Science

Training for the L.A. Marathon provides structure and solace to the newly jobless.

Your foot strikes the ground about 1,500 times when running a mile. It strikes the ground about 39,300 times when running 26.2 of them. That's called a marathon, for which you need both training and a routine.

With more dog and cat owners complaining of adverse reactions and pet deaths, the agency says it will develop stricter testing and evaluation requirements for the topical products.

Complaints of dogs and cats injured and sometimes even killed by flea treatments have increased significantly, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday as it outlined plans to make the products safer.

Gosh, look at all those dark materials ... I mean dust

Huge filaments or threads of interstellar dust link to our Milky Way galaxy, seen as a bright pink horizontal in a new image taken by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.

Planck is the first European mission to study leftover radiation from the time of the theoretical Big Bang, or the beginning of the universe. The satellite launched alongside the Herschel Space Observatory in 2009, and has since helped astronomers understand both the origins of the universe and the formation of galaxies.

This latest image comes from Planck's first all-sky survey at microwave wavelengths, and also uses data taken from the IRAS satellite. White-pink colors represent dust with temperatures of just a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, while deeper colors represent dust at a chillier -261 degrees C -- just 12 degrees above absolute zero.

Warmer dust appears in the plane of the Milky Way, and brighter spots in the image represent denser clumps where star nurseries may be forming.

Astronomers remain unsure as to why the dust takes on the shapes that it does. Galaxy rotations create spiral patterns, gravity tugs every which way on dust and gas, and radiation from stars also pushes the dust around. Magnetic fields may also have a more subtle influence.

If that image has you excited, we'd recommend checking out an IMAX-sized cosmic flythrough of the universe, courtesy of Hubble 3D's Hubblegasm.

Schrodinger would be pleased

When we think of quantum mechanics, we often think of the very small and the very theoretical. Take Schrodinger's Cat for instance; it's an interesting thought exercise but not an experiment one would want to actually execute in his or her apartment. But a researcher at UC Santa Barbara has brought quantum systems down from the chalkboard and into plain sight, creating the first mechanical device large enough to be observed with the naked eye that behaves as a true quantum system, bridging the divide between the macro world of mechanical systems and the micro domain of quantum physics.

To create such a quantum mechanical system, physics researcher Andrew Cleland and his team had to cool the system to its quantum ground state to eliminate all thermal static. They did so by creating a mechanical resonator with an extremely high oscillation frequency -- something like 6 billion cycles per second -- and cooling it almost to absolute zero.

Then, using a superconducting quantum bit, or qubit, to measure and control the resonator's quantum state, they excited a single phonon in the resonator, demonstrating the first steps toward manipulating a mechanical system through quantum control in a plainly observable way.

So what does all this have to do with the cat? Demonstrating a means to manipulate mechanical devices through quantum systems could open the door to better quantum information processing methods that could make today's processing methods seem infinitesimally small by comparison. Moreover, there's the possibility that, if the experiment could be sufficiently enlarged, we could test all kinds of quantum principles that make sense at the subatomic scale but are riddled with paradoxes when applied to the macro world. A spatially larger experiment based on these findings could test possible deviations from quantum mechanics at the macro scale, which in turn could explain away paradoxes like Schrodinger's Cat.

So maybe the cat is alive and maybe the cat is dead, but it would be even better if we could prove that the cat is a moot point (and why); this breakthrough could lay the groundwork for doing exactly that.

[Nature]

Algae has helped create the atmosphere, played a role in populating the oceans and even produced biofuels so that we might pollute the atmosphere and the oceans a tiny bit less. Now, a team of researchers is coaxing therapeutic pharmaceuticals out of the hardy little organisms, in a process that could eventually produce biologic drugs that are a few orders of magnitude cheaper than existing drugs.

Many biologic drugs -- drugs made of proteins -- are manufactured in mammalian cell culture or by bacteria or yeasts for treating everything from diabetes to multiple sclerosis to cancer. But while these processes are effective, they can also be quite expensive -- especially in the case of mammalian cell cultures. Some drugs require investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars before they even reach the clinical trial phase, derailing some potential therapies before they ever get a shot.

Green algae, on the other hand, is abundant, resilient, cheap to grow, and fantastically efficient at folding complex proteins. Unlike the bacteria, yeast, and mammalian cultures that ravenously consume nutrients and energy, algae thrives on sunlight and carbon dioxide alone. So if we can get algae to produce some of the complex proteins used in expensive MS or cancer therapies -- proteins currently grown in mammalian culture -- we could potentially cut costs from, say, $150 per gram to something like a nickel per gram. Those are savings worth pursuing.

To test that potential, a group of biotech researchers at UC San Diego inserted genes for production of several different therapeutic proteins into the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Of the seven proteins they were searching for, the algae produced four of them identically and at commercial volumes. With some more adjustments, researchers might even be able to increase yield.

Of course, that doesn't mean the costs of expensive therapies will plunge overnight. Some yeast and bacterial systems are cheap enough -- and so well refined after many years of use -- that the cost savings brought about by algal systems probably wouldn't justify scrapping the old production methods. But the cost advantage over mammalian cultures is too great to be ignored, meaning green algae could drastically trim the cost of some of the most expensive cancer therapies and MS drugs on the market. Not bad for pond scum.

[Technology Review]

The future of community bike systems may not require much pedaling at all; Sanyo has just installed two "Solar Parking Lots" that serve as solar charging stations for 100 Eneloop electric hybrid bicycles in Setagaya, Tokyo.

The carbon-neutral bike shelter both charges the bikes and provides low-power LED lighting from solar energy collected by panels on the roof. Based on Sanyo's own Smart Energy Systems technologies, the panels charge both the lithium ion batteries installed directly on the bicycles as well as an array of lithium ion-based storage cells that reserve power for those rainy days when sunlight is scarce.

Related ArticlesMIT's iPhone-Linked Copenhagen Wheel Makes Your Bike Smarter While Giving You A BoostA Lighter Frame for a Stronger BikeA Foldable Electric Bicycle for Your Urban Commuting NeedsTagsScience, Clay Dillow, bicycling, eneloop, energy, green power, green tech, lithium ion, Sanyo, solar power, VideoThe storage arrays also include AC converters that can be used to power external devices, making the stations grid-independent sources of electricity in case of emergency.

Eneloop bikes, you'll remember, are electric hybrids that do most of the work for you -- you still pedal to make them go, but electric motors supply most of the energy needed to propel the bikes forward (for a refresher see the video below). The Eneloops provided at the Solar Parking Lots will be used as community bikes, though it's unclear if they will be offered free of charge or rely on some sort of payment system.

Green electricity, green travel and some good old-fashioned exercise amid the great outdoors; in the worst-case scenario, your battery dies and you actually have to provide some forward momentum yourself. There's a lot to like about Sanyo's scheme.

[Sanyo]

Unfortunately for anyone looking to terraform Mars, a new study shows that powerful waves of solar wind periodically strip the Red Planet of its atmosphere. Scientists had known for years that Mars has atmosphere troubles, but only by analyzing new data from he Mars Express spacecraft were they able to identify the special double solar waves as the specific cause.

Double solar waves are a rare phenomenon that result when the Sun emits waves of differing speeds. If a fast wave follows a slow wave, the fast wave crashes into the back of the slow one, rolling them both up into a super-charged double wave. Scientists were able to correlate Martian atmosphere loss, as measured by the the Mars Express spacecraft, with records of double radiation waves in 2007 and 2008 taken by the Advanced Composition Explorer spacecraft. According to the study, one third of Martian atmosphere loss occurs during these waves, which are only present 15 percent of the time.

Unlike Earth, Mars lacks a magnetic field that deflects waves of solar radiation. Without that protection, the waves simply strip the atmosphere right off the planet. However, at the poles, Mars does have the remnants of a magnetic field, protecting the ice caps from these bursts. Only comet strikes and the occasional melting of dry ice from the poles provide Mars with any atmosphere at all. To make Mars habitable would require some sort of giant underground alien air generator.

[Discovery News]

Here's an idea: Rehabilitate the tobacco plant by using it to make flu vaccine. This may sound like a double-whammy nightmare for anyone who believes that vaccines are killing us all and GMOs are killing us all, but let's put that aside and examine what the scientists are doing, and why.

Interest in killer whales has surged since one killed a Florida trainer. Researchers are amazed by their intellect and communication skills.

Neuroscientist Lori Marino and a team of researchers explored the brain of a dead killer whale with an MRI and found an astounding potential for intelligence.

Lawsuit calls into question whether cutting-edge research is moving too fast for safety regulations to keep up

A former Pfizer scientist is suing the pharmaceuticals giant after alleging she contracted an artificial, HIV-like, virus created by a colleague. In her lawsuit, Becky McClain claims Pfizer unlawfully dismissed her while she suffered bouts of paralysis brought on by the man-made virus. Pfizer denies these accusations, and says McClain simply didn't come to work, and only linked her problems to engineered-disease exposure after she was fired.

According to McClain, researchers in her lab genetically engineered an artificial lentivirus, a class of viruses that also includes HIV. McClain believes that she became infected by the virus due to faulty safety measures, resulting in complete body paralysis as often as 12 times every month.

For its part, Pfizer claims that its facilities maintain the required level of safety, a position that OSHA agrees with. Pfizer contends that they responded to McClain's initial complaints about the failure of lab safety devices, and that she refused to return to work even after Pfizer offered to transfer her to a different area. Additionally, Pfizer also claims that McClain's illness could not have resulted from the escaped virus, since it was not engineered from a human virus, or with the genetic code needed for reproduction and infection.

Most likely, we will never know if it is Pfizer's virus that caused McClain's health problems. The court case will focus mostly on safety procedures in the laboratory, not on what exactly from the lab caused the illness. Also, Pfizer refuses to release the genome of the suspected virus, preventing both identification of the disease, as well as the development of a possible cure.

[The Hartford Courant]

Scientists have long been stymied by human regenerative healing -- that is, wholesale regrowth of, say, a severed limb -- an ability inherent in some species but lost on humans. But new research suggests the ability to regenerate isn't based on something newts and flatworms have that we don't; rather, it's something we do have that's keeping us from regenerating tissues. Researchers think a gene called p21 may control regenerative healing, and that by switching it off, humans could perform our own regeneration.

The new research suggests that the potential to heal without scarring -- or possibly even to regrow a limb, albeit in a limited manner -- may lie dormant in human cells, kept in check by the p21 gene. A group of lab mice engineered to lack p21 were able to regenerate surgically removed tissue to the point that no evidence of the surgery remained. Holes punched in their ears -- a standard procedure for tagging lab animals -- also healed perfectly, leaving behind no traces of scar tissue or previous damage.

Essentially, switching off the p21 gene allows adult cells to behave like pluripotent stem cells, reorienting themselves into whatever kind of tissue they need to be. But naturally there is a give-and-take; p21 is closely intertwined with another gene, p53, a cell-division regulator that, if allowed to run amok, can lead to many types of cancers. The p21 gene acts as a safety valve for p53, stopping cell division in the case of DNA damage. So switching off p21 can allow cells to engage in regenerative healing, but the risks of doing so include rampant cell division (read: cancer).

However, in the p21-free lab mice there was no cancer surge as one might expect, but rather an increase in apoptosis, or cell suicide, which directs damaged cells to destroy themselves. So it would appear that by striking some kind of controlled balance between allowing regenerative cells to work, while letting apoptosis regulate out-of-control cell division, could lead to regenerative treatments for humans somewhere down the road.

[Guardian]

Chinese rail passengers already zip between cities on trains traveling three times faster than the average train in the States, and a 217-mph line linking Wuhan and Guangzhou will soon be the fastest train on Earth. But not content with screaming-fast trains linking cities within its borders, China now plans to extend its high-speed network all the way to London with a rail line that will fly through 17 countries at speeds reaching 200 miles per hour.

The project calls for the construction of three lines, hopefully by 2020: the first will link London's King's Cross Station to Beijing and take approximately two days to traverse the entire stretch (it will then continue on down to Singapore). A second line will connect China with Southeast Asian nations like Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. The third line will link Germany and Russia, crossing Siberia to terminate, of course, in China.

How is China getting 17 nations on board with such an ambitious -- and expensive -- project? For starters, they're offering to pick up the tab. China will build the infrastructure in exchange for rights to natural resources in the nations that benefit from the high-speed links. So China gets timber, minerals, oil, gas, etc. as well as a fast, efficient means to pipe them to cities within its borders, and smaller, sometimes isolated nations (here's looking at you, Burma) get a high tech, high speed connection to the greater global economy.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. we can't get federal, state and local bureaucracies to agree on funding for a much slower link between Chicago and St. Louis, and San Francisco to L.A. in less than three hours feels like a distant dream. Sigh.

[Inhabitat]

We do a lot of Hubble gawking here. Arguably NASA's most enduring mission, the telescope has provided humans with the deepest possible look into the corners of the universe and papered many a desktop background. It's beamed back so much beauty that it's easy to take it for granted.

But Hubble 3D reminds us how miraculous a thing the Hubble telescope truly is. It is the apotheosis, the pinnacle of Hubblegasms. It's IMAX 3D in space.

We've already talked to the filmmakers and seen an advance cut, so by now you know the story: space shuttle Atlantis astronauts hauled up a giant 3D IMAX camera to document their daring and dangerous Hubble repair mission in the spring of 2009. They had only 8 minutes of film (every pound hauled into space is precious), but none was wasted. Just like every astronaut has trouble articulating the consciousness-rattling power of seeing Earth from space, difficult too is describing the footage these astronauts captured. It's beautiful and thrilling, and worth the price of admission alone.

In addition, the Hubble 3D team has taken archival footage and some traditional 2D shots and digitally converted them to three dimensions. This footage looks incredible, with a camera mounted on the shell of a solid rocket booster during launch providing an unbelievably guttural thrill. Before the film even gets to space, the shuttle launch sequence had me giggling with pleasure. (Actually, my first awed giggle was seeing the NASA logo, in animated 3D, right in front of my face during the opening credits. But that's just because I'm a nerd).

And as the coup de grace, Hubble's mountain of data is used to create spectacular 3D simulated fly-throughs of the universe. Similar to the 3D renderings of the Ultra Deep Field image we've seen previously, the two sequences take us first through the Orion Nebula and then from our Milky Way to the edge of space.

It's sequences like these that articulate just how difficult it is for our minds to even begin to comprehend the scale of the universe. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true: when faced with something like this film's final edge-of-space tour, the mind in some ways simply shuts down--trying to grasp the sheer inconsequentiality of our little grain of sand on the world's largest beach is such a shock that the brain simply can't continue; it can only sit slack-jawed.

It's good for humans to be presented with the sheer scale of these thoughts. We'd all be saner if we could see, as we do in the film's final sequence, our vast galaxy reduced to a speck in the background from billions of light years away, and that we are but even smaller specks inside.

This is Hubble's lasting contribution. And to this contribution, Hubble 3D pays a fittingly supersized tribute. Go see it.

[Hubble 3D]

While scientists have become rather adept at transforming generic skin cells into specialized organ cells, crafting the organs themselves has proven far more difficult. Since the 3-D architecture of most organs is as important to their function as their cellular makeup, 2-D cell cultures are not very useful for building a replacement heart from scratch. To solve that problem, most organ makers create a scaffolding for the cells to grow on.

For a team of researchers at Rice University, even a biodegradable scaffolding wasn't good enough. By injecting cells with a metallic gel, the researchers have succeeded in suspending cultured cells in a three-dimensional magnetic field. With this magnetic scaffolding, organs can be grown in the right shape, and with no foreign material.

The researchers used bacteriophages, special viruses that inject themselves into cells, to insert a polymer iron oxide gel into brain cancer cells. Once the cells absorbed the magnetic gel, the Rice scientists levitated the cells in a weak magnetic field. And since cells naturally live in a 3-D space, not a 2-D culture, the brain cancer cells actually behaved more normally while suspended in the magnetic field then they did when in a cell culture.

The obvious next step involved programming detailed magnetic fields that float stem cells in the exact spots needed for them to grow into a full organ. To that end, the researchers have sold the technology to the company n3D Bioscences. Whether or not this process leaves your replacement organ magnetic, and how that will affect getting through airports, remains to be seen.

[Technology Review]

The cats over at CSI might just have another forensic tool to supplement their super-sleek glass and steel science lab: the bacteria on our hands. A group of researchers at University of Colorado Boulder have conducted a proof-of-concept study in which they were able to accurately identify people using samples of bacteria collected from their computer keyboards and mouses.

As it turns out, even the most obsessive-compulsive among us carry about 150 species of bacteria around on our hands, and those bacteria in turn carry a genome unique to that person. Those bacteria could potentially become a damning forensic tool at crime scenes, allowing investigators to gather DNA information unique to a perpetrator even without recovering any of that person's actual DNA.

But aspiring villains need not worry about being bacterially identified anytime soon. As is, the process is only 70-90 percent accurate, a margin of error too wide for even the most kangaroo courts. There are still a lot of questions to be answered as well: if more than one person has touched a piece of evidence, will the microbial profile be compromised? Is the microbiome stable enough to be used as an identifier (since, for instance, taking antibiotics can alter one's bacterial profile)? Can criminals intentionally alter their bacterial profiles to throw investigators off the trail?

But these very "flaws" also give the bacterial profile a kind of complexity that DNA alone simply cannot match. For instance, smudged fingerprints can't be accurately used for identification, but they can be mined for bacterial data (a swab of the skin provides 100 times more microbial DNA than human DNA). And the mircrobiome offers clues that DNA alone cannot, like where a person lives and works or what he or she eats. Even identical twins that share a DNA profile have significantly different bacterial profiles, giving investigators another way to differentiate suspects if not to ID them outright.

There's still a lot of work to be done clearly (like tightening up that 10-30 percent margin of error) but in the meantime the procedure could certainly serve as one more tool in the forensic toolbox even if the evidence isn't courtroom-admissible. Besides, once you have the right guy, it's only a matter of sitting him down and telling him the jig is up; after that, the confession is imminent. At least that's how it works on CSI.

[BBC, Technology Review]

Men treated for ED should routinely be checked for cardiovascular problems, experts say.

For the first time, researchers have shown that erectile dysfunction is a strong predictor of the likelihood that men will die of heart disease.

Crime scenes may one day make use of germ makeup, which can be traced to individuals. 'There's a rain forest of bacteria on your skin.'

Forget fingerprint dusting. Crime-scene drama fans might soon see a new forensic technique debut on their favorite TV series: hand-germ testing.

In one of the first clinical studies, Patz found that excess oxygen given to premature babies in incubators led to a disease that causes blindness; he later received a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Dr. Arnall Patz, a Johns Hopkins University physician who discovered and eliminated a major cause of blindness in children, died Thursday of heart disease at his home in Pikesville, Md. He was 89.

By raising low levels of the vitamin to normal levels, patients reduce their risk of heart disease by about 30%, an observational study finds.

Raising the amount of vitamin D in the blood appears to help some people -- at least those deficient in the vitamin -- reduce their risk of heart disease by about 30%, researchers announced Monday. The findings, though preliminary, support further investigation of the interplay between vitamin D and heart health.

Natural silk, as we all know, has a strength that manmade materials have long struggled to match. In a discovery that sounds more like an ancient Chinese proverb than a materials science breakthrough, MIT researchers have discovered that silk gets its strength from its weakness. Or, more specifically, its many weaknesses. Silk gets its extraordinary durability and ductility from an unusual arrangement of hydrogen bonds that are inherently very weak but that work together to create a strong, flexible structure.

Most materials -- especially the ones we engineer for strength -- get their toughness from brittleness. As such, natural silks like those produced by spiders have long fascinated both biologists and engineers because of their light weight, ductility and high strength (pound for pound, silk is stronger than steel and far less brittle). But on its face, it doesn't seem that silks should be as strong as they are; molecularly, they are held together by hydrogen bonds, which are far weaker than the covalent bonds found in other molecules.

To get a better understanding of how silk manages to produce such strength through such weak bonds, the MIT team created a set of computer models that allowed them to observe the way silk behaves at the atomic level. They found that the arrangement of the tiny silk nanocrystals is such that the hydrogen bonds are able to work cooperatively, reinforcing one another against external forces and failing slowly when they do fail, so as not so allow a sudden fracture to spread across a silk structure.

The result is natural silks that can stretch and bend while retaining a high degree of strength. But while that's all well and good for spiders, bees and the like, this understanding of silk geometry could lead to new materials that are stronger and more ductile than those we can currently manufacture. Our best and strongest materials are generally expensive and difficult to produce (requiring high temperature treatments or energy-intensive processes).

By looking to silk as a model, researchers could potentially devise new manufacturing methods that rely on inexpensive materials and weak bonds to create less rigid, more forgiving materials that are nonetheless stronger than anything currently on offer. And if you thought you were going to get out of this materials science story without hearing about carbon nanotubes, think again. The MIT team is already in the lab looking into ways of synthesizing silk-like structures out of materials that are stronger than natural silk -- like carbon nanotubes. Super-silks are on the horizon.

[MIT News]