Anti-Aging Drugs – Just What the Doctor Ordered?
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Very cool: Early but intriguing research on mice suggests a new mechanism of aging, and possibly a way to stall it. Drugs designed to target one aspect of aging also seem to help repair DNA damage and regulate gene activity, preventing them from going haywire with the stresses of time. “In principle, we now could [...]
Lots of Ice Water on Mars
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Water is necessary for human survival. There’s lots of water on Mars: Giant glaciers buried under the surface of Mars at much lower latitudes than any previously known ice are a potential source of drinking water for future astronauts. The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, offers new possibilities in the [...]
More Good News: Woman’s Lungs Repaired with Her Own Tissue
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008I’d mentioned that today was good-news-from-the-world-of-science day. Here’s more: The development of patient-specific tissues and organs for transplantation is a major target for many researchers working in biomedical engineering. A shortage of organ donors, and the necessity to knock out the recipients’ immune systems to prevent graft rejection, are both serious issues facing transplant surgeons, [...]
A Mammoth Question: Who Pays for Basic Research?
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008The idea of resurrecting the mammoth is very cool, but: There is no present way to synthesize a genome-size chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a shortcut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary [...]
Girl Lives Without Heart for 100+ Days
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Lots of good science today. Here’s some more: Last spring D’Zhana and her parents learned she had an enlarged heart that was too weak to sufficiently pump blood. They traveled from their home in Clinton, S.C. to Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami for a heart transplant. But her new heart didn’t work properly and could [...]
The Singularity is Nigh
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008For the first time, computers are exceeding the petaflop barrier. That’s measured in quadrillion floating point operations per second: A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say. When the [...]
New York Times: 1966 Earth Was “More Innocent”
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008First, saying the Earth was “younger” in 1966 is like saying I was younger when I started writing this sentence. It’s true, but meaningless: Last week, NASA released a newly restored image of a younger Earth. It was taken from Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966, the first of several orbiters that helped gather data for [...]
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