Posts tagged scientists

(Source: futurenow321)

The drug is a synthetic molecule in a class of compounds known as aminopyridines, which are precursors to many drugs for neurological disorders. Scientists at Australia’s Griffith University were screening more than 6 million drug compounds and suggested aminopyridine for further study. Then a team of scientists led by Kelly Chibale at the University of Cape Town tested several of these compounds, settling on a suitable molecule that will now be tested further.

Most cases of malaria in Africa are caused by a parasite called Plasmodium falciparum, which lives in the salivary glands of female mosquitoes and is transferred into the human bloodstream when the bug bites.

This new drug killed the parasites instantly, according to reports from Cape Town media and the UCT even those that are resistant to other anti-malarial drugs. Animal tests have not shown any negative side effects. Clinical trials on humans are set to start in 2013, South African government officials announced this week.

(Source: futurenow321)

Bipedal robots, in general, are a pretty stilted bunch. Their movements are overarticulated, they wobble, they topple, and when faced with an obstacle even one as slight as a slope change they often can’t overcome it.

But that may soon change. This week, researchers from the Univeristy of Arizona published a paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering that describes the development of a new type of robot legs that mimic the neuromuscular architecture of human walking.

In other words, they created a pair of robot legs that are starting to “think” about walking the same way people do.

In humans, sensory feedback from our environment is constantly being collected by our lower limbs and sent to a network of neurons in the spinal column called a central pattern generator, which uses that information to keep our gait even and steady. That’s what lets us walk without having to consciously think about it.

Using human legs as a model, the scientists put sensors at the bottoms of the robot legs’ feet that tell them whether they are touching the ground. The scientists also gave internal position sensors to each of the motors that pull on the “muscles” in the legs.

The robot legs adapt naturally to changes in their environment. For example, as the legs hit a slight upslope, they will automatically walk slower and push harder, and if they are going downhill, they will walk a little faster. 

“The conventional AI paradigm is just do everything with logic, but that doesn’t always work very well,” Theresa Klein, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist who co-authored the paper, told the Los Angeles Times. “We are rebuilding the idea of how do we really move and navigate through the world, and you get these results that are much more lifelike.”

Klein’s research should be able to help in the development of robots that move more the way humans do, but it has other applications too. The legs could be used to do research on the neuroscience of walking, which could especially benefit people with spinal cord injuries that affect their legs.

(Source: futurenow321)

The same lab that first reported the shocking results last September, which could have upended much of modern physics, has now reported that the subatomic particles called neutrinos “respect the cosmic speed limit.”
Physicist Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab, presented the results Friday at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan.
“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down,” Bertolucci said in a statement. ast year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there 60 nanoseconds earlier than a beam of light would.
At the time, the physicists were stunned because such a result seemed to break Einstein’s prediction that nothing could travel faster than light. This idea is at the heart of his theory of special relativity, on which much of our modern technology and scientific understanding is based.

The OPERA researchers weren’t sure what could explain their anomalous results, having checked and rechecked their work, so they released their findings to the larger community of physicists in hopes that experts around the world could help them figure it out.
“The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments,” Bertolucci said. “That’s how science moves forward.”

(Source: futurenow321)

An unusual discovery of mammoth bones on a rural Oskaloosa farm has experts studying prehistoric life excited about scientific discoveries that may lie with the massive beast.

The find is rare because it appears to include much of the animal’s skeleton undisturbed. That allows scientists to gather pollen and other plant evidence at the dig site that could reveal details about Iowa’s environment more than 12,000 years ago.

Scientists from the University of Iowa plan to scan the area with ground penetrating radar on Friday to see if they can determine how much of the mammoth remains underground. Excavation will continue throughout the summer.

Bones were first found two years ago by the landowner. He wants his name and location of the farm to remain confidential to protect the site.

(Source: futurenow321)

After 14 years of work and $5.5 billion, the LHC has survived faulty magnets, avian sabotage, and the threat of malevolent time travelers to finally collide its first particles.

This image shows the collision as recorded by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector. The red and blue bars represent subatomic particles flying forth from the proton collision like atomic shrapnel. When the LHC finally ramps up to full power, the 3,600 scientists at the will witness the most powerful particle collisions ever engineered by man.

(Source: futurenow321)

Scientists measure methane at the source: In a lush pasture near Buenos Aires, this cow and its compatriots are digesting important information: how much methane—a greenhouse gas 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide—is released by the country’s 55 million bovines. Researchers from Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology connected inflatable tanks to the cows’ first stomach, where methane is made, through a small hole between their ribs.

By measuring methane production directly inside each cow, biologist Silvia Valtorta hopes to more accurately determine the country’s overall agricultural contribution to global warming. According to the data, an average cow releases more than 70 gallons of the stuff every day. But a change in diet could reduce that. Cows that eat mostly grain produce 20 to 25 percent less methane than grazing cows, and adding tannin—a bitter chemical found in wine—to the feed could lower it further.

(Source: futurenow321)

Nature unleashes a torrent of energy as ash fills the air: After lying dormant for more than 9,000 years, the Chaitén volcano belched forth a 40,000-foot-tall ash plume in early May, touching off lightning and a monthlong eruption. The volcano, situated 700 miles south of Santiago, Chile, forced the evacuation of 8,000 people from the nearby village of Chaitén. It was roughly comparable in size to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption that released hundreds of millions of tons of debris in an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

Scientists suspect that volcanic lightning results from particles in the ash cloud rubbing together as the plume swirls. They aren’t sure about which types of particles generate the most static electricity, nor do they know how much energy is produced during the event. Of course, the lack of research done in the field is understandable: Even scientists, when they see an erupting, lightning-spewing volcano, tend to run in the opposite direction.

(Source: futurenow321)