Researchers have found a way to spur the growth of stem cells in adult brains. Great news for sufferers of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS. Can we use it to increase our brain capacity even if we’re not ill?!

Travellers on the space elevator may be killed by the radiation in the van Allen belts around the earth between 1000 and 20000 km away from the earth. Because the elevator travels at 200 mph, passengers will be exposed for days to the radiation, whereas rocket travellers go much faster. I wonder how they solved this problem for the free fall dude who took a balloon up to the edge of space and jumped out with a hole in his suit?

Pieces of wire stimulating different areas of the brain silmutaneously controlled through a circuitboard shows that the brain associates the two areas and can allow you to bypass damaged areas, which is especially hopeful for stroke or spinal-cord injury victims.

Scottish scientists have developed a sticker / plaster which activates the anti-skin cancer cream using light allowing patients to have the treatment on the go instead of having to lie motionless for hours under cumbersome hospital equipment. Initial studies are very promising.

Apparently the blue dye in jeans, when inserted in cells and activated by red light destroy said cell. As cancer cells are voracious there is a way to get them and nothing else to eat the blue dye. Zap with red light and off it goes.

These boffins have managed to win the jackpot worth $13 million using probability theory. Or did they? They’ve been going at it for the past eight years…

NASA has set up two annual competitions to spur development of space elevator technologies – one in which the robot climber has to go up the tether at a minimum speed of 1m per second and one to measure the strength of the tether itself.

And we get to watch it – aparently these are the best pictures we’ve had yet of the closest colliding galaxy to ours.

Putting paid to all those namby pambies who find smacking children cruel, a 32 year running study has shown that children that were smacked on the butt, arms or legs with an open hand do better in society than kids that weren’t smacked.

Can be caused by zapping parts of the brain with electricity.

Whilst we have been able to teleport single atoms and light for a few years now, finally another breakthrough has been made in Denmark, where they have managed to teleport a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms half a metre. The scientists use light as a carrier of information using entanglement and matter as the storage medium. Allthough we won’t be teleporting large objects let alone living ones any time soon, this is a pretty huge improvement.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are given by Harvard to scientists that is improbable yet thought provoking. Some of the winners might seem absurd, but past Ig laureates have made massive commercial successes out of their research or inventions. At 7.15 PM Boston time the event will begin, also viewable on a live webcast.

Early indications show that sulfasalazine can reverse liver scarring of diseased livers. The treatment would be cheap tablets.

This is an amazing animation of the movement of cells within your body. Very beautiful.

The distant world whose discovery prompted leading astronomers to demote Pluto from the rank of “planet” has now been given its own official name.

Having caused so much consternation in the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the object has been called Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5344892.stm

All hail Discordia!

There are loads of ways of visualising the universe – through radiation, dark matter, gravitational fields, distribution of visible light etc. And then there are the times as which the universe is visualised – at the beginning, as it grows, now and projected into the future. String theory makes for even more different ways of looking at it as multiple concurrent universes can be visualised and there are loads of thing you can (thoeretically) do with the fabric of space to visualise it differently yet again. The images obtained are very compelling and diverse indeed.

NASAs WMAP program uses microwave images

They have many more images on their site.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

They have a lot of datapoints on their sites and quite a few images.

But Spaceref had the only picture I could find with everything they’d mapped on it in one go.

The San Diego Supercomputer Centre goes about running huge complex models of the evolution of the universe

The Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik has some lovely movies and pictures of large-scale structure simulations. They ran the Millenium Simulation, the largest and most realistic simulation ever developed.

More of their images are to be found here

Yup they had three full sensors looking at it when it went boom – the event started in Februari.

BBC

The Register (which has a nice link to an animation)

Currently stem cell useage requires the embryo be destroyed, which is why it is termed unethical in the puritan United States.

There’s some controversy about how Professor Lanza conducted his research to find this out and he claims the baby is undamaged, but I have no idea how redundant cells are in the emryonic stage.
At least something is being done to allow cancer sufferers the hope of research in this line of medical science from US clinics.

We can no longer ignore it – dark matter exists and has been proven using the Chandra and Hubble telescopes.

This is the press release

Here’s a discussion on it

As a result of scientific study, the IAU has now decided that instead of 9 planets, our solar system contains at least 12. So time to change your solar system map and re-remember the new planets.

We’re going to have more planets in our solar system. It depends on the findings of the IAU (International Astronomers Union) who are for the first time going to define what a planet actually is. The word should be out soon.

Ketamine, a recreational drug and anaesthetic, has been shown to relieve heavy depression sufferers within a period of hours, where other drugs take weeks or months to show effect. They will have to isolate the part of the drug that relieves the depression, as ketamine in its current form is too strong to sell commercially.

Dimensions are weird things. There are a whole load more of them than the 3 (length, height and depth) most people are used to, such as dimension number 4 (time) and 0 (the dot infinity).

This page shows in an easy manner how we can understand 10 dimensions. It does however end with the contention that there are only 10 dimensions, but Stephen Hawking says there are 11, so we might not be getting the whole story…

If you want another look at how you could understand more dimensional objects through looking at the shadows they cast as they drop through a world, folding hypercubes are a really good way to look at objects. This page has good jpg movies. (BTW it’s also useful to know that flatlanders are people who live in a 2D world)

These have been given approval by the US FDA. Apparently they give a 38% faster healing period using them for 20 minutes each day. It’s non invasive and uses ultrasonics to stimulate bone into healing.

The U.S. Dept. of Energy has publicised a list of discoveries it has made that it considers most important. It’s quite a large list and has links to more information on the discovery.