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February 16, 2016
Gas In Super-Earth Atmosphere Detected For The First Time
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Artist's impression of the super-Earth 55 Cancri e. ESA/Hubble/M. Kornmesser
Thousands of planets have been found outside the Solar System, ranging from Earth-sized worlds to massive gas giants. An intermediate type of planet called a “super-Earth” has garnered significant interest, though, as it may be the most common type in the universe – and now astronomers have detected gases in the atmosphere of one of these worlds for the first time.
Eternal 5D Data Chip Can Record All Of Human History
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180 million books can be stored on a single chip. agsandrew/Shutterstock
In order to preserve our stories, we used to carve and paint rudimentary images and basic text into stone tablets and onto the walls of caves. Nowadays, any of us can store hundreds of thousands of documents onto a cheap, thumb-sized USB, preserving them for decades. Scientists at the University of Southampton have taken this one extraordinary step further, announcing that they have developed a method to record data that could outlast the human race itself.
Artist Designs “Audiopill” To Create A Rave Inside Your Body
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Jan Strmiska/Audiopill
A Czech artist has developed a pill designed to blast your guts with vibrations to simulate an internal intestinal rave. Why? We’re not sure either.
Dogs Can Sniff Out Criminals With Amazing Accuracy
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A dog at the odorology unit of the French police, identifying via scent which person has held a mobile phone. Xavier ROSSI/Getty
Dogs and their incredible sense of smell are now being used for all sorts of things, from sniffing out breast cancer to smelling bodies hidden below meters of water. But they are also used by the French police in a different way, to determine whether or not someone was at the scene of a crime. Yet, the use of different training techniques and concerns over reliability have meant that evidence gathered by the canine colleagues is frequently treated with doubt.
Lab-Grown “Mini-Brains” Could Aid Drug Research
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Tiny brains made from human stem cells could replace the use of animals in clinical trials of neurological drugs. vitstudio /Shutterstock
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University claim to have grown a series of "mini-brains" from human skin cells, which they say could soon replace the use of animals in drug tests. Containing several different types of neurons and displaying some of the same connectivity seen in real human brains, these tiny bundles of cells can easily be produced in large numbers, and could be put into widespread production as early as this year.
February 15, 2016
Scientists prove feasibility of ‘printing’ replacement tissue
Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.
Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, the scientists said they printed ear, bone and muscle structures. When implanted in animals, the structures matured into functional tissue and developed a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.
“This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients,” said Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) and senior author on the study. “It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape. With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation.”
With funding from the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a federally funded effort to apply regenerative medicine to battlefield injuries, Atala’s team aims to implant bioprinted muscle, cartilage and bone in patients in the future.
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Is This The Largest Rocky Exoplanet That We’ve Ever Found?
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Kepler-10c, illustrated, may have been usurped by BD+20594b. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/David Aguilar
What is the upper limit on how large a rocky planet can be? This is a contentious area in astronomy. Generally, it’s thought that above about 1.6 times the radius of Earth, a planet will become a gas giant. Anything below this is a super-Earth, and smaller still are the terrestrial planets the size of Earth, Mars, and so on.
Curious Stellar Object Confirmed As Rogue Planet
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Artist's conception of a rogue planet floating through space. Christine Pulliam/CfA
Three years ago, a mysterious object was observed drifting alone in interstellar space, 80 light-years from Earth. Much bigger than Jupiter but smaller than most stars, it was called a rogue planet, and now astronomers can confirm that the object is indeed a planet.
PSO J318.5338-22.8603, or PSO J318.5-22 for short, is a large planetary object in the Beta Pictoris moving group. It has a mass of 8.3 times that of Jupiter and a temperature of about 1100 Kelvins. A detailed description of the findings has been published on ArXiv.
“Hellish” Ancient Organisms Found Living Inside Earth’s Crust
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The Hadesarchaea were found 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) below the surface. Angelina Babii/Shutterstock
Billions of years of evolution on Earth have produced “endless forms most beautiful,” as Darwin poetically noted. Some have evolved to live in “extreme” environments, such as deep sea hydrothermal vents and around the rims of lava lakes.
New Saliva Test May Be Able To Detect Cancer In Just 10 Minutes
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Scientists hope the new test, which seeks out fragments of tumor RNA in saliva, could be available in the next four years. Henrik Dolle/Shutterstock
Scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles claim to have developed a new technique for detecting cancer in a single drop of a person’s saliva. Though the method is still being trialed in China, the team behind the new test hopes to see it rolled out in Europe before the decade is up, and says it could take as little as 10 minutes to give a result.
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