ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

It's a bit overwhelming to realize just how little is understood still about the human body. In fact, it was only a few years ago that doctors at Duke University Medical School proposed a beneficial function of the appendix, long thought of as a vestigial organ left over from evolutionary development. Their theory is that the appendix replenishes good bacteria into the gut, which is vital after things like diarrhea effectively slough the top layer of cells from the GI tract, including bacteria that help to digest consumed food. Without an appendix, a person's GI flora repopulate more slowly, and it's unclear what effects that has on health.

http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/28/biotech-startup-ubiome-aims-to-sequence-the-bacteria-that-call-our-bodies-home/

http://www.youtube.com/embed/0jHsq36_NTU?start=0&end=120

Lepo nacrtano.
Ali argumentacija je više nego smešna. Poređenje s elektronima, s DNK, nacrtaše i rep Suncu...

Quadruple helix DNA found in living human cells — and it may be linked to cancer

The double helix DNA structure is about as iconic as its gets. But geneticists have long speculated about the potential for a quadruple helix to exist — a four-stranded DNA structure. And indeed, computer models and lab experiments have suggested that it's theoretically possible.
Now, researchers working at Cambridge University have proven that quadruplexes do in fact exist in nature and they can be found right inside the cells of our bodies. Trouble is, their presence has been correlated with an increase in cellular replication — a process that could be contributing to the spread of some cancers.


Rapid Cellular Division
Called the "G-quadruplex," it's a square-shaped structure that forms in regions of DNA that are rich in the building block, guanine (abbreviated as G, and is one of the four main nucleobases found in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA). It's held together by a special type of hydrogen bonding, one that forms a compact square matrix that can disrupt the DNA helix.

The researchers, a team that included Giulia Biffi, Shankar Balasubramanian and Julie Sharp, were able to isolate the quadruplexes within human cancer cells by using fluorescent biomarkers. The research was funded by Cancer Research UK.

Their discovery shows that a clear link can be established between the presence of concentrated amounts of quadruplexes and the process of DNA replication — a combo that's facilitating cell division and production. And indeed, the research showed that quadruplexes are more likely to occur in genes of cells that are rapidly dividing — including cancer cells. Moreover, they also tend to appear in the core of chromosomes and in telomeres (the caps on the tips of chromosomes that protect them from damage).

Potential Therapy

Consequently, the researchers are looking to further establish this potential link and create a cancer therapy in which synthetic molecules can be used to trap and contain these genetic trouble makers, thus preventing certain cells from replicating their DNA. The scientists are hoping that such a therapy could halt the runaway cell proliferation that's so characteristic of cancer. And indeed, when cancer cells divide rapidly, they often exhibit defects in their telomeres; subsequently, there may be a very intimate link between quadruplexes and tumorous growths.

To prove the existence of the quadruplexes, the researchers generated antibody proteins that could locate and bind to sections of the human genome that's rich in quadruplex-structured DNA. They used fluorescence to mark the antibodies, thus allowing them to visually see where the four-stranded DNA was doing its work within the genome — and at what stage of cell division.

Interestingly, the quadruplex DNA exists fairly consistently throughout the genome of human cells, but they increase dramatically during the 's-phase' of replication, the time when DNA replicates before the cell divides.

Tumors grow when cell proliferation spirals out of control — a process that's driven by genes called oncogenes that have mutated to increase DNA replication. As a result, the increased DNA replication rate in oncogenes leads to an increase in quadruplex structures. So, if the researchers can figure out a way to trap the quadruplex DNA with synthetic molecules, they could devise a novel way to treat cancer.

"This research further highlights the potential for exploiting these unusual DNA structures to beat cancer –- the next part of this pipeline is to figure out how to target them in tumour cells," said Sharp through a release.

Read the entire study at Nature.

Ova ti je dobra kao podloga za SF. Muka je ko će moći da taj potencijal izdvoji.

This miniature ecosystem has been thriving in an almost completely isolated state for more than forty years. It has been watered just once in that time.

The original single spiderwort plant has grown and multiplied, putting out seedlings. As it has access to light, it continues to photosynthesize. The water builds up on the inside of the bottle and then rains back down on the plants in a miniature version of the water cycle.

As leaves die, they fall off and rot at the bottom producing the carbon dioxide and nutrients required for more plants to grow.

What's the meaning of almost?

Radmilo, zar baš moraš da štrcneš te svoje jednorečenične nedotupavnosti ama na svaki topik?

Pa, ako ti toliko smeta ja ću da odem tamo gde sam dobrodošao. Inače, mene zatvoreni sistemi prilično zanimaju, pa mi se omaklo. Tako je i sa kvadruplim heliksima DNK.

Da nema bakterija, ne bi se lišće pretvaralo u azot i ostala sranja...

To mi ne smeta toliko, koliko me, recimo, smeta što svaki put kad svratim na forum na njemu arlauču vaši seoski ludaci. I smeta mi što se svi mi maksimalno sklanjamo, kao da je to upravo to normalno ponašanje, kao da je upravo to ta vaša famozna "socijalna inteligencija".  A nije. Nije uopšte. To je samo nemoć pred sociopatama, i to retardiranim. Zato me tvoj nastup ovde i ne smeta toliko koliko me iritira, je se od čoveka tvojih godina ipak ne očekuje da dnevno postuje makar jedan provokativni oneliner na svakom božjem aktivnom topiku, a kad time nekog eventualno i iziritira - a iziritira neminovno - onda zove Bobana da "reaguje" banom. A ja ne bih da ovaj topik završi na deponiji, tu mi je dosta linkova koji mi trebaju i za koje me mrzi da sad prebacujem u bukmark. I zato nisam malopre imala dovoljo živaca da ti ovde strpljivo crtam očigledno, a to je da odgovor na tvoje kobajagi pitanje leži u drugoj po redu rečenici - sipana je voda, jednom, samo jednom, za svo to vreme. Ali zato sistem nije apsolutno zatvoren, nego je "almost".

I sunce su sipali.

Morali su da dodaju vodu jer je biljka rasla.

Onda ću ti malo opširnije, da bi shvatila šta mene, zapravo, zanima. Prema informaciji sa linka za mene je sistem zatvoren. Sipanje vode u sud pre više od 40 godina je startovanje sistema i ono je isto što i seme biljke sa kojom sistem opstaje. I Zakkova opaska o svetlosti je rešiva sabirnim sočivima sa spoljne strane suda u bilo kojim uslovima, ako svetlosni izvor, bilo kakav postoji. Jedino bi povremene intervencije upućivale na "almost" status, a takve se ne pominju. O tvojim strepnjama neću ni reči.

http://io9.com/5892356/artist-suspends-real-clouds-in-the-middle-of-the-room

http://liftport.com

UBIQ?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/14/carbon_nanotube_threads_spun/

Scientists spin carbon nanotube threads on industrial scale


Stronger than steel, conductive as copper, thinner than human hair

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Science, 14th January 2013 19:41 GMT

An international team of scientists has successfully found a way to spin tens of millions of carbon nanotubes into a flexible conductive thread that's a quarter of the thickness of human hair.

"We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don't exist in any other material," said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali of Rice University. "It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers."

The thread has ten times the tensile strength of steel and is as conductive as copper, but is flexible enough to be wound around a spool or woven. The team envisages it being used in "smart" clothing and the aerospace industry, and says that its properties will be of particular use to electronics manufacturers.

"Metal wires will break in rollers and other production machinery if they are too thin," he said. "In many cases, people use metal wires that are far more thick than required for the electrical needs, simply because it's not feasible to produce a thinner wire. Data cables are a particularly good example of this."

The thread is the result of nearly a decade of research at Rice, which initially focused on extruding nanotubes of a uniform type without them clumping together into weak, poorly connective bundles. Nanotubes come in many forms with different properties, and the team needed to get a uniform production process to get a material than behaved consistently.

 
Hm, to mi izgleda kao da je Klarkov monofilament, a još i provodnik pride...

Da ne bude zabune, u vreme kad je Klark pisao Rajske vodoskoke, ja sam imao ugljenične filamente u laboratoiji. Bili su i tada čvršći od čelika i provodniji od bakra, jer je ugljenik provodniji od bakra kao element. Naravno, ideja o liftu do orbite je bila opsenjujuća i taj roman mi je najbolje što je Klark ispovrteo. Problem koji je tada postojao postoji i danas, a to je istegljivost ugljeničnog vlakna i ako su u Rajsu nešto pomakli, onda bi to moralo da bude u tom pravcu. Neko je već ovde postovao da je projektovanje takvog lifta već u fazi konstruktivnog rešenja, pa kad reše istegljivost - evo ga.

Ovo je sad početak nove tehnološke revolucije. CNT su upotrebljive u mnogim oblastima. Tek će mi da vidimo čemu služi sav taj CO2 i bakibali 

The True Story of a 1967 "Contact" Incident

      The story of the SETI discussions during the discovery of pulsars has never been fully told—until now


http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511136/the-true-story-of-a-1967-contact-incident/






One of the most significant events for human kind will be the detection of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This kind of 'contact' is bound to have a profound impact on human culture, society and technology.

The question of how to handle such an event has been widely discussed. Indeed, the international community agreed on a 'Detection Protocol' in 1990 that sets out the steps that a research group should take in the event of a contact.

Today, Alan Penny at the University of St Andrews in Scotland tells the story of a real life incident in which the possibility of contact with an intelligent civilisation was seriously considered. Penny draws together various first hand recollections of the event to show how researchers handled the possibility.

The event in question is the 1967 discovery of pulsars, which we now know are rotating neutron stars that produce regular radio pulses. The team that made the discovery was led by Anthony Hewish, who later won a Nobel prize for the work, and famously included Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who did not win the prize.

At the time, the dawn of radio astronomy, the discovery of a source of regular pulses in space was a huge surprise. "We had to face the possibility that the signals were, indeed, generated on a planet circling some distant star, and that they were artificial," said Hewish later.

The timeline behind the discovery stretches over 6 months or so. In August 1967, Bell noticed regular signals at the same sidereal time each day. Almost immediately, the team considered the possibility that the signals were generated by Little Green Men or LGM as they called it.

In December, the team confirmed the discovery using another telescope and Bell pinpointed the exact position of the source in the sky.

Soon afterwards, she found a second source of signals and by mid-January, a third and fourth source. By this time, the team discounted the possibility that an artificial source could be responsible and eventually settled on neutron stars as the explanation.

In February, the paper announcing the discovery was accepted and published in Nature following a public announcement on 24 February 1968.

Penny says that what's interesting about this process is that during the discovery process, the team discussed the implications should the signal turn out to be an artificial source, how to verify such a conclusion and how to announce it. They also discussed whether such a discovery might be dangerous.

This process closely follows the Detection Protocol agreed by the international community in 1990.

There's an interesting corollary to this. The team also discussed the possibility that if it were an artificial source, somebody would want to reply.

Penny points out that the international community has yet to agree on a Reply Protocol because there are widely differing views on whether such a course of action would be beneficial or dangerous for humanity.

This is a situation that needs to be rectified. "The 1967 episode indicates how difficult it would be to construct a policy in the fervid atmosphere of a 'Contact'," says Penny.

With SETI searches now focusing on habitable exoplants around other stars, it seems prudent to come to some agreement sooner rather than later.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1302.0641: The SETI Episode in the 1967 Discovery of Pulsars

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/02/libra-the-21st-century-libertarian-space-colony/


Introduction to Libra - a 21st century space colony (1978)

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain's billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.
       
Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.
       
Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president's budget proposal next month. And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project.
       
The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money would be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal constraint or how far the research would be able to get without significant federal financing.
       
In his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should "invest in the best ideas."
       
"Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar," he said. "Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer's. They're developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation."

Story C. Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said that when she heard Mr. Obama's speech, she thought he was referring to an existing National Institutes of Health project to map the static human brain. "But he wasn't," she said. "He was referring to a new project to map the active human brain that the N.I.H. hopes to fund next year."
   
     http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-human-brain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& 

This anatomical specimen dating to the 1200s is the oldest known in Europe.
   http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/mummy-head-medieval-science-130305.htm                                           

In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors' wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries.

Galen's texts wouldn't be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections —- often in public -— surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.

The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red "metal wax" compound that helped preserve the body.

(Gallery: Historic Images of Human Anatomy)

Evo ne moramo daleko da se lansiramo:

Hakovani bilbord na trgu republike!

Mislim da bi se Kori Doktorov radovao.

 Najs tač, ali... hakeri?! jesterdejz njuz. 

Astronomers Conduct First Remote Reconnaissance of Another Planetary SystemMar. 11, 2013 — Researchers have conducted a remote reconnaissance of a distant planetary system with a new telescope imaging system that sifts through the blinding light of stars. Using a suite of high-tech instrumentation and software called Project 1640, the scientists collected the first chemical fingerprints, or spectra, of this system's four red exoplanets, which orbit a star 128 light years away from Earth.





A detailed description of the planets -- showing how drastically different they are from the known worlds in the universe -- was accepted Friday for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
"An image is worth a thousand words, but a spectrum is worth a million," said lead author Ben R. Oppenheimer, associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History.
Oppenheimer is the principal investigator for Project 1640, which uses the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. The project involves researchers from the California Institute of Technology, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cambridge University, New York University, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, in addition to Oppenheimer's team at the Museum.
The planets surrounding the star of this study, HR 8799, have been imaged in the past. But except for a partial measurement of the outermost planet in the system, the star's bright light overwhelmed previous attempts to study the planets with spectroscopy, a technique that splits the light from an object into its component colors -- as a prism spreads sunlight into a rainbow. Because every chemical, such as carbon dioxide, methane, or water, has a unique light signature in the spectrum, this technique is able to reveal the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere.
"In the 19th century it was thought impossible to know the composition of stars, but the invention of astronomical spectroscopy has revealed detailed information about nearby stars and distant galaxies," said Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology. "Now, with Project 1640, we are beginning to turn this tool to the investigation of neighboring exoplanets to learn about the composition, temperature, and other characteristics of their atmospheres."
With this system, the researchers are the first to determine the spectra of all four planets surrounding HR 8799. "It's fantastic to nab the spectra of four planets in a single observation," said co-author Gautam Vasisht, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The results are "quite strange," Oppenheimer said. "These warm, red planets are unlike any other known object in our universe. All four planets have different spectra, and all four are peculiar. The theorists have a lot of work to do now."
One of the most striking abnormalities is an apparent chemical imbalance. Basic chemistry predicts that ammonia and methane should naturally coexist in varying quantities unless they are in extremely cold or hot environments. Yet the spectra of the HR 8799 planets, all of which have "lukewarm" temperatures of about 1000 Kelvin (1340 degrees Fahrenheit), either have methane or ammonia, with little or no signs of their chemical partners. Other chemicals such as acetylene, previously undiscovered on any exoplanet, and carbon dioxide may be present as well.
The planets also are "redder," meaning that they emit longer wavelengths of light, than celestial objects with similar temperatures. This could be explained by significant but patchy cloud cover on the planets, the authors say.
With 1.6 times the mass and five times the brightness, HR 8799 itself is very different from our Sun. The brightness of the star can vary by as much as 8 percent over a period of two days and produces about 1,000 times more ultraviolet light than the Sun. All of these factors could impact the spectral fingerprints of the planets, possibly inducing complex weather and sooty hazes that could be revealed by periodic changes in the spectra. More data is needed to further explore this planetary system's unusual characteristics.
"The spectra of these four worlds clearly show that they are far too toxic and hot to sustain life as we know it," said co-author Ian Parry, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University. "But the really exciting thing is that one day, the techniques we've developed will give us our first secure evidence of the existence of life on a planet outside our solar system."
In addition to revealing unique planets, the research debuts a new capability to observe and rapidly characterize exosolar systems in a routine manner, something that has eluded astronomers until now because the light that stars emit is tens of millions to billions of times brighter than the light given off by planets. This makes directly imaging and analyzing exoplanets extremely difficult: as Oppenheimer says, "It's like taking a single picture of the Empire State Building from an airplane that reveals the height of the building as well as taking a picture of a bump on the sidewalk next to it that is as high as a couple of bacteria."
Project 1640 helps scientists clear this hurdle by sharpening and darkening a star's light. This technical advance involves the coordinated operation of four major instruments: the world's most advanced adaptive optics system, which can make millions of tiny adjustments to the device's two 6-inch mirrors every second; a coronagraph that optically dims the star but not other celestial objects in the field of view; an imaging spectrograph that records 30 images in a rainbow of colors simultaneously; and a specialized wave front sensor that distinguishes between residual starlight that sneaks through the coronagraph and the light from planets, allowing scientists to filter out background starlight more effectively.
Altogether, the project has produced images of celestial objects 1 million to 10 million times fainter than the star at the center of the image, with only an hour of observations. It is also capable of measuring orbital motion of objects.
"Astronomers are now able to monitor cloudy skies on extrasolar planets, and for the first time, they have made such observations for four planets at once," said Maria Womack, program director for the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. "This new ability enables astronomers to now make comparisons as they track the atmospheres, and maybe even weather patterns, on the planets."
Researchers are already collecting more data on this system to look for changes in the planets over time, as well as surveying other young stars. During its three-year survey at Palomar, which started in June 2012, Project 1640 aims to survey 200 stars within about 150 light years of our solar system.
"The variation in the spectra of the four planets is really intriguing," said Didier Saumon, an astronomer at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was not involved in this study. "Perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising, given that the four gaseous planets of the solar system are all different. The hundreds of known exoplanets have forced us to broaden our thinking, and this new data keeps pushing that envelope."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130311173756.htm

Astrobiologists Find Ancient Fossils in Fireball Fragments      Algae-like structures inside a Sri Lankan meteorite are clear evidence of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe, say astrobiologists.

On 29 December 2012, a fireball lit up the early evening skies over the Sri Lankan province of Polonnaruwa. Hot, sparkling fragments of the fireball rained down across the countryside and witnesses reported the strong odour of tar or asphalt.
Over the next few days, the local police gathered numerous examples of these stones and sent them to the Sri Lankan Medical Research Institute of the Ministry of Health in Colombo. After noticing curious features inside these stones, officials forwarded the samples to a team of astrobiologists at Cardiff University in the UK for further analysis.
The results of these tests, which the Cardiff team reveal today, are extraordinary.  They say the stones contain fossilised biological structures fused into the rock matrix and that their tests clearly rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination.


http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512381/astrobiologists-find-ancient-fossils-in-fireball-fragments/

A Day in the Life of a Living Mars

Ne bih da kvarim ljudima snove, ali da je Mars ikada bio "živ" i nastanjen ičim kompleksnijim od bakterije taj život bi erodirao sve ove kratere koji se tako lepo vide na animaciji. Zelenilo na Marsu je deo budućnosti, a ne prošlosti.

Unlike Saturn's icy ring system, it is believed that Jupiter's rings contains dust particles. This ring system is very faint, they consist of three main segments, the halo, a fairly bright main ring, and an outer gossamer ring. Some of Jupiter's Moons orbit within the ring system and may have influence on them. The rings are not observable through telescopes.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/news/wise20130311.html


Closest Star System Found in a Century 03.11.13    WISE J104915.57-531906 is at the center of the larger image, which was taken by the NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Image credit: NASA/JPL/Gemini Observatory/AURA/NSF
› Full image and caption 
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has discovered a pair of stars that has taken over the title for the third-closest star system to the sun. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916.

Both stars in the new binary system are "brown dwarfs," which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion. As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the sun.

"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years -- so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, University Park, Pa., and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

"It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because the system is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs."

The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The star system is named "WISE J104915.57-531906" because it was discovered in an infrared map of the entire sky obtained by WISE. It is only slightly farther away than the second-closest star, Barnard's star, which was discovered 6 light-years from the sun in 1916. The closest star system consists of: Alpha Centauri, found to be a neighbor of the sun in 1839 at 4.4 light-years away, and the fainter Proxima Centauri, discovered in 1917 at 4.2 light-years.

malko van teme ali... radi se o pilot epizodi koja nije uspela da izraste u sf seriju. Liptak je odusevljen, pa mozda vredi overavanja:









In the Canadian TV pilot Borealis, which aired back in January 2013 on the Space Channel, a body falls out of the sky in the Canadian arctic, and threatens to cause a major international incident. Taking place in the near-ish future, global energy supplies have declined, leaving many nations to look for new sources of oil. The Canadian arctic contains some untapped oil reserves, and the world wants a piece of it. The Russians are interested, and looking far into the past to see if there was a Russian presence (and thus some claim on the land), while environmentalists are out documenting abuses.
Into the middle of this complicated mess is Vic, a Canadian agent who owns a bar in the border town called Borealis. He caters to all types: the Russians, Environmentalists, folks looking for a job, Canadian military, and others. He simply wants to make a living and with the arrival of the body, he finds himself stuck in the middle of all the problems, while trying to figure out who killed the guy, and just why he's got some ancient nails in his pocket.

Borealis (2012) starring Ty Olsson

Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers


Within a decade or so, the barriers between biology and technology will start to fall.



As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework.

Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers.




http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681891/cities-of-the-future-built-by-drones-bacteria-and-3-d-printers

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years     
A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers







One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.

The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a "one-time pad" over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.

That sets things up nicely for perfectly secure messaging known as quantum cryptography and this is actually a fairly straightforward technique for any half decent quantum optics lab. Indeed, a company called ID Quantique sells an off-the-shelf system that has begun to attract banks and other organisations interested in perfect security.

These systems have an important limitation, however. The current generation of quantum cryptography systems are point-to-point connections over a single length of fibre, So they can send secure messages from A to B but cannot route this information onwards to C, D, E or F. That's because the act of routing a message means reading the part of it that indicates where it has to be routed. And this inevitably changes it, at least with conventional routers. This makes a quantum internet impossible with today's technology

Various teams are racing to develop quantum routers that will fix this problem by steering quantum messages without destroying them. We looked at one of the first last year. But the truth is that these devices are still some way from commercial reality.

Today, Richard Hughes and pals at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico reveal an alternative quantum internet, which they say they've been running for two and half years. Their approach is to create a quantum network based around a hub and spoke-type network. All messages get routed from any point in the network to another via this central hub.

This is not the first time this kind of approach has been tried. The idea is that messages to the hub rely on the usual level of quantum security. However, once at the hub, they are converted to conventional classical bits and then reconverted into quantum bits to be sent on the second leg of their journey.
So as long as the hub is secure, then the network should also be secure.

The problem with this approach is scalability. As the number of links to the hub increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to handle all the possible connections that can be made between one point in the network and another.

Hughes and co say they've solved this with their unique approach which equips each node in the network with quantum transmitters–i.e., lasers–but not with photon detectors which are expensive and bulky. Only the hub is capable of receiving a quantum message (although all nodes can send and receiving conventional messages in the normal way).

That may sound limiting but it still allows each node to send a one-time pad to the hub which it then uses to communicate securely over a classical link. The hub can then route this message to another node using another one time pad that it has set up with this second node. So the entire network is secure, provided that the central hub is also secure.

The big advantage of this system is that it makes the technology required at each node extremely simple–essentially little more than a laser. In fact, Los Alamos has already designed and built plug-and-play type modules that are about the size of a box of matches. "Our next-generation [module] will be an order of magnitude smaller in each linear dimension," they say.

Their ultimate goal is to have one of these modules built in to almost any device connected to a fibre optic network, such as set top TV boxes, home computers and so on, to allow perfectly secure messaging.

Having run this system now for over two years, Los Alamos are now highly confident in its efficacy.

Of course, the network can never be more secure than the hub at the middle of it and this is an important limitation of this approach. By contrast, a pure quantum internet should allow perfectly secure communication from any point in the network to any other.

Another is that this approach will become obsolete as soon as quantum routers become commercially viable. So the question for any investors is whether they can get their money back in the time before then. The odds are that they won't have to wait long to find out.

Ref:arxiv.org/abs/1305.0305:Network-Centric Quantum Communications with Application to Critical Infrastructure Protection

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514581/government-lab-reveals-quantum-internet-operated-continuously-for-over-two-years/

http://www.gizmag.com/hypothalamus-fountain-of-youth/27392/
Instead of traipsing through Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León might have been better off turning his search inwards. More specifically, he should have turned his attention to a region of the brain called the hypothalamus. At least that's what research carried out on mice by scientists at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University suggests. They found that the hypothalamus controls many aspects of aging, opening up the potential to slow down the aging process by altering signal pathways within that part of the brain.

Located just above the brain stem and found in all vertebrate brains, the hypothalamus is roughly the size of an almond in humans and is responsible for numerous functions, including growth, development, reproduction and certain metabolic processes.

Previous work by Dongsheng Cai, M.D., Ph.D., professor of molecular pharmacology at Einstein, and his colleagues had shown that inflammatory changes in the hypothalamus can lead to various components associated with metabolic syndrome, a combination of medical disorders that increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

This led Dr. Cai to suspect that the hypothalamus may also play a key role in aging, prompting him to study hypothalamic inflammation by focusing on a protein complex called NF-κB (nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells). This is a protein complex that plays an important role in regulating cellular responses, the production of small molecules used for cell signaling known as cytokines, and cell survival.

Dr. Cai and his team found that activating the NF-κB pathway in the hypothalamus of mice caused them to age faster by causing a decline in levels of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). This hormone is synthesized in the hypothalamus and its release into the blood is usually associated with reproduction.

"The mice showed a decrease in muscle strength and size, in skin thickness, and in their ability to learn – all indicators of aging. Activating this pathway promoted systemic aging that shortened the lifespan," he said.

Conversely, blocking the NF-κB pathway in the mice slowed the aging process and increased their median longevity by about 20 percent compared to the control group.

The researchers also found that injecting GnRH into a part of the hypothalamus known as a hypothalamic ventricle protected aged mice from age-associated impaired neurogenesis. In other words, the aged mice were better able to create new neurons. Mice that received daily GnRH injections for a prolonged period saw a slowing of age-related cognitive decline, which the researchers theorize is the result of neurogenesis.

Dr. Cai believes the findings offer two potential strategies for treating age-related diseases and increasing lifespan – preventing the hypothalamus from causing inflammation and using GnRH therapy to increase neurogenesis.

The technology has been made available for licensing and is detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature.

Source: Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University

Meet the thousands of people ready to die on Mars

For $40, those who couldn't be astronauts see Mars One as their chance.






http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/meet-the-thousands-of-people-ready-to-die-on-mars/

ooo... Europa, moj favorit.




What do you get when you combine documentary style film making with hard science and an assist by NASA? If you read the title to this post, you know it's Europa Report, a movie about an expedition to the eponymous moon of Jupiter. Here's the synopsis:

A unique blend of documentary, alternative history and science fiction thriller, EUROPA REPORT follows a contemporary mission to Jupiter's moon Europa to investigate the possible existence of alien life within our solar system. When unmanned probes suggest that a hidden ocean could exist underneath Europa's icy surface and may contain single-celled life, Europa Ventures, a privately funded space exploration company, sends six of the best astronauts from around the world to confirm the data and explore the revolutionary discoveries that may lie in the Europan ocean.

After a near-catastrophic technical failure that leads to loss of communication with Earth and the tragic death of a crewmember, the surviving astronauts must overcome the psychological and physical toll of deep space travel, and survive a discovery on Europa more profound than they had ever imagined.
Europa Report hits theaters on Aug. 2nd, but it goes live On Demand starting June 27th.

Europa Report Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Science Fiction Movie HD

After nine years of hard Mars roving, Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity has broken a 40-year-old extraterrestrial distance record.


On Thursday, the tenacious six-wheeled robot drove 80 meters (263 feet), nudging the total distance traveled since landing on the red planet in 2004 to 35.760 kilometers (22.220 miles). NASA's previous distance record was held by Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt when, in December 1972, they drove their Lunar Roving Vehicle 35.744 kilometers (22.210 miles) over the lunar surface.


http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/opportunity-breaks-nasas-40-year-roving-record-130516.htm

Hungary  has taken a bold stand against biotech giant  Monsanto and genetic modification by destroying 1000 acres of maize found to  have been grown with genetically modified seeds, according to Hungary deputy  state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar. Unlike many  European Union countries, Hungary is a nation where genetically modified (GM)  seeds are banned. In a similar stance against GM ingredients, Peru has also  passed a 10  year ban on GM foods.

Almost 1000 acres of maize found to have been ground with genetically  modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary, deputy state secretary of  the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been  ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he  added.

Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary.  The checks will continue despite the fact that seek traders are obliged to make  sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.
During the invesigation, controllers have found Pioneer Monsanto products  among the seeds planted.
The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not  investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary, but they will check where the  goods can be found, Bognar said. Regional public radio reported that the two  biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and  GMO seeds could have been sown on up to the thousands of hectares in the  country. Most of the local farmers have complained since they just  discovered they were using GMO seeds.
With season already under way, it is too late to sow new seeds, so this years  harvest has been lost.
And to make things even worse for the farmers, the company that distributed  the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation. Therefore, if any compensation  is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to  that company's creditors, rather than the farmers.

Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/hungary-destroys-all-monsanto-gmo-corn-fields/#kSIlAqqGc2ZlK3sV.99

New Stem Cell Discovery Moves One Step Closer to Human Cloning

Dubai Timelapse on Vimeo

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/421999/astronomers-find-first-evidence-of-other-universes/

QuoteThere's something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang.
This, they say, is exactly what you'd expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.   
That's an extraordinary discovery: evidence of something that occurred before the (conventional) Big Bang.
Today, another group says they've found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. These guys start with a different model of the universe called eternal inflation. In this way of thinking, the universe we see is merely a bubble in a much larger cosmos. This cosmos is filled with other bubbles, all of which are other universes where  the laws of physics may be dramatically different to ours.
These bubbles probably had a violent past, jostling together and leaving "cosmic bruises" where they touched. If so, these bruises ought to be visible today in the cosmic microwave background.
Now Stephen Feeney at University College London and a few pals say they've found tentative evidence of this bruising in the form of circular patterns in cosmic microwave background. In fact, they've found four bruises, implying that our universe must have smashed into other bubbles at least four times in the past.
Again, this is an extraordinary result: the first evidence of universes beyond our own.

Scientists resolve a 3.5 billion-year-old mystery of life




Most astrobiologists believe that life in some form is likely to exist away from Earth. But new research demonstrates that life as we know it on Earth might never have come to exist at all if not for a key element delivered to the planet by meteorites billions of years ago.

Scientists at the University of Washington and the University of South Florida found that during the Hadean and Archean eons – the first two of the four principal eons of the Earth's earliest history – the heavy bombardment by meteorites provided reactive phosphorus essential for creating the earliest life on Earth.

When released in water, that reactive phosphorus could be incorporated into prebiotic molecules, and the researchers documented its presence in early Archean limestone, showing it was abundant some 3.5 billion years ago.

"The importance of this finding is that it provides the missing ingredient in the origin-of-life recipe: a form of phosphorus that can be readily incorporated into essential biological molecules like nucleic acids and cell-membrane lipids," said Roger Buick, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences.

Buick is a co-author of a paper explaining the findings, published the week of June 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author is Matthew Pasek, an assistant professor of geology at the University of South Florida.

The scientists concluded that the meteorites delivered phosphorus in minerals that are not now seen on the surface of the Earth, and these minerals corroded in water to release phosphite, a form of phosphorus seen only on the early Earth.

"Meteorite phosphorus may have been a fuel that provided the energy and phosphorus necessary for the onset of life," said Pasek. "If this meteoritic phosphorus is added to simple organic compounds, it can generate phosphorus biomolecules identical to those seen in life today."

He said the research provides a plausible answer for why we don't see new life forms on Earth today: The conditions under which life arose billions of years ago are no longer present.

"The present research shows that this is indeed the case: Phosphorus chemistry on the early Earth was substantially different billions of years ago than it is today," he said.

The findings are based on examination of samples from Australia, Zimbabwe, West Virginia, Wyoming and Florida. The presence of phosphite was detected only in the oldest samples, from surface materials and drill cores from the early Archean in Australia.

Previous research showed that the earliest biological forms might have evolved from RNA alone, before the modern DNA-RNA-protein life emerged. But scientists didn't know how those early RNA–based proto-organisms incorporated environmental phosphorus, which in its current form, phosphate, is relatively insoluble and unreactive.

Meteorites would have provided reactive phosphorus in the form of the iron–nickel phosphide mineral schreibersite, which when placed in water released soluble and reactive phosphite. Phosphite is the salt scientists believe could have been incorporated into prebiotic molecules.

Though there could be other sources of phosphite, no other terrestrial sources could have produced the quantities needed to be dissolved in early Earth oceans that gave rise to life, the researchers concluded. The meteoritic phosphite would have been abundant enough to dominate the chemistry of the oceans, with its chemical signature then becoming trapped and preserved in marine carbonate.

"This finding opens the way for a lot more prebiotic chemical experimentation and may even allow us to produce a catalytic replicating RNA molecule in a test-tube, mimicking what might have naturally happened during the origin of life," Buick said.

Other co-authors are Jelte Harnmeijer of the UW and the Edinburgh Center for Carbon Innovation in Scotland, and Maheen Gull and Zachary Atlas of the University of South Florida. The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Agouron Institute and NASA.
This story is based in part on an article by Vickie Chachere of the University of South Florida.

Math Model Links Space-Time Theories


http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/math-model-links-space-time-theories




Researchers at the Univ. of Southampton have taken a significant step in a project to unravel the secrets of the structure of our Universe.


Prof. Kostas Skenderis, Chair in Mathematical Physics at the university, comments, "One of the main recent advances in theoretical physics is the holographic principle. According to this idea, our Universe may be thought of as a hologram and we would like to understand how to formulate the laws of physics for such a holographic Universe."


A new paper released by Skenderis and Marco Caldarelli from the Univ. of Southampton, Joan Camps from the Univ. of Cambridge and Blaise Goutéraux from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Sweden published in the Rapid Communication section of Physical Review D, makes connections between negatively curved space-time and flat space-time.


Space-time is usually understood to describe space existing in three dimensions, with time playing the role of a fourth dimension and all four coming together to form a continuum, or a state in which the four elements can't be distinguished from each other.


Flat space-time and negative space-time describe an environment in which the Universe is non-compact, with space extending infinitely, forever in time, in any direction. The gravitational forces, such as the ones produced by a star, are best described by flat-space time. Negatively curved space-time describes a Universe filled with negative vacuum energy. The mathematics of holography is best understood for negatively curved space-times.


Skenderis has developed a mathematic model that finds striking similarities between flat space-time and negatively curved space-time, with the latter however formulated in a negative number of dimensions, beyond our realm of physical perception.


He comments, "According to holography, at a fundamental level the universe has one less dimension than we perceive in everyday life and is governed by laws similar to electromagnetism. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card, but now it is the entire Universe that is encoded in such a fashion. Our research is ongoing, and we hope to find more connections between flat space-time, negatively curved space-time and holography. Traditional theories about how the Universe operates go some way individually to describing its very nature, but each fall short in different areas. It is our ultimate goal to find a new combined understanding of the Universe, which works across the board."


The paper specifically explains what is known as the Gregory Laflamme instability, where certain types of black hole break up into smaller black holes when disturbed – rather like a thin stream of water breaking into little droplets when you touch it with your finger. This black hole phenomenon has previously been shown to exist through computer simulations and this work provides a deeper theoretical explanation.

Kod "negative number of dimensions" sam zakukao od nemoći. 

Ala će se mističari obradovati novoj teoriji. Dakle ceo svemir, uključujući i nas, je samo projekcija nečega drugog, i to nešto drugo je "prava stvar", a mi ovde, meso i koske, samo smo projekcija.

...

http://scitechdaily.com/physicists-create-artificial-magnetic-monopoles/

A team of researchers from Cologne, Munich and Dresden have managed to create artificial magnetic monopoles. To do this, the scientists merged tiny magnetic whirls, so-called skyrmions. At the point of merging, the physicists were able to create a monopole, which has similar characteristics to a fundamental particle postulated by Paul Dirac in 1931. In addition to fundamental research, the monopoles may also have application potential. The question of whether magnetic whirls can be used in the production of computer components one day is currently being researched by a number of groups worldwide.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new moon orbiting the distant  blue-green planet Neptune. This brings the number of known satellites circling  the giant planet to 14.
The body is estimated to be no more than 12 miles across, making it the smallest  known moon in the Neptunian system. It's so small that it escaped detection by  NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the  planet's system of moons and rings.
Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., discovered the  moon on July 1, while studying the faint ring-arcs of Neptune. "The moons and  arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order  to bring out the details of the system," he said. "It's the same reason a sports  photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the  background blurs."
On a whim, Showalter extended his analysis outward to regions well beyond the  ring system, and noticed an extra white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune,  located between the orbits of the moons Larissa and Proteus.
Showalter next analyzed over 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by  Hubble from 2004 to 2009. The same white dot appeared over and over again.  He then plotted a circular orbit for the moon, which completes one revolution  around Neptune every 23 hours.
The moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is so small and dim that it is roughly one  hundred million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the  naked eye.
Neptune's largest moon, Triton, which is nearly the size of Earth's moon, may be  a captured icy dwarf planet from the Kuiper Belt at the outer rim of our solar  system. This capture would have gravitationally torn up any original satellite  system Neptune possessed. Many of the moons now seen orbiting the planet  probably formed after Triton settled into its unusual retrograde orbit about  Neptune.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/30/full/