Cool Science Story Of The Day [Continuing Thread]

[rfloz]

Since Herr Dr. Prof. Eng. Webb is on sabbatical, I thought this thread might need a boost.


The following seems to confirm something I have always suspected - Drunk drivers fare better in car crashes than their victims.


Alcohol may protect trauma patients from later complications


Date: June 5, 2014
Source: University of Illinois at Chicago

Summary:

Intoxicated trauma patients have a reduced risk for cardiac and renal complications, according to a study. "After an injury, if you are intoxicated there seems to be a substantial protective effect," says the author of the study. "But we don't fully understand why this occurs." Nearly 85,000 trauma patients with measured blood alcohol levels were included in the retrospective study, which analyzed 10 years of cases at level I and level II trauma units.




Injured patients who have alcohol in their blood have a reduced risk for developing cardiac and renal complications, according to a study from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Among patients who did develop complications, those with alcohol in their blood were less likely to die.

The study is published in the June issue of the journal Alcohol.

"After an injury, if you are intoxicated there seems to be a substantial protective effect," says UIC injury epidemiologist Lee Friedman, author of the study. "But we don't fully understand why this occurs."

To better understand the link, Friedman looked at medical complications that are associated with dying in the hospital in relation to patient blood alcohol levels. Other studies have demonstrated that up to 64 percent of post-trauma deaths are attributable to a limited set of later complications.

Nearly 85,000 trauma patients with measured blood alcohol levels were included in the retrospective study, which analyzed 10 years of cases at level I and level II trauma units in Illinois. Children under 16 and patients with certain injuries, such as burns and superficial wounds, were excluded from the study.

Patients' blood alcohol content ranged from 0 to 0.5 percent -- a life-threatening amount, more than six times the level of legal impairment in the U.S.

Overall, 3.2 percent of the patients studied died. Mortality was substantially higher for those who developed complications compared to those who did not (10.3 percent versus 2.1 percent). Among those who died, 43.2 percent had at least one complication.

Blood alcohol concentration was associated with a reduced risk of developing any complication, and with fewer complications overall.

In patients who had alcohol in their blood, cardiac complications were reduced by 23.5 percent. Renal complications were reduced by 30 percent.

The study raises important questions for treatment of traumatic injury.

"Even though alcohol is metabolized quickly by the body, it appears the protective benefit lasts long after there should be only trace amounts in the body," said Friedman, who is assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at UIC.

It is unclear, he said, if alcohol's protective effect comes during the initial period after injury, when alcohol is still present in the blood -- or if the benefit comes from alcohol's metabolites, in tandem with the body's compensatory responses to both the alcohol and the injury.

"The current analysis shows there were reductions in medical complications dominating the cardiovascular system and kidneys, which provides clues to solving this interesting and potentially life-saving puzzle," Friedman said.




Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Illinois at Chicago. The original article was written by Sherri McGinnis González. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.



Journal Reference:
1.Lee S. Friedman. Complications associated with blood alcohol concentration following injury. Alcohol, 2014; 48 (4): 391 DOI: 10.1016/j.alcohol.2014.01.008

[kach22i]

Fishing spiders are everywhere
Fish-Eating Spiders Lurk on Every Continent Except Antarctica

Arachnologist Martin Nyffeler, of the University of Basel in Switzerland, and fish ecologist Brad Pusey, of the University of Western Australia, pored over scientific papers, citizen reports and photos from around the world and collected 89 such instances of spiders eating fish. Their review was published today (June 18) in the journal PLOS ONE. [See Photos of the World's Fish-Eating Spiders]

Paper mentioned above:

Fish Predation by Semi-Aquatic Spiders: A Global Pattern
PLOS ONE: Fish Predation by Semi-Aquatic Spiders: A Global Pattern



Rare raft spider devours stickleback fish in Sussex | Mail Online

This type of raft spider is typically found in European habitats, although there are similar species in North America.

[Heel n Toe]

Tooooo cool... amazing stuff.
_____________________________
Calling Back a Zombie Ship From the Graveyard of Space
By KENNETH CHANG - JUNE 14, 2014



For 17 years, it has been drifting on a lonely course through space. Launched during the disco era and shuttered by NASA in 1997, the spacecraft is now returning to the civilization that abandoned it.

It seemed destined to pass without fanfare, except for a slight chance of slamming into the moon, and then loop aimlessly through the inner solar system.

But now, a shoestring group of civilians headquartered in a decommissioned McDonald’s have reached out and made contact with it — a long-distance handshake that was the first step toward snaring it back into Earth’s orbit.

The zombie spaceship is coming home.

After 36 years in space, the craft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, appears to be in good working order. The main challenge, the engineers say, is figuring out how to command it. No one has the full operating manual anymore, and the fragments are sometimes contradictory.

“We call ourselves techno-archaeologists,” said Dennis Wingo, an engineer and entrepreneur who has a track record of extracting miracles from space antiques that NASA has given up on. Mr. Wingo’s company, Skycorp, has its offices in the McDonald’s that used to serve the Navy’s Moffett air station, 15 minutes northwest of San Jose, Calif. After the base closed, NASA converted it to a research campus for small technology companies, academia and nonprofits.


Mission Control for the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, located in Building 596, an abandoned McDonald’s, at NASA Ames Research Park.

Mr. Wingo took on the project as if it were a stray puppy. “No one else was going to do it,” he said, “and it seemed like the right thing to do.”

The race to revive the craft, ISEE-3, began in earnest in April. At the end of May, using the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the team succeeded in talking to the spacecraft, a moment Mr. Wingo described as “way cool.” This made Skycorp the first private organization to command a spacecraft outside Earth orbit, he said.

Despite the obstacles, progress has been steady, and Mr. Wingo said the team should be ready to fire the engines within weeks.

NASA launched ISEE-3 in 1978. Jimmy Carter was president, the Commodores topped the music charts with “Three Times a Lady,” and the No. 1 movie was “Grease,” starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. The craft orbited the sun between the sun and the Earth, allowing scientists to observe for the first time the high-speed stream of electrons and protons known as the solar wind before it reached Earth.
Continue reading the main story

Then ISEE-3 was recruited to a different mission. With a serpentine do-si-do around the moon and Earth, it was aimed at Comet Giacobini-Zinner, passing through the tail in September 1985.

NASA used ISEE-3 for a few more observations of interplanetary space before retiring it in 1997. Since then, the craft has been looping around the sun on a 355-day orbit. Like a faster racecar lapping the rest of the field, ISEE-3 will catch up to and pass Earth in two months.

That is exactly what Robert W. Farquhar, the craft’s flight director, intended.

Dr. Farquhar, known for devising clever ways to move a spacecraft from Point A to Point B, came up with the intricate orbits that moved ISEE-3 to various locations in the solar wind, and then with the idea of using ISEE-3 to visit Giacobini-Zinner.

That angered the solar scientists, who accused him of stealing their spacecraft. But Dr. Farquhar won the support of NASA leaders. He also said he was just borrowing the craft and would return it.

After the successful Giacobini-Zinner flyby, ISEE-3 still had ample fuel, so three rocket burns in 1986 set it on a course to zoom about 30 miles above the surface of the moon 28 years later, on Aug. 10, 2014. The gravitational pull of the lunar flyby would swing ISEE-3 into orbit around Earth. Dr. Farquhar suggested that a space shuttle could bring it to the ground. NASA even signed an agreement to donate the craft to the National Air and Space Museum.

The rest of NASA, however, was not looking that far ahead.

In 1999, the agency upgraded its Deep Space Network, the system of radio telescopes that communicates with distant space probes. The old transmitters that could talk with ISEE-3 were thrown away.

But ISEE-3 was never turned off, so while Earth lost its ability to talk to it, ISEE-3 was still broadcasting, waiting for its next command.

In 2008, the Deep Space Network listened briefly at the faraway spot where ISEE-3 was and heard the carrier frequency of the spacecraft’s radio — essentially a dial tone.

Two years later, NASA looked into reviving contact for the 2014 flyby, but concluded that the scientific payoff would not be worth the effort and money. Fans of the old spacecraft persisted, arguing that it could be used to train future scientists and engineers. But in February, Leonard N. Garcia, a NASA employee who had set up a Facebook page promoting ISEE-3, conceded that it was not going to happen. New transmitters could be built, he wrote, “but it would be at a price no one is willing to spend.”

That caught Mr. Wingo’s attention. “Not only is it not impossible,” he said, “I think it can work, and I know how to do it.”

Mr. Wingo and Keith Cowing, the editor of NASA Watch, a sometimes cantankerous website covering news and gossip about the space agency, had previously collaborated on a project that resurrected equipment to read 50-year-old magnetic tapes, extracting high-resolution images taken by NASA lunar orbiters in the 1960s — a task NASA had also regarded as infeasible.

Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing decided ISEE-3 was another worthy effort.

About 20 others scattered around the country joined the effort, including many members of the original ISEE-3 team. On RocketHub, a crowdfunding website, they asked for $125,000 to help pay the costs. They collected nearly $160,000, from 2,238 donors.

Then they signed an agreement with NASA. Recent advances in what are called software-defined radios allowed the team to build a new transmitter and install it on the Arecibo telescope within a few weeks, much more quickly and cheaply than would have been possible a few years ago.

Mr. Wingo has now persuaded NASA to use the Deep Space Network to pinpoint ISEE-3’s trajectory, to calculate the rocket burn required to put it on a path to Earth orbit. Dr. Farquhar’s 1986 calculations were close, but not exact. Slight errors are magnified over time, and now the uncertainty is 20,000 miles, which means the spacecraft could be on course to splat into the moon.

“It is in the agency’s best interest to find out, one way or the other,” Mr. Wingo said. If everything goes as hoped, ISEE-3 will end up in its original location to observe solar wind, fulfilling Dr. Farquhar’s promise to return the spacecraft.

Now 81, Dr. Farquhar is half-retired but collaborating with the reboot effort, and he is still thinking ahead. He wants to send ISEE-3 out to visit yet another comet. Mr. Wingo protests that it would cost too much money.

“We’ll go to the comet,” Dr. Farquhar said. “Trust me.”

Correction: June 15, 2014 - An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the technology that allowed the relatively rapid building and installation of a transmitter on the Arecibo telescope. It is software-defined radio, not software-designed radio.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/science/space/calling-back-a-zombie-ship-from-the-graveyard-of-space.html

[masraum]

That's very cool.

[sjf911]

Yeti/Bigfoot news (aka anomalous primates):

"In the first ever systematic genetic survey, we have used rigorous decontamination followed by mitochondrial 12S RNA sequencing to identify the species origin of 30 hair samples attributed to anomalous primates. Two Himalayan samples, one from Ladakh, India, the other from Bhutan, had their closest genetic affinity with a Palaeolithic polar bear, Ursus maritimus. Otherwise the hairs were from a range of known extant mammals. "

Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, Bigfoot and other anomalous primates

[john70t]

Japanese plant experts produce 10,000 lettuce heads a day in LED-lit indoor farm - Science - News - The Independent

[IROC]

We operated our linear accelerator at over 1.4 megawatts for a few days. It remained pretty stable, so I would imagine we will keep it up after our current maintenance outage (just replaced our liquid mercury target - my job).

[Hawkeye's-911T]

"The US space agency's Opportunity rover has clocked more miles on Mars than any man-made vehicle to reach another celestial body, according to Nasa.

Since arriving on the red planet in 2005, the solar-powered robot has journeyed across 25 miles (40 kilometres) of Martian terrain. That surpasses the previous record, held by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover, which landed on the Moon in 1973.

"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," said project manager John Callas of Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometre and was never designed for distance."

Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit – now defunct – discovered wet environmental conditions on Mars, some of which are mild enough to support life.

Opportunity is now exploring the Endeavour crater on Mars. Its next-generation robotic counterpart, the Curiosity rover, launched in 2012 and is operating near the Gale crater on Mars.

Nasa said the Lunokhod 2 rover landed on Earth's moon on 15 January 1973, and drove about 24 miles in less than five months.

Those figures are based on calculations recently made using images from Nasa's lunar reconnaissance orbiter cameras that reveal Lunokhod 2's tracks, the US space agency said."

Cheers
JB

[john70t]

(from a fire)

[Heel n Toe]

European Spacecraft Pulls Alongside Comet After 10 Years and Four Billion Miles
By KENNETH CHANG - AUG. 6, 2014


The comet, as photographed by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, is 2.5 miles wide.

After 10 years and a journey of four billion miles, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft arrived at its destination on Wednesday for the first extended, close examination of a comet.

A six-minute thruster firing at 5 a.m. Eastern time, the last in a series of 10 over the past few months, slowed Rosetta to the pace of a person walking, about two miles per hour relative to the speed of its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

“It is like driving a car or a bus on a motorway for 10 years,” said Andrea Accomazzo, the flight director, at a post-rendezvous news conference. “Now we’ve entered downtown. We’re downtown and we have to start orienting ourselves. We don’t know the town yet, so we have to discover it first.”

Over the coming months, Rosetta and its comet, called C-G for short, will plunge together toward the sun.

In November, a small 220-pound lander is to leave the spacecraft, set down on the comet and harpoon itself to the surface, the first time a spacecraft will gently land on a comet.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/science/space/spacecraft-pulls-alongside-comet.html?_r=0

[sjf911]

Great read:

"Early bioenergetic evolution"

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1622/20130088.full.pdf

[rfloz]

Klingons beware:


Physicists build reversible laser tractor beam


Date: October 20, 2014

Source: Australian National University


Laser physicists have built a tractor beam that can repel and attract objects, using a hollow laser beam that is bright around the edges and dark in its centre.

It is the first long-distance optical tractor beam and moved particles one fifth of a millimetre in diameter a distance of up to 20 centimetres, around 100 times further than previous experiments.

"Demonstration of a large scale laser beam like this is a kind of holy grail for laser physicists," said Professor Wieslaw Krolikowski, from the Research School of Physics and Engineering at The Australian National University.

The new technique is versatile because it requires only a single laser beam. It could be used, for example, in controlling atmospheric pollution or for the retrieval of tiny, delicate or dangerous particles for sampling.

The researchers can also imagine the effect being scaled up.

"Because lasers retain their beam quality for such long distances, this could work over metres. Our lab just was not big enough to show it," said co-author Dr Vladlen Shvedov, a driving force behind the ANU project, along with Dr Cyril Hnatovsky.

Unlike previous techniques, which used photon momentum to impart motion, the ANU tractor beam relies on the energy of the laser heating up the particles and the air around them. The ANU team demonstrated the effect on gold-coated hollow glass particles.

The particles are trapped in the dark centre of the beam. Energy from the laser hits the particle and travels across its surface, where it is absorbed creating hotspots on the surface. Air particles colliding with the hotspots heat up and shoot away from the surface, which causes the particle to recoil, in the opposite direction.

To manipulate the particle, the team move the position of the hotspot by carefully controlling the polarisation of the laser beam.

"We have devised a technique that can create unusual states of polarisation in the doughnut shaped laser beam, such as star-shaped (axial) or ring polarised (azimuthal)," Dr Hnatovsky said.

"We can move smoothly from one polarisation to another and thereby stop the particle or reverse its direction at will."


Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Australian National University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
1.Vladlen Shvedov, Arthur R. Davoyan, Cyril Hnatovsky, Nader Engheta, Wieslaw Krolikowski. A long-range polarization-controlled optical tractor beam. Nature Photonics, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2014.242

[jyl]

This is maybe not so cool, more like really depressing, but interesting.

It is a long read, but worth it.

Astrobiology: Bolts from the blue | The Economist

"In a paper published on arXiv, an online repository, two astronomers, Tsvi Piran of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Raul Jimenez of the University of Barcelona, argue that some regions of the galaxy are less friendly to life than others. Moreover, the friendly areas may have been smaller in the past than they are now. If that is true, then it may be the case that complex life on Earth is just about as ancient as it is possible for complex life to be. And, since complexity necessarily precedes intelligence, that might mean human beings really are the first intelligent life forms to evolve in the Milky Way."

[M.D. Holloway]

They haven't spent much time in PARF

[Hawkeye's-911T]

Antares rocket explodes at Nasa base seconds after launch | Science | theguardian.com

Cheers
JB

[GH85Carrera]

Not Particles, But Chunks: Dark Matter Gets Stranger

Lumpy dark matter. Is that like coal?

[masraum]

Originally Posted by dfjs

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

Pics or video or it didn't happen.

[masraum]

Man With Severed Spinal Cord Walks Again After Cell Transplant | IFLScience

I had read about this sort of thing in rats or mice a few years ago, but wow, successful testing on humans. Very cool.

[Rusty Heap]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Lumpy dark matter. Is that like coal?

[Aragorn]

BBC - Future - The women with superhuman vision

She sees colors that most people find invisible.