Hubble Images

The Telegraph gathers some of the best images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

(image credit: spiral galaxy M104, "The Sombrero Galaxy", NASA)

Filming HIV

Researchers demonstrate cell-to-cell viral transfer in this amazing video. The new research will greatly aid efforts at a vaccine.

Flowers on the Moon

Paragon Space Development wants to put a greenhouse on the moon. The greenhouse would hitch a ride with lunar lander Odyssey Moon, a Google Lunar X Prize hopeful. They will first try the fast-growing (and evocative) mustard seed, which might flower during a single lunar day (the equivalent of 14 days on Earth).

"Anything essential is invisible to the eyes," the little prince repeated, in order to remember.
"It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important."

(image credit: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince)

Hunting Viruses

Nathan Wolfe on finding novel viruses.

First Oceanographers

In a tradition blending philosophy and oceanography, Vikings let drift pillars of Thor and coffins to determine the drift currents around Iceland - helping them find a place with better resources (driftwood, more marine mammals) and making them the 'first oceanographers'.

(image credit: Bridgeman Art Library/Getty, via newscientist)

Oldest Sea Creatures

Researchers have dated deep sea corals off Hawaii to 0ver 4,000-years-old. The bristlecone pine scoffs.

(image credit: NOAA's Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL))
 

Malagasy Moxie

This week's Economist provides a nice summary of how Andry Rajoelina, a 34-year-old former disc jockey, captured the presidency of Madagascar.

(photo credit: www.economist.com)

Evolving Bacteria

Molecular geneticist George Church and colleagues have developed a technique called MAGE (multiplex-automated genomic engineering) that allows rapid insertion of multiple genes into bacterial genomes, bypassing the tedious one-by-one insertions used in the past. The technique will allow faster and cheaper engineering of a variety of bacterial products, from drugs to fuels.

(image credit: MAGE machine, George Church, via technologyreview.com)

Finding Consciousness

In an intriguing experiment, researchers utilized therapeutic electrodes in the brains of epileptic patients to track down the slippery neural connections responsible for consciousness.

(image credit: Harry Sieplinga/HMS Images/The Image Bank, via newscientist)

Predator X

A newly discovered behemoth dominated the Jurassic seas. The giant pliosaur, known for now as "Predator X", was 50 feet long and weighed 45 tons. It lived 150 million years, long before the greatest shark that ever lived, the similarly sized Megalodon. Yet these beasts can't compare to the largest animal that ever lived.

(image credit: illustration of pliosaur "Predator X", Atlantic Productions, via nytimes.com)

DNA Origami

In a technique called DNA origami, researchers mimic life's complexly layered simplicities.

(image credit: a nanomap of the Americas made using DNA origami, Paul Rothemund, via newscientist)
 
 

World Wide Web Turns 20

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, discusses the future of the internet.

The Maldives Gets Tough on Warming

The President of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, has pledged to make his country the first carbon-neutral nation in the world within the next ten years. Facing an existential threat from rising sea levels, President Mohamed Nasheed said yesterday that the Maldives will now get all of its energy from renewable sources.

Perhaps Senator McCain can help get the ball rolling.

Hummingbirds

Amazing video from Vimeo (h/t Andrew Sullivan). More on hummingbirds.


Ruby-throated Hummingbird Eating From My Hand (Part One) from Russ Thompson on Vimeo.

Google and Parkinson's

Sergey Brin and his wife, 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki, are setting up a catalog of Parkinson's patients with genomes and phenotypes. These sorts of projects promise to unlock genetic secrets of disease. This is a great start.

(image credit: karyotype, nih.gov)

The Sixth Sense

Pattie Maes's TED talk on novel technology to interact with your environment. Drawing a watch when you need one is a nice touch.

"Peking Man" Older Still

Homo erectus migrated to and lived in China 250,000 years earlier than previously thought. New methods have shown that Chinese cave fossils from our hominid ancestor are in fact 770,000 years old. Peking Man, you don't look a day over 750,000.

(image credit: reconstructed Homo erectus skull, nature.com)
 

Printing Bones

A copy of a thumb has been made using a scaffold created in a 3-D printer.

(image credit: Gustoimages/SPL, via newscientist.com)
 
 
 

Nano-targeting Cancer

Cancer-killing genes hidden in tumor-seeking nanoparticles may allow treatment of inoperable tumors in the future. It's an elegant solution with lots of practical hurdles. Researchers are hoping to begin clinical trials within 2 years.

(image credit: SPL, via news.bbc.co.uk)

Quants

Dennis Overbye on physics and finance.

The Preposterous Universe

Two teams of physicists have observed Hardy's paradox, proving again the exceptional bizarreness of the quantum world. Physicist Lucien Hardy proposed in the 1990's that quantum uncertainty meant that an understanding of unobserved past events was compromised by the acknowledgement that the act of observation changes events. This supposed that, when unobserved, particle and antiparticle pairs could survive their meeting instead of jointly annihilating as conventionally understood. Or, generally, that real and very strange things could be happening that we couldn't know about.

Now, using novel methods, researchers have managed to observe photon interactions without biasing the interaction. The results were strange indeed, The Economist:

What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here.

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”. Niels Bohr, no doubt, would have been delighted.

Shakespeare's Portrait

The only known portrait of William Shakespeare made during his lifetime has been unveiled. The portrait, thought to have been painted in 1610, was recognized as possibly of Shakespeare in 2006, after being passed down for nearly 400 years.

(image credit: 17th century portrait thought to be of William Shakespeare, AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Largest Animal That Ever Lived

At 100 feet long and close to 200 tons, Balaenoptera musculus, the Blue Whale, is the largest animal that has ever lived. That's roughly the length of a basketball court and the weight of 40 elephants (check out the National Geographic comparison charts). National Geographic is running a show tonight on the behemoth. Check out a wikipedia list of the largest organisms here. That the giant Blue Whale remains mysterious is reminder of how little we know about the oceans that cover 2/3 of the world.

(image credit: Blue Whale, wikipedia.org)

Gene Stories

As genomic analysis expands, incredible and strange stories of the history of genes are emerging. These are stories of tragedy and triumph, life and death. Science details the curious case of the IRGM gene, which was lost and then found again. IRGM, immunity-related GTPase family, M, is thought to play a role in immune function, specifically the process of autophagy in which programmed cell destruction allows, among other things, nutrient conservation and the removal of infected cells. The gene was lost about 50 million years ago in the ancestor that we share with monkeys. Then 25 million years ago, IRGM came back in the line that became great apes and us. Comparative genomics suggests that an ancient retrovirus and a couple of gene mutations conspired to rouse the sleeping gene. Geneticist Evan Eichler and his colleagues now have the question of how the new gene works. This is but one of innumerable quiet epics written in every cell of our bodies.

(image credit: Cemalettin Bekpen/Stockxpert.com, via sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Christopher Nolan, RIP

The Irish writer Christopher Nolan was born trapped by cerebral palsy. For 11 years he gathered words and poems until, with new medication and improvised typing headgear, his head cradled in his mother's hands, he let loose "A Dam-Burst of Dreams". He went on to win the Whitbread Book Award for his autobiography "Under the Eye of the Clock". The members of the band U2 were his schoolmates in Dublin and later wrote the song "Miracle Drug" about Nolan.

Sadly, Nolan died two weeks ago in Dublin. The New York Times obituary is here.

(image: Christopher Nolan with his father and sister, Simon Townsley, via telegraph.co.uk)

The God Particle

An Edge video with physicist Brian Cox on physics, politics, the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs Boson, the God particle.

Song of the Day - David Byrne

David Byrne on The Colbert Report - Life is Long, from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

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David Byrne Pt. 2

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Facebook and the Neocortex

"Dunbar's number" is anthropologist Robin Dunbar's theoretical limit to the number of social relationships we can keep. That number (hypothesized at about 150 people) is thought to be limited by the computational capacity of the neocortex. The number was extrapolated from primate studies and has (roughly) held up to analyses of human history. The Economist asked Facebook's sociologist to test the number based on their site. They found that the average person has 120 Facebook friends but that people also maintain a much smaller group of closer friends. This offers a new justification for unfriending ("resting my neocortex") even if you can't get a Whopper anymore.

(image credit: sciam.com)

Historically Inaccurate Movies

HowStuffWorks lists 10 historically inaccurate movies. When I studied in Scotland the University of Edinburgh had an entire seminar course devoted to "The Fallacy of Braveheart" (see #5). The professor was not amused by Mel Gibson.

(image credit: AP/Paramount Pictures, via HowStuffWorks)

Checking In With Dr. Doom

TIME interviews Nouriel Roubini:

"We're in the worst global synchronized recession in the last 60 years. Unless we take the right policy actions, we'll end up in a near depression. I did not want to use that term six months ago. At that time, I said the chances of a near depression were only 10%. But today those chances are 33% or so."

(image credit: Win McNamee/Getty)

Happy Square Root Day

Happy Square Root Day? Today, 03-03-09, marks the second such holiday of our young 21st century. The last one occurred on 02-02-04 and the next one won't be until 04-04-16. Here is more on mathematical holidays.

Mugabe's 85th

The nightmare continues.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe celebrated his 85th birthday last month with a $250,000 party as the South African nation continues to deteriorate. The U.N. now says that a raging cholera epidemic has infected 83,265 and killed at least 3,877 Zimbabweans.

Economic ruin is also certain to last as long as Mugabe pursues his disastrous land redistribution program. "Land distribution will continue. It will not stop...The few remaining white farmers should quickly vacate their farms as they have no place there," Mugabe told his birthday crowd.

A "unity government" was finally formed between the President and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai last month. Yet, dozens of opposition party members have been charged with terrorism, imprisoned, and tortured by Mugabe's thugs. For more background click here.

Nano Storage

California Berkeley and UMass Amherst researchers have developed a new technique that could potentially, according to investigator Ting Xu, "enable the contents of 250 DVDs to fit onto a surface the size of a quarter". The technique involves using precisely cut crystal surfaces to foster nano element self-assembly. This allows extraordinary densities that could revolutionize data storage and might also have applications for solar cell efficiency.

As a data storage aficionado, I find a storage revolution based on self-assembling nanotechnology and quantum entanglement very cool.

(image credit: Dong Hyun Lee, UMass Amherst, via sciencedaily.com)

Worse Than Anybody Expected

Martin Wolf speaks to Fareed Zakaria on the troubling state of economic affairs. This type of important conversation is overwhelmed by the nonsense of our partisan politics and absurd media coverage. Despite a horrible name, GPS is the rare serious and worthwhile cable news show.