News Article

Nov

2010

What Does Your City Smell Like? DARPA Wants to Know

Discover, November 15 2010.

How could the government know about a chemical attack before it wreaks havoc? By smelling it. But the problem is, to detect an abnormal stench, the government first needs to know the city’s normal aroma, to have an idea of its “chemical profile.” To that effect, DARPA just released a solicitation looking for suggestions on how to best build chemical composition maps of major United States cities. Spencer Ackerman over at Wired’s Danger Room t0ok a look at the solicitation and explained what DARPA is looking for:

The data Darpa wants collected will include “chemical, meteorological and topographical data” from at least 10 “local urban sources,” including “residences, gasoline stations, restaurants and dry cleaning stores that have particular patterns of emissions throughout the day.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Science Idol! Arab Reality TV Show Puts Inventors in the Spotlight

Discover, November 12 2010.

If America’s Got Talent, then the Arab World’s Got Science–that’s if you believe the messages in reality shows, anyway. The Arab reality show Stars of Science, currently in its second season, takes young (18-30) inventors from around the Arab world and pits them against each other, American Idol style. The show, presented by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, hopes to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity in both the contestants and the show’s viewers, Abdulla Al-Thani told AME info:

“The aim is to showcase the whole process of innovation — from inspiration, to the elaboration of a concept, its development and finally, its application,” said Dr. Abdulla Al-Thani, Vice President, Education of Qatar Foundation. “Science and technology will now be given an entertaining twist through the very popular reality TV show format, making the topic accessible to all. We hope ‘Stars of Science’ will promote the innovative spirit of young people in the Arab world.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Nutritionists to America: For the Love of God, Don’t Try the Twinkie Diet

Discover, November 12 2010.

It’s been making headlines all week (“Twinkie diet helps man lose weight” and “Trying To Lose Weight… Try The Junk Food Diet” might be some of the worst health-related headlines I’ve seen in awhile) as the Ding-Dong Diet or the Twinkie Diet, but let’s just call it the worst diet ever for short. The newsplosion came from an experiment by Mark Haub, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at Kansas State University.

In an effort to prove to his class the importance of calories in weight gain and loss, he decided to drastically change his eating habits. He embarked from the shores of a balanced diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat (totaling about 2,600 calories per day) to a junk food diet consisting of Twinkies, Hostess and Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos–with sides of vitamin pills, protein shakes, and small portions of vegetables. He lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks. Read More >

Nov

2010

“Cool It”: Climate Contrarian Bjorn Lomborg Takes His Message to the Movies

Discover, November 12 2010.

Climate change is causing areas of the world to heat and cool, and it seems a controversial new climate change film is doing the same to reviewers. The film is titled Cool It and was based on a book of the same name by Danish writer Bjørn Lomborg, a contrarian who delights in questioning the gravity of our planet’s environmental problems.

The movie was directed by Ondi Timoner, an award-winning documentarian. Lomborg has raised the hackles of environmental activists since he published The Skeptical Environmentalist a decade ago. Since then he has drawn closer to environmentalists on some issues–for example, he now maintains that global warming should be one of the world’s “chief concerns.” Read More >

Nov

2010

World’s Oldest Embryo Fossils Shed Light on Dinosaur Parenting

Discover, November 12 2010.

Fossilized dinosaur embryos, found still in their eggshells, have claimed the title of the oldest vertebrate embryos ever seen–they were fossilized in the early Jurassic Period, around 190 million years ago, researchers say. The embryos are from the species Massospondylus, a prosauropod, the family of dinosaurs which gave rise to iconic sauropods like the Brachiosaurus. Robert Reisz and his team found the embryos when analyzing a clutch of fossilized eggs collected in South America in 1976. The find was just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Professor Reisz. “Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Stem Cell Injections Give Mice Mighty Muscles

Discover, November 11 2010.

Injecting stem cells into injured mouse muscle not only helped the muscle heal, but gave the mice enhanced muscle mass for years to come. The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, used skeletal muscle stem cells from young donor mice and injected them into injured muscles of mature mice. Researchers figured that the stem cells would be able to create new muscle cells in the recipient mouse, but the question was: could these new cells be incorporated into the existing muscle on an adult mouse?

After injuring the recipient mouse’s muscle and injecting the cells, the researchers noticed that the injury healed quickly and the mice had larger muscles (about twice the volume, and a 50 percent increase in mass) than before the injury, which they expected. But were surprised to see that the muscle enhancement was sustained throughout the recipient mouse’s lifetime, up to two years. Read More >

Nov

2010

Prescription for an Aggressive Man: Look at More Meat

Discover, November 11 2010.

Even the sight of the reddest, rawest steak won’t get your blood boiling. Surprising new research has found that staring at pictures of meat actually makes people less aggressive. The insight comes from McGill University undergraduate Frank Kachanoff. He wondered if the sight of food would incite men’s defensive desires, much like a dog aggressively protecting its food bowl, he explained in a press release:

“I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Your Next Sponge Bath May Come From a Robot Named Cody

Discover, November 11 2010.

A team at Georgia Tech is looking to replace your sponge bath nurse with this sexy beast to the right. No, not the girl. The sponge bath robot next to her, named Cody. He’s the one that wants to wipe you down with his delicate towel hands.

The robot was developed by researcher Charles Kemp’s team at the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and was described in a presentation and accompanying paper (pdf) at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. The robot uses cameras and lasers to evaluate the human’s body, identifying dirty spots, then gently wipes with its towel hands, making sure not to apply too much or too little pressure. It has flexible arm joints with low levels of stiffness to make sure that it doesn’t push too hard. Study coauthor Chih-Hung (Aaron) King put himself in the tester’s spot for the robot’s first rubs. Read More >

Nov

2010

DOGS AWAY! Pups Go Parachuting to Sniff out the Taliban

Discover, November 10 2010.

Man’s best friend can also be man’s best tandem parachuting partner. The Guardian reports that UK forces have been sending Taliban-hunting dogs into Afghanistan. Dogs have been used previously by American and Austrian paratroopers, which sheds some light on how the British might be using their pups, says Wired:

SAS pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection. Read More >

Nov

2010

And the Prize for World’s Largest Testicles Goes to… the Bushcricket!

Discover, November 10 2010.

A cricket’s constant chirping may seem a bit ballsy, but just wait until you hear about their testicles. For at least one species of cricket, the tuberous bushcricket (Platycleis affinis), the testicles take up 14 percent of the insect’s body mass! The Daily Mail made a stunning observation:

To put this into perspective, a man with the same proportions would have to carry testicles weighing as much as five bags of sugar each. Read More >