dropout walked into his office at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, to talk shop. Despite the visitor's unconventional background, which included a stint as a video game programmer, Marcotte says that Zack Booth Simpson "won me over instantaneously. He was so clearly intelligent." They ended up talking for hours on topics such as Marcotte's use of data mining to extract information about the protein networks that control cellular functions.

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Brain Birth Defects Successfully Reversed Through Stem Cell Therapy

piggy submitted, created time 1 week 2 days (www.sciencedaily.com)

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have succeeded in reversing brain birth defects in animal models, using stem cells to replace defective brain cells.

The work of Prof. Joseph Yanai and his associates at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School was presented at the Tel Aviv Stem Cells Conference last spring and is expected to be presented and published nest year at the seventh annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Barcelona, Spain.

Involved in the project with Prof. Yanai are Prof

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Surgeon uses human fat to run his cars

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 7 hours (www.independent.co.uk)

A leading Beverly Hills plastic surgeon claims to have found an environmentally friendly way to combine two of America's great obsessions – after converting his 4x4 to run on fat removed from clients during liposuction operations.

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Carbon dioxide levels may put the squeeze on squid

Researchers find the first vertebrate eye to use mirror instead of lens

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.newscientist.com)

The deep sea is full of surprises, and the four-eyed spookfish is up there with the best of them. It is the first vertebrate found with eyes that use mirrors, rather than a lens, to focus light.

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Fossilized arachnids made silk but not webs

Darkfrog submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.nature.com)

Now here's a randomly cool one. Modern spiders use silk for more than just those webs that we love to photograph with dew all over them. They also wrap prey, wrap eggs, line their burrows and cast the strands upward to catch the wind and travel.

Now, it's not clear exactly what these ancient proto-spiders used their silks for, but we can tell that they lack spinnerets, so they would not have had the fine control of today's spiders. Also unlike today's spiders, they had small, one-millimeter tails

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