The Enlightening Science Thread

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New Artificial Blood Made In Transylvania, Could Lead To ‘Instant Blood’ Doctors Mix With Water

Just in time for Halloween, researchers from the historically Transylvanian city of Romania, called Cluj-Napoca, announced the first-ever artificial blood that could be used without fearing life-threatening side effects of prior models.

The new artificial blood relies not on hemoglobin, like typical artificial bloods, but hemerythrin — a protein extracted from sea worms that is then mixed with water and salts. Doctors can use the artificial blood to reduce infection rates during blood donation, and to supply lost stores in patients for several hours or even up to a day, researcher Dr. Radu Silaghi-Dumitrescu says.

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A Guy

3D printer makes tiniest human liver ever

Lab-grown livers have come a step closer to reality thanks to a 3D printer loaded with cells (see video above). Created by Organovo in San Diego, California, future versions of the system could produce chunks of liver for transplant.

The mini-livers that Organovo made are just half a millimetre deep and 4 millimetres across but can perform most functions of the real thing. To create them, a printer builds up about 20 layers of hepatocytes and stellate cells – two major types of liver cell. Crucially, it also adds cells from the lining of blood vessels. These form a delicate mesh of channels that supply the liver cells with nutrients and oxygen, allowing the tissue to live for five days or longer. The cells come from spare tissue removed in operations and biopsies.

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A Guy

NASA Video Illustrates MAVEN Mission's Investigation of a Lost Mars

NASA has prepared a new video to illustrate its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission's investigation of dramatic climate change on Mars. Today, Mars is a cold and barren desert world, with no sign of life, at least on the surface. However, billions of years ago when the Red Planet was young, it appears to have had a thick atmosphere that was warm enough to support oceans of liquid water – a critical ingredient for life.

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A Guy

Baby pictures! NASA offers first look at Milky Way in its infancy

NASA on Thursday revealed the first imagery of what the Milky Way galaxy likely looked like when it was much younger.

Thanks to evidence gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has been able to determine what our galaxy looked like billions of years ago. Though the space agency obviously wasn't able to take actual photographs of the Milky Way in its infancy, it intuited its conclusions based on Hubble's observations of 400 similar galaxies.

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A Guy

Quantum state world record smashed

A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers.

An international team including Stephanie Simmons of Oxford University report in this week's Science a test performed as part of a project led by Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, Canada, and colleagues. In conventional computers, data is stored as a string of 1s and 0s. In the experiment, quantum bits of information, 'qubits', were put into a 'superposition' state in which they can be both 1s and 0 at the same time – enabling them to perform multiple calculations simultaneously.

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A Guy

People who don’t forget can still be tricked with false memories

“Time is the thief of memory,” wrote Stephen King in one of his many books. For some people, however, that's not true. These people are gifted with what scientists call "highly superior autobiographical memory" (HSAM), which means that they can remember in vivid detail nearly every day of their life going back to childhood. But new research shows that even these special people are susceptible to forming false memories, sometimes even more so than normal people.

The first study of a person with this special ability, later identified to be Jill Price, was published as recently as 2006. Since then, the list of HSAM individuals in the US has grown to about 30. It includes people like Bob Petrella, who can recall the date he met every one of his friends and acquaintances. Or Brad Williams, who can remember both what he did on any day and what significant world events occurred.

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A Guy

Ancient Siberian’s skeleton yields links to Europe and Native Americans

All the evidence indicates that the Americas were populated by people who migrated across the Bering Sea at a time when the ice age lowered ocean levels enough to do it. Well, almost all the evidence. Some of the oldest skeletons found in the new world have features that look somewhat European, a link supported by a few pieces of DNA found in some Native American populations. Now, a 20,000-year-old skeleton from Siberia may help clear up the confusion.

The skeleton indicates that the confusion may be caused by a combination of migration and population structure within Asia at the time. The end result is that some exchanges of DNA only went in one direction—and the donors then moved on to other locations.

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A Guy

Liquid Metal Printer Lays Electronic Circuits on Paper, Plastic, and Even Cotton

One of the dreams of makers the world over is to be able to print electronic circuits on more or less any surface using a desktop printer. The great promise is the possibility of having RFID circuits printed on plastic or paper packaging, LED arrays on wallpaper and even transparent circuits on glass. Or simply to rapidly prototype circuits when designing new products.

There are no shortage of conducting inks that aim to do this but they all have drawbacks of various kinds. For example, many inks have low or difficult-to-control conductivity or need to be heated to temperatures of up to 400 degrees C after they have been printed thereby limiting the materials on which they can be printed. The result is that the ability to print circuits routinely on flexible materials such as paper or plastic has remained largely a dream.

Until now. Today, Jing Liu and pals at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Beijing say they’ve worked out how to print electronic circuits on a wide range of materials using an inkjet printer filled with liquid metal. And they’ve demonstrated the technique on paper, plastic, glass, rubber, cotton cloth and even an ordinary leaf.

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A Guy

We have all seen high-speed police chases on TV. And statistics show that they’re as dangerous as they appear. 360 people are killed each year because of chases, according to a 2010 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Now, StarChase, a Virginia-based law enforcement technology company, wants to halt those risky pursuits with a device straight out of a James Bond movie.

The company’s device is a launchable GPS tracker that is mounted onto the grill of a police car. When a suspect flees in a vehicle, an officer can fire a small sticky GPS tracker onto the suspect’s car.

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