I have oftentimes said that my brain is not well connected to my mouth. How many times have you been thinking about something so eloquently and clearly, having an epiphany that you have to share with those around you, but when you try to enunciate it, it comes out all garbled?

While that phenomenon isn't explained, an important first step to understanding the connections between thought and sleep has been taken.

From the Discover Magasine article:

A curious experiment has given scientists an unprecedented look into the human brain as it goes about a vital and everyday task: processing and speaking words. The study, published in Science, found that the brain carries out three steps of the task in about half a second, and that all the activity happens sequentially in the same small brain region, known as Broca’s area.

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Read the full article here.

Read the original research article here.

From the New Scientist article:

PETER MITCHELL was an eccentric figure. For much of his career he worked in his own lab in a restored manor house in Cornwall in the UK, his research funded in part by a herd of dairy cows. His ideas about the most basic process of life - how it gets energy - seemed ridiculous to his fellow biologists.

"I remember thinking to myself that I would bet anything that [it] didn't work that way," biochemist Leslie Orgel wrote of his meeting with Mitchell half a century ago. "Not since Darwin and Wallace has biology come up with an idea as counter-intuitive as those of, say, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger."

Over the following decades, however, it became clear that Mitchell was right. His vindication was complete when he won a Nobel prize in 1978. Even today, though, most biologists have yet to grasp the full implications of his revolutionary ideas - especially for the origin of life.

"Mitchell's ideas were about how cells are organised in space, and cellular energy generation is a feature of that," says geochemist Mike Russell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The problem is that most ideas on the origin of life lack both spatial organisation and a supply of energy to drive replication or growth."

A few researchers, including Russell, have been rethinking the origin of life in the light of Mitchell's ideas. They think the most counter-intuitive trait of life is one of the best clues to its origin. As a result, they have come up with a radically different picture of what the earliest life was like and where it evolved. It's a picture for which there is growing evidence.

Before Mitchell, everyone assumed that cells got their energy using straightforward chemistry. The universal energy currency of life is a molecule called ATP. Split it and energy is released. ATP powers most of the energy-demanding processes in cells, from building proteins to making muscles move. ATP, in turn, was thought to be generated from food by a series of standard chemical reactions. Mitchell thought otherwise. Life, he argued, is powered not by the kind of chemistry that goes on in a test tube but by a kind of electricity.

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Read the full (and fascinating) article here.

I've frequently posulated that humans have hit an evolutionary wall, what with our intervening in all aspects of human health and longevity. So I welcome any and all evidence that this isn't the case, even if the result, in this case, is purely speculative.

From the New Scientist article:

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.

Medical advances mean that many people who once would have died young now live to a ripe old age. This has led to a belief that natural selection no longer affects humans and, therefore, that we have stopped evolving.

"That's just plain false," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. He says although differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, differences in reproduction still can. The question is whether women who have more children have distinguishing traits which they pass on to their offspring.

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Read the full article here.

I'm just gonna let the article blip take care of the explaining of this one.

From the Scientific American article:

Named for a Dutch physicist, the Casimir effect governs interactions of matter with the energy that is present in a vacuum. Success in harnessing this force could someday help researchers develop low-friction ballistics and even levitating objects that defy gravity. For now, the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a two-year, $10-million project encouraging scientists to work on ways to manipulate this quirk of quantum electrodynamics.

Vacuums generally are thought to be voids, but Hendrik Casimir believed these pockets of nothing do indeed contain fluctuations of electromagnetic waves. He suggested, in work done in the 1940s with fellow Dutch physicist Dirk Polder, that two metal plates held apart in a vacuum could trap the waves, creating vacuum energy that, depending on the situation, could attract or repel the plates. As the boundaries of a region of vacuum move, the variation in vacuum energy (also called zero-point energy) leads to the Casimir effect. Recent research done at Harvard University, Vrije University Amsterdam and elsewhere has proved Casimir correct—and given some experimental underpinning to DARPA's request for research proposals.

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Read the full article here.

Finally, all of my hours spent surfing around online during my free time are reaping benefits. Researchers have found out that using the internet actually enhances brain function.

From the Live Science article:

As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.

Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.

"We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," Dr. Gary Small, study author and professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said in a statement.

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Read the full article here.

Making a blue rose has been the bane of plant breeders around the globe for many, MANY decades. I personally love the idea that scientists have spent so much time and money trying to simply create something beautiful.

From the BBC News article:

Rosebreeder Bernard Mehring says that as far back as the 1900s there was a German variety of "blue" rose known as the Veilchenblau. But the petals are, again, more a "mauvey-grey", he says, and it only flowers once.

According to the Victorians, who promoted floriography - the language of flowers - blue roses signified mystery or the attempt to attain the impossible.

Since those times the colour of a rose has represented a different sentiment or feeling.

Passion and romantic love is still associated with red roses. Pink roses apparently imply a less passionate affection - rather a more gentle or poetic one. White roses signal sincerity and purity, while yellow roses stand for friendship.

Sarah Holland from the Flowers and Plants Association in the UK says she believes natural blue roses "would be hugely in demand".

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Read the full article here.

Hint: It's not Peter Parker.

From the National Geographic article:

Part of a well-known group of golden orb-weaver spiders—which can spin webs up to three feet (one meter) wide—N. komaci was first identified in a South African museum collection in 2000.

But it wasn't until a 2007 field survey, which discovered three individuals in South Africa's Tembe Elephant Park, that scientists knew the spider still existed in the wild.

The newfound spider, detailed October 20 in the journal PLoS One, is the first addition to the Nephila genus since 1879.

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Read the full article here.

Three telescopes have captured an image of the furthest cluster of galaxies ever observed.

From the Discover Bad Astronomy blog:

The image doesn’t look like much, but it’s scientifically amazing. When light left those galaxies, the Universe was only about 3.5 billion years old! Remember, for a long time the whole cosmos was just gas, and that took a long time to collect, clump up, and form stars and galaxies. It’s currently thought that it took a few billion years for clusters of galaxies to form after the Big Bang, so JKCS041 looks like it was an early bloomer. We may find even more distant clusters, but there probably aren’t too many more out there, and they almost certainly won’t be much farther away than this one.

Clusters are among the largest structures in the Universe (the only things bigger are superclusters; clusters of clusters if you like), so studying them tells us a lot about conditions in the early Universe. And, of course, the farther back we find them the more interesting things get! I suspect that the newly-refurbished Hubble may be pointed this way sometime soon, too, and I also imagine JKCS041 will be a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest space telescope ever launched. When it’s observed by these observatories, what secrets about dark matter, dark energy, and the early Universe will the cluster reveal?

And since I hate ending posts with rhetorical flourishes, I’ll take a stab at a generic answer: surprises. Whenever we probe deeper, look farther, the one thing we discover is that the Universe will always have something unexpected up its sleeve. That’s one reason science is so much fun!

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Read the full article (and see the picture) here.

The primate fossil that captured the world's attention a month or so ago has been found to not be our earliest ancestor, but distant kin to humanity.

From the CBC News article:

The scientists who unveiled Darwinius said it was not a direct ancestor to humans or monkeys, but could show what an ancestor of apes and humans might have looked like. They said it shared some characteristics with higher primates worth examining.

The new analysis says the adapoids don't belong to the same major grouping of primates as apes, monkeys and humans. The features it shares with higher primates, such as the loss of certain teeth, must have evolved independently, the researchers said.

"This is a rigorous analysis based on many features," said Eric Sargis, an anthropology professor at Yale. He said he'd found the argument of the Darwinius researchers unconvincing, so the new result came as no surprise.

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Read the full article here.

Researchers have discovered the mechanism by which the leaves of a lotus plant are able to stay dry. This could have wide-ranging applications for material scientists in developing new water-repellent materials.

From the Science Daily article:

"We faced a tricky problem -- water droplets that fall on the leaf easily roll off, while condensate that grows from within the leaf's nooks and crannies is sticky and remains trapped," said Jonathan Boreyko, a third-year graduate student at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, who works in the laboratory of assistant professor Chuan-Hua Chen. The results of the team's experiments were published early on-line in the journal Physics Review Letters.

"Scientists and engineers have long wondered how these sticky drops are eventually repelled from the leaf after their impalement into the tiny projections," Boreyko said. "After bringing lotus leaves into the lab and watching the condensation as it formed, we were able to see how the sticky drops became unsticky."

The key was videotaping the process while the lotus leaf rested on top of the woofer portion of a stereo speaker at low frequency. Condensation was created by cooling the leaf. It turned out that after being gently vibrated for a fraction of a second, the sticky droplets gradually unstuck themselves and jumped off the leaf.

Voila, a dry leaf.

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Read the full article here.

A paper published on Nanotechnology by German scientists caused quite an uproar earlier this weeks, but the research agency responsible for releasing the report says these fears are unfounded.

From the Spiegel article:

Nanotechnology, which is widely considered one of the most exciting technologies of the 21st century and, according to experts, will be worth trillions of euros globally by the year 2020, utilizes materials at an atomic or molecular level -- nano literally means "extremely small" in Greek. Such materials now have many commercial and scientific applications -- from providing extra UV protection and skin care in sun cream and cosmetics to helping clean graffiti off walls more efficiently to significantly advancing industry, health care and the military.

In fact, there are already countless products on the market that feature nano-technological innovations. They can be found in everything from sunscreen to ketchups and powdered sugar. They have also been used in enviromentally-friendly products such as a thermal-insulating paint.

Germany is one of the European leaders in this area. A report by Nanoforum, an online gateway for nanotechnology news funded by the European Community, reports that the German government support for the technology is strong and that, "between 1998 and 2004, the volume of projects funded in Germany quadrupled to around €120 million."

"We do not know how many products there are on the market that contain nano-particles," Wolfgang Dubbert a spokesperson for the UBA told German press agency DPA on Wednesday. And consumers can't really avoid them either. Apart from sunscreen, "the products on the shelves are not labeled" as containing nano-particles.

Still, Dubbert said he felt the discussion sparked after the update was heading in the wrong direction. "You can't just talk about the risks -- you also have to look at the opportunities," the researcher said. UBA estimates that 800 German companies are currently active in the field of nanotechnology. The new government currently being formed between Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives and the business-friendly Free Democrats are considering making their support for the nascent industry a priority for the next administration.

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Read the full article here.

A phenomenon called "quantum tunneling" may mean faster than light travel, meaning you arrive somewhere before you even leave.

From the Telegraph article:

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

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Read the full article here.

Some true weird science here. We still don't know how memory works, but researchers have found a way to encode new memories into flies with, wait for it... Friggin' laserbeams.

From the BBC News article:

Associative memories are made when an animal learns to link a cue to a particular outcome. It might for example learn that a certain odour is a sign that a predator is nearby.

"So the appearance of that odour predicts that something bad is going to happen," explained Gero Miesenbock from the University of Oxford, UK, who led this study.

Previous research had already identified that the brain cells or neurons responsible for this type of learning are those that produce dopamine. This is a chemical which acts as a signal that can be transmitted from cell to cell in the brain.

Professor Miesenbock and his team "tapped into these gene regulatory mechanisms" of the neurons - programming them to respond to a laser.

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Read the full article here.

A research team has found a new impact basin that may have been the site of impact responsible for killing off the dinosaurs.

From the Daily Mail article:

The dinosaurs may have been wiped out by a meteor four times bigger than the one previously thought to have caused their extinction.

Scientists believe a 25-mile wide meteor crashed into the ocean off the west coast of  India, creating the 310-mile wide Shiva basin.

Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and his team are now analysing the submerged basin, in the hope it will prove their theory.

'If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet,' Chatterjee said.

The meteor would dwarf the six-mile rock that left a 112-mile crater in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs 65million years ago.

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Read the full article here.

Reserachers investigating what factors impact tree growth in Britain have found a startling result: cosmic rays could be a culprit.

From the BBC article:

The researchers froze the trunk slices, to prevent the wood shrinking, then scanned them on to a computer and used software to count the number and width of the growth rings.

As the trees aged, they showed a usual decline in growth.

However, during a number of years, the trees' growth also particularly slowed. These years correlated with periods when a relatively low level of cosmic rays reached the Earth's surface

When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster.

The effect is not large, but it is statistically significant.

The intensity of cosmic rays also correlates better with the changes in tree growth than any other climatological factor, such as varying levels of temperature or precipitation over the years.

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They're not quite sure of what mechanism is leading to this increase in growth during periods of high cosmic radiation, but it's certainly fascinating to think about.

Read the full article here.

Ah, yes. Mars. What other planet in our solar system has such a death-grip on the imagination that Mars does. In the past, it seemed impossible to get man there, what with the trip taking two years, which is longer than any human has spent in space. But a breakthrough in propulsion technology might shave that trip down to a meager 39 days.

From the Canada.com article:

Because Mars and Earth only pass close together every two years, space experts have always assumed a crew would have to travel one way, wait a year, then fly back the next time the planets were close together - raising huge problems for food, air and water storage.

But ion drive could make a return trip possible during a single close approach of Earth and Mars.

“We built an ion propulsion engine down in Houston,” said Chris Hadfield, a veteran Canadian astronaut.

“A whole bunch of countries (were involved), but Canada has one of the main pieces of hardware. And this engine can get us to Mars in 39 days.

“And this just happened in the last couple of weeks.”

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Another article, appearing in the Houston Chronicle outlines a rather ghoulish plan (reminiscent of the plot of Red Mars, if you ask me) that calls for astronauts to give their lives for the sake of discovery.

From the article:

But what if NASA could land astronauts on Mars in a decade, for not ridiculously more money than the $10 billion the agency spends annually on human spaceflight? It's possible, say some space buffs, although there's a catch.

The astronauts we'd send would never come home.

The concept of a one-way mission to Mars has circulated among space buffs for years, with a Houston-based former NASA engineer, James C. McLane III, among its chief champions. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin has endorsed the plan.

Relieving NASA of the need to send fuel and rocketry to blast humans off the Martian surface, which has slightly more than twice the gravity of the moon, would actually reduce costs by about a factor of 10, by some estimates.

And it would captivate the country, if not the world.

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Read the full article about the ion propulsion engine here.

Read the full article about sending people to Mars here.

In light of my interview last year with noted science fiction author Geoff Ryman about putting the science in science fiction, this rant by Charlie Strauss is incredible. Amen, brother. Amen.

From the rant:

I have a confession to make: I hate Star Trek.

Let me clarify: when I was young — I'm dating myself here — I quite liked the original TV series. But when the movie-length trailer for ST:TNG first aired in the UK in the late eighties? It was hate on first sight. And since then, it's also been hate on sight between me and just about every space operatic show on television. ST:Voyager and whatever the space station opera; check. Babylon Five? Ditto. Battlestar Galactica? Didn't even bother turning on the TV. I hate them all.

I finally found out why:

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.

He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."

Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:

La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."

Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."

La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."

Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."

"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."

As you probably guessed, this is not how I write SF — in fact, it's the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel.

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Read Charlie's thoughtful rant here.

Australian frogs are having problems lately attracting mates as their croaks are being drowned out by noise pollution. But the frogs are adapting.

From the NPR article:

The sound of a male southern brown tree frog looking for a date is music to the ears of a female southern brown tree frog. But add the sounds of nearby traffic, and the message just isn't getting out, says Kirsten Parris of the University of Melbourne.

"The distance over which the male frog can be heard is cut really dramatically by traffic noise from hundreds of meters, in some instances, down to maybe only 20 or 50 meters," she says. "We're quite concerned that ... there are frogs out there that aren't getting together because the noise we're making is getting in the way."

So some frogs have come up with an interesting strategy for making themselves heard. They're changing their calls to a higher, squeakier pitch. "This increases the distance over which it can be heard," Parris says.

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Read the full article here.

Everyone has heard about how NASA sent rockets to the moon to probe for water to see if our astral companion might hold promise as a future base of operations for refueling. Now the first pictures have been released.

From the Register article:

Exploitable reserves of water would be hugely useful for exploration of the Moon and perhaps for space operations in general. Water could be used to produce hydrogen for rocket fuel, and this could be important even for operations in Earth orbit - it would potentially be easier and cheaper for spacecraft and operations there to use fuel from the Moon, rather than supplies boosted up through Earth's more powerful gravity and troublesome atmosphere.

Hence NASA's efforts to find out if there might be water deposits in the chilly, eternally dark polar craters. The LCROSS impacts were watched with great interest on Friday, but disappointingly it appeared that no debris was thrown high enough above the obscuring crater walls to enter sunlight and so be visible to ordinary visual observation. Neither Earthly telescopes nor the plunging LCROSS follower saw any sunlit plume after the two-ton Centaur smashed into the deeps of Cabeus, and the follower craft similarly appeared to have little effect.

However, NASA had another card to play. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which went into space atop the same booster stack as the LCROSS, has been orbiting the Moon since June. Given the lack of any lunar atmosphere, the satellite can orbit safely just 30 miles up, scanning the surface beneath with an array of instruments.

Just 90 seconds after the LCROSS craft plummeted into Cabeus, the LRO made its first pass overhead. Over the weekend NASA assembled imagery of the strike zone, and pictures were released yesterday.

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Read the full article here.

And who really couldn't resist an article that uses the word "embiggen". Really.

From the Discover Magazine blog:

Incredibly, even though hundreds of billions of stars are involved, each individual star is far too small to suffer a physical collision. But gas and dust clouds are much bigger than stars (they can be hundreds of trillions of kilometers across, as opposed to stars which are a trifling million or so kilometers in diameter), so collisions between them are common. When clouds collide they collapse and undergo violent bouts of star formation. This too is clear in the image: the blue clumps in the tidal tails are vast regions of clusters of stars being born; over 100 such clusters have been identified in this image in the tail on the right alone.

Collisions like this blast out energy, not just in visible light, but at other wavelengths as well. In infrared alone, NGC 2623 radiates with the power of 400 billion times the Sun’s energy. This makes NGC 2623 a ULIRG: an ultraluminous infrared galaxy. Although relatively rare locally, they are so common at great distance (and therefore earlier on in the age of the Universe) that they comprise as much as half of all the infrared background glow we see in the Universe. The huge amount of infrared comes from the collision itself; star formation produces prodigious amounts of dust which absorb ultraviolet light from newly-born stars and re-radiate it in the infrared. The collision also dumps gas and dust into the central supermassive black holes in the cores of the two colliding galaxies, which piles up in a flat disk outside the black hole, heats up hugely, and again glows brightly.

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Read the full article (with the gorgeous Hubble pic from 2007) here.