• According to British health chiefs, white is the new black…at least when it comes to keeping your house cool. They’re suggesting that all U.K. homes be painted white to combat global warming—a technique long used in hot Mediterranean countries like Greece.
• Turns out you’re not the only one who can prevent forest fires. Giant buzzsaw-wielding robots can do it, too!
• Don’t let the economy get you, er, down: Some jobless Americans are now eligible for a free year’s supply of Viagra and other drugs.
• Scientists are using human bile acids to make a replacement for mercury and plastic dental fillings. As if going to the dentist didn’t already leave a bad taste in your mouth.
• And lastly, check out what might be the world’s smallest cat. Itty bitty kitty committee, anyone?
The next big step in cancer treatment might be small enough to balance on a grain of salt.
Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed a miniature crawling robot, called ViRob, that can crawl through your lungs, find a tumor, and zap it with drugs. The bot, which is one millimeter long and four millimeters from end to end, can snake its way through the body, slipping into blood vessels and navigating through the respiratory and digestive systems, Innerspace style.
Other mini-robots have been designed to take a voyage into the body. But thanks to tiny arms that help it grip vessel walls , ViRob is the first microbot that can tunnel between different body cavities. It’s controlled by an electromagnetic field outside of the robot that creates a vibration that propels ViRob forward.
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Despite their energy-saving efforts, wind farms have a bad rap for killing birds. And now there may be a bigger problem: The noise from turbines could be killing livestock as well—or, at least, playing a part in their deaths.
According to one Taiwanese farmer, Kuo Jin-shan, the turbines erected near his farm on an island in the Taiwan Strait have been keeping his goats awake at night. Now that 400 of Huo’s goats have died, he is blaming their deaths on the loud noise coming from the wind farms.
After eight turbines were installed on the Penghu archipelago four years ago, the farmer began to notice some marked changes in his goats—they weren’t as hungry, they were losing weight, and many had started to die.
It seems outlandish to suggest that hundreds of goats dropped dead from sleep deprivation, but local livestock inspector Lu Ming-Tseng has backed up the farmer’s claim. Apparently, unusual sounds can affect an animal’s appetite, disturb how it grows, and make it lose shut-eye, all of which cause serious disruption to the animal’s health.
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New Scientist is reporting that a paper by the U.S. National Academies of Science has thrown out the possibility of using genetic testing and analysis to match soldiers with specific duties/specialties, and monitor their brains for signs of stress or weakness. For instance:
If a soldier is struggling, a digital “buddy” might step in and warn them about nearby threats, or advise comrades to zap them with an electromagnet to increase their alertness. If the whole unit is falling apart, biosensors could warn central commanders to send in a replacement team….
Sponsored by the U.S. army and written by a panel of 14 prominent neuroscientists, the report focuses on those areas with “high-payoff potential” – where the science is sufficiently reliable to turn into useful technologies….
Within five years, biomarkers might be used to assess how well a soldier’s brain is functioning, and within 10 years, it should be possible to predict how individuals are likely to respond to environmental stresses like extreme heat and cold, or endurance exercises.
There’s also the matter of matching people to combat specialties based on a combo of psych and genetics tests:
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Thirteen-year-old Nicholas Rossi took a nasty fall off his bike and hit his head. After picking himself up, he felt fine, so he went home. But when his mom spotted a large bump forming on his cranium, she rushed him to the nearest hospital in their rural Australian town.
The general practitioner on call, Rob Carson, recognized that the boy had fractured his skull, causing a potentially fatal blood clot— the type of brain injury similar to what killed actress Natasha Richardson.
The hospital didn’t have the necessary tool for proper brain surgery, so Carson went to the closet and nabbed a standard power drill. Before drilling into the boy’s skull, he phoned a Melbourne-based neurosurgeon for advice. He then performed the surgery, relieving enough pressure to save Rossi’s life.
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Cross-posted from Cosmic Variance:
From the Seattle P.I.:
About 3 p.m. Sunday, Bellevue firefighters were called to the 17100 block of Northeast Fifth Street after neighbors saw flames and smoke.
“It appears that a glass bowl, partially filled with water and elevated on a wire rack in a sunny area of the home’s deck, provided the right conditions to focus the sunlight and start a fire,” Lt. Eric Keenan said.
They should have listened to the warnings from the ants.
Related:
Discoblog: Fire Water Gets Literal: Colorado Couple’s Tap Water Erupts in Flames
Discoblog: Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires—But Maybe You Shouldn’t
Talk about sticking to your mantra. Google—overlord of the Internet, juggernaut of all data crunchers, right hand of the god of algorithms—is doing a little digging into human resources. Specifically, the company is worried about brain drain, particularly in the wake of several top executives announcing their departure. And given that the Web giant spends a pretty penny on hiring and training just the right group of geniuses to man its world-controlling desks, a mass exodus could dent its status as the Master of All Web Innovation.
So what did management do to determine which bright minds were most likely to give notice? They created an algorithm. Performance reviews, pay raises, promotion histories, and other data on its 20,000 employees were crunched into yet another mathematical formula, which reportedly spat out the names of who was most likely to quit.
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Scientists typically design their devices for function rather than fashion. For designers, it’s the other way around. But now, jewelry designer Leah Heiss is looking to combine the two. In fact, she’s been working with scientists to make several scientific gadgets pretty enough to be worn as accessories.
While completing a residency at Nanotechnology Victoria in Australia, Heiss created jewelry that diabetic patients can use to inject insulin—sort of like the insulin tattoo, only a bit more design-oriented. The medical jewelry is currently being developed in several countries, including the U.S., and could free diabetic patients from syringes forever—but first it’ll have pass clinical trials.
Heiss designed the insulin delivery jewelry—a necklace and a ring—as a two-piece set meant to be worn together. The necklace holds NanoMAPs insulin patches made of small needles. The wearer can apply the patch to the skin on the person’s finger, thereby delivering insulin in low doses. The ring must be worn to hold the patch in place. And for men, the jewelry isn’t gender specific though—men can use the necklace as a keychain.
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Not that Star Trek was lacking for an audience to begin with, but it’s now been screened in space, surely spoiling entertainment for astronauts from here on out.
Last week, Paramount Pictures transferred a copy of the movie to NASA’s Houston center, which then uploaded the blockbuster to the International Space Station. Astronaut Michael Barratt then used a laptop to watch it inside the Unity module.
Still no word on whether he found it as uniformly “meh” as we did (well, not all of us).
Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: BA Review: Star Trek
Image: Flickr / culture.culte
Short people may be disadvantaged on the basketball court, in the workplace, and when trying to see over large crowds, but they just might be quicker in sensing the world around them—because, well, their signals don’t have to travel as far to get to their brains.
In effect, this means that tall people are living in the past, if only by a tenth of a second. This is all according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose essay entitled “Brain Time” suggests that “if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.”
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