Pakage Posted December 21, 2011 Author Share Posted December 21, 2011 HIV vaccine developed in Canada approved for human studies jFpwHe6KjDA A Canadian-developed vaccine to prevent HIV has been given the green light for testing in human clinical trials. The vaccine, developed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to start being tested in humans in January. It is the first preventive HIV vaccine approved for clinical trials to use a whole HIV-1 virus, which has been both killed and genetically engineered, to activate immunity. In this way, the new vaccine is much like the killed whole virus vaccines that are successful against polio, rabies and influenza. full article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted January 10, 2012 Author Share Posted January 10, 2012 Yesterdays news.. but i forgot to post it up: German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet into Space There's more than one way to stick it to The Man. There's civil disobedience, subversive propaganda, political art, outright violent revolt--each possessing its own degree of difficulty and consequence. In a decidedly 21st-century twist, team of German hackers bent on fighting the powers that be has chosen a rather ambitious means of taking the power back: building a hacker-owned and -operated space program, complete with a constellation of communications satellites beaming uncensored Internet to users on the ground. Full Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Known One Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Marijuana Shown to Be Less Damaging to Lungs Than Tobacco The TL:DR (paraphrasing): Occasional use of marijuana may not be associated with adverse consequences on pulmonary function. Findings do suggest an accelerated decline in pulmonary function with heavier use ? either very frequent use or frequent use over many years. ?We found exactly what we thought we would find in relation to tobacco exposure: a consistent loss of lung function with increasing exposure,? said the paper?s lead author, Mark Pletcher, MD, MPH, associate professor in the Division of Clinical Epidemiology at UCSF. ?We were, however, surprised that we found such a different pattern of association with marijuana exposure.? ?Essentially with tobacco, the more you use, the more loss you have with both of the indicators, air flow rate and lung volume,? The same was not true with marijuana use. Air flow rate increased rather than decreased with increased exposure to marijuana up to a certain level. It's a bit of common sense really... I mean they do mention in the article... ?An important factor that helps explain the difference in effects from these two substances is the amount of each that is typically smoked,? Pletcher said. ?Tobacco users typically smoke ten to 20 cigarettes/day, and some smoke much more than that. Marijuana users, on average, smoke only two to three times a month, so the typical exposure to marijuana is much lower than for tobacco.? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted January 23, 2012 Author Share Posted January 23, 2012 Z4VUAjVp0Jg Looks interesting, Brian Cox is pretty awesome. He's giving a 1 hour long science lecture to famous peeps. This will be the backing track of my day today. Will report back later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted February 1, 2012 Author Share Posted February 1, 2012 Just found this site: http://www.newsciencedocs.com Pretty decent collection of doco's. Check it out! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Known One Posted February 10, 2012 Share Posted February 10, 2012 How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he's now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist's science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Known One Posted February 21, 2012 Share Posted February 21, 2012 This somewhat blew my mind today... The Moon is slowly becoming further away from earth at a rate of 3.8cm per year. Tides will get weaker over time and inversely have been stronger in earths history. The reason for this is that the water on Earth is pulled toward the Moon (The Tide) and at the same time, the Rotation of the earth pulls that water mass away from the moon in the direction of the Earths rotation. The moon steals angular momentum energy from the resulting torque generated by the tides in combination with Earth's rotation. This action has been slowing the Earths rotation and it's likely that a few billions years ago, one "day" was only a few hours long. This is why occasionally we need to insert a Leap Second ....and.... back to work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phonetics Posted February 22, 2012 Share Posted February 22, 2012 cool, i wonder what will happen first; the Earth being consumed by the Sun, or the Earth coming to a halt/perpetual day on one side and perpetual night on the other... or would a day last a whole year and have all four seasons... awesome! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Known One Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 oh yea... forgot to reply to this... I'm not sure, but I think that what would happen before the earth stopped rotating would be that the moon would be in a geo-syncronous orbit around the earth... so the earths rotation would slow down to the same rate as the moon orbits. In other words, the moon would always be in the same place in the sky... only one side of the earth would see it, and the tide would always be in or out, depending on the side of the globe. This all needs citation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted March 2, 2012 Author Share Posted March 2, 2012 From what i understand the earth and the moon will eventually become tidally locked with a period of 1128 hours or 47 days. Mark's right, the moon would always appear in the same spot in the sky the same side of the earth would always face the moon, just like how the same side of the moon is tidally locked to the earth now. This would however take close to 10 billion years to happen and there's a few debates around the issue. Some calculations show that the earth will be consumed by the sun's red giant phase when the star starts to die and expand in about 5 billion years. Other calculations show that the ejection of matter from the star as it becomes a red giant could push the earth out past the point of being consumed. The other possibility is that the earths solar year is slowing down by .00024 seconds per century which means that we're absorbing angular momentum as we orbit the sun. Its of much debate wheter the earth will instead become tidally locked to the sun rather than the moon. Fun fact: Mercury is the only planet which is close to being tidally locked to the sun yet with a 3:2 spin:orbit resonance. I couldn't find overwhelming evidence either way, but regardless of being tidally locked to the moon or the sun, the earth will be a long dead planet by the time this tidal locking occurs, either consumed by the sun or fried to a crisp. Hope this sheds some light Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phonetics Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 cool, i was keen to know which one would occur first...not that i'll see either event! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted March 2, 2012 Author Share Posted March 2, 2012 From what ive been reading, currently, the moon has twice the tidal effect on the earth as the sun does. As the moon spins away from the earth its tidal effect will lessen and after a while the suns tidal effect will over power that of the moon and we will then start to become tidally locked to the sun instead of becoming locked to the moon. Currently the moon is 384,403 KM's (or 38,440,300,000 CM's) away from us and is moving away from us at about 3.86 CM per year. Given that gravity and distance have an inverse square relationship, for the moon's tidal force to drop by half, it would need to move the sqaure root of 2 (1.414) times as far away as it is now to a distance of 543627.9 KM's or 54,362,793,601 CM's. So, to move by 15,922,493,601 CM's it would take 4,124,998,342 years or 4.12 Billion Years. So by that math, the sun would only over come the tidal force of the moon less than a billion years before it turns into a red giant and then i have no idea how long it would take to tidally lock after it overcomes the force of the moon since its still fighting the ever weakening force of the moon amongst other gravitational variables. However, the moon is not moving away from us at a linear rate, its been calculated that: 2.5 billion years ago it was moving at 1.27 CM / year 650 million years ago it was moving at 2.16 CM / year and now its moving at 3.86 CM / year So you can see its exponentially speeding away from us, meaning that the sun would over come the force of the moon long before this date. You could calculate when the moon would be at this distance by plotting these points on a graph and extrapolating the moons recession over time and seeing when it converges on this distance. Then calculate how long after that it would take for the sun to tidally lock the earth and see if that is below the 5 billion year time frame when the sun is supposed to become a red giant. The rest of the maths is a bit too much for me this early on a saturday and there are far too many variables for a noob like me to give you a definite answer. So here we are, no closer to the answer than when we started. However, I hope you found this post informative and interesting. Its been real Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Known One Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Certain birds may be able to 'See' the orientation of the Earths Magnetic Field. Birds evolved compass 'head up display' Pretty neato. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted April 12, 2012 Author Share Posted April 12, 2012 The Amazing Trajectories of Life-Bearing Meteorites from Earth The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs must have ejected billions of tons of life-bearing rock into space. Now physicists have calculated what must have happened to it. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27720/ Very interesting read. They have calculated that not only would a substantial amount of life bearing ejecta have reached Mars & Europa. Also around 1000 rocks would have made it all the way through interstellar space to Gliese 581 which is a close by red dwarf with a super-earth orbiting it within the habitable zone. This impact could have potentially seeded life in another solar system! If the microbes were able to survive the journey, they could have been evolving there for the last 160 million years. Mind = Blown. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted April 22, 2012 Author Share Posted April 22, 2012 I wrote a good little explanation for "dummies" on why a tachyon violates causality in reddits ask science sub. Thought it was worth sharing if anyone is interested in that kind of thing: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted April 26, 2012 Author Share Posted April 26, 2012 Researchers claim quantum breakthrough Researchers say they have designed a tiny crystal that acts like a quantum computer so powerful it would take a computer the size of the known universe to match it. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/26/3489504.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted June 5, 2012 Author Share Posted June 5, 2012 Not sure whose interested in the Transit of Venus that’s happening today. I think it’s pretty exciting, it won’t happen again until the year 2117! This is a live image of the Sun from our Sun orbiting satellite. It refreshes every 15 minutes: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/mov/depot/APOD/latest_APOD_HMIC_FR.jpg New Zealand Timetable: http://www.rasnz.org.nz/2012Transit/Venus2012.html NASA Web casts: http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2012/transit/webcast.php Wiki Article on the transit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus,_2012 I bought some Eclipse Shades for it, but it doesnt look like ill get a peek at the sun with my own eyes today.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pakage Posted August 23, 2012 Author Share Posted August 23, 2012 Big Bang Was Actually a Phase Change, New Theory Says How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so. Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice. full article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Known One Posted November 25, 2012 Share Posted November 25, 2012 The Machinery of Life David S. Goodsell Really interesting read if you are interested in Micro Biology. Explaining the fundamentals of Cells and the Chemistry, Physics and a whole host of other information about life at the micro level. This book blew me away. I used to have so many unanswered curiousities about how Cells work and how we evolved. This book really cleared up a lot. Starting out with the most studied single celled organism, Escherichia Coli. The book uses CAD drawings to explain the workings of a Bacterium Cell. This little guy resides harmlessly in our Gut (amongst other places). For instance, the Bi-lipid layer which serves as most Cells outer membrane is explained and has had 3D models made in scale down to the Distance between Atoms. Or some of the Human Body's mechanisms for Storing and Using Energy or Transporting Molecules/Atoms Here we have the Protein responsible for taking a Copy of a section of DNA and transposing it into an RNA molecule. I found this to be very interesting as RNA is amazing in how it works and is used in the body or by Viruses. Such a crazy awesome, mind blowing read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dr_weazel Posted November 26, 2012 Share Posted November 26, 2012 http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/7984572/Mars-discovery-for-the-history-books Mars discovery 'for the history books'Mars watchers are in a ferment after hints from Nasa that it has found something significant on the red planet, but it's keeping the discovery secret for now. "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good," John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the Mars rover mission said. But he is keeping mum on the details for now until researchers have been able to make sure the finding is not some fluke or error. The exciting results have come from the Curiosity rover's SAM, the Sample Analysis at Mars suite of three instruments, which analyse soil and gases. "We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting," Grotzinger said last week in his office at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where data from SAM first arrive on Earth. Grotzinger said a soil sample recently analysed in SAM showed something earthshaking, NPR reported. It would be several weeks before he and his team would be ready to talk about it. Organic compounds? Water? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nato Posted November 26, 2012 Share Posted November 26, 2012 Organic compounds? Water? Red Rocks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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