Oh, you. You think you’re pretty fancy, don’t you, with your matching pair of eyeballs, your precious optic nerve, your oh-so-sophisticated visual cortex. You think you’re so evolved.
The sea urchins are not impressed.
Though the round, spiny marine creatures have no actual visual organs, they do have light-sensitive proteins that help them “see” well enough to move around, find shelter and avoid predators (well, at least the slow ones). Biologists now think that a sea urchin’s entire body functions as one big compound eye, where photosensitive tissue inside the exoskeleton picks up light that’s filtered by the radiating spines. And the denser an urchin’s spines, the sharper its perception of its surroundings, a new study suggests. So who’s fancy now?
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Here’s a message from the Department of the Obvious–overuse of the new iPad could lead to bad posture.
If we were handed Apple’s latest sleek and shiny gadget offering, we’d find it hard not to gaze lovingly at it for extended periods of time. And given that the tablet is Wi-Fi and (in some models) 3G compatible, it will be all the harder to resist spend hours jabbing at the shiny glass screen, typing out emails or playing online games.
Now, scientists have declared that prolonged usage of the iPad could lead to bad posture, and that those hunched shoulders could cause neck and upper back problems.
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Baboon syndrome
“Andersen et al described baboon syndrome in 1984. Read the rest of this entry »
This could mean an end to fear and loathing at the dentist’s office. A new (allegedly) painless blowtorch-like device is being developed that uses a thin beam of plasma could kill oral bacteria in cavities. A plasma is an ionized gas—one in which some of the electrons are stripped away from their atoms.
The plasma kept the dentin, the fibrous bonelike material that makes up most of a tooth under the outer enamel layer, intact, while reducing bacteria 10,000-fold. This means that plasma jets could be used to wipe out the tooth-decaying bacteria in cavities–a procedure that normally requires the use of a painful dental drill to grind away the infected portion of tooth.
The plasma being used is a “cool” plasma with a temperature of just 100 degrees Fahrenheit. When it fires, it charges the oxygen gas around it, which creates reactive molecules that break down and destroy the bacteria’s cell walls, killing them in the process.
But here’s the bad news: If you have a gnawing cavity right now, there’s no point putting off a visit to the dentist. Researchers say it will take three to five years for the new plasma drill to make it to the dentist’s office.
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Image: Stefan Rupf
While we know what it looks like when a star explodes into a luminous supernova, here’s a chance to discover what one sounds like–sorta. Scientists have translates a supernova’s electromagnetic waves into waves of sound; and when there is sound, there is music. Enter the Grateful Dead.
The band’s famed percussionist Mickey Hart is working on a musical project to “sonify” the universe–taking sounds collected by scientists from supernovae and other astronomical phenomena and using them in his new album “Rhythms of the Universe.” To anyone who has ever heard one of the Grateful Dead’s extended “drums and space” jams, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
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Perceptions of the Jackson-Timberlake Super Bowl incident: role of sexism and erotophobia.
“201 college women’s and 179 men’s impressions of the Jackson-Timberlake Super Bowl incident were related to measures of benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and erotophobia. Read the rest of this entry »
You might decorate your ears, eyebrows, nose, or other body parts with piercings to make an external statement about your personality, but would you do the same to your dog or cat or hamster?
Dog groomer Holly Crawford didn’t think there was anything wrong with piercing her kittens and then marketing them on e-Bay as “Goth Kitties” for hundreds of dollars. She had no qualms about piercing the kittens’ necks, ears, and tails with a 14-gauge needle, typically used to pierce the skin of cattle.
In a not-surprising development, Crawford was charged with animal cruelty after her Pennsylvania premises were raided last month. Crawford’s trial began earlier this week in a Pennsylvania court.
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On Wednesday, Iran launched a rocket into space–with a special and somewhat wriggly payload.
One mouse, two turtles and some worms were packed into the “experimental capsule” in the “Kovoshgar 3″ (Explorer 3) rocket and were given a one way ticket into the great yonder. The rat, nicknamed Helmz 1, and his buddies will now live out the rest of their lives on the rocket, their movements monitored by live video relayed from the space ark.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exulted over the success, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, saying:
“We are two more steps away from reaching a point of no return. To a point where we bring all the skies under the domain of Iranian scientists.”
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Success of self-administered home fecal transplantation for chronic Clostridium difficile infection.
“Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) can relapse in patients with significant comorbidities. A subset of these patients becomes dependent on oral vancomycin therapy for prolonged periods with only temporary clinical improvement. These patients incur significant morbidity from recurrent diarrhea and financial costs from chronic antibiotic therapy. We sought to investigate whether self- or family-administered fecal transplantation could be used to definitively treat refractory CDI. Read the rest of this entry »
The next time your partner isn’t in the mood for some nookie, how about tempting him or her with a piece of… er… pork? It may sound strange, but Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez swears that a little bit of pig has a whole lot of pop to it.
Reuters quotes the president:
“I’ve just been told something I didn’t know; that eating pork improves your sex life… I’d say it’s a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry. She said she recently ate pork and “things went very well that weekend, so it could well be true.”
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