Monday, January 30, 2012

PhysOrg Newsletter Week 04

Dear Reader ,

Here is your customized PHYSorg.com Newsletter for week 04:

Grape seed extract kills head and neck cancer cells, leaves healthy cells unharmed
Nearly 12,000 people will die of head and neck cancer in the United States this year and worldwide cases will exceed half a million.

The ethics of brain boosting
(Medical Xpress) -- The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true.

Graphene: Supermaterial goes superpermeable
Graphene is one of the wonders of the science world, with the potential to create foldaway mobile phones, wallpaper-thin lighting panels and the next generation of aircraft. The new finding at the University of Manchester gives graphene's potential a most surprising dimension – graphene can also be used for distilling alcohol.

First atomic X-ray laser created
Scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction and opening the door to a new range of scientific discovery.

Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life
Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life.

Does antimatter weigh more than matter? Lab experiment to find out the answer
Does antimatter behave differently in gravity than matter? Physicists at the University of California, Riverside have set out to determine the answer. Should they find it, it could explain why the universe seems to have no antimatter and why it is expanding at an ever increasing rate.

Kepler announces 11 planetary systems hosting 26 planets
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, its host star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form.

Blue marble 2012: Amazing high definition image of Earth
A new high-definition version of the ‘Blue Marble’ has been taken from the newest Earth observation satellite. The just-renamed Suomi NPP satellite took numerous images on January 4, 2012 and this composite image was created from several “swaths” of Earth. It is a stunningly beautiful look at our home planet, with the largest versions of the image showing about 1.6 km (1 mile) per pixel. This Sun-synchronous Earth-orbiting satellite is 824 kilometers (512 miles) above Earth, and it gets a complete view of our planet every day. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of how our Earth may be changing.

Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom
The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects—for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA—are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

Chemists find new material to remove radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel
(PhysOrg.com) -- Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.

How wings really work
(PhysOrg.com) -- A 1-minute video released by the University of Cambridge sets the record straight on a much misunderstood concept – how wings lift.

Envelope for an artificial cell
(PhysOrg.com) -- Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life.

Professors argue flattening oil production should trump environment as reason to move to alternative sources
(PhysOrg.com) -- Two university professors, one from the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle, the other from Oxford, have published an opinion piece in the journal Nature, where they argue that governments aren’t doing enough to wean modern societies off of oil and onto more sustainable and stable sources, including atomic energy. James Murray, who is also the founding director of the University of Washington's Program on Climate Change and David King, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford as well as senior science adviser to the bank UBS also has served as chief scientific adviser to the British government back in 2000-07; together write that because global oil production hit a cap in 2005, small disruptions in supply have led to large disruptions in economic systems and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

World's most powerful X-ray laser creates two-million-degree matter
Researchers working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the world's most powerful X-ray laser to create and probe a two-million-degree piece of matter in a controlled way for the first time. This feat, reported today in Nature, takes scientists a significant step forward in understanding the most extreme matter found in the hearts of stars and giant planets, and could help experiments aimed at recreating the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun.

Stock market network reveals investor clustering
(PhysOrg.com) -- The stock price of a company continuously changes, going up or down depending on the collective activity of a large number of investors. Although this process seems fairly straightforward, no one fully understands how this collective trading activity finds the "correct" price of a stock. Some theoretical models have been proposed to describe how different investment strategies affect price dynamics, but challenges such as investor confidentiality and complicated data mining make it difficult to gather empirical support for these models.

Study: Stem cells may aid vision in blind people
The first use of embryonic stem cells in humans eased a degenerative form of blindness in two volunteers and showed no signs of any adverse effects, according to a study published by The Lancet on Monday.

Waiting for Death Valley's Big Bang: A volcanic explosion crater may have future potential
In California's Death Valley, death is looking just a bit closer. Geologists have determined that the half-mile-wide Ubehebe Crater, formed by a prehistoric volcanic explosion, was created far more recently than previously thought—and that conditions for a sequel may exist today.

Bus-sized asteroid shaves by Earth
An asteroid about the size of a bus shaved by Earth on Friday in what spacewatchers described as a "near-miss," though experts were not concerned about the possibility of an impact.

NVIDIA dresses up CUDA parallel computing platform
(PhysOrg.com) -- This week’s NVIDIA announcement of a dressed up version of its CUDA parallel computing platform is targeted as a good news message for engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists, geophysicists, and other researchers on fast-track computations using GPUs. The new version features an LLVM (low-level virtual machine)-based CUDA compiler, new imaging and signal processing functions added to the NVIDIA Performance Primitives library and a redesigned Visual Profiler with automated performance analysis and expert guidance. NVIDIA says the new enhancements are ways to advance simulations and computational work for these users.

Putting an airplane on a distant moon
(PhysOrg.com) -- In addition to its rivers, oceans, mountains, sand dunes and winds, Saturn’s moon Titan may someday share another similarity with Earth: airplanes.


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