Terraforming planet earth

Now you can replant a forest by dropping seedlings out of helicopters... Awesome! Has anyone got a spare helicopter lying around for a wee bit of ecoactivism? I fancy reforesting the Manawatu!

Instructions for Bioterrorists

Today I printed out the delightfully titled "SENTINEL LABORATORY GUIDELINES FOR SUSPECTED AGENTS OF BIOTERRORISM" to refer to at work. Sadly, it is only packing and shipping instructions for diagnostic and clinical specimens, infectious substances, and biological agents, but for 30 seconds there I actually loved my job!

Aquatic Super Power

Articles like this one in New Scientist sure do make me hopeful... using the ocean's thermal differential to generate power seems so obvious... and of course (as the article says), people have thought of it before... but maybe now there will be the will and economic incentive to overcome the (pretty substantial) technical difficulties and make it happen... I like the way they're planning to produce hydrogen to power vehicles as well. Bye bye oil companies. We won't miss you!

Large Dark Spaces

Check out New Scientist's spooky space pictures for Halloween...

Robots with rat neurons in their brain vats

I guess these count as cyborgs?

I love the idea that a "baby"neuron culture might need to be implanted in the robot and grow up with it to avoid being driven insane by sensory deprivation...

And acid rained from the sky...

Scientists have found more evidence for a cosmic explanation for the Tunguska catastrophe... some things totally gain in translation!

Making the blind to see!

Following on from the robotic monkey arms (and here and here), another cool prosthesis, this time stimulating nerve cells inside the eye, to enable people who have lost their sight from (a specific type of) retinal disease to perceive visual images. A thousand miracle cliches are fluttering at my fingertips!

Is there life on Mars?

Doesn't really look like it from this picture, eh?:-)
Check out the new images from NASA's Phoenix spacecraft...

I may yet get my prehensile tail...

Look! A mind controlled prosthetic arm that a monkey can use to feed itself... Next stop, Perdido Street Station . I'm sure a few brain probes would be a small price to pay for an extra limb!

(But seriously... awesome news for people with spinal cord injuries.)

Self medication

Need cheering up? Try burning frankinsence!

Living in the future!

I just walked back from the glasshouse with two gigabytes of data storage capacity not making any kind of bulge in my pocket and suddenly thought of the 1st PC that R and I shared... an aging XT clone, bought in the 2nd semester of 1992 for about $600. We named it IGOR because it immediately needed a brain transplant. IGOR died completely (and inconveniently) the following year in the throes of Honours essays and was mourned briefly and replaced forthwith with a not-quite-so-venerable 286 (which took about half an hour to process a round of Civilisation). My memory stick has approximately 200 times more capacity than IGOR at less than 1/20th of the price... We live through incredible changes, oblivious.

Nasty stuff that sea salt...

From a (real... I kid thee not) MSDS (material safety data sheet) for sodium chloride, something I've always been kind of casual about... which just proves that everything is toxic if you are careless enough!

Routes of Entry: Inhalation. Ingestion.
Toxicity to Animals:
WARNING: THE LC50 VALUES HEREUNDER ARE ESTIMATED ON THE BASIS OF A 4-HOUR EXPOSURE.
Acute oral toxicity (LD50): 3000 mg/kg [Rat.]. (okay, so that's 1g/kg of rat killed half of the rats in the study)
Acute dermal toxicity (LD50): >10000 mg/kg [Rabbit]. (... and bathing in 10g/kg killed half the rabbits but that's a pretty salty stew!)
Acute toxicity of the dust (LC50): >42000 mg/m3 1 hours [Rat].

Chronic Effects on Humans: MUTAGENIC EFFECTS: Mutagenic for mammalian somatic cells. Mutagenic for bacteria and/or yeast.

Other Toxic Effects on Humans: Slightly hazardous in case of skin contact (irritant), of ingestion, of inhalation.

Special Remarks on Toxicity to Animals: Lowest Published Lethal Dose (LDL) [Man] - Route: Oral; Dose: 1000 mg/kg (so someone once died from eating 1 g for every kg of body weight... so eating >60g of salt in one sitting might be a bad idea... I guess if you had really bad munchies and lots of potato crisps?)

Special Remarks on Chronic Effects on Humans:
Causes adverse reproductive effects in humans (fetotoxicity, abortion, ) by intraplacental route.
High intake of sodium chloride, whether from occupational exposure or in the diet, may increase risk of TOXEMIA OF PREGNANCY in susceptible women (Bishop, 1978). Hypertonic sodium chloride solutions have been used to induce abortion in late pregnancy by direct infusion into the uterus (Brown et al, 1972), but this route of administration is not relevant to occupational exposures. (I should hope not!)
May cause adverse reproductive effects and birth defects in animals, particularly rats and mice (fetotoxicity, abortion, musculoskeletal abnormalities, and maternal effects (effects on ovaries, fallopian tubes) by oral, intraperitoneal, intraplacental, intrauterine, parenteral, and subcutaneous routes. While sodium chloride has been used as a negative control n some reproductive studies, it has also been used as an example that almost any chemical can cause birth defects in experimental animals if studied under the right conditions (Nishimura & Miyamoto, 1969). In experimental animals, sodium chloride has caused delayed effects on newborns, has been fetotoxic, and has caused birth defects and abortions in rats and mice (RTECS, 1997).

May affect genetic material (mutagenic) (okay, that's kind of scary)
Special Remarks on other Toxic Effects on Humans:

Acute Potential Health Effects:
Skin: May cause skin irritation.
Eyes: Causes eye irritation.
Ingestion: Ingestion of large quantities can irritate the stomach (as in overuse of salt tablets) with nausea and vomiting. May affect behavior (muscle spasicity/contraction, somnolence), sense organs, metabolism, and cardiovascular system. Continued exposure may produce dehydration, internal organ congestion, and coma.
Inhalation: Material is irritating to mucous membranes and upper respiratory tract.

There was once a microscopic princess who built herself a beautiful glass palace

One day some scientists worked out how to join her glass palace up with the glass palaces of other princesses to make silicon circuitry on computer chips.

"Did you see any diatoms?" asked R's Mummy when I enthused about the uni-cells (and the awesomely destructive rotifer) that I'd seen under the microscope in my 1st year Cell Bio lab. "What's a diatom?" I asked, so she showed me some pictures and described diatoms in such loving detail that they immediately became part of my personal mythology (I learnt a lot about passion for research from R's parents).

R's D, who also worked on diatoms, once described them as "siliceous micro-fossils", which rather lacks romance and (pick the geologist) also ignores the fact that there are thousands of diatom species still in existence, but does prove that diatoms rock!

I suspect the computer chip thing is pretty speculative (and maybe a bit of manoeuvring for grants), as what they have actually reported is identifying 75 genes involved in silicon processing in one species of diatom (Thalassiosira pseudonana) from a screen for genes expressed during silicic acid starvation. They've chosen 30 genes for further study, of which 25 have no similarity to known genes, so I'd guess they have a lot of knock-outs to make and/or proteins to express and a lot of characterisation to do before they fully understand the function of even one of these genes, let alone describe the process and learn to manipulate it in any meaningful way... So unless they have an enormous and unusually well-financed team, diatom-fabricated computer chips are probably a lifetime away. Still, it's a magical idea, and to me, it's ideas like these that justify pure research in fields as apparently esoteric as diatom genetics.

Dancing with PCR machines

I am definitely the target market for this ad (lyrics here). I haven't laughed so hard in ages. I particularly love these lines:

Denaturing, annealing, and extending.
Well it’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do

And the chorus:

PCR, when you need to detect mutations.
PCR, when you need to recombine.
PCR, when you need to find out who the daddy is.
PCR, when you need to solve a crime

Disclaimer: This is in no way an endorsement of Bio-Rad, although I do use some of their products because they have me trapped into a dependancy cycle.

The smartest cookies in the tin?

I find it amusing how even though humans have defined ourselves as far more intelligent than other species and constructed the parameters of the trait to reinforce this view, (un)-surprisingly scientists studying animal behaviour keep finding evidence for higher cognitive abilities and tool-use in other animals.
Some cool examples:

• These rhesus macaque monkey mathemeticians scored almost as well as university students in a test of mental addition (I'm guessing the scores in the article are means and I wonder if some monkeys scored better than some humans?)
• And these five-year-old chimps beat adult humans (though also their mother) at correctly remembering a sequence of numbers (I wonder how human five-year-olds would compare)
• Tamarins, although not tool-users show evidence of "motor planning ability", grasping an object in the correct orientation to use it
• Elephants (my favourite putatively sentient species), as well as recognising themselves in the mirror and imitating trucks, can apparently recognise potentially hostile groups of people by scent and clothing colour (so don't wear red on safari!)

Weirdly though, we may be using the kind of olfactory intelligence we usually ascribe to dogs and pigs to decide whether we like a new person or not.

Finally, only tenuously relatedly, and obviously still a long way from reality, this research suggests it might be possible to build a machine that can read your mind (at least if you let some dodgy scientist type close enough to implant electrodes in your brain).