10 Daily Things » Science

Surprise! Unknown Asteroid Buzzed Earth

djStelios — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:27:53 +0000

A previously undiscovered asteroid came within 14,000 km (8,700 miles) of Earth last week, and astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before closest approach. On Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST a 7 meter asteroid, now called 2009 VA, came only about 2 Earth radii from impacting our home planet. This is the third-closest known non-impacting Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid.

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Drop of water

djStelios — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:25:34 +0000

Looking at it up close and in slow motion is really incredible

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Flu Attack! How A Virus Invades Your Body

djStelios — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:08:26 +0000

When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny factories that help spread the disease. In this animation, NPR’s Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky explain how a flu virus can trick a single cell into making a million more viruses.

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World’s Largest Pyramid Discovered

djStelios — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:37:20 +0000

Just in time for the 2012 craze, CNN reports on a brand new massive Mayan pyramid discovery, including an amazing stone frieze showing the Maya sacred creation story, the Popol Vuh:

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US students take stunning images of Earth from space on a shoestring

djStelios — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:02:10 +0000

An American science student has captured images of the curvature of the Earth after sending a balloon into space on a shoestring budget. Oliver Yeh spent less than $150 on a secondhand camera, a GPS-enabled mobile phone, a weather balloon and a polystyrene coolbox which he launched from a field in Massachusetts as part of a science project.

The result was a time-lapse array of stunning photographs from the edge of space that could easily have come from Nasa, with its $17bn annual budget.

Yeh, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, enlisted two friends to help with Project Icarus, which he dreamed up to prove that it was possible to reach the upper levels of the atmosphere even on a tight budget. “For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do,” the 20-year-old said. “Before, people were just kind of, ‘That’s a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.’”

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The camera, which Yeh bought on eBay, was positioned inside the coolbox to protect it from -40C temperatures 17.6 miles above the Earth’s surface. He cut a small hole for the lens then hooked the camera up to a computer programme that instructed it to take photographs every five seconds. He also placed a phone inside that broadcast its co-ordinates to help the team find and retrieve the device when the helium-filled balloon popped and it returned to Earth on a parachute.

The students launched the balloon on 2 September near their college. They expected the flight to last five hours, but soon lost contact with it, fearing that the low temperatures had frozen the phone’s battery. They later rediscovered the signal and found the camera undamaged 25 miles from the launch area. The team has since collated the hundreds of photographs taken during the flight into a video that they posted on YouTube and on their own website.

Yeh says his favourite image is the one taken at the peak of the flight, 17.5 miles from the Earth’s surface, just as the balloon popped and the camera began its descent.

Static Shock

djStelios — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:34:02 +0000

Static electricity phenomenon shocks kid.

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Maggot Therapy

djStelios — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:28:55 +0000

Maggot therapy (also known as maggot debridement therapy (MDT), larval therapy, larva therapy, larvae therapy, biodebridement or biosurgery) is a type of biotherapy involving the intentional introduction by a health care practitioner of live, disinfected maggots (fly larvae) raised in special facilities into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wound(s) of a human or animal for the purposes of selectively cleaning out only the necrotic tissue within a wound (debridement), disinfection, and promotion of wound healing.

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Rare tongue-eating parasite found

djStelios — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:23:54 +0000

A rare parasite which burrows into host fish before eating and replacing their tongues with itself has been found off the Jersey coast. Fishermen near the Minquiers – islands under the jurisdiction of Jersey – found the isopod, a type of louse, inside a weaver fish.

Marine researcher Paul Chambers, from the Société Jersiaise, was one of the fishing party and identified the find. He said he was surprised to find the isopod away from the Mediterranean sea. Isopods are normally about 2cm (1in) long and live in fish, surviving on the animal’s blood, in warm waters.

Mr Chambers said: “When we emptied the fish bag out there at the bottom was this incredibly ugly looking isopod. Really quite large, really quite hideous – if you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp, nasty claws underneath and I thought ‘that’s a bit of a nasty beast’.

“I struggled for weeks to find an identification for this thing until, quite by chance I stumbled across something that looked similar in a Victorian journal. Apparently there’s not too much ill effect to the fish itself except it’s lost its tongue.”

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Blind patient sees again with eye tooth

djStelios — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:30:56 +0000

A 60-year-old woman, blind for nine years, has regained useful vision in one eye following a rare operation in Miami in which surgeons removed one of her teeth, drilled a hole in it, inserted a plastic lens into the hole and implanted the tooth-lens combination into her eye.

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Kids Marshmallow Experiment

djStelios — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:03:40 +0000

The marshmallow experiment is a famous test of this concept conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University and discussed by Daniel Goleman in his popular work. In the 1960s, a group of four-year olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

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