Drive by science

[Angakuk]

Biological Pacemaker

By injecting a gene into a pig’s heart, scientists have created a “biological pacemaker” that can regulate heartbeats, an achievement that eventually may lead to an alternative to electronic pacemakers in some people.
The technique may also prove to be a promising example of gene therapy, which so far has shown glimmers of success in just a few other conditions.
Researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles reported Wednesday that they had injected a gene into a tiny section of pigs’ hearts and were able to temporarily reprogram ordinary heart cells into rhythm-generating cells. Human trials of the technique are at least three years away, and if successful, the approach would be, at least at first, limited to a small subset of pacemaker users.

(More information at the link)

This is pretty cool, if they can make it work long term.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Angakuk

Biological Pacemaker

(More information at the link)

This is pretty cool, if they can make it work long term.

Long term would be good, but to do that they would need to change the basic genetic structure of the tissue. The article sounds like a temporary patch, not a permanent fix.
Pacing is only part of the problem in some cases. Sometimes when fibrillation occurs, pacing will not bring the heart out of it, and the defibrillator must shock the heart to stop it so it will start up again with a normal heart beat. I've been through both and I really don't want to experience either again. I suppose that pacing is good for the less severe cases, but I don't think it would be enough for me.

[BrotherMan]

How Gravity Makes Things Fall - YouTube

[beyelzu]

Originally Posted by Angakuk

Biological Pacemaker

(More information at the link)

This is pretty cool, if they can make it work long term.

I would rate it highly unlikely as working long term. I can not be sure because the technical details are lacking in the article but it seems they are injecting dna into the heart that is then transcribed and translated into a protein. Cells don't like floating DNA, it gets degraded. There are ways to slow this but I am surprised that it lasts as long as it does.

[slimshady2357]

New mushroom shaped creatures found off coast of Australia that defy classification!

National Geographic
New Deep-Sea Animal Species Look Like Mushrooms but Defy Classification

Scientific America
Lone Survivor? Weird New Animal May Be Long Sought Living Ediacaran | The Artful Amoeba, Scientific American Blog Network

Daily Mail - in case you also want to see "24 foods that you won't believe exist!"
Bizarre mushroom-shaped creatures discovered deep off the coast of Australia | Mail Online

[Dragar]

Originally Posted by Dragar

And it looks like it was fuss over nothing (or more probably, over galaxy dust). Read the paper here.

"...and its spectral index is found to be consistent with that of the CMB, disfavoring dust at 1.7 σ..."

So yeah, 1.7 sigma is not exactly solid. Good blog coverage here.

And finally, it looks like the latest Planck results have pretty much quashed any claims of gravitational wave detection.

Bet the media are silent on this...

(Oh, there's a BBC article hiding.)

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Dragar

Bet the media are silent on this...

(Oh, there's a BBC article hiding.)

Major news outlet fails to support poster's presumption of lack of reporting of negative results in science

[LadyShea]

A Swedish woman has become the world's first to give birth after having a womb transplant

[Ensign Steve]

Wow, that's just mind-blowing. What a time to be alive!

[LadyShea]

Curiosity has discovered organic matter on Mars - CNET

[JoeP]

NASA Just Emailed A Wrench To The International Space Station | IFLScience

Awesome.

Of course, there'll still be naysayers who'll insist the future hasn't really arrived until we can email flying cars to each other.

Before that, we'll have this:
Instead of going to the toolbox / garage for a particular tool, I'll just print another one where I am. Like WhatsApping my daughter instead of calling up the stairs.

[ceptimus]

Saw an article about this on the BBC website, although they have their figures wrong.

It was the shortest day (longest night) of the year in the northern hemisphere (winter solstice) yesterday, but mornings will continue to get darker and later until early January; why?

It's because of the earth's elliptical orbit - we're closer to the sun in winter than summer and the earth is moving around its orbit faster.

The earth always takes about 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds to spin once (relative to the stars) and the extra 4 minutes that make up a day are due to the earth having to turn a little bit extra to present the same face back to the sun, having moved around its orbit. Because the earth's speed varies over a year, a solar day is not always the same length. December 22nd is about fifty one seconds longer than September 16th. The cumulative effect leads to clocks being up to sixteen minutes out, compared to a sundial.



And that explains the darker mornings after the solstice - although December 21st was the shortest day, and the sun will start to rise sooner each day after that, at the moment all our clocks are running about half a minute fast per day, compared to real solar time as measured by a sundial, and that discrepancy is big enough to override the lengthening days for another ten days or so.

[Crumb]

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by slimshady2357

New mushroom shaped creatures found off coast of Australia that defy classification!

We need to get plankton portal's s oceanography rig out by the australian coast, stat. It can photograph large stretches of sea without net-trawling it and specializes in catching semitransparent things by shadowgraphy. If it's there, it could find them.

[mickthinks]

A Jumbo Jet is in trouble. I'm hoping that someone who knows stuff can tell me what might the perceived advantage be, to crew, or passengers, or airline shareholders, of returning to the departure airport rather than performing the problematic landing at the destination airport. I can't see the weather at Gatwick being better than at Vegas.

Picture 12.png

[BrotherMan]

If I'm reading it right, in this specific case it seems like the landing gear was stuck somewhere between fully extended and fully retracted. That would definitely cause a problem with fuel efficiency and probably flight dynamics. It could possibly even cause more damage to the airframe.

[ceptimus]

That. But even if the landing gear had stowed away properly (but they somehow knew that it wouldn't come down again right) then they would probably have preferred the plane to land at a home airport rather than a foreign one, so they could have their own engineers work on repairs in their own hanger/workshop.

[Crumb]

http://blog.cosmosmagazine.com/blog/...billion-pixels

[BrotherMan]

The program they used is phat.

[The Lone Ranger]

The image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has an amazing 1.5 billion pixels that would require 600 HD television screens to display in full.

And yet, the galaxy is so incomprehensibly huge that there are hundreds of stars per pixel. And Andromeda is only one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe.

I love these sorts of things, because I think it's good for us to every now and again be reminded that the Universe is incomprehensibly vast.

[Ari]

That's the insane thing. It would still be impressive if there were only 10 galaxies but there's actually 100x as many as there are pixels in that image.

One day I want to setup a mini planetarium with a decent projector and images like this and the Hubble deep field will be shown for a bunch of tripping people and I will get to hear the sound of their brains exploding.

[Dragar]

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

The program they used is phat.

An oft used tool for extracting individual objects from a image containing multiple is called SExtractor.

[Pan Narrans]

Hey, I know the guy who wrote the manual to that! It's my old college roomie

[LadyShea]

Ancient Britons imported wheat 8000 years ago, new archeological evidence suggests | Science Recorder

“Amongst our Bouldnor Cliff samples we found ancient DNA evidence of wheat at the site, which was not seen in mainland Britain for another 2,000 years,” said Dr. Allaby in a report by Scientific American. “This is incredibly exciting because it means Bouldnor’s inhabitants were not as isolated as previously thought. In fact, they were in touch, one way or another, with more advanced Neolithic farming communities in southern Europe.”

[JoeP]

Probably just southern Europeans popping over for summer holidays.