Thursday, November 15, 2007
Repeat it often enough, and people will believe it…
With the 2008 presidential election only a year away, the merits of each candidate are becoming a common topic of conversation. But how do our brains, after hearing so many different opinions, gauge the popularity of each one? New research findings suggest that we judge a viewpoint’s prevalence by...
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Curing Drug Addiction: A Dental Approach
Could a dental anaesthetic help with drug addiction? Researchers have found that by injecting amphetamine-addicted rats' brains with lidocaine, the rats could forget temporarily their cravings for narcotics. The lidocaine was injected into the insula, a part of the brain that partly figures in drug...
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Now, here’s the kind of bug I could live with…
Australian researchers have discovered microorganisms that “eat” trace amounts of gold within rocks and then deposit them into larger nuggets. Mining companies are looking to use the critters instead of cyanide to pull gold from ore, which would be much less environmentally destructive. ( Discover,...
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Monday, November 12, 2007
Today’s Special – Toaster Schnitzels
Germans who crave traditional food but who don’t have time to prepare it can look forward to a new convenience from the meat company Toennies: “toaster schnitzels”. Made with pork and covered in bread crumbs, like traditional schnitzels, they cook in any toaster in three minutes. Dietrich...
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Sunday, November 11, 2007
Cosmic dust, cockroach parts, and Caesar’s breath – you can’t avoid it…
The incredible diverse mix of molecules and particles that we call air has a history stretching back to 4.5 billion years ago, when space rocks and planetesimals bombarded the still-forming Earth....The air was far from the oxygen-rich, life-sustaining stuff we enjoy today. About 2.7 billion years...
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Friday, November 9, 2007
Are Parasites Invading Your DNA?
The deeper we look into the genetic code, the more surprises we find. The first complete maps of the human genome turned up far fewer genes than expected (30,000 vs. the anticipated 80,000 to 140,000). Then scientists found that so-called junk-DNA – stretches of genetic material that don‘t code for...
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
Spacemen on Appliance Fire Rampage
The Civil Protection Department has a theory about why appliances in a Sicilian village spontaneously caught fire three years ago. Fridges, TVs, cell phones – all burst into flames. The department says the fires could have been from “aliens testing secret weapons.” Said a spokesman: “We are not...
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Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Knowledge in Bacteria
No data-storage method is fool-proof. Bacteria, however, have been passing genetic information from one generation to the next one for at least 3 billion years, and they will most likely still be reproducing when humans are long gone. If we could encode information in their genomes, it would be...
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Apes vs. Two-year-olds...
Score one for the tykes - researchers find that two-year-old toddlers are more socially mature than adult chimps and orangutans. In tests, all the species on average showed a similar facility with physical tasks, but human tots were more than twice as competent when it came to dealing with social...
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Sunday, November 4, 2007
Most of us knew that Einstein was right, but this should convince the rest!
According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a massive body like Earth should bend the space-time fabric of the Universe, causing it to curve and flex like a trampoline supporting a bowling ball. Nearly three years ago, NASA’s oft-cancelled $750 million Gravity Probe B Relativity...
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