Posts tagged Scientific

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Science magazine and the National Science Foundation have just announced the winners of the 2010 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual international competition is set up to award outstanding artistic efforts to visualize complex scientific concepts. The event also highlights the innovation and technical expertise of scientists who have abilities to visually attract a large number of audiences and encourage them to experience the complex nature as well as beauty of science. The 3-D images of HIV virus, plant-gene map, centipede robot, rough waters, tomato-seed “hair” and so on are some among the best science images of 2010

(Source: futurenow321)

A dead heart beats again, thanks to the efforts of scientists at the University of Minnesota. To rebuild and reanimate the organ, which was harvested from a rat, scientists first stripped the old heart cells away with a detergent typically found in shampoos. That left behind a collagen matrix the protein fibers that hold groups of cells together and help give organs their overall shape which they then reseeded with heart cells from a newborn rat. They attached the organ to electrodes and waited. Then it happened: The heart started to beat regularly. “We were all running around like crazy, scared that it would [just stop and] never beat again,” says team member Harald Ott, a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The reanimation technique is now being tested on pig hearts, which are much closer in structure to human hearts than are rat hearts. Organs from built-to-order collagen matrices could help treat the five million Americans who suffer from heart failure and the some 2,600 patients currently waiting for transplant donors.

(Source: futurenow321)

Biologists on Wednesday reported they had discovered a new sensory organ on blue, humpback, minke and fin whales that helps explain why these mammals are so huge.

In a study appearing in the journal Nature, researchers in the United States and Canada said the organ is located at the tip of the whale’s chin, in a niche of fibrous tissue that connects the lower jaw bones.

Comprising a node of nerves, the organ orchestrates dramatic changes in jaw position that are essential for “lunge” feeding by the rorqual family of whales, Earth’s biggest vertebrates.

These whales plunge into banks of krill, gulping up tonnes of water at one go and filtering it in seconds to get the tiny crustaceans needed for food.

A 50-tonne fin whale, the second-longest whale on the planet, can swoosh through 80 tonnes of water in one operation, netting 10 kilos (22 pounds) of krill in the process.

The lunge requires “hyper-expandable” throat pleats, a Y-shaped cartilage structure connecting the chin and a lower jaw, made of two separate bones that move independently.

“In terms of evolution, the innovation of this sensory organ has a fundamental role in one of the most extreme feeding methods of aquatic creatures,” said Bob Shadwick of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

(Source: futurenow321)

As cold cases go, it does not get much colder than Ötzi the Iceman, whose body was found frozen solid in the Italian Alps 5,300 years after he died from an arrow wound.

Since he was discovered by trekkers in 1991, scientists have mapped his DNA and figured out everything from what ailments he suffered from (Lyme disease and a weak heart) to the last meal he ate (venison and ibex) before he was shot in the back, probably by an enemy tribesman.

Now, using advancednanotechnology, they have located traces of Ötzi’s blood, the oldest blood sample ever retrieved. The discovery sheds new light on his death and may change the way police study blood found at modern crime scenes.

Using an atomic microscope and a spectroscope, an Italo-German team found tiny traces of blood similar to modern-day blood around the arrow wound and a cut to Ötzi’s hand.

The team also found fibrin, a protein involved in blood clotting, in the arrow wound. “Fibrin is produced by the body at the moment of wounding and later replaced during the healing process,” Zink said. “What we found shows he died within 30 minutes of being shot.”

(Source: futurenow321)

Hopper is working on the big stuff: climate change, clean energy, astrophysics, particle physics… its home, the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, offers its services to more than 3,000 researchers in the fields of climate research, chemistry, new material development and other crucial fields.

(Source: futurenow321)