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.
- Bacteria and obesity - September 28. 2007 → Could bacteria that shed their skins be the underlying cause of obesity?
- Cold winter predicted for Britain - September 27. 2007 → Is that the same predictive tool that said we’d have temperatures of fifteen below last winter and didn’t even see a frost in some parts of the country? Or, maybe it’s the one that said April would be wet and cold and it didn’t rain the whole month! Or, maybe it’s the one that predicted a drought this summer and saw holidays and homes washed out by seemingly interminable rains.
- Musical Search Engine - September 26, 2007 → Fancy listening to some bands like Nirvana, or maybe it’s a funky jazz fusion day, perhaps you want some Beatles, but not USSR, something more mellow. Soon you could use natural language searching to get back songs that put you in the mood, perfectly, thanks to research by electrical engineers at UCSD
- Academics accelerate bit torrent - September 25, 2007 → Software developed by Northwestern University can accelerate Bit Torrent downloads by connecting only to peers with the most bandwidth
- The radical problem of vitamin C - September 25, 2007 → Vitamin C does not work in the way that biochemists thought. The intermediates commonly believed to be involved in vitamin C’s radical scavenging functions simply do not occur.
- Meteoric arsenic splash - September 25, 2007 → The meteorite thought to have caused an epidemic of illness in Peru was not toxic, the water into which it crash landed was contaminated with arsenic…
- American and Asian dinosaurs get it together - September 20, 2007 → An 80 million year old dinosaur skeleton found 24 years ago near Choteau has finally been identified as a new species that links North American dinosaurs with Asian dinosaurs. The one metre tall creature would have weighed no more than about 20 kilograms. So not a giant among its kind, but putatively one of the biggest finds.
- Cheesy Snaps - September 21, 2007 → Sony has launched a digital camera that features “smile recognition shutter function”, which does exactly what it says on the box. So, you have to smile to have your photo taken. Say cheeeeese.
- Human remains - September 20, 2007 → A team of scientists working in Georgia has unearthed the remains of four human-like creatures dating to 1.8 million years ago.
- Meteoric crash sickens Peruvians - September 19, 2007 → Hundreds of people who flocked to the site of a meteorite impact have taken ill, suffering headaches, nausea, and vomiting. It’s not some microbrial alien invasion but the toxic effects of a range of gases released by the collision.
- Unpatentable drugs - September 18, 2007 → The unavailability of a patent for whatever reason presumably makes any drug candidate a non-starter as far as the industry is concerned. I have corresponded recently with someone about a simple small molecule that is apparently making waves in alternative cancer therapy, but it’s unpatentable, so unlikely ever to go mainstream. As to its efficacy and safety record, it’s early days. More on that in the main Sciencebase.com blog soon.
- Don’t all blogrush at once - September 18, 2007 → Yet another blog syndicator claiming to help bloggers spread the word to blog readers. Hype all the way, I suspect. But see for yourself - BogRush
- Abstinence and condoms - September 18, 2007 → Teaching adolescents to use condoms when abstinence fails is a reasonable strategy for preventing HIV, according to UK research.
- Fake Viagra proves a flop - September 17, 2007 → Five people have been found guilty of conspiracy to supply millions of pounds worth of counterfeit Viagra in the UK
- Fruity Veg Reduce Asthma, Allergies - September 12, 2007 → Tomatoes, eggplants (aubergines), capsicums (sweet peppers), cucumber, green beans and zucchini (courgettes) together with oily fish in the diet have been shown to reduce asthma and allergies, at least on the Balearic island of Menorca. Elsewhere, who knows? Meanwhile, diesel exhaust fumes have been shown to kill throat cells.
- Contraceptive Anticancer Pill - September 12, 2007 → Any increased risk of breast or cervical cancer linked to the use of the contraceptive pill is apparently negated by the long-term protection it offers against other forms of cancer, according to new research, but only up to eight years of use.
- Chicken and duck dropped - September 11, 2007 → It’s that time of year again, as the bird flu scaremongering season begins, chicken and duck are off the menu in Bali, the US fails to prepare, and the WHO warns against complacency.
- Acid rain redux - September 10, 2007 → The ozone hole and then global warming have hogged the climate news limelight in recent years, but acid rain never went away. Now, researchers have found it to have a disproportionate impact on coastal waters.
- Breasts are bigger, bounce more - September 10, 2007 → Not only has the average cup size of the female breast increased in recent years, now British scientists have discovered that they are bouncing far more than the a standard bra can cope with.
- Starch fueled human evolution → Our ability to digest starch may have provided the fuel for our rapidly expanding brains, according to US researchers.
- Plain soap beats bacteria - September 6, 2007 → More news from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious, plain soap, say UMich researchers, is just as effective against bacteria as antibacterial soaps! Could that be something to do with the fact that any detergent or surfactant like molecule will lyse a bacterium? I think so. But, what about viruses?
- Green light for human-cows - September 4, 2007 → UK regulators have given the go ahead to Geordies hoping to create human-cow hybrid cells.
- Mouldy asthma - September 4, 2007 → Eradicating mould from the indoor environment reduces asthma symptoms for many people. Also reduces sneezing, runny or blocked noses, and itchy-watery eyes, according to Asthma UK supported research.
- Bonobo Sex and Handshakes - September 4, 2007 → On their last trip, they found that bonobos were better cooperators than chimpanzees because they have more sex and play a lot. Now, it turns out they are even more like humans than chimps.
- Twinkle no more little star - September 4, 2007 → Cambridge and Caltech astronomers have devised a camera for their telescopes that cancels out the twinkling effect of the Earth’s atmosphere, producing images of distant heavenly bodies that are clearer even than those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Mathematical bird flu - September 3, 2007 → A mathematical analysis of bird flu (H5N1) clusters among people in Indonesia, suggests that there was at least one human to human transmission of the virus in April 2006. Thankfully, the virus reached a dead end and spread no further. This much hyped news, however, does not mean that we are on the verge of a truly P2P transmissable avian influenza
- Storm Worm Beats Supercomputer - September 2, 2007 → The Storm Worm has infected an estimated 1-10 million computers across the globe, representing a vast distributed network. If only it could be put to good use.
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