There is a significant link between mercury emissions and increased incidence of autism, according to latest research. Researchers Raymond F. Palmer of the University of Texas, Stephen Blanchard of Our Lady of the Lake University and Robert Wood found that community autism prevalence is reduced by one to two percent with every 10 miles of distance from the pollution source.
"This is not a definitive study, but just one more that furthers the association between environmental mercury and autism.
"Ultimately, we will want to know who in the general population is at greatest risk based on genetic susceptibilities such as subtle deficits in the ability to detoxify heavy metals," he added.
Mercury-release data examined was from 39 coal-fired power plants and 56 industrial facilities in Texas. Autism rates examined were from 1,040 Texas school districts, reported Science daily.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
BiggestDinosur
Where else would the world's biggest dinosaur live, but in the world's trendiest town?
"Live" may be stretching it a bit. Brachiosaurus brancai has been dead for 150 million years, but he remains impressive, towering more than 13 meters over visitors to Berlin's Naturkundemuseum (Natural History Museum).
Brachiosaurus is big - very big. His head measures about a meter from the tip of his nose to the back of his skull and his heart is thought to have weighed 400 kilogram’s. The refurbished museum in old East Berlin, a 15-minute stroll along Invalided stressed from the main central station, reopened in July last year. It now has special-effects binoculars that show how Brachiosaurus looked and moved around his environment.
The special effects first show the skeleton as it is displayed in the museum, then add muscle and sinew, followed by skin. After that the dinosaurs dance about, chewing chunks out of the late Jurassic vegetation - and each other. Brachiosaurus is definitely the star of the show. He - if it is a he - has two heads.
One is fixed where it should be, at the end of his neck way up high, and the second mounted on a low pedestal at ground level so that visitors can get a closer look. The second head is in fact a three-dimensional digital copy that shows the huge holes in the skull through which this immense beast once breathed.
This Brachiosaurus is the largest mounted dinosaur specimen in the world, measuring 15.5 meters long and 13.27 meters high. Apparently he weighed in at 50 tons and could run at up to 17 kilometers an hour.
While Brachiosaurus is definitely the biggest attraction, the museum has much else to offer. A realistic lion facing an equally life-like zebra are testimony to one of its key interests - taxidermy, or stuffing animals for display. An exhibition reveals the history off this art, showing how it ha developed down the years.
Some of the fossils are astonishing. A fish seems almost ready to leap from the stone.
"Live" may be stretching it a bit. Brachiosaurus brancai has been dead for 150 million years, but he remains impressive, towering more than 13 meters over visitors to Berlin's Naturkundemuseum (Natural History Museum).
Brachiosaurus is big - very big. His head measures about a meter from the tip of his nose to the back of his skull and his heart is thought to have weighed 400 kilogram’s. The refurbished museum in old East Berlin, a 15-minute stroll along Invalided stressed from the main central station, reopened in July last year. It now has special-effects binoculars that show how Brachiosaurus looked and moved around his environment.
The special effects first show the skeleton as it is displayed in the museum, then add muscle and sinew, followed by skin. After that the dinosaurs dance about, chewing chunks out of the late Jurassic vegetation - and each other. Brachiosaurus is definitely the star of the show. He - if it is a he - has two heads.
One is fixed where it should be, at the end of his neck way up high, and the second mounted on a low pedestal at ground level so that visitors can get a closer look. The second head is in fact a three-dimensional digital copy that shows the huge holes in the skull through which this immense beast once breathed.
This Brachiosaurus is the largest mounted dinosaur specimen in the world, measuring 15.5 meters long and 13.27 meters high. Apparently he weighed in at 50 tons and could run at up to 17 kilometers an hour.
While Brachiosaurus is definitely the biggest attraction, the museum has much else to offer. A realistic lion facing an equally life-like zebra are testimony to one of its key interests - taxidermy, or stuffing animals for display. An exhibition reveals the history off this art, showing how it ha developed down the years.
Some of the fossils are astonishing. A fish seems almost ready to leap from the stone.
Friday, May 9, 2008
പലന്റ്സുസ്........
Some insects that live above and below the ground communicate with each other by using plants as "green telephone lines", a new study has found.
Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, insects above the ground are alerted that the plant is already "occupied", according to the study by scientists.
This messaging enables spatially-separated insects to avoid each other, so that they do not unintentionally compete for the same plant, Science Daily reported.
In recent years it has been discovered that different types of above-ground insects develop slowly if they feed on plants that also have subterranean residents and vice versa.
It seems that a mechanism has developed via natural selection that enables the subterranean and above-ground insects to detect each other. This avoids unnecessary competition.
Using these "telephone lines", subterranean insects can also communicate with a third party, namely the natural enemy of caterpillars.
Parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside above-ground insects. The wasps also benefit from the volatile signals emitted by the leaves, as these reveal where they can find a good host for their eggs.
The communication between subterranean and above-ground insects has only been studied in a few systems. It is still not clear how widespread is this phenomenon.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
DESIGNER FUEL
Imagine a world where synthetically made microorganisms will suck up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel. It's not the imagination of a science fiction writer.
Where artificially created organisms could provide solutions to some of the most pressing ecological dilemmas.
"We can use the potential of the new field of synthetic genomes to tap energy from sunlight, create biomass, recycle carbon dioxide, which will bring down its level.
A new company, Synthetic Genomics, which as its name implies fabricates modified microorganisms to produce alternative fuels.
"The biggest problem that, today is what we are doing to the environment.
Scientist was involved in a programmed with British Petroleum to convert coal into natural gas using natural organisms.
"Bacteria live on the surface of the coal, eat it and digest natural gas... If we could have even a one percent change, it will be a huge impact on the natural gas industry, adding that it will also put a dent on the ecologically harmful method of using coal as a fuel by burning it and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"In the long term, the area for potential is of designer fuels.
He said he was working on "fourth generation fuels" which will have carbon dioxide as the "feedstock". "Imagine, instead of burying carbon dioxide in the ground, we have pipelines of carbon dioxide running around, which are then converted into natural gas.
Besides future fuels, researcher also talked about his plans to capture human phenotypes, that is, observed qualities that are not inherited, like behavior and development.
"Think of all your physical, mental, historical or medical information in one place. Then we can compare it with genotype to answer the eternal question - what's nature and what's nurture," scientist said.
Speaking on his controversial image, Venter, The researcher said it was a result of being on the "leading edge of technology".
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
COMPUTER CAN TELL....
''Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions, but our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment,''
In the first step of the study, 30 men and women were presented with 100 different faces of Caucasian women, roughly of the same age, and were asked to judge the beauty of each face. The subjects rated the images on a scale of 1 through 7 and did not explain why they chose certain scores.
''Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don't understand how they arrived at their conclusions''.The researchers then went to the computer and processed and mapped the geometric shape of facial features mathematically.
Additional features such as face symmetry, smoothness of the skin and hair color were fed into the analysis as well.
Based on human preferences, the machine ''learned'' the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a fresh set of faces, as reported by Science Daily. ‘The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.
This is considered a remarkable achievement, because it's as though the computer ''learned'' implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.
In the first step of the study, 30 men and women were presented with 100 different faces of Caucasian women, roughly of the same age, and were asked to judge the beauty of each face. The subjects rated the images on a scale of 1 through 7 and did not explain why they chose certain scores.
''Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don't understand how they arrived at their conclusions''.The researchers then went to the computer and processed and mapped the geometric shape of facial features mathematically.
Additional features such as face symmetry, smoothness of the skin and hair color were fed into the analysis as well.
Based on human preferences, the machine ''learned'' the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a fresh set of faces, as reported by Science Daily. ‘The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.
This is considered a remarkable achievement, because it's as though the computer ''learned'' implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Saturday, May 3, 2008
TOMORROWS CELL PHONE
Making calls from a cell phone without a battery, using just the
Warmth of your hand? Perhaps that's no more than a pipe dream right
now. But new circuits being developed by researchers in Germany are
already making it possible to harness body heat for generating
electricity.
Numerous items of medical equipment are attached to a patient's body
in the intensive care ward. They monitor the heart rate, blood
pressure, body temperature, pulse and breathing rate. This tends to
produce quite a jumble of cables as all these devices require their
own electricity supply.
In future, medical sensors may be able to function without power from
a wall socket. Instead, they will draw all the power they need from
the warmth of the human body, say the German researchers. The data
will be sent by a radio signal to the central monitoring station.
Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated
Circuits IIS in Erlanger, Germany, have developed a way of harnessing
natural body heat to generate electricity.
It works on the principle of thermoelectric generators, TEG for short,
made from semiconductor elements. The TEGs extract electrical energy
simply from the temperature difference between a hot and a cold
environment.
Normally, a difference of several tens of degrees would be required to
generate enough power, but the differences between the body's surface
temperature and that of its environment are only a few degrees.
A conventional TEG delivers roughly 200 millivolts, but electronic
devices require at least one or two volts. The engineers have come up with a solution to this problem: "They combined a number of components in a completely new way to create circuits that can operate on 200 millivolts,".
"This has enabled us to build entire electronic systems that do not
require an internal battery, but draw their energy from body heat
alone." The scientists are making further improvements to this system:
Warmth of your hand? Perhaps that's no more than a pipe dream right
now. But new circuits being developed by researchers in Germany are
already making it possible to harness body heat for generating
electricity.
Numerous items of medical equipment are attached to a patient's body
in the intensive care ward. They monitor the heart rate, blood
pressure, body temperature, pulse and breathing rate. This tends to
produce quite a jumble of cables as all these devices require their
own electricity supply.
In future, medical sensors may be able to function without power from
a wall socket. Instead, they will draw all the power they need from
the warmth of the human body, say the German researchers. The data
will be sent by a radio signal to the central monitoring station.
Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated
Circuits IIS in Erlanger, Germany, have developed a way of harnessing
natural body heat to generate electricity.
It works on the principle of thermoelectric generators, TEG for short,
made from semiconductor elements. The TEGs extract electrical energy
simply from the temperature difference between a hot and a cold
environment.
Normally, a difference of several tens of degrees would be required to
generate enough power, but the differences between the body's surface
temperature and that of its environment are only a few degrees.
A conventional TEG delivers roughly 200 millivolts, but electronic
devices require at least one or two volts. The engineers have come up with a solution to this problem: "They combined a number of components in a completely new way to create circuits that can operate on 200 millivolts,".
"This has enabled us to build entire electronic systems that do not
require an internal battery, but draw their energy from body heat
alone." The scientists are making further improvements to this system:
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