Science, Space, Health & Robotics - Page 457

One of the big challenges when it comes to performing organ transplants is to keep the organ fresh during the trip from the donor to the recipient. If the two live in different part of the country or world, keeping those organs fresh and viable can be difficult. Scientists have devised a new supercooling method that has the potential to keep the organs fresh for days.

Currently organs can only remain fresh and viable for less than 24 hours during transportation. Scientists have developed a new supercooling process that in lab tests has shown to be able to keep a rat liver fresh and viable for three days.

The supercooling technique reportedly connects the organ to a machine that perfuses it with nutrients and cools it so minus 6C. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the ability to share donated organs around the world.

The inevitability of intensifying global warming isn't just a problem for humans - it's a problem for the world's livestock too. Now, to make chickens a little less susceptible to the heat, one team of scientists has started research to breed poultry that are born bald.

Carl Schmidt, a geneticist at the University of Delaware, is embarking on a mission to Uganda and Brazil, where chickens have naturally shed their feathers over the years, according to Gizmodo UK. Schmidt's worried about feeding the world by 2050, adding that it'll be made even worse "if the climate does continue to change."

"We're going to be seeing heat waves that are both hotter and longer," Schmidt said in an interview with Modern Farmer. "We need to learn how to mitigate the effect of climate change on animals - we need to figure out how to help them adapt to it." For now, Schmidt plans a programme of selective breeding rather than alterations to their core genetics. But as well as breeding a whole new race of heat-resistant super-chickens, Schmidt and the team are also investigating other elements of selective pressure. "We're isolating the genetic variants that have allowed them to survive," Schmidt said.

Just minutes after the Big Bang, scientists theorize that the universe blinked itself out of existence - that's the current, new theory, anyway. After spending $10 billion, decades of research and tests, and the world's largest particle accelerator, scientists theorize the universe itself doesn't exist, or that it shouldn't exist.

One of the researchers said thanks to finding the Higgs Boson particle, it shows that the universe may have blinked out of existence moments after the Big Bang itself. This researcher continued: "This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory ... if this had happened, we wouldn't be around to discuss it!"

Australian astrophysicist Dr Alan Duffy says: "I love this idea of bringing together two discoveries found at the biggest extremes of size you can imagine. From studying the Higgs Boson at tiny scales much smaller than an atom to (potentially) measuring Inflation by searching into the distant past of our enormous universe".

The European Commission has claimed it's launched the world's largest ever civilian research and innovation programme in robotics.

Teaming with 180 companies and research groups under the umbrella of euRobotics, today saw the official announcement of the EU initiative - which will cover manufacturing, agriculture, health, transport, civil security and households. The initiative is called SPARC and aims to build and strengthen Europe's position in the worldwide robotics market.

In an official statement, the European Commission's VP Neelie Kroes said that Europe must "be a producer and not merely a consumer of robots."

NASA and a group of amateur astronomers are working together to put an old satellite back on task. When the little satellite, known as ISEE-3, flies back by the Earth next month, scientists will have a short window to attempt to communicate with the old satellite and get it back to work on its original mission. The problem for NASA with getting the satellite back on task was that it didn't have the resources to take on the project due to a tight budget.

Amateur scientists stepped up and took up the challenge of communicating with the satellite. NASA has endorsed the group, known as ISEE-3 Reboot Project. The original mission for the satellite was created in the Carter Administration. ISEE-3 stands for International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 and was launched in 1978.

The mission for the satellite was to monitor the solar wind. Originally, it was paired with ISEE-1 and ISEE-2, but ISEE-3 was pulled from that original mission in an attempt to encounter Halley's Comet. After that comet mission was successful, the satellite took a 30-year route to bring it back near the Earth. Amateur scientists crowd funded $125,000 for the project. The team will have to create virtual software versions of the communications gear used to communicate with the satellite because that original gear no longer exists. If the team misses the satellite, it will take another 30-40 years before it passes close by the Earth.

NASA and many other organizations are searching the universe for evidence that life exists on other planets. while the near term search is focusing on looking on and under the surface of Mars and other planets in our solar system, other researchers are looking much further away.

One of the planets being closely looked at for signs of possible life is called Kepler-186f. This is the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. That means it is the right distance from the sun for liquid water to pool on the surface.

SETI is one of the research groups that is looking for signs of extra terrestrial life. SETI researchers believe that in the next 20 years, alien life will be discovered. SETI is looking at half a dozen other world's that might have life, including Kepler-186f. Naturally, SETI scientists say that the discovery will depend on financing. That gives SETI an out if no alien life is discovered in the next 20 years; they can just say the financing wasn't there.

For more than 100 years now, astronomers have gazed into space and attempted to figure out what fuels the massive hurricane-like storm that orbits just below Jupiter's equator. During the 1800's the storm was estimated to measure more than 25,000 miles across, and recent images from the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is just a mere 10,250 miles across today. To put that into perspective, back in 1890, three Earth's could fit inside the storm, and today only one would could squeeze in.

At the moment, scientist have no conclusive theory on why the storm is shrinking, it has been able to figure out that the storm is shrinking faster as they years go by, and that it is currently losing about 580 miles in diameter per year. One early theory suggest that Jupiter's atmosphere is losing some of its volatility and bleeding off energy, which in turn is causing the storm to slowly die down. The video below from Videos From Space shows just how fast this shrinkage is taking place.

"In our new observations, it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm," Amy Simon, associate director for strategic science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the accelerated change, by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot."

According to reports, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX Elon Musk agreed to help fund the Nikola Tesla Museum, thanks to Matthew Inman's illustration in The Oatmeal.

Inman led the fundraising via Indiegogo to bring up a museum based on Nikola Tesla's invention by using one of his facilities which was going to be torn down. Inman was able to successfully raise $1.5 million to buy the property in time. He needed to raise $8 million more so that the facility can be converted into a museum.

Recently he posted a two-part comic about owning a Tesla Model S. In part One he called it as a 'magical space car' and in Part 2, it was about asking Tesla Motor's Elon Musk to help him fund for the museum via twitter. Inman explained why it would be a good gesture for the electric car company to help fund this project.

For countless decades, scientists have been gagged and bought when it comes to "global warming" or "climate change". You might not want to hear it, but if you dig deep enough, the rabbit hole begins to make sense. For those who have never heard of "Suspicious0bservers" on YouTube, you might want to check out his videos - he's quite the expert and spokesperson to the masses.

Suspicious0bservers, or Ben Davidson, has over 180,000 subscribers on YouTube, but his latest video "Why Global Warming Failed" should be an eye-opener for you. The video above has plenty of data and links to papers he cites from, with some very large points to be made. It's not just the Earth that is experiencing changes, but virtually every single planet in our solar system is going through some form of change. Those planets aren't having changes due to man now, are they?

We, mankind, are causing some form of pollution and "climate change" but it is in no way near the numbers scientists, governments and corporations are reporting. During the video (at around the 8:30 mark), you can see the CO2 levels on Earth are skyrocketing - something that man is surely doing. But, the temperature - "global warming" - is right on the models that have been tracked over the last 300,000 years. We're actually seeing the temperature in Antarctica dropping a few degrees in the last 300,000 years - where every 100,000 years we're seeing a drop of a couple of degrees.

Scott White from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been working on something quite incredible: a plastic that is lined with something similar to an artificial vascular system, just like the veins and arteries that see the blood flow through your body, that can repair for larger breaks.

This new system features two different liquids, with the first containing long, thin molecules, and the other with three-sided molecules, in separate channels. Once these fluids mix, a reaction sees them joining together to create a scaffold, which forms a thick gel. Mixing in some other ingredients causes the gel to solidify over a few hours.

Once the plastic is fractured, the vascular system is damaged, with the two liquids pouring out. The liquids mix together, forming a restorative gel. This gel can fill a 4mm hole with 35mm of surrounding cracks within 20 minutes, hardening in a 3-hour span of time. The patch that is created is around 60% as strong as the original plastic, so we're not talking about a complete 100% strength, but this is an incredible feat nonetheless.