Microbiologists seeking ways to eliminate pollution from waterways with microbes instead discovered that some pollution-eating bacteria commonly found in freshwater ponds can generate electricity. They present their findings today at the 105th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.”The bacteria are capable of continuously generating electricity at levels that could be used to operate small electronic devices. As long as the bacteria are fed fuel they are able to produce electricity 24 hours a day,” says Charles Milliken of the Medical University of South Carolina, who conducted the research with colleague Harold May. … these bacteria … are the first known spore-forming bacteria shown to continuously generate electricity. A bacterial spore is a dormant stage of growth for the organism and is highly resistant to heat, radiation and drying.
…. Until now, Desulfitobacterium (pictured) was not known to have the capacity to generate electricity. These bacteria are most commonly known for their ability to breakdown and detoxify some of the most problematic environmental pollutants, including PCBs and some chemical solvents. - terradaily
Desulfitobacterium hafniense strain DCB2 generates electricity in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) when humic acids or the humate analog anthraquinone-2,6-disulfonate (AQDS) is added as an electron-carrying mediator. When utilizing formate as fuel, the Gram-positive, spore-forming bacterium generated up to 400 mW/m2 of cathode surface area in a single-chamber MFC with a platinum-containing air-fed cathode. Hydrogen, lactate, pyruvate, and ethanol supported electricity generation, but acetate, propionate, and butyrate did not. Scanning electron microscopy indicated that strain DCB2 colonized the surface of a current-generating anode but not of an unconnected electrode. The electricity was recovered fully within minutes after the exchange of the medium in the anode chamber and within a week after an exposure of a colonized anode to 90°C for 20 min. Of the six strains of Desulfitobacteria tested, all of which would reduce AQDS, only D. hafniense strain DCB2 continued to reduce AQDS and generate electricity for more than 24 h, indicating that reduction of the humate analog alone is insufficient to sustain electrode reduction. - springlnk
Read more about microbial fuel cells (MFCs). I don’t read Russian, but I think this photo is related to Desulfitobacteria somehow. It would be great if we could buy sealed MFCs for home use.
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst announced yesterday that they have built a novel device that uses bacteria to turn garbage into electricity. At the heart of the advance, which will be described in the October issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, is a newly discovered organism that is part of a group of bacteria known as “iron breathers,” so called because they rely on iron instead of oxygen. Yesterday’s announcement is part of a broader effort to tap the unusual properties of various iron breathers, now being discovered across the far reaches of the planet, to generate power or clean up oil spills or other pollutants. - bestview
A large number of a Geobacter species known as Desulfuromonas acetoxidans use iron as their terminal electron acceptor. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts reported in this week’s issue of the journal Science that these microorganisms can transform organic matter commonly found at the bottom of the ocean into electrical energy. What the researchers did was give the Desulfuromonas acetoxidans a graphite electrode instead of iron to serve as their terminal electron acceptor. Even though graphite does not occur naturally in the sediment at the bottom of Boston Harbor, Desulfuromonas acetoxidans was happy to use it as a terminal electron acceptor. These bacteria made so many electrons the researchers were able to produce enough electrical current to power a lightbulb or a simple computer. - suite101
The seemingly nonsensical Zen practice of “thinking about not thinking” could help free the mind of distractions, new brain scans reveal.
This suggests Zen meditation could help treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (so-called ADD or ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression and other disorders marked by distracting thoughts.
In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of scientific research into meditation, due in part to the wide availability and increasing sophistication of brain-scanning techniques. For instance, scientists recently found that months of intense training in meditation can sharpen a person’s brain enough to help them notice details they might otherwise miss.
“It is important that this type of research be conducted with high scientific standards because it carries a long-standing stigma - perhaps well-deserved? - of being wishy-washy,” said researcher Giuseppe Pagnoni, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “Constructive skepticism should always be welcomed as a great sparring partner.” Pagnoni and his colleagues investigated Zen meditation, which Pagnoni himself has practiced while studying for his doctorate in Italy. …
Their scans revealed that Zen training led to different activity in a set of brain regions known as the “default network,” which is linked with spontaneous bursts of thought and wandering minds. After volunteers experienced in Zen were distracted by the computer, their brains returned faster to how they were before the interruption than novice brains did. This effect was especially striking in the angular gyrus, a brain region important for processing language.
“The regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts,” Pagnoni said. - yahoonews
I am about to begin a several week meditation group.
Scientists at Penn State have developed a new computational method that they say will help them to understand how life began on Earth. The team’s method has the potential to trace the evolutionary histories of proteins all the way back to either cells or viruses, thus settling the debate once and for all over which of these life forms came first. …
The team is focusing on an ancient group of proteins, called retroelements, which comprise approximately 50 percent of the human genome by weight and are a crucial component in a number of diseases, including AIDS. “Retroelements are an ancient and highly diverse class of proteins; therefore, they provide a rigorous benchmark for us to test our approach. We are happy with the results we derived, even though our method is in an early stage,” said Patterson. The team plans to make the algorithms that they used in their method available to others as open-source software that is freely available on the Web.
Scientists map out the evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing their genetic and/or protein sequences. Those organisms that are closely related and share a recent common ancestor have greater degrees of similarity among their sequences. In their paper, the researchers describe how they used 11 groups of the retroelement proteins — ranging from bacteria to human HIV — to trace the evolutionary histories of retroelements. Their method uses a computer algorithm to generate evolutionary profiles — also called phylogenetic profiles — that are compared all-against-all. For example, given four sequences, the new method compares profile A to profiles B, C, and D; it compares profile B to profiles C and D; and so on, for a total of six comparisons. The method then selects the regions of the profiles that match and creates a tree-like diagram, called a phylogenetic tree, based on the retroelements’ similarities to one another. The tree provides evolutionary distance estimates and, hence, phylogenetic relationships among retroelements. - ScienceDaily
Great! Some claim that humans are too complicated to have occurred by chance, and so, an all powerful man with a white beard must have created us. Perhaps techniques like this will solve the debate once and for all. They might even show that our DNA was intelligently altered by aliens several times during Earth’s evolution as some claim.
I wonder if the same technique could be used to show a person’s family tree in the entire picture of human evolution? Perhaps in a few years we will be able to access something like this on line. But first, we need a way (at home) to get one person’s 20,000-25,000 genes uploaded for a complete analysis.
Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.
The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.
The stunts are “by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter,” said Andrew Ng, the professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley.
The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of “apprenticeship learning,” in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.
Stanford’s artificial intelligence system learned how to fly by “watching” the four-foot-long helicopters flown by expert radio control pilot Garett Oku. “Garett can pick up any helicopter, even ones he’s never seen, and go fly amazing aerobatics. So the question for us is always, why can’t computers do things like this?” Coates said. … Computers can, it turns out.
For five minutes, the chopper, on its own, ran through a dizzying series of stunts beyond the capabilities of a full-scale piloted helicopter and other autonomous remote control helicopters. The artificial-intelligence helicopter performed a smorgasbord of difficult maneuvers: traveling flips, rolls, loops with pirouettes, stall-turns with pirouettes, a knife-edge, an Immelmann, a slapper, an inverted tail slide and a hurricane, described as a “fast backward funnel.”
The pièce de résistance may have been the “tic toc,” in which the helicopter, while pointed straight up, hovers with a side-to-side motion as if it were the pendulum of an upside down clock. - SCIENCEDAILY
That’s a show I’d like to see. Ah, what did we do before Youtube? Check it out:
Yow! Put a disk shaped shell around this and it would make an awesome UFO.
The elephant’s memory is legendary, but in a large, grey surprise to science the mighty Asian elephant turns out to have a distinct flair for maths as well
Under carefully controlled experimental conditions — essentially comprising a large cage and two buckets of assorted fruit — one elephant at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo managed to get its sums right 87 per cent of the time. A slightly less gifted pachyderm across the country in Kyoto scored a still respectable 69 per cent.
The curiously accurate adding skills of Elephas maximus have been discovered by Naoko Irie, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Tokyo putting the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis …“I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Irie, “They could instantly compare numbers like six and five.”
The elephants she subjected to the fruit-based arithmetic tests were as good at telling the difference between five and six as they were at spotting that five is greater than one, she said.
Speculation among scientists over why the elephant should have developed its limited but nonetheless impressive mathematical ability centres on the way in which the lumbering creatures move in herds. A basic counting ability, say experts, might act as a guarantee that no calf is left behind. - timesonline
Fresh clues have been found to help a scientist in her efforts to identify a mystery creature found on Orkney.
Geneticist Dr Yvonne Simpson has researched the Stronsay Beast and will reveal her latest discoveries at the Orkney International Science Festival. The creature’s carcass, which some said was that of a basking shark, was found off Stronsay in 1808. Dr Simpson has said the descriptions of its long neck were along the lines of those of the Loch Ness Monster. … “The drawings of the Stronsay Beast carcass are strikingly similar in shape and size to the popular image of Nessie.” - bbc
From a sketch made by Sir Alexander Gibson in 1808.
The Stronsay beast was a large, dead sea-creature that washed ashore on the island of Stronsay (at the time spelt Stronsa), in the Orkney Islands, after a storm in 1808. The carcass measured 55 feet in length, but as part of the tail was apparently missing, the animal was actually longer than that (Wernerian Society Notes, 1808-1810, Library, Royal Museum, Edinburgh.[1] The Natural History Society (Wernerian Society) of Edinburgh could not identify the carcass and decided it was a new species, probably a sea serpent. Later the anatomist Sir Everard Home in London dismissed the measurement, declaring it must have been around 36 feet, and deemed it to be a decayed basking shark (basking sharks can take on a ‘pseudo plesiosaur‘ appearance during decomposition). In 1849 the Scottish professor Goodsir in Edinburgh came to the same conclusion. However, the largest reliably recorded basking shark was 40 feet in length, so at 55 feet in length, the Beast of Stronsay still constitutes something of a cryptozoological enigma.
The Stronsay beast was 55 feet long, as measured by three witnesses (one was a carpenter and the other two were farmers).
It was 4 feet wide and had a circumference of approximately 10 feet.
It had three pairs of ‘paws’ or ‘wings’.
It had skin that was smooth when stroked head to tail and rough when stroked tail to head.
Its fins were edged with bristles and it had a ‘mane’ of bristles all down its back.
The bristles glowed in the dark when wet. … - wikipedia
Archeologists have uncovered the remains of what they believe to be a 20ft fence designed to screen Stonehenge from the view of unworthy Stone Age Britons.
The wooden construction extended nearly two miles across Salisbury Plain more than 5,000 years ago, and would have served to shield the sacred site from the prying eyes of ordinary lower-class locals.
Trenches have been dug around the monument, tracing the course of the fence which meanders around the stone circle. - telegraph
German police are trying to track down a skateboarder who sped down a steep stretch of motorway at 62mph.
They believe the man who raced down the Ulm-Stuttgart motorway for two miles before he stopped and fled was a professional stuntman, Goeppingen police spokesman Uli Stoeckle said. A video of the skateboarder, broadcast on German TV, showed a helmeted figure wearing a red and white protective suit. He is seen building up speed by holding onto the back of a motorcycle before letting go and freewheeling. The film clips show several cars escorting the skateboarder, enabling his collaborators to record the event. - foxnews
The Mayans and Egyptians constructed incredible feats of architecture able to weather the test of time, but they had no idea their pyramids would inspire the shape of the latest carbon-neutral super-structure to hit Dubai. Dubai-based environmental design firm Timelinks recently released some eye-catching renderings of the gigantic eco pyramid - aptly named Ziggurat - with plans for its official unveiling scheduled for the Cityscape Dubai event which runs October 6-9 of this year. The ginormous pyramid will cover 2.3 square kilometers and will be able to sustain a “community” of up to 1 million. - inhabitat
Martijn Kramer, managing director of The International Institute for the Urban Environment told WAN: “As a general reaction the Ziggurat Project is viable from a technical point of view. However reflecting from a more sustainable holistic approach we do wonder if the food supply and waste system are taken care for, as the concept seems rather based upon carbon neutrality and energy saving.” Kramer’s initial reaction to “Ziggurat” also raises a very important issue: are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km? Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people? - worldarchnews
Well, I do like the fact that it has a moat. I like to stay in the Luxor sometimes when I go to Las Vegas. If the Ziggurat had rooms with jaccuzzi’s I’d stay there too … if I ever wanted to go to Dubai. Now that I think of it, the Luxor should get a moat.
John McCain’s campaign threatened legal action against the National Enquirer today for running a story about McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, allegedly having an affair with her husband’s business partner.
Microbiologists seeking ways to eliminate pollution from waterways with microbes instead discovered that some pollution-eating bacteria commonly found in freshwater ponds can generate electricity. They present their findings today at the 105th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.”The bacteria are capable of continuously generating electricity at levels that could be used to operate small electronic devices. As long as the bacteria are fed fuel they are able to produce electricity 24 hours a day,” says Charles Milliken of the Medical University of South Carolina, who conducted the research with colleague Harold May. … these bacteria … are the first known spore-forming bacteria shown to continuously generate electricity. A bacterial spore is a dormant stage of growth for the organism and is highly resistant to heat, radiation and drying.
