If you have a friend or co-worker with a paranoid streak (or who simply consumes too much tabloid media), they may have informed you that electrical fields can cause cancers to form in your brain. Well, now you can tell them that the opposite is the case – an Israeli company has developed a device for killing brain tumors using weak electrical fields. Of course, your friend will just tell you how that’s what the Illuminati want you to think, but that’s half the fun. [BeyondTheBeyond]
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Pig clones cloned, cloned and cloned again
Aaah, aren’t these little piglets cute? They’re also fourth-generation piglet clones, apparently free of any abnormalities resulting from their engineered origin. Scientists have pinned great hopes on the cloning of animals as a potential solution to the world-wide shortage of transplantable organs; pigs, with their great similarity to human physiology, may well play a large part in such plans.
The tipping point for climate change denial?
While there are still some loud shrill voices denying the reality of climate change, Jamais Cascio thinks we may have finally reached the tipping point where such denialism is irredeemably exposed as obfuscation by those with vested interests – I sincerely hope he’s right.
That said, even advocates for environmental issues should be prepared to question the accepted dogmas; for example, a detailed study seems to indicate that the “eat local” philosophy may be misguided by the best of intentions, and that the long distance transportation of foodstuffs may actually have a smaller footprint than locally grown equivalents when other factors are introduced into the equation. [Brian Dunbar]
Russian space tourist lineup
According to Personal SpaceFlight blog, several Russian space tourist candidates are getting their applications vetted by Roskosmos, and that Space Adventures (the group that handles these private space travelers) has two seats set aside on Soyuz flights in fall ’08 and spring of ’09. The names for who’s flying should be coming soon.
I always find it ironic that it’s the Russian space program that’s taking willing, paying passengers, while the US is not. Who would have believed that 20 years ago?
Shrimp-shell goop wound sealant to get test in outer space
This is wild, but apparently there is a would healant made out of shrimp shells that’s about to get space tested. Apparently they’re curious to see how chitosan, the biopolymer that makes up these space-age bandaids, acts in outer space. According to the New Scientist:
Chitosan is a water-soluble form of chitin, an abundant long-chain natural biopolymer that is a key component of the semi-transparent exoskeletons of arthropods from insects to lobsters, and in the cell walls of fungi.
Some researchers believe natural chitin helps protect arthropods from bacterial infection, important because they lack a conventional immune system. The soluble chitosan carries a positive charge that attracts the negatively charged membranes of bacteria, stopping them from multiplying and in some cases killing them. The charge also initiates clotting of red blood cells.