07 Nov

Posted at 19:01h in Scoop.it

A clever new study shows that blue whales lean on their memory to guide their epic migrations.

 

The blue whales of the North Pacific spend their winters in their breeding grounds off California and Costa Rica. Come spring, they swim up the coast of North America toward the food-rich summer waters of the Pacific Northwest. They could make the journey in two months (and they do, on the reverse trip back south). Instead, they take twice that time, pausing to gorge themselves on blooms of krill that appear along the way. It’s a leisurely season-long tour of a continent-wide buffet line.

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theatlantic.com

07 Nov

Posted at 18:53h in Scoop.it

New technique makes it easier to build stable “tissues”

 

3D-printed tissues and organs could revolutionize transplants, drug screens, and lab models—but replicating complicated body parts such as gastric tracts, windpipes, and blood vessels is a major challenge. That’s because these vascularized tissues are hard to build up in traditional solid layer-by-layer 3D printing without constructing supporting scaffolding that can later prove impossible to remove.

 

One potential solution is replacing these support structures with liquid—a specially designed fluid matrix into which liquid designs could be injected before the “ink” is set and the matrix is drained away. But past attempts to make such aqueous structures have literally collapsed, as their surfaces shrink and their structures crumple into useless blobs.

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencemag.org

07 Nov

Posted at 18:51h in Scoop.it

Birds display a rainbow palette of colors, many of which come from special arrangements of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our skin. Researchers at the University of Akron have developed a safe and stable pigment based on the melanin structures.

 

In the colorful world in which we live, colors are significant for not only aesthetics and pleasure, but also for communication, signaling, and security. Colors are produced through either absorption of light by molecules — pigmentary colors — or scattering of light by nanostructures — structural colors.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: wksu.org

26 Oct

Posted at 14:03h in Scoop.it

"

  • Anxiety about the effects of social media on young people has risen to such an extreme that giving children smartphones is sometimes equated to handing them a gram of cocaine. The reality is much less alarming.

 

  • A close look at social media use shows that most young texters and Instagrammers are fine. Heavy use can lead to problems, but many early studies and news headlines have overstated dangers and omitted context.

 

  • Researchers are now examining these diverging viewpoints, looking for nuance and developing better methods for measuring whether social media and related technologies have any meaningful impact on mental health."

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.scientificamerican.com

22 Oct

Posted at 22:50h in Scoop.it

The word “Universe” comes from the Latin “Universum”, which was used by Roman authors to refer to the cosmos as they knew them. This consisted of the Earth and all life as well as the Moon, the Sun, the planets that they knew about (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and the stars.

The term “cosmos”, on the other hand, is derived from the Greek word kosmos, which means "order" or “the world”. Other words commonly used to define all of known-existence include “Nature” (from the Germanic word natur) and the English word “everything” (self-explanatory).

Today, the word Universe is used by scientists to refer to all existing matter and space. This includes the Solar System, the Milky Way, all known galaxies, and superstructures. In terms of modern science and astrophysics, it also includes all time, space, matter, energy, and the fundamental forces that bind them.

Cosmology, on the other hand, is used to describe the study of the Universe (or cosmos) and the forces that bind it. Thanks to thousands of years of scholarship, what we know about the physical Universe has grown by leaps and bounds. And yet, there is still so much that we don’t understand.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: interestingengineering.com

22 Oct

Posted at 22:48h in Scoop.it

Here’s the reality: We’re messing up the Earth and any far-out ideas of colonizing another orb when we’re done with our own are wishful thinking. That’s according to Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics this year for discovering the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside of our solar system.

 

"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: We will not migrate there," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). He said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say, ‘OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on Earth.’"

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.livescience.com