| March 2010 |
Crashing stars resolve a mystery |
| Need more bulk? Steal it from your neighbour |
For almost 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over the youthful appearance of stars known as blue stragglers. These are the timeworn Hollywood starlets of the cosmos: they shine brightly, they are... |more| |
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| February 2010 |
The future of fat |
| Scientists have found a new way to rev the body’s metabolism: activate its fat cells. |
Five years ago this February, Aaron Cypess had an epiphany about fat. A fellow in endocrinology at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Cypess happened to be attending a lecture in which a... |more| |
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| January 2010 |
Fused realities |
| Whether it’s a fracture, an arrhythmia or a tumour, the problem is, how do you treat it if you can’t see it? Now, thanks to new techniques from Siemens that fuse information from different diagnostic modalities, many medical conditions are becoming transparent. |
Although medical imaging devices such as ultrasound scanners and computer and magnetic resonance tomographs have become inncreasingly effective in recent years, one hurdle remains to be overcome:... |more| |
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The nature of dark energy |
| Three-quarters of the Universe is composed of dark energy, but nobody knows what it is. An unknown form of energy that fills space? Some kind of ‘antigravity’ matter? Is it caused by extra dimensions of the cosmos, or is it just a flaw in Einstein’s theory of gravity? New and improved techniques for investigating these questions are now in the works. |
Dark energy appears to account for over three-quarters of the stuff in the Universe, and it’s pushing all the rest – ordinary matter and dark matter – further apart at an... |more| |
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| December 2009 |
Discovering Ardi: a new chapter on human evolution |
| Following the publication in the journal Science on the find and study of a 4,4 million-year-old female partial skeleton nicknamed “Ardi”, Discovery Channel will present a world premiere special, Discovering Ardi (watch the trailer), to premiere in South Africa in December. |
The two-hour special documents the sustained, intensive investigation leading up to the landmark publication of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils.The scientific investigation that began in... |more| |
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Toxic planet |
| Incontrovertible scientific evidence shows that we’re surrounded by hazardous chemicals. Not only that, but our bodies are riddled with nasties accumulated from the sky, the food chain, the technological hardware that runs our world… even the soap we use to wash our faces. Hey, here’s a radical idea: perhaps if we tried to consume less… |
We live in a sea of toxic chemicals. Every single person on earth carries in their bodies minute quantities of hundreds to thousands of hazardous chemicals: polyaromatic hydrocarbons from smokestacks... |more| |
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| November 2009 |
The real-life science behind sci-fi flick Surrogates |
| In the sci-fi thriller Surrogates (watch the movie trailer), which opens on the big screen on 13 November, humans don't venture out into the world; instead, they send robot proxies, which they control with their brains and a special chair. Operators experience everything their surrogates do, with no risk of injury, illness or death. That is, until someone begins destroying the robots in a way that kills their operators, too. This is the central mystery that Agent Harvey Greer (Bruce Willis) must solve. The film takes place in the near future, and according to some scientists, the premise isn't that far from being a reality. |
The script appealed to director Jonathan Mostow because "it was a spot-on metaphor of what it's like to live in the digital age," he told Popular Mechanics last month. "I just connected with the... |more| |
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The tech behind the all-robot world in Surrogates |
Director Jonathan Mostow enjoys his latest assignment: building the population of an all-robot world.
By Erin McCarthy |
When robot stand-ins populate the world in a movie – as they do in Disney’s Surrogates (|more| |
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Quantum of hope |
| Nanotech is the newest weapon in the war on cancer... |
Using tiny crystals called quantum dots, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US have developed a highly sensitive test to look for DNA attachments that are often early warning signs of... |more| |
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| October 2009 |
Scrubbing up to explore space |
| In the icy North, scientists learn to sanitise their tools before looking for life on other planets. |
When searching for life on a distant planet, it pays to make sure that any biologically derived molecules you find didn’t catch a ride from Earth on the spaceship. Avoiding “forward contamination”... |more| |
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