Nicked from James Nicoll over at LJ.
Your degree of insignificance will vary depending where you set the slider.
Category Archives: science!
Okay, maybe no one was crazy about the printed food…
…but printed bones are just wow.
An 83-year-old woman operated on last summer was the first person to receive an entire 3D-printed jaw transplant, her Belgian doctors announced Monday. The woman’s own lower jaw was riddled with infection, and given her age, and the fact that reconstructive surgery would have been a long and painful process, her doctors decided to have a new jaw specially manufactured for her. The replacement jaw is made out of titanium, assembled in thousands of layers by a 3D printer.
Rest of the story here, with a link to a paper about 3-D printing of bone substitute implants.
In lieu of actual content, 1 Feb edition
No time to say more than…whoa. Totally encrusted with science…and just a bit scary.
And if they get a little bigger and brave the outdoors, UFO sightings will jump about 1000%.
Cornell Lab Prints Food
There are printers that can spit out 3-D model cars and others that can make paper solar panels. Next up: technology that can print food for restaurants and homes.
Engineers envision printed breakfasts synced with alarm clocks and gourmet spreads downloaded from high-end restaurants but served at the dinner table. Printers could to linked to digital food logs and programmed to churn out meals that fill in the day’s nutritional blanks.
So instead of not being able to get a table at an exclusive restaurants, will there be a waiting list for licenses for a particular dish?
It occurs to me how this could revolutionize food manufacturing–anything you eat could be plumped full of nutrients/fat-free/tuned to your individual metabolism. Could kick world hunger in the slats as well, depending on the price of the starting materials.
Link to the Cornell website here.
“We are not anti-social; we’re differently social.”
Another good column/Q&A about introversion, by author Susan Cain. The most surprising thing that Cain discovered?
The most surprising and fascinating thing I learned is that there are “introverts” and “extroverts” throughout the animal kingdom – all the way down to the level of fruit flies! Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson speculates that the two types evolved to use very different survival strategies. Animal “introverts” stick to the sidelines and survive when predators come calling. Animal “extroverts” roam and explore, so they do better when food is scarce. The same is true (analogously speaking) of humans.
I have my extroverted moments. But the quiet glass of wine with a friend instead of a party? The need for seclusion at times? The irritation concerning the confusion between shyness and introversion? So me.
Noisy Systems and Wandering Canines
The difference between climate and weather explained, with bonus puppy.
Parasitic fly spotted in honeybees, causes workers to abandon colonies
A worrying tale, if it proves out. And a horrendous fate for infected bees…which frankly has ZOMBIE written all over it.
There are many possible causes of this “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). These include various viruses, a single-celled parasite called Nosema apis, a dramatically named mite called Varroa destructor, exposure to pesticides, or a combination of all of the above. Any or all of these factors could explain why the bees die, but why do the workers abandon the hive?
Andrew Core from San Francisco State University has a possible answer, and a new suspect for CCD. He has shown that a parasitic fly, usually known for attacking bumblebees, also targets honeybees. The fly, Apocephalus borealis, lays up to a dozen eggs in bee workers. Its grubs eventually eat the bees from the inside-out. And the infected workers, for whatever reason, abandon their hives to die.
There are hundreds of species of Apocephalus flies, and they’re best known for decapitating ants from the inside. The larvae, laid within an ant, migrate to the head and devour the tissue inside. The brainless ant wanders aimlessly for weeks, before the larvae release an enzyme that dissolves the connection between the ant’s head and body. The head falls off, and adult flies emerge from it.
Follow the link below for the rest of the story:
Parasitic fly spotted in honeybees, causes workers to abandon colonies.
Posted in animal planet, science!
Tagged animal planet, science
Predictions for 2012
Courtesy of DISCOVER magazine, and based on !Science!
1. Objects dropped from rest will accelerate toward the ground at an approximately constant rate, up to corrections due to air resistance.
2. Of all the Radium-226 nuclei on the Earth today, 0.04% will decay by the end of the year.
3. A line drawn between any planet (or even dwarf planet) and the Sun will sweep out equal areas in equal times.
Go here for the rest.
Once again, in lieu of actual content
Six servings of Thanksgiving factology, courtesy of DiscoverBlog
Posted in blogging, cool links, science!
Tagged blogging, cool links, science
In lieu of actual content
An absolutely marvelous time-lapse video of the Earth, taken from the ISS.
Gacked from Bad Astronomy.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Posted in cool links, science!
Tagged cool links, science