Category: Science

Darpa takes on Zombie Pigs

Posted by Digital Vendetta – 14/01/2010

Remember all those SF movies where it takes suspended animation to travel to a distant planet or galaxy? Ripley, the buff female protagonist in the film Aliens, spends 57 years in “hypersleep” — without aging — before being rescued. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is now funding research that may one day bring humans to a zombie-like form of hibernation. The motivation, however, is not so much space travel as emergency trauma care for wounded soldiers on the battlefield.

Zombie Pig

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Swine Flu “False Pandemic” Biggest Pharma-Fraud Of The Century

Posted by Digital Vendetta – 14/01/2010

The Council of Europe will launch a probe into pharmaceutical companies after reports that vaccine manufacturers pressured the World Health Organization into declaring swine flu pandemic seeking increase in profits.

It was supposed to be a deadly pandemic, but is so far is nothing more than a serious cold.

Shhh it's a secret.

And it has left a lasting headache as a debate rages over whether pharmaceutical companies deliberately misled governments about the seriousness of swine flu to make them stockpile vaccines.

The legal standards organization, the Council of Europe, will gather the arguments.

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‘Grey goo’ food laced with nanoparticles could swamp Britain

Posted by Nexus – 11/01/2010

[via dailymail.co.uk]

Prince Charles derided nanoparticles as 'grey goo' food

Britain is on the brink of a massive expansion in foods containing controversial ‘grey goo’ nanoparticles, according to the former head of the Food Standards Agency.

Low-calorie chocolate and beer that doesn’t go flat could be on sale within just five years, Lord Krebs said last night.

However, he and other peers believe there will be no requirement for the hi-tech products to be labelled as containing nanoparticles – microscopic compounds that can worm their way into the brain, liver and kidneys with unknown consequences.

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Nasa’s new space telescope finds five new planets outside our solar system.

Posted by Digital Vendetta – 10/01/2010

Nasa’s new planet-hunting telescope has discovered its first five worlds beyond our Solar System.

Numerous planets have been found before by other telescopes, such as Hubble, but the sole mission of the Kepler observatory – launched last year – has been to find potential ‘Earths’ elsewhere in our galaxy.

Unfortunately life is unlikely to survive on the new planets as they are thought to generate hellish heat. Estimated temperatures of the worlds range from 1,200 to 1,650 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava.

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Golden Ratio Discovered in Quantum World

Posted by Digital Vendetta – 10/01/2010

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.

The magnetic field is used to tune the chains of spins to a quantum critical state. The resonant modes (“notes”) are detected by scattering neutrons. These scatter with the characteristic frequencies of the spin chains. (Credit: Image courtesy of Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres)

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The Tail of the Small Magellanic Cloud

Posted by Nexus – 08/01/2010

Click on picture for full-size image

A satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud is wonder of the southern sky, named for 16th century Portuguese circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan. Some 200,000 light-years distant in the constellation Tucana, the small irregular galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust that lie along a bar and extended “wing”, are familiar in images from optical telescopes. But the galaxy also has a tail.

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A Force from Empty Space: The Casimir Effect

Posted by Nexus – 05/01/2010

[via apod.nasa.gov]

casimir sphere

Click on image for full-size

This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever.

Measuring slightly over one tenth of a millimeter, the ball moves toward a smooth plate in response to energy fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space. The attraction is known as the Casimir Effect, named for its discoverer, who, 50 years ago, was trying to understand why fluids like mayonnaise move so slowly.

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