News Article

Oct

2010

Shivering Shavenbaby

The Scientist magazine, October 2010.

The paper

N. Frankel et al., “Phenotypic robustness conferred by apparently redundant transcriptional enhancers,” Nature, 466:490-93, 2010.

The finding

Are redundant copies of noncoding DNA sequences due to poor genomic housekeeping, or do they function to improve the organism’s chances of survival? David Stern at Princeton University and colleagues attacked this question by looking at duplicate or “shadow” versions of enhancers, noncoding regions that regulate and promote gene expression. Read More >

Oct

2010

Google Street View Goes to Antarctica, Brings Maps to the Penguins

Discover, October 1 2010.

Google’s expansion of its Street View project to all seven continents has the sweet reward of allowing you to visit Antarctica while sitting on your couch in your leopard-print snuggie. (They also filled in the holes of Ireland and Brazil, but much as we love those countries, Antarctica is still more exciting.) Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist, told The Guardian that this feat was “hugely significant” to the Goog:

“One of the challenges we wanted to crack is to go to these remote places, and one of geo team at Google went to Antarctica so he took some kit and took some imagery. It’s called Street View, but there aren’t many streets in Antarctica,” he said. “This allows people to understand the contrast between New York Times Square and being on the edge of a glacier looking at penguins.” Read More >

Oct

2010

Ig Nobel Awards Honor Pioneering Work on Bat Fellatio, Whale Snot, & More

Discover, October 1 2010.

The list of wacky science discoveries from the Ig Nobel awards announced last night includes teams who made strides in vital fields like bat fellatio and curing diseases via roller coaster rides. The awards are given out every year for discoveries that made us both laugh and think.

Here’s a full list of the winning teams and projects. Read More >

Oct

2010

U.S. Apologizes for Deliberately Infecting Guatemalans With Syphilis

Discover, October 1 2010.

The United States government officially apologized to Guatemala today for unethical medical experiments conducted by American researchers in the country over 60 years ago, in which unwitting subjects were deliberately infected with syphilis.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said they were, in their words, “outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health.” Read More >

Sep

2010

Space Tourists Will Get Their Own Special Space Beer

Discover, September 30 2010.

A new type of beer is being marketed to a very select demographic: space tourists. The special beer is about to undergo testing in a near-weightless environment to qualify it for drinking in space. Unlike other space beers, which are created from barley that grew on the International Space Station, this space beer is being made especially to be consumed in space.

The brew is a team effort from Saber Astronautics Australia and the 4-Pines Brewing Company (aka Vostok Pty Ltd), and will be given its low-gravity try-out by the non-profit organization Astronauts4Hire. From the Vostok Pty Ltd Facebook page. Read More >

Sep

2010

Long-Lost Letters From DNA Pioneers Reveal Conflicts and Tensions

Discover, September 30 2010.

Almost 50 years after they won the Nobel Prize for defining the structure of DNA, Maurice Wilkins, James Watson, and Francis Crick are in the news again. Nine boxes of “lost” correspondence (from the days before email!) between two competing groups of researchers have been unearthed. The letters, between Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin of King’s College and Watson and Crick at Cambridge University, provide insight into the researchers’ mindsets while they were making these historic, game-changing discoveries.

“The [letters] give us much more flavor and examples illuminating the characters and the relations between them,” said study researcher Alexander Gann, editorial director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York. “They’re consistent with what we already believed, but they add important details.” Read More >

Sep

2010

Russian Company Plans to Open Orbital Space Hotel in 2016

Discover, September 30 2010.

Russian company Orbital Technologies has announced its plans to build a commercial space station (to be named the commercial space station, if you can believe that), which would also serve as a “space-hotel” for visiting tourists. The company claims the venture will launch in 2016.

“Once launched and operational, the CSS will provide a unique destination for commercial, state and private spaceflight exploration missions,” said Sergey Kostenko, chief executive of Orbital Technologies. Read More >

Sep

2010

After 9 Years Retirement, Lab Chimps May Return to Medical Testing

Discover, September 29 2010.

The governor of New Mexico wants a say in the future of 168 chimpanzees, and has pulled scientists, government officials, and even Jane Goodall into the debate. The chimps in question are currently living (and have been for the last ten years) in a research reserve in the town of Alamogordo in New Mexico.

They were all previously used as lab animals, where they are used to test and study HIV and Hepatitis C, life-threatening human diseases which don’t grow in any other animals. The chimps were removed from laboratory testing after being taken from the Coulston Foundation, a research facility that was found to be abusing and neglecting its primate residents. The Alamogordo reserve was given the ten-year contract to house and care for the animals in 2001. Read More >

Sep

2010

My, What Biometrically Unique Ears You Have

Discover, September 29 2010.

It’s not in the eyes, the face, or fingerprints. For some researchers, the future of biometrics lies in the ear. Imagine walking into a store and instead of submitting to an iris scan, like in Minority Report, having the cameras scan your ear, noting its curves and wrinkles, to identify you.

Christopher Mims, blogging for Technology Review, reports that that day may come. What makes the human ear good for use as a biometric is its uniqueness, which does not change with age. But first the computer needs to be able to pick your ear out of the crowd, which–while easy for a human–is quite difficult for a computer.

A team of researchers at the University of Southampton has developed a way(pdf) for a computer to recognize an ear with 99.6 percent accuracy. That’s right. It knows if an ear is an ear almost all the time. Of course, it has no idea whose ear it is. To “see” an ear, the algorithm uses a sophisticated image analysis approach, says Technology Review. Read More >

Sep

2010

The Mass of Hurricanes Converted to More Familiar Units: Cats & Dogs & Elephants

Discover, September 29 2010.

If you were to calculate how much a hurricane weighs, what units would you pick? To understand how much water is in a cloud, it seems many researchers pick the good ole elephant unit, or sometimes a blue whale.

Choosing some of the largest animals on the planet gives everyone a better sense of just how much water is up there in the clouds. Calculating the number of elephants in a small white puffy cloud will start to give you a sense of just how many elephants to expect from your average hurricane.

Andy Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told NPR’s science correspondent Robert Krulwich that a single, small, white, cotton-ball cloud weighs about the same as 100 (4-ton) elephants. Read More >