A diagnostic system using DNA powder and gold nanoparticles being developed by scientists at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering could provide rapid point-of-care diagnosis of the world’s leading infectious diseases in the near future.
BBME PhD student Kyryl Zagorovsky has developed a rapid diagnostic biosensor that will allow technicians to test for multiple diseases at the same time with one… read more
A comet called C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is expected to miss Mars around Oct. 19, 2014 by 37,000 km (23,000 miles), says Bad Astronomy Slate blogger Phil Plait.
Assuming it does hit, while the nucleus size is not well known, it may be as small as 15 kilometers (9 miles) or as big as 50 km (30 miles). Even using the small number means Mars would… read more
Order tends towards disorder. This is also true for quantum states. Measurements at the Vienna University of Technology show that in quantum mechanics this transition can be quite different from what we experience in our daily lives.
Ice cubes in a cocktail glass melt until an equilibrium state is reached in which the ice cubes are gone. After that, the geometric shape of the ice… read more
Even dying stars could host planets with life — and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade.
This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf’s planet could be detected much more easily than in an Earth-like planet orbiting a… read more
In this month’s special edition of Physics World, focusing on quantum physics, Thomas Jennewein and Brendon Higgins from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, Canada, describe how a quantum space race is under way to create the world’s first global quantum-communication network.
The field of quantum communication — the science of transmitting quantum states from one place to another… read more
The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More, will be published April 29, 2013.
It is the “first authoritative and comprehensive survey of the origins and current state of transhumanist… read more
Scientists of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) have successfully performed cryopreservation — freezing and thawing oocytes (egg cells) from different cat species at minus 196 degrees Celsius.
Successful cryopreservation of ovarian tissue of wild cats is a key element for the establishment of genome resource banks, an important tool for the preservation of genetic diversity. All felid species except for the… read more
Last summer, six scientists proposed a project they compared in scope and ambition to the Human Genome Project: to map the activity of the human brain. In February, news media reported that the Obama administration plans to move forward with that effort, known as the Brain Activity Map.
One of those six scientists was George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School… read more
Transplanted eyes located far outside the head in tadpoles can give them vision without a direct neural connection to the brain, biologists at Tufts University have found.
The research sheds new light (literally) on one of the major questions in regenerative medicine, bioengineering, and sensory augmentation research.
“Our research reveals the brain’s remarkable ability, or plasticity, to process visual data coming from misplaced eyes,… read more
A team of neuroengineers at Brown University has developed a fully implantable and rechargeable wireless brain sensor capable of relaying real-time broadband signals from up to 100 neurons in freely moving subjects.
Several copies of the novel low-power device, described in the open-access Journal of Neural Engineering, have been performing well in animal models for more than year, a first in the brain-computer interface field.… read more
“Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think. There’s something else Google Glass makes possible that no one — no one — has talked about yet, and so today I’m writing this blog post to describe it,” says Mark Hurst on Creative Good.
“It’s lifebits, the ability to record video of the people, places, and events around you, at all times. with a… read more
Researchers have discovered prebiotic (pre-life) molecules in interstellar space that may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars.
The molecules were detected in a giant cloud of gas some 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy — specifically, the star-forming region Sagittarius(Sgr) B2(N), which is the richest interstellar chemical environment currently known.
One of the newly-discovered molecules, called… read more
At TED 2013 Thursday, Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld, and Vint Cerf launched the idea of the “interspecies internet.”
Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist, has been been teaching dolphins to communicate through an underwater keyboard of symbols that correspond to whistles and playful activities.
Through this keyboard, the dolphins learned to perform activities on demand, and also to express their desire for them. (Also see… read more
A team of researchers at UC San Francisco has uncovered the neurological basis of speech motor control, the complex coordinated activity of tiny brain regions that controls our lips, jaw, tongue and larynx as we speak.
The work has potential implications for developing brain-computer interfaces for artificial speech communication and for the treatment of speech disorders. It also sheds light on this ability, which is… read more
Researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley have mapped the three-dimensional global connections within the brains of seven adults who have genetic malformations that leave them without the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right sides of the brain.
These “structural connectome” maps, which combine hospital MRIs with the mathematical tool known as network analysis, reveal new details about the condition known as… read more