Do a Nobel Experiment

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 October 2009 09:58:13 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From msnbc.com: Science: Nobel-winning science sometimes touches on subjects as remote as the big bang and the weird world of quantum physics, but this year's Nobel Prize for physics celebrates breakthroughs that are as close as your cellphone and computer keyboard. Read

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Femtoseconds Lasers Will Help Formation Flying in
Space

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 October 2009 09:56:39 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine: Theoretical work commissioned to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) by the European Space Agency has recently concluded that lasers capable of generating extremely short pulses — known as "femtosecond comb lasers" — could be

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-Flying-in-Space?from_rss=1

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An Electron Microscope That Won't Destroy
Living Cells

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 October 2009 09:55:19 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine: Instead of light, traditional high-resolution electron microscopes use a particle beam of electrons to illuminate a specimen. However, the particle beam also destroys the samples, meaning that electron microscopes can't be used to image liv

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oy-Living-Cells?from_rss=1

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An Almost Lotus That Runs on Vegetable Oil

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 07 October 2009 09:51:41 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine: Even before entering the Progressive Automotive X-Prize competition, Jack McCormack had started to pull together all the things needed to knock out a sporty two-seater car capable of achieving 100 miles per gallon. Fueled by the desire to m

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Oil?from_rss=1

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A priest, a rabbi, a Baptist, an Episcopalian,
and an imam walk into a bar…

post from Pharyngula on 07 October 2009 09:02:59 AM. © Pharyngula

It's not that funny. Anyway, here is this utterly hideous 'infographic' ('infographic' is the term they use when they torture information with a useless pile of graphic clutter) which tries to illustrate the changes in the numbers and percentages of various religious beliefs with a photo of a group of representatives of each faith in a bar, with a graph superimposed on each. The bar photo is busy, distracting, and adds nothing but visual noise to the data. However, one thing stands out.

The members of the different faiths are sitting around on bar stools. Guess who represents the godless? A hot tattooed chick…and she's the bartender.

I wonder if the photographer reads Jesus & Mo?

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2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the Structure and
Function of the Ribosome

post from Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog on 07 October 2009 08:28:00 AM. © Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog

graphic image of the components of a cell Cross section of a cell by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. A ribosome is about 25 nanometters (a millionth of a millimeter) in size. A cell contains tens of thousands of ribosomes.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life’s core processes: the ribosome’s translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.

Details from the Nobel Prize site (which continues to do a great job providing scientific information to the public openly).

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is the third in a series of prizes that show how Darwin’s theories actually function at the level of the atom. Images, generated by means of various X-ray techniques, show how the simple DNA code can manifest itself not only as hearing, feeling and taste, or muscles, bone and skin, but also as thoughts and speech.

The trilogy of prizes began with one of the most famous Nobel Prizes of all, that of 1962, when James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were recognised for their elaboration of an atomic model of the double-stranded DNA molecule. The second prize in the trilogy was awarded in 2006 to Roger D. Kornberg for X-ray structures that explicate how information is copied to the messenger RNA molecule.
…
The body contains tens of thousands of different proteins that control what happens in the body with an astounding precision. Examples of such proteins are: haemoglobin, which transports oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body; insulin, which controls the sugar level in the blood; antibodies that capture intruding viruses; and keratin, which builds hair and nails.

Ribosomes exist in all cells in all living organisms, from bacteria to human beings. As no living creature can survive without ribosomes, they are the perfect targets for drugs. Many of today’s antibiotics attack the ribosomes of bacteria, but leave those of humans alone.

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e-structure-and-function-of-the-ribosome/

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Kirk and Ray get a musical…tribute

post from Pharyngula on 07 October 2009 08:02:30 AM. © Pharyngula

Be warned, this tribute is a song in Satan's genre, that loud rock music.

video details and more

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y_get_a_musicaltrib.php

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Science NEWS Interviews Spokesman from
Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute

post from Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) on 07 October 2009 07:59:04 AM. © Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

tags: Intelligent Alien Design, Discovery Institute, Gordon J. Glover, Casey Luskin, humor, parody, satire, Canadian cartoon, streaming video

This video is a hypothetical dialogue between Gordon J. Glover and the official spokesperson of the Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute on Science NEWS. They discuss the Academic Freedom legislation that recently became law in Louisiana and how it might also help various theories of Paleo-Contact to be taught alongside mainstream archaeology in the public science classroom.

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ZERO Emission Success! Motorbike with Hydroplus

[...]

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ith.html

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Student Blogging Communities - Pay to Play (Part
3)

ePals wasn't to my liking, so I asked my school's tech coordinator for other options. He suggested a low-cost alternative that allowed personalization of student blogs in a closed environment. I was interested enough to look further. This was how I started working with 21Classes.com

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-Part-3?from_rss=1

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