Conservationists in Brazil are poised to try cloning eight animals that are under pressure, including jaguars and maned wolves, New Scientist reports.
None of the targeted animals are critically endangered, but Brazil’s agricultural research agency, Embrapa, wants a headstart. Working with the Brasilia Zoological Garden, it has collected around 420 tissue samples, mostly… read more
Painful finger-prick blood tests for diabetics could become a thing of the past, say physicists who have built a sensor that measures glucose in saliva.
Mitchell Lerner at the University of Pennsylvania and associates have developed just such a device, MIT Technology Review reports. Their glucose sensor is essentially a carbon nanotube-based transistor in which the nanotubes are coated with pyrene-1-boronic acid molecules that bind to glucose.… read more
Information stored in the activity patterns of cerebral cortex neurons is discarded at the surprisingly high rate of one bit per active neuron per second, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization at the University of Gottingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Gpttingen have found.
The new results obtained by the scientists in Göttingen have also revealed that the processes in the cerebral cortex… read more
Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system, the International Energy Agency warned in the 2011 edition of the World Energy Outlook (WEO).
If you create and modify your own virtual reality avatars, could what happens to these alter egos influence how you perceive virtual environments?
Penn State researchers found this question relevant to designing more realistic and immersive virtual reality exercises and games. They assigned random avatars to one group of participants, but allowed another group to customize their own avatars.
When placed in a virtual environment with three hills… read more
Trusting research over their guts, scientists in New Zealand and Canada examined the phenomenon that Stephen Colbert, comedian and news satirist, calls “truthiness” — the feeling that something is true.
In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim.
“We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos… read more
European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the star system nearest Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun.
The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Alpha Centauri is one of… read more
Using gene therapy, Yale neurologists have managed to repair neurons associated with traumatic nerve injury pain in rats.
Neuropathic pain associated with diabetes, shingles, and traumatic injury affects up to 18 percent of the population and can be difficult or impossible to effectively treat.
“Since the therapy targets only cells in the pain-sensing neurons outside the brain and spinal cord, this method can avoid… read more
Raising the upper bounds of the human lifespan is turning out to be trickier than increasing the average person’s life expectancy. In the past few years, the global count of supercentenarians — people 110 and older — has leveled off at about 80.
And the maximum age hasn’t budged. Just seven people whose ages could be fully verified by the Gerontology Research Group have ever made it… read more
MIT is leading an ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced.
Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project will aim to develop a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.
“This research envisions a whole new way of… read more
Researchers from North Carolina State University (NC State) have developed a new way to fine-tune wireless power transfer (WPT) receivers, making the systems more efficient and functional. WPT systems hold promise for charging electric vehicles, electronic devices, and other technologies.
Researchers have previously shown that it is possible to transmit power wirelessly by using magnetic resonance, but even minor changes in how the transmitter or receiver is… read more
The world’s lightest material — with a density of 0.9 mg/cc — about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam — has been developed by a team of researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories, and the California Institute of Technology.
The new material, using nickel-phosphorous thin films, redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture. The researchers were able to make a material that… read more
DARPA has launched a program called called “Living Foundries,”designed to apply the conventions of manufacturing to living cells, Wired Danger Room reports.
DARPA has awarded seven research grants worth $15.5 million to six different companies and institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, Cal Tech, and the J. Craig Venter Institute.
“Living Foundries” aspires to streamline genetic engineering for “on-demand production” of whatever bio-product suits… read more
A new telescope, the Sentinel Space Telescope, promises to provide an early-detection system that could predict a devastating asteroid impact.
It will map the approximately half-million large asteroids that populate the inner solar system. The observations could be used to identify threats decades in advance of an impending collision.
A large asteroid colliding with Earth may seem like a science fiction scenario, but there’s reason to take it… read more