Detergent 'Battle' About to Get Real

Through a series of decisions taken by the federal government of the United States, the selling of dishwasher detergent containing phosphates has been forbidden in the country. But this measure, designed to safeguard life, is making homeowners unhappy. 

The new detergents, which were deprived of one of their main active ingredients, are apparently not as effective at removing grease and other types of dirt from dishes as their former selves. 

This is making consumers very unhappy, given that phosphate-based cleaning agents are no longer sold anywhere in the United States. As such, they can find no alternative to the low-efficiency detergents they are currently stuck with using. 
The situation is the focus of a new story, which appears on the cover of the current edition of the American Chemical Society's weekly journal Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN).

In the article, experts debate the issue on all sides. They take a look at the laws passed by 16 states, prohibiting the inclusion on sodium tripolyphosphate in household detergents.

When this chemical was first developed, it was heralded as the most effective substance for clearing dishes, as it did away with grease in no time. It was only later on that it negative side-effects began being discovered in hydrological studies.

Just like its counterparts used as agricultural fertilizers, sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP) can have a disastrous effect on streams, rivers and lakes. Once it makes its way into bodies of water, it begins to boost the growth of algae, which then go on to bloom.

These algal blooms are very dangerous for all other species living in the same ecosystem. They can create dead zones, areas where oxygen levels drop below those needed to support complex, aerobic life.
This means fish and invertebrates are slowly killed off, or forced to move to other locations. Because of the massive volume of algae, they prevent other plants from getting any sunlight, Science Blog reports.

Since the plants cannot simply take their root out of the lake floor or river bed and leave, it slowly dies off, unable to feed itself. All these negative effects were kept in mind when the use of STPP was prohibited for detergents.

Trees Tell Tales of Ancient Climate Change

Researchers in the United Kingdom are currently racing around the clock to find and preserve ancient trees buried underneath peat bogs in New Zealand. The investigators believe that the rings inside these trees might tell them more about how Earth's climate looked like about 30,000 years ago.


With these data in our pocket, we could then extrapolate on available information, and determine how the climate will look like in the near future. Such simulations already exist, but the goal is to make them as accurate as possible.

The scenarios they compute can then be used to sway policymakers and national authorities towards working more actively in the field of climate security and protection. Countries might be more willing to talk to each other if they have even more data available. They dwarf an average human in size, and are really heavy and difficult to move. 


In order to get to that point, scientists first need to dig up a number of kauri trees, which have endured the passing of time, preserved in peat bogs. The relics need to be unearthed, put in holding chambers, and then analyzed in roughly the same conditions they were subjected to for the past 30 millennia.

The research effort is being conducted by a team of biologists led by experts at the University of Exeter Scientists with the new effort say that the climate records which could be extracted from the kauri trees span back to the end of the last Ice Age.

Top 10 Pictures That Shocked The World

It has often been said throughout time that a picture is worth a thousand words. Any picture may be worth a thousand words, but only a few rare photos tell more than a thousand words. They tell a powerful story, a story poignant enough to change the world and galvanize each of us. Over and over again…

From the iconic images of Omayra Sanchez’s tragic death to the horrifying images of the Bhopal Gas disaster in 1984, the power of photography is still alive and invincible.

Here is my top 10 list of photos that shocked the world:

Warning: Be prepared for images of violence and death (in one  case, the photograph of a dead child) if you scroll down.

10. Kosovo Refugees (Carol Guzy)

Carol Guzy, the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, received her most recent Pulitzer in 2000 for her touching photographs of Kosovo refugees.

The above picture portrays Agim Shala, a two-year-old boy, who is passed through a fence made with barbed wire to his family. Thousands of Kosovo refugees were reunited and camped in Kukes, Albania.

9. War Underfoot (Carolyn Cole)

Los Angeles Times photographer Carolyn Cole took this terrifying photo during her assignment in Liberia. It shows the devastating effects of the Liberian Civil War.

Bullet casings cover entirely a street in Monrovia. The Liberian capital was the worst affected region, because it was the scene of heavy fighting between government soldiers and rebel forces.

8. Thailand Massacre (Neil Ulevich)

Neal Ulevich won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for a “series of photographs of disorder and brutality in the streets of Bangkok, Thailand”  (Pulitzer.com).

The Thammasat University Massacre took place on October 6, 1976. It was a very violent attack on students who were demonstrating against Field Marshall Thanom Kittikachorn.

F. M. T. Kittikachorn was a dictator who was planning to come back to Thailand. The return of the military dictator from exile provoked very violent protests. Protestors and students were beaten, mutilated, shot, hung and burnt to death.

10 Greatest Inventors in History

How to determine who the greatest inventors in history were is often a passionate and, at times, even a heated debate. Many men can lay claim to having invented or, at very least, perfecting someone else’s obscure invention, making such a listing problematic at best. Fortunately, I don’t maintain any personal favorites, which will hopefully give me the ability to remain a little more objective than some people. I know that some readers whose favorites failed to make the list will consider their oversight a great travesty, but I really do try to do my best.

To pick the top names, I’ve tended towards those who have the greatest number of inventions to their credit—assuming fecundity to be a better gauge of genius—rather than selecting only those inventors who came up with the most significant devices (although there is a degree of overlap between them). That being said, there are a few inventors not on my list who hold over a thousand patents each; they fail to make the cut, however, because almost all of their patents relate to minor variations on a single device (such as a computer processor, for example) or are concentrated in one specific industry rather than over a range of disciplines. Additionally, I do factor in the major impact some inventions had on society but gauge them based upon the degree of technical challenges they represented and the level of technology available to the inventor at the time. And so, without further ado, here are my nominations for the ten greatest inventors of all time.

10. Leonardo Da Vinci

Many will doubtlessly be surprised that one of the greatest minds of the Renaissance has fallen all the way to number ten, but that’s not an indictment of him, but of the times he lived in. The problem was that his ideas were so far ahead of the technology of his age that almost none of his ideas could be realized; as such, technically he didn’t really “invent” anything at all. He was more of a futurist who imagined various innovations rather than a person who possessed the mechanical aptitude to build things with his own hands. Additionally, his interests were so varied that he didn’t get very far in developing any single idea beyond drawing a few sketches or describing his ideas in very general terms. Further, while he came up with futuristic things like gliders and tanks and submarines, he didn’t envision any truly remarkable inventions such as electricity, the telephone, photography, or even sliced bread. A great mind, no doubt, and had he the focus to concentrate on any single idea long enough to bring it into reality, he might well have proven to have been one of the greatest inventors in history. For now, however, I’m afraid the best he can do is finish out the top ten.

9. Edwin Land

Connecticut physicist and inventor Edwin Land didn’t invent photography, of course, but he invented or perfected almost everything else having to do with it.  While a freshman at Harvard University in 1926, he developed a new kind of polarizer by aligning and embedding crystals in a plastic sheet, which he called Polaroid. Later, joined by other young scientists, he applied the polarizing principle to light filters, optical devices, and motion picture processes and founded the Polaroid Corporation in the process. Holder of no fewer than 535 U.S. Patents, Land is probably best known for developing the first self-developing camera, making it possible to embarrass your friends on the spot rather than having to wait for the film to come back from the drug store before humiliating them.

World's Largest Video Protein Database Promises Rapid Drug Development

Proteins in Motion Image courtesy of Institute for Research in Biomedicine-IRB

A new database developed by Spanish biologists is giving pharmaceutical quick access to protein structure data that could lead to more rapid development of important biologic drugs. The database, known as MoDEL, contains protein motion data for more than 1,700 different human proteins, making it the largest such database of proteins in the world.

Developed through intensive supercomputer calculations at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine tapped into the international Protein Data Bank (PDB) to create the new video database. Each of the 1,700 proteins catalogued there is displayed through a series of 10,000 to 100,000 photos, showing how the higher order structures of complex proteins move and change. And while 1,700 proteins out of 40,000 may not seem like a lot, many of the proteins logged in the PDB are highly similar – those 1,700 proteins actually represent something like 40 percent of proteins with a known structure.

What does this mean to those of us who aren't biologists? If there’s a "next big thing" in pharmaceuticals, protein therapies are it. While there are still great strides being made in chemically derived, small-molecule pharmacology, biologic drugs – those derived from biology like protein therapies – open up whole new areas of pharmaceutical exploration. This is the area where the last two decades’ advances in understanding the human genome are just starting to pay off, hopefully leading to treatments for everything from inflammatory diseases to cancer.

But in order to create effective and safe protein therapies, pharmaceutical makers must first understand the structures of the proteins they hope to manipulate. Currently, most drugs are designed around a static picture of proteins, which – like most living things – are anything but. By offering researchers a clearer picture of how protein structures move and change, it should help them more quickly identify new potential therapies and reduce failures in clinical trials.

The 1,700 proteins, now partially available online to researchers worldwide, are just the beginning, as MoDEL will continue to grow as more proteins are better characterized. The researchers behind the project hope to have 80 percent of proteins relevant to treating human diseases available in MoDEL within two to three years.

link : [Science Daily]

One Human Brain Is Equivalent to All the Digital Data In the World

Supercomputer An IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer rack. Wikimedia Commons


If you could put all the data in the world onto CDs and stack them up, the pile would stretch from the Earth to beyond the moon, according to a new study. The world’s technological infrastructure has a staggering capacity to store and process information, reaching 295 exabytes in 2007, a reflection of the world’s almost complete transition into the digital realm. That's a number with 20 zeroes behind it, in case you're wondering.

Martin Hilbert and Priscila López took on the unenviable task of figuring out how much information is out there, and how its storage and processing have changed over time. Some of their findings seem obvious, like the fact that Internet and phone networks have grown at quite a clip (28 percent per year), while TV and radio grew much more slowly. But others are more surprising, like the nugget that 75 percent of the world’s stored information was still in analog format in 2000, mostly in the form of video cassettes. By 2007, 94 percent of the world’s info was digital.

In 2007, all the general-purpose computers in the world computed 6.4 x 10¹⁸ instructions per second, according to the study. Doing this by hand would take 2,200 times the period since the Big Bang.

In 1986, the first year the team examined, 41 percent of all computations were still done by calculator, the researchers found. By 2000, personal computers were doing 86 percent of the computing; by 2007, video game hardware accounted for 25 percent of the work. On the whole, gaming consoles have more computing power than the world’s supercomputers, the study found.

Cell phones are catching up, too — they accounted for 6 percent of all computing in 2007. It’s worth noting that’s the year the first iPhone debuted, and a year before anyone could buy a mass-market Android phone, so it’s a fair guess this number has increased exponentially since then.

Hilbert and López surveyed more than 1,000 sources and sifted through an incredibly thorough 60 categories of analog and digital technologies, from paper to vinyl records to Blu-ray discs. In all, they say the world was able to store 295 trillion optimally compressed megabytes; communicate almost 2 quadrillion megabytes; and carry out 6.4 trillion MIPS (million instructions per second) on general-purpose computers.

If you sympathize, and feel a bit overloaded as this work week ends, remember that in the grand scheme of information, this is but a speck. It’s still smaller than the number of bits stored in all the DNA molecules of a single human adult, the authors say.

“To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4 x 10¹⁸ instructions per second that humankind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,” Hilbert and Lopez write.

link : http://www.popsci.com

Tawing Durian from the mountain foot of GunungLawu

'Hmm, it smells good. Sweet and sticky in the tongue,’ said Drs H Saleh Muljono MM, the Regent of Magetan. The memory of tasting Durian Tawing 7 years ago are still on his mind. Unnoticedly, 2 segments were gone being eaten up.

It is no surprise that the no 1 man in Magetan crushes on Durian Tawing. ‘It is very particular and very different from other durian I have ever tasted,’ he said. It tastes sweet and nice but a little bit bitter. The fruit flesh is thick and some seeds are shrink. The Durio Zibethinus has been the pride of the Regency of Lawu Mountain. It has been ordered even when it is still young by the durian lovers - most are from Magetan - who don't want to have nothing of it left.

Such is obvious because there are only two trees left. Both are in Dukuh Tawing, Plumpang village, Plaosan Regency. It is estimated that the age of the tree is 300 years to be seen from its diameter which reaches up to 3,4 – 3,7 m and its height 30 m.

Once said, because of theirs old age, the presence of that Bombaceae famili member trees is assumed to be the origin of Dusun Tawing. Although those trees stand side by side 7 m distant, their crown touch each other due to their huge figure.

Two kinds

If we look at them closely, the fruits of those two trees are quite different. The Agriculture Service team of Magetan Residency called them green tawing and yellow tawing. The green tawing is liked most by the Regent. Its characteristics are green skin fruit and a prettty blunt thorn. Each segment comprises 5-6 pongge.pongge have shrink seeds and thick fruit flesh. The green tawing tree belongs to Mbah Niyah. Almost 76%

On the other hand, the yellow tawing is not less delicious, it has a sweet and a bit bitter taste. The skin fruit colour is yellowish green. It is state of the art because the thorns are sharp. The skin fruit is moderate thick because the majority of seeds grow in normal size. The owner for the present is a married spouse, Mbah Darmi and Mbah Sarmun. Both are the relative of Mbah Niyah.

Eventhough those two trees are aging, they are still productive. Every year, the fruits are harvested twice, that is on March-May and November-Desember. The productivity is over the average, 1.500-2.000 fruits per year. The average weight is 0,75-1,4 kg per fruit.

Unsuccessful

Before 2000, the local agriculture service had tried to multiply the trees through grafting, but the attempt was unsuccessful. They even had cooperated with the Konservasi Flora Laboratorium Teknologi Lingkungan BPPT Pusat team to multiply the tissue culture dan grafting. The result was 100% of tissue culture was fail, and the grafting was only 20%.

The main factor of the failure was due to the difficulty to obtain productive entres. That was due to the trees height is 30 m and the diametre is 3,4 m. The cultivation of grafting only grew 40%. Three of it were planted on Desa Bulungagung. It is expected that from those 3 young plants, the replacement of the mother tree entres can be taken.

Although the development attempt has not succeed, the presence of durian tawing in Magetan is a good news for the Indonesia fruit world. It becomes the fruit researchers' and the entangled parties' challenge in order to prevent the fruit from extinction. ‘We are ready to support anyone who wants to multiply durian tawing.’ Muljono said. (Drs Iswahyudi Yulianto Msi, the head of Information and Public Relation Affair of Magetan regency)

Source : Trubus

The Eugenia Aquea Fruit

That afternoon the sun seemed to burn the top of the head. The air was hot and the sweat were streaming down on the body. However, the view in a garden in Joglo area, West Jakarta, seemed to steam all the tiredness. There, eugenia aquea fruit in container were in rows bearing fruits spoiling those who saw it.

We saw a figure of 2 m high king rose apple full of pink fruit. Some of its branches were bending down for they could not resist the weight of too much fruit. It was obvious because in one group there were 10 jumbo size of eugenia aqueas bigger than a tennis ball each. Whoever sees it would feel the desire to pick them up. ‘When they were still a valve size, I counted there were 500,’ said Yanto, the garden administer. Unfortunately, half of them were fallen because of rain.

The fruit in container of dark red eugenia aquea which has bell shape was not less interesting. The dark red fruits stood out among the green leaves, resembling a christmas bell embellishing pine tree. When they bore fruits at the same time, the group of unnamed Syzygium aqueum almost covered the whole diadem. The rose apple with slim leaves ofter bear fruits.

3 in 1

There is at least a reason if the 1,000m² garden were full of eugenia aquea fruit in container. Edy Chandra - the owner - is indeed a huge fan of that Myrtaceae family. Beside King rose which dominated the garden, Trubus also saw the Petruk's nose (Irung petruk) eugenia aquea fruit in container. The  eugenia aquea from Yogyakarta has a long and oval shape resembling the nose of Petruk - one of Punakawan in Javanese Puppet story. They have shining red colour like a lipstick so that when they all appears, the fruit in container will seem to shine brightly.

Not only the red fruits, Edy Candra also collects tsunami eugenia aquea fruit in container. The fruit colour is dark green when they are young and turns to pale green when they are ripe. Eventhough the appearance is not as attractive as the red jambang family, tsunami is still a favourite because it has had a sweet and thick flesh since it is young. Moreover, the red sprinkle is enjoyable from the brownish red on the point of the leaves. The tsunami name is derived from the mother tree coming from Banda Aceh which were washed away by that massive rising wave.

In the same garden, there is also a 3 in1 fruit in container. They are actually 3 different kinds of  eugenia aquea which were impregnated in 1 tree. The one which bears fruit at the same time is 3 in 1 fruit in container of apel putih, cincalo merah, and lilin hijau. ‘Eugenia aquea, including the 3 in 1, are easy to be impregnated at the same time,’ continued that father of 5. One of the main keys is actually very simple: the owner must be active in chipping young sprouts.

Appear on the stem

Such activity is done by Yanto. When  eugenia aquea enter the bearing fruit time - usually at the age of 1 year after descending from the transplant - that middle age man does the leaves selection. From each stem he only leaves out 6 leaves or 3 pairs of leaves. The remainder leaves are cut off one by one by hand until their stem are released from the trunk. The purpose is to make the fruits appear from the leaves pluck point, and not on the branch point. The fruits in the branch point are dislike because of too small and few.

Within 1 week, from each leaf plucked point appear new sprouts. The prospective leaves must be chipped. It must be done over and over again - the usual frequency is once every 1 week. After 2-3 times of chipping, the prospective flowers and not the prospective leaves will appear. Beside the sprouts chipping, medium, manuring, and watering are the important factors. Yanto chose mixed medium of raw husk, burnt husk, red soil, and barn-yard manure in equal ratio.

Husk is chosen in order to keep the soil loose. The red soil is quite poor of nutrients but it does not crumple up easily and can keep water longer.

‘The lack of nutrients is overcome by manuring,’ said Yanto. Before the pot is filled with medium, raw husk is added for about 10 - 15 cm thick at the bottom in order to prevent the soil to be washed away while watering. Every 3 months, as many as 2 kg barn-yard manure from cow feces are surpressed. At the same time, the cutting off to shape the crown is done. There is no special rule, the key point is the crown shape is rounded. From the age of 1 year, an equal composition of NPK is given every 2 weeks to the plant. As much as 2 tablespoonfuls are dispersed on the medium, and watered directly to prevent it from vapouring. Using leaves manure is also applicable with the same composition.

Manuring is stopped if the prospective flowers have appeared. Manuring should be replaced by giving 1 cc Atonik per liter and 1 cc fish oil per liter over the medium. The frequency is once in a month until the fruits are ready to be picked from the trees. During the flowering process until they become fruit, the plant must not over dry. Watering should be done every day. With such treatment, the Joglo garden is ready to ‘harvest’  eugenia aquea fruit in container.

Link : www.trubus-online.com

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

When Brazilians first elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva President in 2002, the country's robber barons nervously checked the fuel gauges on their private jets. They had turned Brazil into one of the most inequitable places on earth, and now it looked like payback time. Lula, 64, was a genuine son of Latin America's working class — in fact, a founding member of the Workers' Party — who'd once been jailed for leading a strike.

By the time Lula finally won the presidency, after three failed attempts, he was a familiar figure in Brazilian national life. But what led him to politics in the first place? Was it his personal knowledge of how hard many Brazilians must work just to get by? Being forced to leave school after fifth grade to support his family? Working as a shoeshine boy? Losing part of a finger in a factory accident?

No, it was when, at age 25, he watched his wife Maria die during the eighth month of her pregnancy, along with their child, because they couldn't afford decent medical care.

There's a lesson here for the world's billionaires: let people have good health care, and they'll cause much less trouble for you.

And here's a lesson for the rest of us: the great irony of Lula's presidency — he was elected to a second term in 2006 and will serve through this year — is that even as he tries to propel Brazil into the First World with government social programs like Fome Zero (Zero Starvation), designed to end hunger, and with plans to improve the education available to members of Brazil's working class, the U.S. looks more like the old Third World every day.

What Lula wants for Brazil is what we used to call the American Dream. We in the U.S., by contrast, where the richest 1% now own more financial wealth than the bottom 95% combined, are living in a society that is fast becoming more like Brazil.

Moore's latest film is Capitalism: A Love Story

link : www.time.com

How Taking an Active Role in Learning Enhances Memory

The new study showed that activity and interactivity increases between important brain regions in individuals who have more control over their learning environment, as compared to those who are passively absorbing information. The researchers found that the hippocampus is essential to the boost in performance that results from this heightened activity

Good news for control freaks! New research confirms that having some authority over how one takes in new information significantly enhances one's ability to remember it. The study, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, also offers a first look at the network of brain structures that contribute to this phenomenon.

The study focused on activity in several brain regions, including the hippocampus, located in the brain's medial temporal lobes, near the ears. Researchers have known for decades that the hippocampus is vital to memory, in part because those who lose hippocampal function as a result of illness or injury also lose their ability to fully form and retain new memories.

"Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we're beginning to understand why," said University of Illinois psychology professor Neal Cohen, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss. "Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you're actively exploring the world."

But the hippocampus doesn't act alone. Robust neural connections tie it to other important brain structures, and traffic on these data highways flows in both directions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, which track blood flow in the brain, show that the hippocampus is functionally connected to several brain networks -- distinct regions of the brain that work in tandem to accomplish critical tasks.

To better understand how these brain regions influence active versus passive learning, Voss designed an experiment that required participants to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer monitor. A gray screen with a window in it revealed only one object at a time. The "active" study subjects used a computer mouse to guide the window to view the objects.

"They could inspect whatever they wanted, however they wanted, in whatever order for however much time they wanted, and they were just told to memorize everything on the screen," Voss said. The "passive" learners viewed a replay of the window movements recorded in a previous trial by an active subject.

Then participants were asked to select the items they had seen and place them in their correct positions on the screen. After a trial, the active and passive subjects switched roles and repeated the task with a new array of objects.

The study found significant differences in brain activity in the active and passive learners. Those who had active control over the viewing window were significantly better than their peers at identifying the original objects and their locations, the researchers found. Further experiments, in which the passive subjects used a mouse that moved but did not control the viewing window, established that this effect was independent of the act of moving the mouse.

To identify the brain mechanisms that enhanced learning in the active subjects, the researchers repeated the trials, this time testing individuals who had amnesia -- a disease characterized by impairment in learning new information -- as a result of hippocampal damage. To the surprise of the researchers, these participants failed to benefit from actively controlling the viewing window.

"These data suggest that the hippocampus has a role not just in the formation of new memory but possibly also in the beneficial effects of volitional control on memory," the researchers wrote.

Brain imaging (by means of fMRI) of healthy young subjects engaged in the same active and passive learning tests revealed that hippocampal activity was highest in the active subjects' brains during these tests. Several other brain structures were also more engaged when the subject controlled the viewing window, and activity in these brain regions was more synchronized with that of the hippocampus than in the passive trials.

Activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum and the hippocampus was higher, and more highly coordinated, in participants who did well on spatial recall, the researchers found. Increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe, the parahippocampal cortex and the hippocampus corresponded to better performance on item recognition.

"Lo and behold," Cohen said, "our friend the hippocampus makes a very conspicuous appearance in active learning."

The new findings challenge previous ideas about the role of the hippocampus in learning, Voss said. It is a surprise, he said, that other brain regions that are known to be involved in planning and strategizing, for instance, "can't do very much unless they can interact with the hippocampus."

Rather than being a passive player in learning, the hippocampus "is more like an integral part of an airplane guidance system," Voss said. "You have all this velocity information, you have a destination target and every millisecond it's taking in information about where you're headed, comparing it to where you need to go, and correcting and updating it."

Link : http://www.sciencedaily.com

Be Careful, Deficiency of Dietary Omega-3 May Explain Depressive Behaviors

                                        

Salmon is high in omega 3 fatty acids. How maternal essential fatty acid deficiency impact on its progeny is poorly understood. Dietary insufficiency in omega-3 fatty acid has been implicated in many disorders. Researchers have now studied mice fed on a diet low in omega-3 fatty acid. They discovered that reduced levels of omega-3 had deleterious consequences on synaptic functions and emotional behaviours. (Credit: iStockphoto)progeny is poorly understood. Dietary insufficiency in omega-3 fatty acid has been implicated in many disorders. Researchers from Inserm and INRA and their collaborators in Spain collaboration, have studied mice fed on a diet low in omega-3 fatty acid. They discovered that reduced levels of omega-3 had deleterious consequences on synaptic functions and emotional behaviours.

How to trick your brain into remembering what you study

Ever wonder why you can go over a book again and again and still be completely lost when tested on what you read? It may be because you haven't practiced remembering.

The traditional view of knowledge is that it is acquired and stored in the brain to be retrieved later. The acquisition and the storage is meant to be the difficult part. Once the knowledge is in the brain, yes we may forget it over time, but it has been transferred successfully and the learning process is complete.

To that end, educators develop many different methods to help students acquire that knowledge. Some people take new facts or concepts in best by listening to an informal lecture. Others learn best when they read or when they have a visual picture. Still others learn best when they have a chance to manipulate the concept in order to completely understand it. Schools try to incorporate many different techniques to get students to ‘download' the concepts they're trying to learn.

Some research, however, suggests that successful learning is more complicated than attaining information. The brain also needs practice in calling up the information at will. Students can go over a text, or understand and manipulate information as much as they need to, but in order to have learned something successfully, they need to have the information at the ready. A recent study followed two groups of students. They both learned something from a text.

One group made diagrams about the concepts and associations in the text, as a way of more firmly encoding information. The other group simply put the text away and tried recalling the concepts that they had just looked over.

Both groups did equally well on a test given immediately after their study period. However, when they returned a week later, the group that practiced remembering did much better than the one that had used the extra time to re-learn. Perhaps, just like the body, the mind has to practice moves over and over again to become good at them, even when it's only recollecting memories.

link : http://io9.com

Scientists make next-generation computers with gold and DNA

Researchers have fabricated a lattice out of gold and virus fragments. It could make your computer much faster. And turn it into a biological machine.

Optical computing technology, a growing field in the tech sector, involves computers that send data using beams of light. In order to expand the capabilities of optical computing, engineers are required to find materials that manipulate light very precisely. Photonic crystals are one such helpful material. A photonic crystal can block very precise wavelengths of light, making it a great optical tool. But creating such a crystal is a challenge. Now scientists have tested a new method for making them, and they have done using the coolest materials possible: Gold and virus parts.

Tiny gold nanospheres and pieces of virus were hooked together using strands of DNA. The DNA pieces were created specifically for the experiment. Small spheres of gold attach to certain base pairs and form part of the lattice. Gold, while malleable for a metal, is relatively heavy and rigid for such a small structure. The lattice is made more bendable by its organic component, capsids, which are what make up the protein shells of viruses. These bits of virus 'skin' string together the tough gold spheres.

A mix of all of these components - DNA, capsids, and gold spheres - self-assembles into a lattice. The structure of that lattice can, with certain materials, be made into a photonic crystal. No one would have to build a crystal to use in optical computing, mixing together the right ingredients could make it build itself.

Sung Yong Park, one of the scientists who worked on the project, was excited by the jump from mechanical to organic assembly:

Organic materials interact in ways very different from metal nanoparticles. The fact that we were able to make such different materials work together and be compatible in a single structure demonstrates some new opportunities for building nano-sized devices.

No word on what happens when the virus bits and the DNA combine to make self-reproducing computers. It will probably be the end of the world. Who knew it would come in the form of crystalline gold viruses?

link : http://io9.com

Building Microbial Fuel Factories

Grow lights illuminate flasks of photosynthetic microörganisms that produce biofuels. Credit: Bob O’Connor
Viewed from a biofuels perspective, biological plants waste huge amounts of energy: they use sunlight to make cellulose, starch, lignin, and seeds, some of which can then be broken down and converted into fuels. A growing body of research is seeking to genetically engineer organisms to make liquid fuels directly. Organisms optimized in this way could theoretically be an order of magnitude more efficient than technologies that make fuels from biomass.
Joule Unlimited, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, is genetically altering photosynthetic microörganisms so that over their lifetime, they devote only 5 percent of the solar energy they absorb to growing and staying alive. The rest goes to secreting a steady supply of diesel fuel. The company, which is building a pilot plant in Leander, TX, says its process will generate 15 to 25 times as much fuel per acre as technology for making fuels from cellulosic biomass, but that it will take several years to demonstrate at a large scale. Synthetic Genomics, with funding from ExxonMobil that could exceed $300 million, is taking a similar approach, working with algae.
To replace all petroleum with biofuels, however, it might be necessary to genetically engineer organisms that get energy through potentially more efficient mechanisms. And the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is funding 13 projects that are engineering organisms to convert electricity and hydrogen--ideally from renewable sources--into liquid fuels for conventional cars. Link : http://www.technologyreview.com

Brain Control

Ed Boyden is learning how to alter behavior by using light to turn neurons on and off.

Seeing lights: In his MIT lab, Ed Boyden studies how photosensitive proteins can be used to affect the workings of the brain. Credit: Dana Smith

   

The equipment in Ed Boyden's lab at MIT is nothing if not eclectic. There are machines for analyzing and assembling genes; a 3-D printer; a laser cutter capable of carving an object out of a block of metal; apparatus for cultivating and studying bacteria, plants, and fungi; a machine for preparing ultrathin slices of the brain; tools for analyzing electronic circuits; a series of high-resolution imaging devices. But what Boyden is most eager to show off is a small, ugly thing that looks like a hairy plastic tooth. It's actually the housing for about a dozen short optical fibers of different lengths, each fixed at one end to a light-emitting diode. When the tooth is implanted in, say, the brain of a mouse, each of those LEDs can deliver light to a different location. Using the device, Boyden can begin to control aspects of the mouse's behavior.

Mouse brains, or any other brains, wouldn't normally respond to embedded lights. But Boyden, who has appointments at MIT as eclectic as his lab equipment (assistant professor at the Media Lab, joint professor in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group), has modified certain brain cells with genes that make light-sensitive proteins in plants, fungi, and bacteria. Because the proteins cause the brains cells to fire when exposed to light, they give Boyden a way to turn the genetically engineered neurons on and off.

link : http://www.technologyreview.com

Transgenic Worms Make Tough Fibers

These silk fibers, made by transgenic silkworms, contain strengthening spider proteins and green fluorescent proteins.

Researchers have been trying to make artificial spider silk for decades. Now a startup claims to have overcome one of the main challenges in synthesizing the lightweight, stronger-than-steel fibers.

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories has made genetically modified silkworms that produce fibers incorporating spider-silk proteins. The resulting fibers are much stronger, more flexible, and finer than silk made by normal silkworms. The company says it believes it will be able to match the properties of spider silk within the next year. The company hopes to sell the first generation of fibers to companies that will make stronger everyday silk products. Its ultimate goal is to mass-produce artificial spider silk, which could be used to make very strong and lightweight products including bulletproof vests, composite materials for vehicles and sports equipment, and even new construction materials.

Spiders make many varieties of silk, and many of these fibers are stronger than steel. Mimicking such silk and developing ways of producing it industrially has long been a goal of materials scientists. But spiders are too aggressive to be farmed, so researchers have made transgenic animals that make the spider proteins. But that isn't enough, because simply producing the protein components of these materials is not enough--you have to mimic the way spiders put them together by spinning a thread.

"Genetic engineers have been focused on making organisms that produce as much spider-silk protein as possible, but this is like dumping a load of bricks in the yard and asking why you don't have a house," says Kim Thompson, founder and CEO of Kraig Biocraft, based in Lansing, Michigan. Bacteria, for example, can be made to produce spider-silk proteins, and the Canadian biotech company Nexia even succeeded in creating goats that excreted high levels of spider-silk proteins in their milk. But they lacked the means to assemble these proteins into usable silk.

Other groups have created transgenic silkworms that make spider silk, but the worms didn't integrate the foreign proteins into the fiber structure, and fiber's mechanical properties didn't significantly improve over what natural silkworms make. The worms' natural systems for spinning fibers are tailored to their own natural proteins. "There's no reason the silkworms would necessarily include the spider protein in their fiber," says Randy Lewis, professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming. Lewis has sequenced several spider-silk genes.

Link : www.technologyreview.com

PROCCESS OF COLOUR, HOW IS IT HAPPEN

Some details have an important place in the minds of humans and they never change. Let us begin with trees, which are very familiar to us. The colour of trees is most often either green or shades of green. It is well known that during autumn, leaves change colour. Similarly, the colour of sky is either blue, shades of grey when cloudy or yellows and reds at sunrise and sunset. The colours of fruit never alter; the rich and varied colours of the apricot and of the cherry are set, and are always familiar to us. Every living being and every object held under light has a colour. Have a careful look at the things around you. What do you see? The table, the chairs, the trees you see through your window, the sky, the walls of your house, the faces of the people around you, the fruit you eat… Each one of them have distinct colours. Have you ever thought how it is that all these colours have been formed and arranged?

Let us examine in general what is required for the formation of colours that play significant roles for life. (These points will be discussed later on in detail). For the formation of a single colour, for example, red or green, each of the following processes has to take place and, importantly, in the following sequence.

The importance of colours in man's life is indisputable as every object acquires a meaning with its colours. Imagine that none of the colours you see in this photograph at the top (including black and white) exist at all. Certainly, you would not be able see any of the objects in the photograph. For the formation of even a single one of these numerous colours present on these objects, quite a few factors must be fulfilled, all at the same time. Allah has made the formation of colours dependent on the existence of a very detailed system.

1. The first condition required for the formation of colour is the existence of light. In this respect, it will be useful to start with examining the properties of the light coming from the sun. For the formation of colours, the light coming from the sun to the earth must have a certain wavelength to produce colours. The proportions of this light, called "visible light", to all other light rays emitted by the sun is one in 1025. This hardly believable, tiny proportion of the light rays that are necessary for the formation of colour reach the earth from the sun.

2. In fact, most of the sunrays diffused by the sun across space bear some characteristics harmful to the eye. For this reason, the light arriving on earth must take such a form that it can be easily perceived by the eye and not harm it. For this, the rays must pass through a filter. This giant filter is the "atmosphere" which surrounds the earth.

3. The light passing through the atmosphere is spread over the earth, and on hitting the objects it encounters, it is reflected. The objects on which light falls must not be of a type that do not absorb light but reflect it. In other words, the structural quality of the objects must also be in harmony with the light reaching the earth so that colour can form. This condition is also fulfilled and a new light wave is reflected from the objects on which the light coming from the sun strikes.

4. Another essential step in the process of colour formation is the need for a perceiver to perceive the light waves, which is the eye. It is essential that the light waves be in harmony also with the organs of sight.

5. The rays coming from the sun must pass through the lens and the layers of the eye and be converted into nerve impulses in the retina. Then these signals must be conveyed to the vision centre of the brain, which is responsible for making sense of sight.