So you are telling me someone could walk again and be able to become blue? Man that is a cool trade off if you ask me! The sad thing is it might help spinal injuries but probably has some other terrible side effect (other than turning blue) that they haven’t discovered yet. I am usually an optimist but it just seems like that is how it always works. I hope this discovery really works and helps people in the future though, so lets keep our fingers crossed. In the meantime you better keep popping those blue M&M’s!

Check out the story at CNN

Take care!

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Wow, this is pretty awesome. At an oil digging site about a mile and a half underwater shell oil caught video and pictures of a giant alien squid. The species of squid is called Magnapinna and apparently a few have been found in the past, but this video is very fascinating. There are also pictures on the site you can check out!

Click Here for the National Geographic article and video.

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According to physorg.com Taiwanese engineers developed a new wireless technology that makes WIFI and 3.5G cell phones speeds laughable. This new SoC design chip is 100 times faster than WIFI and 350 times faster than 3.5G and could possibly only cost $1 to make per chip in mass quantities.

The head of the project Professor Jri Lee of National Taiwan University (NTU) and UCLA PhD recently demonstrated the chip locally at NTU. According to physorg.com, “The system on a chip combines Front-End Circuits and an antenna array to reach the ultimate transmission speed.” The SoC chip was demonstrated at downloading a 4GB video in about 10 seconds which would take about 4.5 hours using a bluetooth device.

SoC stands for System-on-a-chip and If you are curious to what the SoC chip definition is check out this LINK at Wikipedia to find out.

Click Here to read the rest of the article at physorg.com

Source: physorg.com

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Well, I have just recently heard about the annual IG Nobel Prizes given out each year around October and there are some interesting winners. As you might have figured out from the title of this post Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson did lab research and discovered that Coca Cola can be used as an effective spermicide. They don’t go into detail on how they experimented with this research, but we can only imagine. The research also showed that Diet Coke worked better than regular Coke. That is great, you can get less calories and prevent pregnancy at the same time!

Readers please don’t try this, I am pretty sure it is a parody and supposed to be taken lightly, the main title of improbable.com is “Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.” I did laugh but I tried not to think after reading about this one because what is the point.

Here are a couple more notable winners: For Biology Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and Michel Franc of Ecole discovered that fleas living on a dog can jump higher than fleas that live on a cat, For the Economics prize Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan found out that a strippers (professional lap dancers) “ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.”

There are many others to check out so go Here to see the rest of the big winners!

Source: Improbable.com

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With clinical trials starting soon for this miracle gel, we can hope that we’ll see it in use eventually during surgery (stopping bleeding instantly instead of looking for vessels to cauterize), by paramedics or field medics during combat. The possibilities are so many for something like this.

The material consists of naturally occurring amino acids that have been engineered to form peptides that spontaneously cluster together to create long fibers when exposed to salty, aqueous environments, such as those found in the body. The fibers form a mesh that serves as a physical barrier to blood and other fluids.

And, since the body eventually assimilates it, you don’t have to remove it after using it. Sounds great!

Here’s to hoping it will be cheap when mass produced, so everyone can have it.

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I found quite a few articles dealing with our Solar System this week, so I thought I’d share them all in one post.

A Telescope Farm on the Moon? Maybe

Astronomers looking for a clear and quiet place from which to map the faintest echoes from the universe’s infancy may have found a welcome mat on the far side of the moon.

A farm of lunar radio telescopes is among 19 next-generation observatories that intrigued NASA enough to garner a combined $12 million for a year-long study.

Earth, Mars, Moon, have different origin, study says

A new study is challenging the long-standing notion that the whole solar system formed from the same raw materials.

Until now most scientists had believed that the inner solar system bodies—Mercury, Venus, Earth, its moon, and Mars—had the same composition as primitive meteorites called chondrites.

Salt deposits found on Mars, may point to former life on Mars

Scientists using a Mars-orbiting camera designed and operated at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility have discovered the first evidence for deposits of chloride minerals – salts – in numerous places on Mars. These deposits, say the scientists, show where water was once abundant and may also provide evidence for the existence of former Martian life.

Evidence for Ocean Found at Saturn’s Moon Titan

An ocean seasoned with the chemical ingredients of life may lie hidden beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Titan.

The evidence? The entire surface of Titan appears to be sliding around, scientists say, like cheese over tomato sauce on a slice of pizza.

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“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Economist.com has the full story.

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The gold standard for limb regeneration is the salamander, which can grow perfect replacements for lost body parts throughout its lifetime. Understanding how can provide a road map for human limb regeneration.

The early responses of tissues at an amputation site are not that different in salamanders and in humans, but eventually human tissues form a scar, whereas the salamander’s reactivate an embryonic development program to build a new limb.

Learning to control the human wound environment to trigger salamanderlike healing could make it possible to regenerate large body parts.

One of the most encouraging signs that human limb regeneration is a feasible goal is the fact that our fingertips already have an intrinsic ability to regenerate. This observation was made first in young children more than 30 years ago, but since then similar findings have been reported in teenagers and even adults. Fostering regeneration in a fingertip amputation injury is apparently as simple as cleaning the wound and covering it with a simple dressing.

Read the rest of this 6 page article

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The Sharad (SHAllow RADar) can look up to 1 km below the surface to find water, by sending pulse waves and analyzing the time delay when they return and their strength.

The Sharad radar experiment, on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft made the discovery in Mars’ mid-northern latitudes.

The ice is found in distinctive geological structures on Mars’ surface that are hundreds of metres thick.

The radar data suggest that some of these features consist mostly of ice.

Read more here

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