RFID implants linked to animal tumors

AP: "When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found 'reasonable assurance' the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top 'innovative technologies.'

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had 'induced' malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. 'The transponders were the cause of the tumors,' said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich."


Um. Whoops. More on the back-story, including hints of political corruption and coverup of the risks at 27bStroke6... Un-chip your pets.

Salt water to replace oil?

AP: "An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the 'most remarkable' water science discovery in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn. The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel."


Bad. Ass. Yay science!

Scientists to create artificial life

Telegraph: "Scientists could create the first new form of artificial life within months after a landmark breakthrough in which they turned one bacterium into another.

In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists in the US took the whole genetic makeup - or genome - of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species.

This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process.

The team that carried out the first “species transplant” says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory."


File under "What could possibly go wrong?"

'Dark galaxy' found. Stars not included.

New Scientist: "The Hubble Space Telescope has failed to reveal the expected number of stars in the mysterious, galaxy-sized cloud of hydrogen known as VIRGOHI21. The research bolsters the idea that the gas cloud is the only known example of a 'dark galaxy' that never kick-started star birth.

Galaxies are thought to coalesce from normal, or baryonic, matter that has collected in clouds of hypothetical dark matter. But surveys have turned up fewer galaxies than expected, suggesting that – for unknown reasons – some galaxies are stillborn, and simply fail to form stars."


Fascinating.

Scientists claim discovery of 'wireless power' 100 years too late

Daily Mail: "Scientists have sounded the death knell for the plug and power lead. In a breakthrough that sounds like something out of Star Trek, they have discovered a way of 'beaming' power across a room into a light bulb, mobile phone or laptop computer without wires or cables. In the first successful trial of its kind, the team was able to illuminate a 60-watt light bulb 7ft away."

Um. No. Had the journalist done any research whatsoever, he would have found what many already know - Nicola Tesla had discovered and used this principal over a century ago.

Even holding a fluorescent tube near a Tesla Coil will cause it to light up. Research, people.

Terrorism stats database - moving beyond hype

LiveScience: "The majority of terrorist attacks result in no fatalities, with just 1 percent of such attacks causing the deaths of 25 or more people.

And terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.

These and other myth-busting facts about global terrorism are now available on a new online database open to the public.

The database identifies more than 30,000 bombings, 13,400 assassinations and 3,200 kidnappings. Also, it details more than 1,200 terrorist attacks within the United States.

The unclassified Global Terrorism Database (GTD) will give anyone interested the opportunity to peruse through the actual details of global terror attacks. The online terror rap sheet is expected to be a critical tool for researchers and policy-makers who can use it to improve responses to terrorism."


Objective reality should get more airtime... Link to the database web-front-end...

So... everything really tastes like T-Rex?

CNN: "Tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone have given scientists the first genetic proof that the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant cousin to the modern chicken.

"It's the first molecular evidence of this link between birds and dinosaurs," said John Asara, a Harvard Medical School researcher, whose results were published in Friday's edition of the journal Science."


I think we're going to need a bigger ziplock...

Is dark energy an illusion?

New Scientist: "The quickening pace of our universe's expansion may not be driven by a mysterious force called dark energy after all, but paradoxically, by the collapse of matter in small regions of space.

Astronomers were astonished to discover in 1998 that the expansion of the universe is happening at an ever-increasing rate. The mysterious repulsive force responsible for this was dubbed dark energy, though scientists still do not know what it is (see Dark energy: seeking the heart of darkness).

Now, physicist Syksy Rasanen of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, says we might not need dark energy after all. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the increasing rate of expansion might be due to the collapse of small regions of the universe under gravity, he says."


Not sure how this impacts the math, but it does make an intuitive sort of sense that the voids would have less gravitational resistance to expansion.. Also explains the filament-like nature of matter distribution throughout the universe...

15% human. 85% sheep. 100% tasty?

the Mail on Sunday: "Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs. The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer."


File under "what could possibly go wrong?"... We wonder if New Zealand is somehow behind this - as a means of increasing the apparent human:sheep ratio? We also wonder what happens if the beastie gets into the wild and breeds. Will we all one day be cannibals?

U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling

New York Times: "The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering"

"The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons."

"While the proposed rules have not been finished, justice officials said they were certain to bring a huge new workload for the F.B.I. laboratory that logs, analyzes and stores federal DNA samples. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said they anticipated an increase ranging from 250,000 to as many as 1 million samples a year. The laboratory currently receives about 96,000 samples a year, said Robert Fram, chief of the agency’s Scientific Analysis Section."


All your DNA are belong to us. Forever.
And still doesn't address the issue of the millions of chimeric twins out there. One body - multiple versions of DNA.

70 million year old dinosaur soft tissue discovered

Science Now: "When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage. However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible."

This is incredibly cool.. Although we predict that some religious fundamentalist will jump on 'pliable soft tissue' as 'proof' that dinosaurs were around more recently, and just didn't fit on the ark... (insert eye roll)

Tarantulas Produce Silk From Their Feet

ScienceDaily:: "Researchers have found for the first time that tarantulas can produce silk from their feet as well as their spinnerets, a discovery with profound implications for why spiders began to spin silk in the first place.

Adam Summers, a UC Irvine assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, was among the team of scientists who made the discovery using zebra tarantulas from Costa Rica. The team found that the tarantulas secrete silk from spigots on their legs, allowing them to better cling to surfaces. Until now, spiders were only known to spin silk from spinnerets located on their abdomen and to use the silk to form webs for protection and capturing prey rather than for locomotion."


Fascinating.. So did the spinnerets evolve as an independent set of limbs through some mutation, or were they legs that eventually specialized in early spiders? Spiders have 8 legs and 2 spinnerets, where their aquatic cousin the crab has 10 legs, the front two of which developed into claws.. Looking forward to more research on other species.

Yay Science!

Electricity stimulates wound healing...

New Scientist: "IT MAY sound like something out of Frankenstein, but electric currents applied to the skin could potentially speed up wound healing. Ironically, though the phenomenon was reported 150 years ago by the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, it has been ignored ever since.

Now Josef Penninger of the Austrian Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna and Min Zhao of the University of Aberdeen, UK, have demonstrated that natural electric fields and currents in tissue play a vital role in orchestrating the wound-healing process by attracting repair cells to damaged areas.

The researchers have also identified the genes that control the process. 'We were originally sceptical, but then we realised it was a real effect and looked for the genes responsible,' Penninger says. 'It's not homeopathy, it's biophysics.'"



Watt? Ohm my god.. This is shocking news. While sure to be met with resistance, it's current research. (groan)