The Enlightening Science Thread

Rosetta: 100 days for comet-chasing mission to wake-up

IBM microfluidics tech designed to improve cancer diagnosis

Researchers accustomed to designing tiny features on microprocessors have taken up a new tiny-technology challenge: improving the diagnostic tests used to spot cancer.

Using a procedure called a biopsy, pathologists today closely examine cells to try to determine if a person has cancer and if so, details about what type. Such tests use chemical markers that can spotlight a variety of problems, including different types of cancer, but the tiny slice that constitutes a biopsy sample isn't big enough for a multitude of tests.

IBM's approach, which University Hospital Zurich plans to test in the coming months, uses a chip technology called microfluidics to shrink the area required for such tests to a square patch just 100 micrometers wide -- about the same as a human hair. It pumps the marker chemical down one tiny channel into the biopsy sample, then slurps it back up with a second channel to keep the marker from spreading beyond the confines of its designated patch, and a pathologist watches on a microscope to see the response.

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A Guy

Some really interesting reading in this this lady explained briefly during a local science program how there can be different negative charges on an atom which accounts for certain structures formed by the atom, and I think she was referring to our old friend carbon.

Dr Amanda Barnard: investigating materials at the nanoscale | CSIRO

Chemists find biological complexes that beat chance

How life originated from an inanimate set of chemicals is still a mystery. While we may never be certain about precisely which chemicals existed on prebiotic Earth, we can study the biomolecules we have today to give us clues about what happened three billion years ago.

Now, scientists have used a set of modern biomolecules to show that the formation of larger, more complex groupings of molecules may be inherently favored. They found that when components of the molecular machines that exist in living cells today are mixed with membrane material, functional complexes form more often than you’d expect from chance.

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A Guy

MIT has built a dark-matter hunter out of a modified particle accelerator

Dark matter is estimated to make up a vast majority of the universe's mass, yet no one has ever definitively detected it before. Now researchers from MIT are working to modify a particle accelerator to allow it to test select theories on what dark matter could actually be like. The work, described on Friday in Physical Review Letters, is primarily going to test if dark matter takes the form of a photon-like particle with one particularly notable difference: it has mass.

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A Guy

India vies for elite role in space with Mars trip

India is aiming to join the world's deep-space pioneers with a journey to Mars that it hopes will showcase its technological ability to explore the solar system while seeking solutions for everyday problems on Earth.

With a Tuesday launch planned for Mangalyaan, which means "Mars craft" in Hindi, India will attempt to become only the fourth country or group of countries to reach the red planet, after the Soviet Union, United States and Europe.

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A Guy

I know this should be a you tube dump but it also belongs here I think the voice very Stephen Hawking though

Risk of massive asteroid strike underestimated

The asteroid that exploded on 15 February this year near the city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals region of Russia was the largest to crash to Earth since 1908, when an object hit Tunguska in Siberia. Using video recordings of the event, scientists have now reconstructed the asteroid's properties and its trajectory through Earth’s atmosphere. The risk of similar objects hitting our planet may be ten times larger than previously thought, they now warn.

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A Guy

A Guy said:

Risk of massive asteroid strike underestimated

The asteroid that exploded on 15 February this year near the city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals region of Russia was the largest to crash to Earth since 1908, when an object hit Tunguska in Siberia. Using video recordings of the event, scientists have now reconstructed the asteroid's properties and its trajectory through Earth’s atmosphere. The risk of similar objects hitting our planet may be ten times larger than previously thought, they now warn.

Source

A Guy

Fabulous find Bill:)