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.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State University engineers have invented a radar system that is virtually undetectable, because its signal resembles random noise.

The radar could have applications in law enforcement, the military, and disaster rescue.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/noiserad.htm

Canadian scientists have developed a low-intensity ultrasound based device that can regrow bones and teeth.

Geoengineering involves changing our environment to suit human needs better. This article looks at ways geoengineers have thought about reducing global warming by not reducing greenhouse gasses, but by proactively doing something about it. Some pretty far out ideas, such as floating white plastic islands in oceans, space mirrors and lacing the atmosphere with sulphur are brought up. Science is starting to look at these options more seriously and trying to get funds for them at a small scale.

Our faces express our emotions – apparently there are around 20 key facial movements expressed around 24 facial feature points, which betray our emotions. By scanning these points intelligently, and detecting things such as facial form, computers can read the emotions of those using them.
Ideas posited in the article: websites advertising products directed at the emotional state, detecting boredom or sleepines in cars and helping people with Asperger’s syndrome (difficulty in recognising emotions and facial expressions).

2 gravity wave detectors have been switched on, trying to prove and discover waves posited by Einstein as part of his theory of general relativity.

The Americans have a huge isolated lab called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) run by a few people from the LSU and California Institute of Technology in the middle of Livingston Parish, LA.

Britain and Germany have their Geo 600 Detector in Hannover, run by scientists from Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham and Hannover Universities.

Apparently there’s also a similar experiment in Japan, but I couldn’t find the links to that.

Using an arsenal of rockets, artillery and aircraft, China will try to blast the clouds out of the sky, a meteorologist told a Beijing magazine, through a technique which falls under the umbrella of “cloud seeding.”

“We can turn a cloudy day into a dry and sunny one by shooting the clouds less intensively than when we make rain,” head meteorologist Mian Donglian for the Beijing municipal weather bureau told Time Out.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/06/05/china.rain/index.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6344

The aim is to create a sealed reactor that can be delivered to a site, left to generate power for up to 30 years, and retrieved when its fuel is spent. The developers claim that no one would be able to remove the fissile material from the reactor because its core would be inside a tamper-proof cask protected by a thicket of alarms

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6344

The 100 megawatt version is expected to be 15 meters high by 3 meters wide, and weigh 500 tonnes. A 10 megawatt version is expected to weigh less than 200 tonnes. To obtain the desired 30 year life span, the design calls for a moveable neutron reflector to be placed over a column of fuel. The reflector’s slow downward travel over the column would cause the fuel to be burned from the top of the column to the bottom. Because the unit will be sealed, it is expected that a breeder reaction will be used to further extend the life of the fuel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTAR

Read up on your ‘small nuclear power reactors’ : see “Liquid Metal cooled Fast Reactors”
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.htm

The Erasmus University has studied the costs of leading an unhealthy life, and discovered (duh) that allthough smokers cost more to care for, they lead lives which are on average 10 years shorter than non-smokers, so they cost society less.