Cool Science Story Of The Day [Continuing Thread]

[jyl]

I would like to start a continuing thread for interesting science stuff - new discoveries, cool technologies, medical advances, science policy, etc. Think of it as the Cool Science Story Of The Day.

Environmental science stuff is fine but if you want to argue climate change at great length, start a different thread. Actually, if you want to discuss any particular story at great length, consider starting a different thread.

To kick it off, here is something that may not be "real" science, but should get us going - fellow nerds feel free to follow with a real science post.

Rouillon and his team spent years measuring the changes in the breasts of 330 women using a simple slide rule and caliper at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (University Hospital) in Besançon, where he carried out his research.
He found that no evidence that bras helped ease back pain. Instead, he found that the chest supports could even add to the problem.
According to The Connexion, the findings suggest that breasts would gain more tone and support themselves if no bra was used. Researchers explain that bras limit the growth of supporting breast tissues, leaving the breast to wither and degrade more quickly.
The study found that women who took off their bras for good experienced a 7mm lift in their nipples each year they didn't wear a bra. Researchers also found that bra-less women developed firmer breasts and saw their stretch marks fade.

Bras Make Breasts "Saggier", 15-year French Study Reveals : Physical Wellness : Counsel & Heal

[M.D. Holloway]

The site of Malapa, South Africa, has yielded perhaps the richest assemblage of early hominin fossils on the continent of Africa. The fossil remains of Au. sediba were discovered in August of 2008, and the species was named in 2010. In 2011, detailed studies of four critical areas of anatomy of these remains were published in Science, and a refined date of ~1.977 to 1.98 Ma was proposed for their age. In 2013, Science presents six articles that complete the initial examination of the prepared material attributed to three individuals: the holotype and paratype skeletons, commonly referred to as MH1 and MH2, and the adult isolated tibia referred to as MH4. They, along with the cumulative research published over the past 3 years, provide us with a comprehensive examination of the anatomy of a single species of early hominin.

Science/AAAS | Special Collection: Australopithecus sediba

[M.D. Holloway]

Two-Billion-Dollar Cosmic Ray Detector Sees Signs of Something
Adrian Cho
This week, physicists working with a $2 billion cosmic ray detector aboard the International Space Station confirmed a previously reported excess of antiparticles from space that could emanate from dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity binds the galaxies. If so, the observation could help scientists determine the nature of dark matter. But the excess measured by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer could also be subatomic exhaust from a pulsar or some other mundane astronomical object. And determining which explanation is correct may require entirely different types of experiments and could take years.

Two-Billion-Dollar Cosmic Ray Detector Sees Signs of Something

[Hawkeye's-911T]

BBC - Future - Technology - Wireless highway charges electric cars as they go

Maybe not "a cool science story" but interesting stuff all the same re: electric cars
Cheers
JB

[M.D. Holloway]

The new structure, currently dubbed Y(4140), was discovered in experimental data at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). "We don't know what it is," said Kai Yi, physicist at the University of Iowa and one of the panelists. It could be some sort of exotic new combination of quarks, though not the so-called charmonium that involves charm quarks, or something else entirely. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That Await Discovery]

Atom Smashers Find Something Not So Charm-ing

[sammyg2]

Titanium looks awesome when you blast it in a glass bead cabinet at night with the lights off.

That is all.

[Hawkeye's-911T]

BBC News - Giant black hole in tiny galaxy confounds astronomers

This may qualify as a lame-a$$ed bump as this article is from Nov. last year. If it is a repeat post, I apologize but in a way, it does fit the thread title.
Cheers
JB

[Hawkeye's-911T]

This is interesting stuff.

NASA - Kepler

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by jyl

I would like to start a continuing thread for interesting science stuff - new discoveries, cool technologies, medical advances, science policy, etc. Think of it as the Cool Science Story Of The Day.

Environmental science stuff is fine but if you want to argue climate change at great length, start a different thread. Actually, if you want to discuss any particular story at great length, consider starting a different thread.

To kick it off, here is something that may not be "real" science, but should get us going - fellow nerds feel free to follow with a real science post.



Bras Make Breasts "Saggier", 15-year French Study Reveals : Physical Wellness : Counsel & Heal

Is this real or one of those pseudo news satire webpages?

[M.D. Holloway]

Sun-powered plane completes California test flight

A solar-powered plane that has wowed aviation fans in Europe took to the skies Friday over the San Francisco Bay area in a successful test flight.

[Laneco]

Wow - I find that plane to be quite beautiful.

(there's my science contribution - Ohhh! PRETTY!)...

angela

[sjf911]

Another piece of the evolution puzzle added, the African coelacanth genome published:

The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

[imcarthur]

"The Norwegian government has backed an ambitious plan to create the world's first ship tunnel . . . At 45m high (148ft) and 36m (118ft) wide, the 1.7km (one mile) long Stad Ship Tunnel will be the only one of its kind - a passage through solid rock able to accommodate 16,000 tonne freight and passenger ships.

Ship canals have long been used to make journeys more direct and safer but the Stad peninsula is a mountainous divide, peaking at 645m, between the Norwegian Sea to the north and the North Sea to the south."

See BBC

Ian

[Hawkeye's-911T]

Maybe not so cool - but something to think about

BBC News - How are humans going to become extinct?

Cheers
JB

[M.D. Holloway]

Design News - Electronic News & Comment - Slideshow: Electronics Add Glitter to New Rolls-Royce

I think there could have been a better choice in the name...

Rolls-Royce is rolling out a new fastback-style vehicle that cranks out 624 HP, goes from 0 to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds, and employs more electronic technology than any vehicle in the company's storied history.

Known as the Wraith, the new luxury car combines a V-12 engine with an eight-speed, satellite-aided transmission that "sees" the road ahead. It also incorporates LED exterior lights, a "starry night" array of fiber-optic lamps on the ceiling, and a touchscreen that reads handwritten messages. "It's a very intuitive vehicle," Rolls-Royce spokesman James Warren told Design News. "It can see beyond what the driver sees."

[kach22i]

THE AUROCHS
Follow the Piper: THE AUROCHS

I thought it was about time for me to write about another ancient, extinct animal, so I chose the aurochs. Most of the cattle breeds we have on our farms today, such as Jerseys, Guernseys, Herefords, and Angus, are descendants of the aurochs, except smaller. Aurochses were really, really big cattle. At the shoulder, they were 6.6 feet tall, and they could weigh as much as 2,200 pounds. Hunting them, back in the days when people mostly used spears and arrows and other such weapons, was scary and dangerous. But whenever the hunters killed an aurochs, they had enough meat to feed the whole village, and maybe their dogs, too.

In Poland there is a group called the Polish Foundation for Recreating the Aurochs, and the scientists in this group want to use DNA from aurochs bones in museums to make a new aurochs. They think they will be able to do this, and when they have made some new aurochses, they can put them back in the forests of Poland, where they used to live.

The Texas Longhorn Genome Decoded
The Texas Longhorn Genome Decoded | News

Among the findings was that Texas Longhorns are direct descendants of the first cattle in the New World, which were brought over by Columbus in 1493. They arrived in the area that would become Texas near the end of the 17th century.....................

Once in the New World, most of the cattle eventually went feral. Under the pressures of natural selection they were able to re-evolve ancient survival traits that had been artificially bred out of their European ancestors. Selection for longer horns allowed them to defend against wild predators. They became leaner and more able to survive heat and drought.

Longhorn Legacy: Surprising Origins of Columbus' Cattle Found
Origins of Columbus' Cattle Revealed | Evolution | LiveScience

The first cows brought to the Americas by explorer Christopher Columbus originated from two extinct wild beasts from India and Europe, a new genetic analysis shows.

[Geneman]

Another win for Synthetic Biologists. Here they engineer in the complete enzymatic procees to convert sugar to long chain petrocarbons.. is it cost effective,, ...think about filling your tank with water and a few cups of sugar the night before you go to work add a tablet of bacteria ..and next day you have a tankfull of diesel no kidding!! just like making beer !

BBC News - E. coli bacteria 'can produce diesel biofuel'

[kach22i]

Originally Posted by Geneman

BBC News - E. coli bacteria 'can produce diesel biofuel'

I wonder if it will contain any sulfur. No mention of it in the article above.

Ultra-low-sulfur diesel
Ultra-low-sulfur diesel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ULSD has a lower energy content due to the heavy processing required to remove large amounts of sulfur from oil, leading to lower fuel economy. Using it requires more costly oil.

That low sulfur fuel really messed up a lot of older trucks. Better now that many of them have been forced to retire.

[Aragorn]

Found this funny and science related:

COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO: NASA rovers scrawl giant willy on Mars • The Register

[pavulon]

http://news.yahoo.com/hubble-telescope-spies-incoming-comet-ison-221940848.htm

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A recently discovered comet, dazzlingly bright even though it is still almost as far away as Jupiter, is racing toward a November rendezvous with the sun, officials said on Tuesday.
If it survives the encounter - and that's a big if - the comet may be visible even in daylight in Earth's skies at the end of the year.
Discovered by amateur astronomers in September 2012, Comet ISON is about to reach the outer edge of the asteroid belt, located some 280 million miles (451 million km) from Earth, said William Cooke, lead scientist at NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The comet is shedding dust from its nucleus at a rate of more than 112,000 pounds (50,802 kg) per minute, the result of heating by the sun, observations from NASA's Swift telescope show.
That level of activity is unusual for a comet still so far away from the sun. It could spell its doom.
Preliminary measurements made with the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured an image of the comet that was released on Tuesday, indicate Comet ISON's body is no more than 4 miles in diameter.
The comet's nucleus will continue to shrink as it flies closer toward the sun and heats up. The rock-and-ice object could break up completely before it gets as close as 700,000 miles (1.1 million km) from the sun's surface on November 28.
A comet in the 1970s passed 10 times farther away than that and partly disintegrated, Cooke said.
"I doubt this thing is going to survive. I guess we won't know for sure until we look for it to come out from behind the sun," he said.
The comet was named for the International Scientific Optical Network, or ISON, telescope that made its discovery.