Source insciences.org Image: solar winds (Image from insciences.org, courtesy of Hinode satellite)

Solar wind generated by the sun is probably driven by a process involving powerful magnetic fields, according to a new study led by UCL researchers based on the latest observations from the Hinode satellite.

Scientists have long speculated on the source of solar winds. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS), on board the Japanese-UK-US Hinode satellite, is now generating unprecedented observations enabling scientists to provide a new perspective on the 50-year old question of how solar wind is driven. The collaborative study, published in this month’s issue of Astrophysical Journal, suggests that a process called slipping reconnection may drive these winds.

A team of scientists from Italy and Sweden has developed what is believed to be the first artificial hand that has feeling. It has been attached to the arm of a 22-year-old man who lost his own hand through cancer. Researchers say it works by connecting human nerve endings with tiny electronic sensors.

Source the-scientist.com Image: Jason Rasgon (left) and Grant Hughes (right) are trying to infect mosquitoes with a life-shortening bacterium. (Image from the-scientist.com)

Scientists are trying to design the last malaria control agent the world will ever need.

Entomologist Simon Blanford attaches a spray nozzle onto the top of a jar of white-powdered fungus immersed in a concoction of mineral oils. He leans forward into a fume hood and applies an even coating of fungal spores onto cut-up strips of disposable coffee cups taped against the back wall.

The next morning, after the sopping wet strips have dried, Blanford, a senior research associate at Pennsylvania State University in State College, will return to put the cups back together. Then he’ll toss in a load of young Anopheles mosquitoes that have just eaten a malaria-ridden blood meal, cover the cups with a mesh lining, and wait. One week later, the vast majority of the mosquitoes will die, victims of the fungus that rubbed off on their bodies from the coated cups. At least, Blanford wants it to be 1 week later, which is just short enough to prevent the transmission of malaria, but long enough to potentially circumvent the evolution of insecticide resistance—indefinitely.

Source insciences.org Image of cell death predictors (Image from insciences.org, Andrei P. Smertenko)

Research has previously assumed that animals and plants developed different genetic programs for cell death. Now an international constellation of research teams, including one at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, has shown that parts of the genetic programs that determine programmed cell death in plants and animals are actually evolutionarily related and moreover function in a similar way. The findings were published in Nature Cell Biology October 11.

More than 500,000 Brazilian free-tailed bats, emerging to forage at night, light up the pitch black darkness of New Mexico's Carlsbad Cavern in this thermal infrared video.

Source insciences.org Image of Pallas (Image from insciences.org)

Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn't sure what she'd glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that gray area between an asteroid and a small planet?

The answer, she found, was yes. Pallas, like its sister asteroids Ceres and Vesta, was that rare thing: an intact protoplanet.

Source the-scientist.com Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Nobel Prize system is dated and in desperate need of an overhaul, a group of top scientists and engineers said today (September 30) in a letter to the Nobel Foundation.

In their letter, addressed to the foundation's executive director, Michael Sohlman, the researchers recommend that the awards should be broadened to include advancements in environmental issues, public health, and new fields of basic research such as neuroscience and ecology.

There’s a lot going on 2500 meters below sea level. It’s dark, temperatures can climb to 300 degrees Celsius near thermal vents, and the pressure is about 250 atmospheres. If humans could swim at that depth, the pressure exerted on the body would be equivalent to the weight of about 30 Boeing 747 jumbo jets, says Peter Girguis at Harvard University. And yet the water at this depth is teeming with life, with more biomass in 1 cubic meter than in a cubic meter of the richest rain forest (Mar Ecol Progr, 148:135-43).

These days food comes to us in all manner of attractive packaging: fancy foils, bright boxes, and striking wrappers. But the plants that make up the bulk of our diets can be even more beautiful than the most cleverly designed package. This fact, often lost on modern day consumers, is celebrated in the second edition of The New Oxford Book of Food Plants by plant taxonomist John Vaughan and nutritionist Catherine Geissler.

Source the-scientist.com Wayson stain of Yersinia pestis Image: Wikimedia commons, US Center for Disease Control

A University of Chicago geneticist studying the genetics of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, may have died from exposure to a weakened strain he worked with in the laboratory.

Source renewableenergyworld.com

Although the current slide in overall wind market demand means 2009 figures are unlikely to match recent booms, the dip has not come at the expense of wind technology innovation.
by Eize de Vries, Wind Technology Correspondent

London, UK [Renewable Energy World Magazine]
More than 31,000 MW of new wind capacity was added worldwide in 2008, a record that can be described as an absolute milestone in the modern history of wind power development. Fortunately that build up -- and the dip in overall wind market demand that has followed the financial constraints -- did not take place at the expense of wind industry development nor technology innovation.

Source renewableenergyworld.com

Excessive trash can be a problem at college campuses, fouling up dorm hallways and campus walkways. But an energy team at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) has found a way to turn that problem into a solution by using trash for heat and electricity.

"Rather than spend money to upgrade those old technologies, the school decided to spend the money on a co-gen plant. We figured, why spend the money on this old technology? Let's move into the 21st century."

Source insciences.org View into the ultrahigh vacuum chamber in which strontium atoms are cooled and stored. In the upper third of the window, the blue fluorescent light of a cloud of cold strontium atoms (Sr) is to be seen.

You imagine a clock to be different - yet the optical table with its many complicated set-ups really is one. Optical clocks like the strontium clock in the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig could be the atomic clocks of the future; some of them though are already ten times more precise and stable than the best primary caesium atomic clocks. Now they might also become more compact and even portable, maybe in the future even travel to space. PTB scientists have shown how some fundamental difficulties, which a more simple set-up had previously hindered, could be avoided. They have written about this in the current edition of the journal "Physical Review Letters". In the next step they want to build such a clock. They already have a practical application in mind: the clock could help to determine geographical heights even more exactly than before.

Experts say we all need to know how modern technology can help them in times of disaster. That means knowing how to use cell phones and social networks to stay in touch.

you will see some new evidence here in this video that you were not aware of, as I made sure to include a few less-publicized (though in my opinion still highly compelling) images in this presentation.

I also include audio portions of another radio interview with Doctor Edgar Mitchell , Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 14 mission and the sixth man to walk on the Moon. This particular interview is from July of 2008, and as you will hear, Mitchell is VERY candid about the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life and of the long-term and on-going effort to conceal this information from the public. In addition to his fame as an Apollo astronaut, here is a brief look at some of Doctor Mitchell's other very impressive credentials.

Dr. Kevin Chung oversees the Army's only burn ICU, but when he's deployed or on leave he uses a robot to check on his patients. Use of the so-called Chungbot began as an Army telemedicine pilot project several years ago

Where would we be without such courageous intellectuals? The world has far better benefited from people that said "I don't know but I? intend to find out" than those who pretended to have all the answers and, thus, never questioned anything.

Theory of Evolution, Science, Humanity, Knowledge, God & Religion

In scientific investigations, it is permitted to invent any hypothesis and, if it explains various large and independent classes of facts, it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory. (Charles Darwin)

How extremely stupid for me not to have thought of that!
(Thomas Huxley's first reflection after mastering, in 1859, the central idea of Darwin's Origin of Species)

Source insciences.org (Image: Wikimedia commons)

A team of physicists from the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham have shown that electrons in narrow wires can divide into two new particles called spinons and a holons.

The electron is a fundamental building block of nature and is indivisible in isolation, yet a new experiment has shown that electrons, if crowded into narrow wires, are seen to split apart.