Here comes the Matrix.
It may someday be possible to use brain technology to learn to play the piano, reduce mental stress, or even master kung fu with little or no conscious effort. Lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe says in a statement: “Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning.”
from The Atlantic.
Source: The Atlantic
What Earth would look like with rings like Saturn.
Cory Poole made this video of the annular solar ecplise yesterday using 700 photographs from a telescope with “a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it.”
Cory says: “The filter only allows light that is created when hydrogen atoms go from the 2nd excited state to the 1st excited state.” Very cool.
In a review of the Color Uncovered iPad app, Carl Zimmer highlights something I hadn’t heard before: Claude Monet could see in ultraviolet.
Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he perceived grew muddy. Monet’s cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see — and to paint — in ultraviolet.
The condition is called aphakia.
Someone on Reddit asked: Are chicken eggs one cell?
The answer is no, but—as usual—some interesting facts surfaced in the discussion.
One user said:
A cell that big would never actually work because intracellular communication (gene regulation due to things going on in the ‘periphery’ of the cell) would take ages, far too long to be effective.
But was corrected:
To be fair, single celled organisms do exist that are larger than a hen’s egg. The point is that they have a LOT of multiple nuclei etc. to allow fast response to the environment.
A couple examples are Xenophyophores:
giant unicellular organisms found throughout the world’s oceans, at depths of up to 10,641 meters (6.6 miles). There are approximately 42 recognized species in 13 genera and 2 orders; one of which, Syringammina fragilissima, is among the largest known protozoans at a maximum 20 centimetres in diameter.
…and Valonia ventricosa (bubble algae):
… which consists of a thin-walled, tough, multinucleic cell with a diameter that ranges typically from 1 to 4 centimetres (0.39 to 1.6 in) although it may achieve a diameter of up to 5.1 centimetres (2.0 in) in rarer cases.
Two things I didn’t know before today:
Source: reddit.com
Fossils discovered in northeastern China of a giant, previously unrecognized dinosaur show that it is the largest known feathered animal, living or extinct, scientists report.
…
Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, who was the lead author of the paper, said in a statement that it was “possible that feathers were much more widespread, at least among meat-eating dinosaurs, than most scientists would have guessed even a few years ago.”
Dr. Xu said the feathers were simple filaments, more like the fuzzy down of a modern baby chick than the stiff plumes of an adult bird. Such insubstantial feathers, not to mention the animal’s huge size, would have made flight impossible. The feathers’ most important function was probably as insulation.
The species has been named Yutyrannus huali, which means “beautiful feathered tyrant” in a combination of Latin and Mandarin.
Here’s a great answer by Matan Shelomi:
Nope. No blood vessels.
A heart attack is when fatty deposits, clots, etc. block the coronary artery that leads to the heart muscle. Blood flow to the heart muscle itself (as opposed to the pumping chambers) stops, so the muscle dies and the heart stops beating. So to have a heart attack, you need a heart and arteries.
Insects have a heart, sometimes, but no arteries or veins. They have an open circulatory system: all their organs just float in a goo called “hemolymph” that is a combination of lymph and blood. Some insects, bees included, have a heart and an aorta (the vessel leading out of the heart) that pumps the blood and gives it some semblance of direction (from the back of the insect to the front), but beyond that there is no circulatory system. The heart floats in the hemolymph along with everything else. No way to stop it from receiving blood flow, because it’s surrounded by it.
Furthermore, unlike human blood, insect blood doesn’t carry oxygen. They have a special network of tubes called trachea that provide oxygen: think of it having air vessels go from your lungs all throughout your body instead of blood vessels. Conceivably the trachea leading to an insect heart could all get blocked by something from the outside, which would be the closest thing to a “heart attack” in an insect, but there’s no record of that happening and its unlikely anyway. So, nope, no insect can have a heart attack. Scare them to your heart’s content.
via Quora
Source: quora.com
The Potential of Synthetic Biology in Space
A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work. […]
[via] [Synthetic Biology @ NASA] [photo credit by Matt Mansell]
(via futurescope)
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![futurescope:
The Potential of Synthetic Biology in Space
A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work. […]
[via] [Synthetic Biology @ NASA] [photo credit by Matt Mansell]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1uudsBxIR1r08k60o1_1280.jpg)
