Science Extra Geeky Bits from David Bradley
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The latest science extra Geeky Bits news from Sciencebase's David Bradley. The most recent 30 days of news snippets, worthies and oddities, as well as other items of interest that didn't make it on to the Sciencebase Science Blog homepage because I was (a) too busy to do a full write-up (b) too lazy to do a full write-up (c) too bored to do a full write-up. Visit the Science Extra Geeky Bits Archive for all items posted during the last year.
- Riding a solar wave - August 31, 2007 → Scientists have finally spotted elusive waves on the sun’s surface. Now even the coolest surf dude would sweat it there, surely?
- Truly empty space - August 24. 2007 → A vast hole in the universe, a billion light years across, containing no stars, galaxies, nor even dark matter, has been found by astronomers at the University of Minnesota. Well, obviously they didn’t find it at the Uni, it’s out in space. “What we’ve found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe,” the researchers say.
- Epidemic Airlines - August 23, 2007 → 2.1 billion airline passengers flying each year means a greater risk of a major epidemic like AIDS, SARS, Ebola fever, or even a bird flu outbreak, according to the latest warning from WHO.
- Staph screenings - August 22, 2007 → Illinois will become the first US state to screen all hospital patients for drug-resistant staphylococcus aureus infections prior to admission, under new legislation. MRSA, methicillin (or multiple)-resistant staphylococcus aureus infections afflict millions of patients and kill tens of thousands each year.
- Top journals publish dubious structures → The hotter the journal, the worse the crystal structures. That’s the conclusion of a study of 14,518 crystal structures in the Protein Data Bank. There are more “wrong” structures published in Cell, Nature, Science, Molecular Cell, and EmboJ than in supposedly less prestigious journals.
- Azadirachtin At Last → Cambridge’s Steve Ley and his colleagues have ended their twenty year and forty chemist odyssey to synthesize the natural insecticide azadirachtin. The total synthesis uses an industrially inviable 64 steps but is an amazing achievement nevertheless and points the way to the synthesis of analogs and the chemistry learned along the way opens up new routes to countless other compounds.
- Breaking light’s speed limit - August 21, 2007 → According to Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, Germany, quantum tunelling can allow light to break its own speed limit
- Slow blood test in McCann case - August 10, 2007 → Why is it taking so long for UK police to carry out DNA tests on the blood sample from the McCann’s apartment? Why did the Portuguese police not spot the blood when they first searched the premises?
- Scientists tattoo you - August 9, 2007 → Carl Zimmer on The Loom rounds up the nerds with tattoos. How cool is that? Nerds+tattoos! Spot the DNA anklet, the nucleotide girl, atom arm, and chunky velociraptor …
- Baiiji goes way of the dodo - August 9, 2007 → The Yangtze river dolphin is presumed extinct, this goddess of the river, survived 25 million years until Ships, tourists boats, pollution and propellers along China’s waterways mean a fruitless six-week search for the last remaining members of a species.
- DNA Testing Too Expensive in Uganda - August 8, 2007 → African science is fast climbing the international ladder, but some things, such as DNA testing remain way beyond the means of people in many of its nations, according to eyeondna.com
- A free lunch, at last - August 8, 2007 → Freegans boycott the checkout and scavenge for food only just out of its sell-by-date that would otherwise be dumped by supermarkets. Urban foragers are not driven by poverty but by an ethical conscience.
- Save 25% on your fuel bills - August 3, 2007 → Homogeneous charge compression ignition, works in a similar way to spark-free diesel internal combustion engines, achieving similar efficiency ratings but running as smoothly as a petrol (gas) engine.
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