Mr. Wizard Strikes Again

Okay so there isn't too much to say, but damn science is cool. . .

Water forms floating 'bridge' when exposed to high voltage from PhysOrg.com

While it's one of the most important and abundant chemical compounds on Earth, water is still a puzzle to scientists. Much research has been done to uncover the structure of water beyond the H₂O scale, which is thought to be responsible for many of water’s unique properties. However, the nature of this structure, governed by hydrogen bonds, is currently unknown.

[...]

Not sure about the implications of this, but damn - might bring a whole new meaning to walking on water (as long as you are insulated, of course).

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The cockroaches' ability to learn varies dramatically with the time of day from Exploration

In its ability to learn, the cockroach is a moron in the morning and a genius in the evening.

Dramatic daily variations in the cockroach’s learning ability were discovered by a new study performed by Vanderbilt University biologists and published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This is the first example of an insect whose ability to learn is controlled by its biological clock,” says Terry L. Page, the professor of biological sciences who directed the project. Undergraduate students Susan Decker and Shannon McConnaughey also participated in the study.

[...]

I think the major difference here is that the cockroach seems to have a genetically hard set bio-rythum vs humans which seem to like messing with their rythum on a regular basis with all sorts of fun stuff :P

Athough if the link can be proved right I expect a test of some kind to come out to help find the 'right' time to learn in the day, or to manipulate our bio-rythum to peak when learning is 'supposed' to occur.

Shooting WHAT?!?!

Some one sent me this video and . . . well let's just say there are some mysteries that although fascinating I'm just not sure I was ready to understand yet :P

Pre-wired for Sacrifice?

Just stumbled onto this topic in an article on Slashdot that talks about a recent item that neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered about the 'roots' altruism:

Study: Morality has biological roots

Experiment shows good impulses such as altruism are basic to the brain like food and sex.
Shankar Vedantam / Washington Post

WASHINGTON --

The e-mail came from the next room. "You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written.

Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other.

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.

Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as St. Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time.

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal responsibility.

Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

Detnews.com - http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/LIFESTYLE03/705290323/1040

This raises a lot of questions, partly in the category of what is the perception of right/wrong and the implications of decisions we make, and what exactly will the future definition of mental illness be?

Wish List

Okay I admit I was a little down on the whole toy industry thing in my last post - - but I'm not sorry.

On the other hand I was wandering the web, which seems to be becoming a past-time for me, when I stumbled on to this little site:

http://www.wickedlasers.com/

It screams out to my inner geek, the deep down instigator, and the cool experimenter inside. Now to find that $3000.00 USD to light up my life in ways that will burn in infamy :P

Not that I will ever really be able to afford or own one, but Hell this is one cool Talking Frog.

Stops Bleeding

This was just way to cool not to post:


Self-assembling gel stops bleeding in seconds
13:15 10 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service

Robert Adler

Swab a clear liquid onto a gaping wound and watch the bleeding stop in seconds. An international team of researchers has accomplished just that in animals, using a solution of protein molecules that self-organise on the nanoscale into a biodegradable gel that stops bleeding.

If the material works as well in humans, it could save thousands of lives and make surgery far easier in many cases, surgeons say.

Molecular biologist Shuguang Zhang, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, began experimenting with peptides in 1991. Zhang and colleagues at MIT and the University of Hong Kong in China went on to design several materials that self-assemble into novel nano-structures, including a molecular scaffold that helps the regrowth of severed nerve cells in hamsters (see Nano-scaffolds could help rebuild sight).

Their work exploits the way certain peptide sequences can be made to self-assemble into mesh-like sheets of "nanofibres" when immersed in salt solutions.

In the course of that research they discovered one material's dramatic ability to stop bleeding in the brain and began testing it on a variety of other organs and tissues. When applied to a wound, the peptides form a gel that seals over the wound, without causing harm to any nearby cells.
Vessels and arteries

"In rodents it works in all the blood vessels and arteries, including the femoral artery, the portal vein, and in the liver," says MIT neuroscientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke.

The peptides assemble into a gel that looks "like a hairy ribbon, but at the nanoscale" says Ellis-Behnke, although precisely how it stops bleeding is not yet clear. "It's critically important to understand the mechanism so we can rationally design new self-assembling materials," Zhang says.

Some surgeons are already excited about the material. "I see great potential in the eye field, the gastro-intestinal field, and in neurosurgery," says Dimitri Azar, head of ophthalmology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, US.


Paradigm shift

"In the eye, even a drop of blood will blur your vision for a long time," Azar adds. "A material that would stop the bleeding could lead to a paradigm shift in how we practice surgery in the eye."

Ed Buchel, who teaches general and plastic surgery at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada, sees equal potential for treating trauma and burns. "If this works as well on humans as it does on rats, it's phenomenal," he says.

Still, they caution that extensive clinical trials are needed to make sure the materials work properly and are safe. The MIT researchers hope to see those crucial human trials within three to five years.

Their research will appear in the 10 October 2006 edition of online journal Nanomedicine.

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Weblinks
Laboratory for Molecular Self-Assembly, MIT
http://web.mit.edu/lms/www/
Nanomedicine
http://www.nanomedjournal.com/inpress