Life is an inordinately complex unsolved puzzle. Despite significant theoretical progress, experimental anomalies, paradoxes, and enigmas have revealed paradigmatic limitations. Thus, the advancement of scientific understanding requires new models that resolve fundamental problems. Here, I present a theoretical framework that economically fits evidence accumulated from examinations of life. This theory is based upon a straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS
(carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations. The theoretical
framework unifies the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms, validates predicted laws of nature, and solves the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe.

Erik D Andrulis

via Life | Free Full-Text | Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.

Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Fit females make more daughters, mighty males get grandsons.

An insect’s internal chemicals can be converted to electricity, potentially providing power for sensors, recording devices or to control the bug, a group of researchers at Case Western Reserve University report.

via Implanted biofuel cell converts bug’s chemistry into electricity: Scientists take step toward cyborgs.

2 glasses of cherry juice per day allows you to sleep on avg 39 minutes longer and more efficiently as well as reducing napping behaviour.

Tart cherry juice drinkers gain sleep advantage.

Gene therapy can protect against HIV : Nature News & Comment.

By heating carbon nanotubes a Texas scientist has created a small invisibility cloak.

Texas scientist Ali Aliev makes strands of a real ‘invisibility cloak’ | Mail Online.

Why do we lie? Robert Trivers has written a book “The Folly of Fools” that covers deception from an evolutionary standpoint.

The evolution of deceit – Salon.com.

Using a variety of techniques, a fontface has been designed that makes it much easier for dyslectics to read texts.

studiostudio, dyslexie lettertype, project dyslexia, dyslexie, lettertype dyslexie, project dyslexie.

These are useful for surgeons who need to operate and see beforehand what they will need to do. The current cost is in the thousands of pounds for a single model. Using NL company safeways as a printer slashes the costs significantly.

BBC News – Plastic bones could save the NHS thousands of pounds.

Less efficient than proper solar panels, but cheaper and easy to install yourself.

3M film turns windows into transparent solar panels | ITworld.

Scientists say they have found a way to disarm the AIDS virus in research that could lead to a vaccine. Researchers have discovered that if they eliminate a cholesterol membrane surrounding the virus, HIV cannot disrupt communication among disease-fighting cells and the immune system returns to normal.

Scientists have discovered that HIV needs cholesterol, which it picks up from the first immune cells it infects, to keep the virus’ outer membrane fluid. That allows it to communicate with – and disrupt – the body’s immune system.

Scientists Disarm AIDS Virus’ Attack on Immune System | Health | English.

The researchers have found neutrino’s that seem to go faster, but are putting this out as a request for confirmation. They believe it could be measuring errors but are looking for others to replicate their experiment or check their measurements.

BBC News – Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern.

Time cloaking is possible because of a kind of duality between space and time in electromagnetic theory. In particular, the diffraction of a beam of light in space is mathematically equivalent to the temporal propagation of light through a dispersive medium. In other words, diffraction and dispersion are symmetric in spacetime.

That immediately leads to an interesting idea. Just as its easy to make a lens that focuses light in space using diffraction, so it is possible to use dispersion to make a lens that focuses in time.

Such a time-lens can be made using an electro-optic modulator, for example, and has a variety of familiar properties. “This time-lens can, for example, magnify or compress in time,” say Fridman and co.

This magnifying and compressing in time is important.

The trick to building a temporal cloak is to place two time-lenses in series and then send a beam of light through them. The first compresses the light in time while the second decompresses it again.

But this leaves a gap. For short period, there is a kind of hole in time in which any event is unrecorded.

So to an observer, the light coming out of the second time-lens appears undistorted, as if no event has occurred.

In effect, the space between the two lenses is a kind of spatio-temporal cloak that deletes changes that occur in short periods of time.

via First Demonstration of Time Cloaking  – Technology Review.

For the first time, engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) have now developed a process to create “CIGS” solar cells with inkjet printing technology that allows for precise patterning to reduce raw material waste by 90 percent and significantly lower the cost of producing solar cells with promising, yet expensive compounds.

The researchers focused on chalcopyrite, or “CIGS” – so named for the copper, indium, gallium and selenium elements of which it’s composed – due to its high solar efficiency. A layer of chalcopyrite one or two microns thick has the ability to capture the energy from photons about as efficiently as a 50-micron-thick layer made of silicon.

The researchers were able to create an ink that could print chalcopyrite onto substrates with an inkjet approach, with a power conversion efficiency of about five percent. While this isn’t yet high enough to create a commercially viable solar cell, the researchers say they expect to be able to achieve an efficiency of about 12 percent with continued research.

via Researchers cut waste and lower cost of ‘CIGS’ solar cells using inkjet printing technology.

This article includes pictures of what the traffic managers see on their screens and how the information gets there. Unfortunately, ghost jams are generally caused by human idiot drivers:

But often we have only ourselves to blame: staying in the middle lane rather than keeping to the left whenever possible, getting too close to the car in front and subsequently having to brake, or simply changing lanes. When we overtake, for example – perhaps to get past the person in the middle lane – we create a space in the lane we’ve left. When that happens often enough, we create a phantom jam – a congestion from nowhere that will radiate exponentially backwards and take significantly longer to dissipate than it took to develop in the first place

via The dark science of the traffic jam: Ever wondered why you’re stuck in one when there’s no jam? | Mail Online.

GE has announced the first power plant to integrate wind and solar power with natural gas—a 530-megawatt plant that will start operating in Turkey in 2015. The power plant is made practical by a flexible, high-efficiency natural-gas system the company announced two weeks ago and a solar thermal power system created by eSolar, a Burbank, California-based startup that GE recently invested in

via GE Combines Natural Gas, Wind, and Solar – Technology Review.

A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.

The researchers found a way to make an “optical battery,” said Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics.

In the process, they overturned a century-old tenet of physics.

“You could stare at the equations of motion all day and you will not see this possibility. We’ve all been taught that this doesn’t happen,” said Rand, an author of a paper on the work published in the Journal of Applied Physics. “It’s a very odd interaction. That’s why it’s been overlooked for more than 100 years.”

Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.

via Solar power without solar cells: A hidden magnetic effect of light could make it possible.

Now this is from MS themselves, so obviously they’ll have picked sites which work best for IE, but most importantly it shows that there is a huge variability in the amount of power each browser uses. This is not only useful for laptop users who want to maximise their batteries, but also for the global power consumption, considering the browser is what most people use continuously on their computer.

Browser Power Consumption—Leading the Industry with Internet Explorer 9 – IEBlog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

Nearly all the energy we use on this planet starts out as sunlight that plants use to knit chemical bonds. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge have created a potentially cheap, practical artificial leaf that does much the same thing—providing a potentially limitless source of energy that’s easy to tap.

The new device is a silicon wafer about the shape and size of a playing card coated on either side with two different catalysts. The silicon absorbs sunlight and passes that energy to the catalysts to split water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is a fuel that can be either burned or used in a fuel cell to create electricity, reforming water in either case. This means that in theory, anyone with access to water can use it to create a cheap, clean, and available source of fuel.

via Spinning the Sun’s Rays Into Fuel – ScienceNOW.

The Foresight project Global Food and Farming Futures final report and executive summary provide an overview of the evidence and discuss the challenges and choices for policy makers and others whose interests relate to all aspects of the global food system.

via Reports and publications | Our work | BIS.

The story then says that radiation levels are still ‘safe’. I’d say radiation levels were still ‘safe’ too. As far as I’m concerned we get enough radiation levels from the global background radiation, we really don’t need ANY more radiation from any source at all. Except medical X-Rays – these fall under what I term necessary. Not these stupid scanners that don’t work, don’t deter, cost millions and resequence our DNA.

TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Companies are measuring the responses your brain gives to parts of movies, allowing producers to tweak movies to provide the kinds of responses they want.

How Hollywood Studios Harness Your Brainwaves to Win Oscars.

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?

via The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker.