Results tagged “dailygalaxy” from 60 Second Science

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Breathalyzers are no longer just good for getting a DUI citation. Now when a police officer suspends your driver’s license he can throw in, “By the way, not only is your blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but according to my breathalyzer—you have an inoperable malignant brain tumor.” Indeed, scientists have found that by simply blasting a person's breath with laser light, you can detect specific molecules that will tell you whether or not they have specific diseases like diabetes or cancer.

Actually, this StarTrekish advancement is not intended to diagnose drunkenness (although it can do that too), but rather is meant to make professional medical diagnostics quicker, less expensive, less painful and potentially even more accurate that current methods. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder say the advancement would allow doctors to simultaneously screen for a variety of conditions with a mere exhale. Known as optical frequency comb spectroscopy, the technology earned it’s creators a Nobel Prize in physics, and is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath while also being sensitive enough to distinguish rare molecules that can serve as biomarkers for specific diseases.

Continue reading 'Futuristic "Breathalyzer" Laser Created that Can Assess Personal Health with a Mere Exhale' >

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The entire particle physics community is counting down to May like it was their birthday, Christmas and the Second Coming of the Lord all wrapped up in a clutch of Superbowls. It's when the Large Hadron Collider comes online, but while most are hoping for data and praying for the bashful Higgs boson to finally show it's tiny little face, some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travelers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.

The idea dates back to Einstein's explanation that spacetime can be deformed by large energies or masses. Since the Large Hadron Collider is a twenty-six kilometer ring of superconducting magnets designed to do nothing but give a particle as large an energy as possible, that sounds like it could be an issue. Small deformations in spacetime (like Earth) give us the force of gravity, severe deformations give the cosmological trash compacting black holes, and an extreme case could cause a wormhole - a link between two points as spacetime folds over to touch itself (no sniggering).

Continue reading 'Time Travelers: Futurenauts Using Ultra-duper Atomsmasher' >

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There's been a huge upsurge in cool prosthetic technology recently, thanks to a mysterious increase in the number of first world otherwise-healthy citizens who are suddenly stumbling around the place missing a limb or two. But while advances like bluetooth-controlled legs are undeniably awesome, they're only half of the equation needed before the Detroit crime rate is cut by someone part man, part machine but All Cop. Mechanical parts and squishy human brains have a bit of dysfunctional relationship at the moment - while machines can learn how to interpret the desires of twitching muscles, the gooey nervous system tends to get annoyed or dead when the machine tries to inject signals back.

Continue reading 'Birth of the iHead?' >

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For the first time ever, scientists announced last week that they have finally successfully created an entire synthetic genome. Working diligently in the lab, scientists were able to stitch together the DNA of the smallest known free-living bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. The research is hailed as a groundbreaking event in genetic manipulation that will one day lead to the "routine" creation of synthetic genomes—possibly including chromosomes in larger animals like mammals.

This accomplishment marks the next big step in creating entire synthetic life forms. The new work is the second step in a three-step process, said research leader Hamilton Smith, a biologist and Nobel laureate at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.
The first step was reported last year also by the same team at Venter's institute, with the successful transplantation of a genome from one species of bacteria into another, which effectively switched the organism’s identity.

Continue reading 'Synthetic Life: Two Down, One to Go' >

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One of the most critical questions of global warming: how fast will sea levels rise? It’s a question the experts are eager to find answer for, as the rate at which some glaciers are melting away into the ocean has already doubled, far out pacing former estimates.

These videos animate one scary potential effect of climate change -- rising sea levels.

New York

Miami

Boston

Continue reading 'Global Warming & Rising Sea Levels: Videos of New York, Boston, Miami' >

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"LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity — the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe."

— Bill Gates -Microsoft co-founder.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, partially funded by $30 million from Microsoft founders Bill gates and Charles Simyoni, the developer of Word and Excel, is projected for ‘first light’ in 2014 in Chile's Atacama Desert -the world's Southern Hemisphere space-observatory mecca. The 8.4-meter telescope will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3-billion pixel digital camera. The telescope will probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and it will open a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids and distant Kuiper Belt objects.

Continue reading 'Bill Gates Funds Futuristic Internet-Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert' >

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"Today, every few weeks brings news of a new Jupiter-sized extra-solar planet being discovered, the latest being about 15 light years away orbiting around the star Gliese 876. The most spectacular of these findings was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured breathtaking photos of a planet 450 light years away being sling-shot into space by a double-star system.

"But the best is yet to come. Early in the next decade, scientists will launch a new kind of telescope, the interferometry space telescope, which uses the interference of light beams to enhance the resolving power of telescopes."

— Michio Kaku, Theoretical physicist and host of BBC series Visions of the Future.

In a brilliant essay, Michio Kaku observes that although conjecture about advanced civilizations a matter of sheer speculation, we can still use the laws of quantum field theory, general relativity, thermodynamics, to place upper and lower limits on these civilizations.

Continue reading 'Michio Kaku on Extraterrestrial Civilizations: "How Advanced Could They Possibly Be?"' >

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Strange flying-saucer-shaped moons embedded in Saturn's rings have baffled scientists studying images transmitted by the ESA's Cassini Spacecraft. New research suggests that the oddly shaped moons, Pan and Atlas, are born largely from clumps of icy particles in the rings themselves, a discovery that could shed light on how Earth and other planets formerd from the disk of matter that once surrounded our newborn sun.

Animation of the moon's formation after the jump...

Continue reading 'How Saturn's 'UFO' Moons formed [video]' >

Once a week, we tap our friends over at Daily Galaxy for insights into science, astronomy, and general tomfoolery.

“Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”
~ Epicurus (Greek philosopher, BC 341-270)

Trying to keep up with Joneses? Why is having “enough” never quite enough for those of us living in the “rat race” of urban ideals? In an interesting new study of how money motivates, brought to us by the University of Bonn, researchers discovered that humans don’t just want “more”—we want more in comparison to others. This relative sense of “more” appears to play a much larger role in motivation that previously suspected.

These findings support previous research by Andrew Oswald of England's Warwick University and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College who found that even if our own incomes are rising, we tend to become less happy if the incomes of others are increasing more in relation to ours.

Continue reading 'The Joneses Paradox: Brain-Scan Study Rewrites Economic Theory' >