It was a month ago that Russia put the Bion-M craft filled with 45 mice, 15 newts, snails, gerbils as well as some plants and microflora in orbit at about 575 kilometres above Earth. The capsule has now returned to Earth.

The research was conducted to get insights into how bodies adapt to weightlessness “so that our organisms survive extended flights“. The primary focus was to learn how microgravity affects organisms’ skeletal and nervous systems as well as muscles and hearts. The capsule stored the animals inside five containers that automatically opened in orbit and closed when it was time to return, and it was equipped with some measuring devices and other equipments.

Not all the animals have survived the experiment, apparently due to “the stresses of Space“. The majority of the mice did not survive, but that was expected by the scientists. But equipment failure leading to the death of all the gerbils was not expected.

The Russian media is praising the research as a success and as a mission which has not yet been conducted by any other country. Russia previously sent mice to space back in 2007 for a duration of 12 days.

The mission is part of Russia’s goal of sending manned flights to Mars. Their plan is to start setting up a base on the Moon by 2030 for flights to the Red Planet.

What do you think of this mission? Was it necessary to send so many animals into a very deadly situation or were there better ways to go about it?

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Recently near Timmins, Ontario Canada, researchers found a small pocket of water that is estimated to be 2.64 billion years old.  The water was found one and a half miles below the earth’s surface, in the oldest known part of the North American crust, the Canadian Shield.  The depth of this pocket of water is the exciting part due to the fact that it was left untouched and untampered with by standard erosion and seismic activity, which means this pocket of water contains the gasses from that period 2 and a half billions years ago, giving us a glimpse at environmental conditions of ancient Earth.

However rather than just teaching us about the Earth’s past, it makes scientists excited over the possibility that there also could be untouched pockets of water on Mars.  The researchers found the Timmins pocket had as much hydrogen gas the water found within hydrothermal vents.  That level of hydrogen has been known for creating unique ecosystems that thrive in strange and harsh environments.  This information could definitely be used to advance scientists beliefs that there could be alien life living under the surface of mars.

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A manned mission to Mars could happen sometime in the coming decades, possibly by 2030. One of the safety issues, which was discussed by researchers and public health experts at the Humans 2 Mars Summit, is how to deal with dust on the Red Planet.

According to some of them, the martian dust’s high silicate mineral content could produce bad chemical effects by interacting with water in human lung tissue. While Richard Williams, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, was more concerned about perchlorates in the dust which can cause damage to the thyroid gland.

But of course human visitors would be wearing spacesuits on Mars as the planet’s oxygen content is insufficient and there are radiation issues as well. But the dust can stick to the suits and reach living spaces to result in health problems, damage to critical instruments and more troubles. Maybe they will find some way to clean their spacesuits perfectly before entering their accommodation.

The good news is that we can collect a lot of data from the robotic missions, and then gain as much necessary info as possible to ensure full safety for us to land and live on Mars. According to Grant Anderson, co-founder of Paragon Space Development, “The Apollo programme spent $17 million trying to solve their lunar dust problems, and I’m not sure they made much progress, because they had to do the tests on Earth. For Mars, the precursor robotic missions should all have some way to test how dust is going to kill you“.

All this is very exciting, right? But when are these guys going to plan a trip to the new Earth? Maybe it will happen after a few centuries?

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There are a variety of causes for the occurrence of blindness, such as the lack of enough blood supply for the retina. If it doesn’t get proper amounts of oxygen, the result will be permanent blindness. The chances of preventing it depend on when the doctors realize if a patient’s retina is not receiving sufficient oxygen; the sooner the better. Prof. Bradley Nelson and his team of researchers at ETH Zurich seem to have found out a solution.

Earlier the team created microrobots, measuring a millimeter in length and one third of a millimeter in width, which could be used to deliver medication or remove scar tissue in the eye. Magnetic fields can be used to guide these tiny robots through the vitreous fluid.

They coated these microrobots with nanospheres made of a dye, which fluoresces when exposed to a specific wavelength of light. This fluorescence fades faster if there is higher amount of oxygen surrounding the dye. Now the team can inject these oxygen sensing dye-coated robots into the vitreous fluid to move them to the surface of the retina. They would then apply light to observe the dye’s fluorescence, and thereby determine the amount of oxygen around the area. The robots can be removed from the eye later on by magnetically attaching them to an inserted needle.

According to ETH, other methods now available for determining the oxygen levels within the eye are not sensitive enough. The method using microrobots have already been tested in water samples with different O2 levels and were found to be a success.

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Time crystals, seems like something out of a sci-fi movie or even the “Final Fantasy” game series.  A perpetual motion machine, an item that can oscillate for eternity without any energy application.  This has long a goal of scientists and inventors, but the idea has fallen short as make believe and an impossibility.  What if however, a Nobel prize winning physicists says it’s possible?

Wired reported that MIT’s Frank Wilczek has made that very claim, putting himself out there to be shunned from the scientific community for such outlandish claims.  But it was with great consideration and thought that he came to the idea that, theoretically, it is possible.  His idea states:

When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organize themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. An atom occupies each “lattice point,” but the balance of forces between the atoms prevents them from inhabiting the space between. Because the atoms suddenly have a discrete, rather than continuous, set of choices for where to exist, crystals are said to break the spatial symmetry of nature — the usual rule that all places in space are equivalent… Eventually, his equations indicated that atoms could indeed form a regularly repeating lattice in time, returning to their initial arrangement only after discrete (rather than continuous) intervals, thereby breaking time symmetry. Without consuming or producing energy, time crystals would be stable, in what physicists call their “ground state,” despite cyclical variations in structure that scientists say can be interpreted as perpetual motion.

An interesting claim, but one that clearly isn’t going to be excepted by the scientific community at large. Not everyone thinks his idea is that of science fiction.  A Berkeley team of scientists, after reading the idea, decided to attempt to make the crystal based on the concept.  If they succeed, it will rewrite the basic ideas of time as we know it, and destroy the fundamental concept of time symmetry.  The Berkeley researchers are optimistic and have said it can take “anywhere between three to infinity years” to accomplish.  But until then we can only wonder.

What do you think of Wilczek’s idea, completely outlandish or could he be right/

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In 2009, winter ended at Saturn’s North Pole and began to let sunlight in to brighten up the place. It was then that scientists discovered that there was a massive hurricane in the region. Three years later, in November 2012, NASA’s unmanned Cassini spacecraft moved into position to capture images and video of the storm.

What you see above is a false color image of the hurricane, with the color red corresponding to low clouds and green to high ones. It has cloud speeds of up to 330 miles per hour and its eye is 1,250 miles wide, which is about 20 times the size of an average hurricane on our planet. But they do not know for how many years it’s been active.

Scientists are wondering how such a hurricane exists on Saturn with just small amounts of water vapor. Their study will certainly shed more light on how storms are formed here on Earth.

So, that’s a hurricane the size of Australia. You think that’s big? You clearly haven’t heard about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is a storm two to three times the size of Earth.

What did you think of the videos above? Pretty fascinating stuff, wouldn’t you say?

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Itching, how I hate you. Sometimes you itch for reasons like coming into contact with outside irritants, but other times you just think about itching or hear someone else talking about it and you start itching. So what exactly causes itching? According to Lian Hong and Xinzhong Dong, nueroscientists from John Hopkins, it is actually a specific neuron that causes the trouble.

A protein receptor called MrgprA3 on some neurons has nerve endings in the skin, when the signals are fired, you start to itch. To test their theory, scientists found a way to remove all MrgprA3 neurons from a group of lab mice and found that while the mice still responded to painful stimuli, they desire to itch was gone.

The testing with mice went a few steps further to prove that MrgprA3 only caused itching and wasn’t associated with other feelings, but botton-line, you can blame these neurons specifically for the desire to itch.

So what does that mean for us exactly? Nothing right now, but with the right amount of research, it isn’t impossible to think that they could engineer some kind of pill that could help with problematic itching by making it go away for a while.

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Astronomers love to look for liquid water on other planets. The reason for that is not the need to find a place to drop by to quench our thirst in between future space travel, but water is one of the essential ingredients of life on our planet. So, if an exoplanet is in the habitable zone (far enough from the host star to be cool enough for liquid water to exist, and not too far that there is only ice), life could exist on it.

Kepler has found two such planets in the new Kepler-62 exosolar system. These planets were not seen directly, but the astronomers came to the conclusion that they existed after noticing the dimming of their host star at regular intervals.

The astronomers are saying that these planets are most probably solid rather than molten and are at a correct distance from the host star to support liquid water.

Among these new planets Kepler 62-e (1.61 Earth radii) is in the “empirical habitable zone”, which means that it should be cooler than Venus. But Kepler 62-f, which is just a bit larger than Earth at 1.41 Earth radii, is inside both the calculated and empirical habitable zones. 62-f is at that distance from the Kepler 62 star, meaning that it could have splashing water at the surface.

But whether or not there is life out there is the question. That most probably won’t be answered any time soon. Do you find the thought about life on other planets exciting?

Source: ArsTechnica

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Apparently, the current project is to “lasso” an asteroid from outer space and bring it closer to Earth so they can study it. In “kidnapping” the space rock, NASA can then send astronauts to visit it and to perform various scientific experiments on it. If the asteroid were a living being, we’d almost say this was cruel, but I guess it’s just a rock.

The main goal of this project is to learn enough about asteroids such that we can avoid a catastrophic collision in the future. Many astrophysicists have already warned us about these potential collisions and the kind of impact (terrible pun intended) they could have on the planet as we know it. We need to know how to best deflect an incoming asteroid so that it will avoid crashing into the Earth.

So, NASA wants a pet rock so it can pluck off its wings, poking and prodding at its body for scientific curiosity. I guess we are all kids at heart, even if we have bolder goals and ambitions.

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Treatment for addiction to illicit drugs such as cocaine includes several processes like detoxification, medication, behavioral therapy, relapse prevention and all these take time. But a new study is suggesting that cocaine addiction can be switched on and off by the application of laser light to the brain. The research was done at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco.

Via genetic engineering researchers inserted rhodopsins (light-sensitive proteins) into the neurons of the prefrontal cortex of rats. Then through implanted fiber optic cables they activated those neurons by using pulses of laser light. The result was that the drug-seeking behavior in cocaine-addicted rats was turned off. This happened because the prefrontal cortex deals with impulse control and it is less active in addicted rats (and addicted humans).

Meanwhile, when they switched off the light to deactivate the neurons addicted behavior was switched on in non-addicted rats.

According to the scientists, these same effects can be brought about using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The folks over at NIH will soon start treating the prefrontal cortex of cocaine-addicted humans with TMS. Check out the video to know more about their research.

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