Science Odds and Ends

A University of Georgia researcher has invented a new technology that can inexpensively render medical linens and clothing, face masks, paper towels -- and yes, even diapers, intimate apparel and athletic wear, including smelly socks -- permanently germ-free.

The simple and inexpensive anti-microbial technology works on natural and synthetic materials. The technology can be applied during the manufacturing process or at home, and it doesn't come out in the wash. Unlike other anti-microbial technologies, repeated applications are unnecessary to maintain effectiveness.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one of every 20 hospitalized patients will contract a healthcare-associated infection. Lab coats, scrub suits, uniforms, gowns, gloves and linens are known to harbor the microbes that cause patient infections.

Other markets for the anti-microbial technology include military apparel and gear, food packaging, plastic furniture, pool toys, medical and dental instrumentation, bandages and plastic items.

The study, published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, paves the way for new solar cell manufacturing techniques and the promise of developments in renewable solar energy. Plastic (polymer) solar cells are much cheaper to produce than conventional silicon solar cells and have the potential to be produced in large quantities. The study showed that when complex mixtures of molecules in solution are spread onto a surface, like varnishing a table-top, the different molecules separate to the top and bottom of the layer in a way that maximises the efficiency of the resulting solar cell.

Rather than using complex and expensive fabrication methods to create a specific semiconductor nanostructure, high volume printing could be used to produce nanoscale (60 nanometers) films of solar cells that are over a thousand times thinner than the width of a human hair. These films could then be used to make cost-effective, light and easily transportable plastic solar cell devices such as solar panels."

Palaeontologists in America have discovered the youngest known dinosaur bones, after digging up the fossilized remains of a Triceratops or Torosaurus’ 45cm-long brow horn.

But what makes this find — from the Hell Creek Formation in the wastelands of south-east Montana — even more special is its ramifications for the current theories on what wiped out the prehistoric lizards.

It’s generally believed that a colossal asteroid pummeled into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago, which led to a mass extinction of any animal that couldn’t fly, swim or burrow into the ground.

But some skeptics believe that the dinosaurs were already on a sharp decline, or even extinct, when the asteroid hit.

This newly discovered brow horn was found just 13cm below that all-important line. It proves that this Ceratopsian dinosaur (probably a Triceratops or Torosaurus) was wandering about right up to the impact event, and the authors believe this debunks the dissenting theory.

The power output of wind farms can be increased by an order of magnitude -- at least tenfold -- simply by optimizing the placement of turbines on a given plot of land, say researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) who have been conducting a unique field study at an experimental two-acre wind farm in northern Los Angeles County.

Dabiri's experimental farm, known as the Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE), houses 24 10-meter-tall, 1.2-meter-wide vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs)—turbines that have vertical rotors and look like eggbeaters sticking out of the ground. VAWTs are ideal, Dabiri says, because they can be positioned very close to one another. This lets them capture nearly all of the energy of the blowing wind and even wind energy above the farm. Having every turbine turn in the opposite direction of its neighbors, the researchers found, also increases their efficiency, perhaps because the opposing spins decrease the drag on each turbine, allowing it to spin faster (Dabiri got the idea for using this type of constructive interference from his studies of schooling fish).

The solution, says Dabiri, is to focus instead on the design of the wind farm itself, to maximize its energy-collecting efficiency at heights closer to the ground. While winds blow far less energetically at, say, 30 feet off the ground than at 100 feet, "the global wind power available 30 feet off the ground is greater than the world’s electricity usage, several times over," he says. That means that enough energy can be obtained with smaller, cheaper, less environmentally intrusive turbines—as long as they're the right turbines, arranged in the right way.

Humans, just like all other animals, face the same problem every day: how do we get around the world? I don’t mean how do we walk, swim, crawl, or fly. I mean, how do we navigate? If I leave in search of food, how do I find my way back home?

Ask most people how they manage to navigate the world, and many will tell you that they think about the space around them in map-like terms. Perhaps they will explain that they imagine a bird’s-eye view of their neighborhood. This, they will insist, allows them to get to the store from the office, even if they have never driven that particular route before (they usually drive to the store from home, never from the office).

For most of the past century, cognitive psychologists would have argued that human intutions happened to be correct when it came to the existence of a “map within the mind.” Our story starts in the 1940s, with a group of rats at UC Berkeley in the laboratory of experimental psychologist Edward Tolman… For more than thirty years, the existence of the cognitive map was generally accepted in psychology. But by the early nineties, the cognitive map began to fray.

...our internal representations of the environment are not map-like.

The small albino California Kingsnake, now on show in the Black Sea resort of Yalta is quite a handful, zoo workers told AFP.

The snake's two heads are fiercely independent, are not always in agreement and like to snatch food from each other, said keepers of the private zoo, called Skazka, or Fairy Tale.

"If it is really hungry, its heads may steal food from each other," he said, adding he also needs to separate the heads with a barrier. "The second head may get angry, but both then feel satiation because they only have one stomach," he told AFP.

The three-year-old, two-foot-long (60 centimetre) reptile is on loan from Germany.

Thanks to search engines, most simple facts don’t need to be remembered. They can be accessed with a few keystrokes, plucked from ubiquitous server-stored external memory — and that may be changing how our own memories are maintained.

A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.

If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.

As ominous as that sounds, however, study co-author and Columbia University psychologist Elizabeth Sparrow said it’s just another form of so-called transactive memory, exhibited by people working in groups in which facts and expertise are distributed.

What a week for stem cell-related surgeries. Not seven days ago surgeons in Europe announced the successful transplantation of the world’s first lab-grown organ --a trachea--grown from a patient’s own stem cells, and now Japanese researchers are saying they’ve grown and successfully transplanted new stem-cell derived teeth in mice.

Alright, so the mouse news may be somewhat dwarfed by the human trachea, but it’s no less groundbreaking from a “future of medicine” standpoint. In both cases, scientists extracted cells from the body, grew body parts outside of the body, and then put those body parts into the body. And the bodies, for their part, seem unbothered by the switch.

PhD student Keith Oliver and Associate Professor Wayne Greene have spent the last two years gathering a wealth of evidence which proves that what are commonly known as jumping genes are actually driving the evolutionary process in some species.

Jumping genes are sequences of DNA that can move to new positions within the genome of a cell. This movement can create mutations and therefore change the observable characteristics of a species.

Their latest scientific paper on the idea brings together around 100 examples of where the activity of jumping genes have created or greatly-modified primate and human genes, resulting in the generation of well-known primate-specific traits.

“In fact, it’s very hard to see how primates and humans could have evolved in the way they have, without the intervention of jumping genes.”

Mr Oliver and A/Prof Greene have further developed their theory into four modes that help shed light on why evolution sometimes occurs in fits and starts, sometimes gradually and sometimes hardly at all. Therefore, their jumping gene theory helps to explain a number of mysteries in biology, including why species suddenly appear in the fossil record, why some groups of organisms are species-rich and others are species-poor. “With this work we are unquestionably standing on the shoulders of others that have worked on jumping genes, but we are certainly the first to bring all their work together for what we believe is the most persuasive case ever put forward on the pivotal role of jumping genes in evolution.”