Science Updates

[boxy]

Still up there, sitting in a tin can, after all these years

And here's the real life version. Don't know about the rest of you, but sends shivers up my spine.

[Black Orchid]

Adaptive behaviour in Cockroaches

Think twice before stomping the lights out of the next cockroach you come across — you’re going to want them to return the favour after the takeover. Thanks to new research on this most vexatious blight of mankind, we can now say more or less definitively that the despised cockroach will, in fact, come to rule us all. Because, apparently, they’re developing the ability to outsmart our attempts at poisoning them dead.

Cockroaches have had 350 million years of evolutionary practice at becoming immune to threats in their environment, and the battle against their newest enemy — us — is going just as swimmingly. Published in Science this past Thursday, the report, Changes in Taste Neurons Support the Emergence of an Adaptive behaviour in Cockroaches, outlined how certain populations of the bug have actually altered their internal chemistry to find the taste of glucose repugnant. Because what’s usually the first thing you do after seeing a cockroach? Have an irrationally loud, psychological breakdown before going out to buy a roach motel coated in sticky, delicious, sugar-flavoured poison.

Exterminators (or as the New York Times notes to be their preferred moniker, pest management professionals) began using this method in the early ’90s instead of the old standby — wildly spraying poison around the rooms where you and your loved ones live and eat. As the cockroaches slowly came to find the traps repellant, it had always been assumed that they were becoming immune to the actual poison being used, not its glucose guise.

But as the researchers were studying the cockroaches, which use little hairs on their bodies to detect either sweetness or bitterness, they realised that the roaches had changed the way their brains received impulses from these receptors. Instead of the sweet hairs firing off a “sweet” signal, they’d shoot off a message of bitterness.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6135/972
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/05/cockr ... picks=true

[Super Nova]

I am not happy with this conclusion and the action plan for it. Time to take this threat seriously.


Nasa's advice on asteroid hitting Earth: pray
Charles Bolden, the chief of the Nasa, has warned that the US space agency's best advice on how to handle a large asteroid heading towards New York City is "pray".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... -pray.html

[AiA in Atlanta]

Still up there, sitting in a tin can, after all these years

And here's the real life version. Don't know about the rest of you, but sends shivers up my spine.

That was well-done.

[Black Orchid]

Is this a rat or lizard on Mars?

MARS rover Curiosity has captured a picture of what appears to be a rat on the surface of Mars.

The 'Mars rat' looks as though it has four legs and a tail, pictured surrounded by rocks on the red planet.

A Japanese blogger believes to have discovered the life on Mars, according to UFO Sightings Daily, which said it "seems to resemble a rodent but also may be a lizard".

"With water existing on Mars in small amounts, it's possible to find such desert animals wandering around … although very rare mind you," the post says.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-t ... z2Uq1Mr9bL

[boxy]

Is this a rat or lizard on Mars?

Rock.

Life on Mars, if it's even there, isn't going to look like a lizard or rat, if you can't even find a blade of grass or lichen.

[Neferti]

It is a "rock". There is no life on Mars!

[Aussie]

It is a "rock". There is no life on Mars!

Phew......thank fuck for you Nappy. I was worried there until you clarified it for me.

[Super Nova]

This is am amasing element and I think will be key for many new materials and computers/nano bots in the future. Also carbon is so abundant and these simple structures could more easily me built by self replicating machines.

Miracle material: the graphene revolution
The race is on to harness the potential of graphene, a substance that is harder than diamond, yet incredibly flexible, and the world’s best conductor of electricity.



The is so much potential.

Unbreakable touch screens for mobile phones as bendable as the watch strap on your wrist; a revolution in medical diagnostics, drug delivery and bionic devices; pin-sharp environmental monitoring; protective coatings for everything from food packaging to wind-turbines; a torrent of fresh water through desalination membranes; easy clean-up of radioactive waste; dramatically faster computer chips and broadband; solar panels that could be painted or sprayed on to any surface; revolutionary batteries of infinitely higher capacity than those we currently use – these are only a few of the graphene-led revolutions that researchers worldwide suggest are to come.

More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/n ... ution.html

[Rorschach]

That is so cool.... technology marches on.