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Written By: grant on May 23, 2012 No Comment

The health desk at The Atlantic might be looking a little bit like a wood shop, thanks to their reporting on the medical marvels of bone putty:

Researchers at the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense are developing a new “fracture putty” with the aim of significantly shortening the healing [...]

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Written By: grant on May 22, 2012 No Comment

PhysOrg gets me all het up over this modern-day alchemist who’s figured out how to transmute greenhouse gases into useful materials… and energy:

Making carbon-based products from CO2 is nothing new, but carbon dioxide molecules are so stable that those reactions usually take up a lot of energy. If that energy were to come from fossil fuels, over time the [...]

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Written By: grant on May 21, 2012 No Comment

…bad consequences follow. Forbes traces the problems with the most authoritative “we can cure the gay out of you” study:

[Dr. Robert L.] Spitzer now looks back with regret and critically dismantles his work, but the truth is that his study wasn’t credible from the beginning. It only assumed a veneer of credibility because it was stamped with the [...]

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Written By: grant on May 21, 2012 No Comment
Science Art: <i>Paillettes de glace eclairées par les rayons du soleil observées en ballon</i>, by M. Albert Tissandier


Click to embiggen

When you’re a pioneering aviator, it pays to have a brother who’s an illustrator.

From the Tissandier collection in the Library of Congress, a dream of the sky from the past.

In 1875, Gaston Tissandier flew higher than anyone had ever gone. Two of his companions died from the altitude and he went deaf. [...]

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Written By: grant on May 18, 2012 No Comment

Science Daily reaches out its withered hands to hold up the promise of a viral cure for aging:

Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), led by its director María Blasco, have demonstrated that the mouse lifespan can be extended by the application in adult life of a single treatment acting directly on the animal’s genes.

Mice treated at [...]

Written By: grant on May 17, 2012 No Comment

Discover launches a thousand new phobia cases with their expose (and I cannot do better than their headline here) Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms in the Brain:

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their [...]

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Written By: grant on May 16, 2012 No Comment

National Geographic unveils Kepler’s latest discovery – a really black planet:

Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears to reflect almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.

“Being [...]

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Written By: grant on May 15, 2012 No Comment

Medical Xpress takes a closer look at the hazy, flickering way we really perceive the world:

The [University of Glasgow] researchers studied a prominent brain rhythm associated with visual cortex functioning that cycles at a rate of 10 times per second (10Hz).

They used a ‘simple trick’ to affect the oscillations of this rhythm which involved presenting a brief sound to [...]

Written By: grant on May 13, 2012 No Comment
Science Art: <i>Fig. 9</i>, (electrolysis of water) from <i>Chemistry</i>, 1876.

This is how to get hydrogen and oxygen from water – acidulated water – by using a Grove’s battery and two platinum wires. And “decomposing” the water. Try it at home!

An educational image from Chemistry, by Henry Enfield Roscoe.

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