STRANGE BUT COOL:
Scientists have recently unearthed these crystal penises buried in various places in the US. These crystal penises have been carbon dated and it’s shown they’ve been here since before the vikings visited America thousands of years ago. They’re perfectly sculpted and show gorgeous anatomy, an advanced understanding of the human atatomy that only an advanced civilization could accomplish. These crystal penises are typically found around important historical sites such as the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore. People digging up these crystal penises have reported visions and a burning sensation on their hands when touching them. These crystal penises are shrouded in mystery, and scientists as well as archaeologists are working around the clock to find out as much as they can, as these may have the same origins as the crystal skulls from Mayan civilization.
(via sempiternus-noctem)
The LittleDog Robot
This is the more advanced version of this robot, created by the University of Southern California. The robot is completely autonomous and trained by machine learning algorithms.
Beetles Modify Emissions of Greenhouse Gases from Cow Pats
Agriculture is one of the biggest sources of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Among these, cattle farming for meat and milk are major sources of methane, a gas with a potent warming effect. Much of this methane comes from the guts of ruminating cattle, but some escapes from dung pats on pastures. Now researchers from the University of Helsinki have found that beetles living in the cow pats may reduce emissions of methane. The study has just been published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Atte Penttilä, Eleanor M. Slade, Asko Simojoki, Terhi Riutta, Kari Minkkinen, Tomas Roslin. Quantifying Beetle-Mediated Effects on Gas Fluxes from Dung Pats. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (8): e71454 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071454
By digging around in their food, dung beetles like Aphodius pedellus may aerate cow pats — and thereby modify methane emissions.
One Human Mind Controlling Another … Well, Sort Of:
University of Washington scientists have achieved what they call the first noninvasive human brain-to-brain interface, doing so without surgery or brain implants. We’ve seen similar things in rats, but this is the first time it’s been reported in humans. There’s a catch, though. There’s always a catch.
What they did: Two subjects, a sender and a receiver, sat in separate rooms wearing (silly-looking) EEG caps. The sender played a simple artillery-type video game, but instead of manually “pew-pew-ing” when he wanted to, he just thought about pulling the trigger.
The recipient had his finger on a trigger. He could not see the game screen and could not hear the sender. Between the two subjects was a pair of computers and brain-interpreting software. When the sender thought about firing, the recipient received a signal … and he pressed the trigger at precisely the right moment! BOOM!! Achievement unlocked!! You can watch a video of the experiment here.
What this means: Human brains can be connected, and information from one can be used to stimulate the other. Two of the most complex computers ever created are communicating through two considerably simpler computers, which is very cool.
So what’s the catch? It comes down to the word “specific”. I mean, there’s also the fact that this is coming from a press release and not a peer-reviewed research paper. That’s a big catch, but it only means that it’s preliminary, not wrong. The biggest thing is that this is certainly not the transmission of thoughts or specific brain signals between two human beings.
These researchers used a technique called EEG, those funny looking electrode caps we’re all familiar with. EEG is very good at sensing the brain’s electrical activity (like a motor signal that says “pull the trigger”) and recording it in real time (you see a blip as soon as the brain registers electrical activity). But EEG kind of sucks when it comes to spatial resolution. There’s better techniques for this kind of thing, but they are more complex.
Our brain is crowded with nearly a hundred billion neurons, and exponentially more connections between them. In the regions that control your movement, like pressing a video game trigger, they are packed in there like cellular sardines. but two neighboring neurons could be controlling very different actions. EEG can’t tell the difference, it doesn’t have the precision to read a signal and say “You meant to press the trigger” as opposed to “You meant to give the other researcher the bird”.
My guess is that the recipient did feel something, but there is so much unconscious activity going on in our brains that I have a hard time believing the command to “PUSH THE BUTTON” just fell out of the ether and he did it. He most likely got a very generalized brain buzz, and then just pushed the button.
The researchers claim this could one day be used to help someone land a plane if the pilot goes down, or communicate beyond language. Needless to say, I’m skeptical. Don’t put me on that plane.
But it’s still cool. This is another step in decoding the elaborate circuitry of the brain, and perhaps one day we will be able to recreate that information in meaningful ways, like hat-controlled prosthetic limbs, or automatic hunger-triggered pizza-ordering systems. But today is not that day (and the pizza lovers wept).
“Super-mice bred to lack certain immune molecules display a superior ability to form new neural connections, or strengthen existing ones — and they could serve as a model for reversing brain disease.”
A Deep Sea Love Story … Solved
Last year, Japanese underwater filmmaker Yoji Ookata came across something strange on a dive: An intricate underwater rosette design that had been painstakingly carved in the sea floor, likely to attract a mate.
The likely artist was quickly identified as a pufferfish, but no one was able to capture it in action. Now, a team has captured footage of the pufferfish sculptor at work making his Zen garden of love. The male swims across the edges, flapping out sand from the grooves, and even at one point placing a shell in the center, likely to provide nutrients for the young hatchlings he hopes will take up residence.
The ocean floor still remains so mysterious. Think of the awesome biology that still remains to be found down there! We know more about the moon than most areas of the ocean floor.
Anyway, I’m jut glad we got this footage before the Discovery channel turned it into a movie about alien mermaids.
(via Spoon and Tomago)
A 110 million-year-old fossil of Cleoniceras ammonite, found in Madagascar. Ammonites are extinct cephalopods that lived in shells. Their closest modern relatives are nautiluses, octopi, squid, and cuttlefish. Like the nautilus, ammonites gradually added onto their shell to accommodate their increasing body mass. As they extended the shell they built a wall behind them, closing up the now too-narrow portion of the shell as they moved into the larger portion of the spiral.
Unlike the nautilus, the morphology of the tissue wall ammonites built between the chambers is not just a smooth curved wall. Instead it has a bizarrely complex 3-dimensional fractal shape. These are called “suture patterns” and mark the intersection of the septum walls with the shell. Scientists can’t agree why these walls are so complexly furrowed or even how they formed.
Ahhh! My ammonite has these patterns!
When scientists get too honest
> I would love to see more science posts on Tumblr. I particularly liked, “The postdoc who did all the work has since left to start a bakery.”
Well scientists are still human after all.
The last one slayed me omg
(via blessphemy)
A layer of human skin made from stem cells by a 3d printer
Guys, this is SO MUCH HUGER than this image. They actually have systems under development that can print directly into a wound.
The bioprinter has a built-in laser scanner that scans the wound and determines its depth and area. The scan is converted into three-dimensional digital images that enable the device to calculate how many layers of skin cells need to be printed on the wound to restore it to its original configuration. The system has successfully printed skin patches 10 cm square on a pig
http://www.zeitnews.org/node/974
Ten years. that’s how long they reckon until this is commonplace. Ten years.
And that article is two and a half years old! Check out what they can do now:
3D printer makes tiniest human liver ever
(via witchydarling)
The Darwin Manuscripts Project at the Museum is currently digitizing the entirety of Charles Darwin’s evolution manuscripts— some 30,000 pages of letters and manuscripts.
Once complete, the project will make publicly accessible the world’s largest collection of full-color, high-resolution scans of Charles Darwin’s manuscripts.Darwin’s Primate Tree / Cambridge University Library
I CAN’T WAIT
(via scishow)
MEET CYRU: A MAN-SIZED JELLYFISH ROBOT COULD REVEAL SECRETS OF OCEANS
Jeanna Bryner/ Live Science
A giant, slimy, tentacled robot modeled after one of the world’s largest jellyfish could be a precursor to self-powered, autonomous robots that monitor the seas, map the seafloor and even reveal secrets of marine life, engineers say.
Dubbed Cyro, the newly unveiled robotic jellyfish is a scaled-up version of another mechanical swimmer, this one the size of a human hand, called RoboJelly that was developed by the same team of researchers at Virginia Tech College of Engineering.
At 5-foot-7 (1.7 meters) and weighing 170 pounds (77 kilograms), Cyro is the jelly equivalent of an average human guy.
Jellyfish make great models for self-powered and autonomous bots partly because of their relatively low metabolic rate, meaning they can move through the sea on little energy. They also come in various sizes and inhabit a range of aquatic habitats from shallow coastal areas to the deep-sea, meaning engineers have plenty to work with when looking for a mimic for particular uses.
Cyro is modeled after Cyanea capillata, or the lion’s mane jellyfish, whose bell stretches about 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 m) across, with some observations suggesting the bell can reach 9 feet (2.7 m) across. The robot mimic also has a central “bell,” this one holding the creature’s electronic guts, with a thick layer of squishy silicone meant to mimic jellyfish skin covering the entire creature, Alex Villanueva, a mechanical engineering graduate student at Virginia Tech
The robot’s arms, which are powered and controlled by the central electronics, move radially from an outward position in toward the center. That radial “musculature” triggers the pulsing motions of the artificial mesoglea, or the gelatinous substance that makes up the jellyfish’s skin.
Cyro is still in the prototype stages, and so years away from real deployment in the seas, the researchers said. The team, which also includes graduate student Tyler Michael, is working on horizontal movements, as Cyro currently can move only in the up-down direction
- Photo: Virginia Tech video Virginia Tech
- via Nautilus Explorer
(via futureofscience)
Test tube baby: http://bit.ly/13V60OO
Artificial heart: http://nyti.ms/18WdNxW
Exoplanet: http://bbc.in/13DOAHB
Planarian worms: http://bit.ly/1b1onEu
Gene therapy: http://bit.ly/16xDZZt
Star birth: http://bit.ly/130nzX4
(via blessphemy)
Teen creates bio-plastic from banana peels
Sixteen-year-old Elif Bilgin of Turkey has developed a way to replace traditional petroleum-based plastic with banana peels.
The Turkish teen took home a US$50,000 prize for her project “Go Bananas!” Thursday after winning the second annual Scientific American Science in Action Award, associated with Google Science Fair.
“My project makes it possible to use banana peels, a waste material which is thrown away almost every day, in the electrical insulation of cables,” Bilgin said in a media statement.
“This is both an extremely nature-friendly and cheap process, which has the potential to decrease the amount of pollution created due to the use of plastics, which contain petroleum derivatives.”
Bilgin spent two years developing the bio-plastic, which does not decay. She said the process is so easy that it is possible to repeat at home, with special care taken for chemicals used in the production process.
In September, the teen will compete at Google’s California headquarters for the overall Google Science Fair prize for 15-to-16 year olds. She will also have access to a one-year mentorship.
Has anyone else noticed how many brilliant breakthroughs in science are coming from the minds of teenage girls the last few years? Between this story, the four girls in Nigeria who invented a generator that runs on urine, the California girl who invented a twenty-second cell phone charger… Who knows where we’d be today without the patriarchal interference of men, stealing or hiding the brilliance of women?
Our future is in the hands of teenage girls, and I for one feel really good about that.
When I was about 7 I wanted to invent a thing that purified water based off of fish gills. I went to the school library to do research like a good little inventor and one of my teachers asked me what I was doing, and then told me that there were some new barbie books in, and that I’d probably be better off with those.
Don’t forget the girl who invented a torch that’d light up just from the heat of your hands
basically everyone should stop shitting on teenage girls because they do awesome things when you let them
or that one time a girl found the cure for cancer that we could be using in 15 years
(via theseadorkablethings)
If you don’t think evolution is badass yet, here is a parasitic fungus that takes over EVERY tissue cell in the victim and the fruiting body eventually sprouts from the corpse in order to spread the infection. Some species affect the behavior of the host turning it into a zombie. Check out this video
Quartz May Be Used to Store Memory for Millions of Years
British scientists say they have discovered a method for storing and retrieving huge amounts of digital data that could last for over a million years.
Using extremely short and intense pulses of laser light, researchers at the University of Southampton assembled structures in fused quartz glass that can withstand temperatures up to 1000 degrees Celsius.
Scientists say the new method opens the possibility of creating memory discs with an unprecedented memory capacity of up to 360 terabytes, with an almost unlimited lifetime.
when the hell am I ever going to need 360 terabytes of storage space
when arent you