Han Solo In Carbonite Ice Molds

This is a $10 Han Solo in carbonite ice cube tray from ThinkGeek. It molds ice cubes that look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite…that’ll last ten seconds in a drink before transforming into formless blocks. Now that’s magic.

via Jabba Drinks: Han Solo In Carbonite Ice Molds – Geekologie.

Tron: Legacy-inspired Lightcycle superbike that can hit 120mph costs $54,000

If you have a spare £33,000 and are in the market for the ultimate boy’s toy, then this might be the treat for you.

A motorbike painstakingly engineered to replicate the computer-generated bike in science fiction film Tron: Legacy is now on sale.

In the film, the bike was created using state-of-the-art CGI graphics and is controlled by computer programs and gamers.

The real version, created by Parker Brothers Choppers, is 8ft long, 23 inches wide and weighs 474lbs. It can also reach a cool 120mph.

…Its hubless wheels are produced using former truck tyres that have been custom-shaped to fit and decorated with electro-luminescent strips.

A fibreglass cover encases a steel frame and, unusually, riders have to lie at a near-horizontal position just as in the film.

The bike is powered by a fuel-injected Suzuki 996cc, four-stroke engine and is spring-loaded at the front and back.

Every bike is custom-built and are available to buy online from Hammacher Schlemmer.

Spokesman Trish Hammond said: ‘This bike has been fine-tuned so that every aspect of it is identical to the bike in the famous film.

‘It is stunning to look at and you would certainly turn a few heads riding it down the street.’ …

via Tron: Legacy-inspired Lightcycle superbike that can hit 120mph costs £33k | Mail Online.

Movie Titles in Movies

Demodex Mites and Dry Eyes

Long-term studies of Demodex and its role in chronic blepharits have been carried out in recent years. Demodex are intradermal parasites that thrive in hair follicles, meibomian and sebaceous glands. Demodex is spread through direct contact and probably by dust that contains eggs.

Demodex folliculorum is the tiny parasitic mite that lives primarily in eyelash follicles and the meibomian glands. Demodex brevis mites live primarily in sebaceous glands connected to hair follicles and the glands of Zeis. These mites are now linked to some forms of rosacea. Both species are primarily found in the face, near the nose, the eyelashes and eyebrows.

The Demodex mites try to avoid light. Mating takes place in hair follicle openings at night and eggs are often laid deep inside the sebaceous and meibomian glands. The larvae hatch in the glands after 3-4 days, and it takes about seven days for the larvae to develop into adults that venture out at night.

In the vast majority of cases, Demodex mites go unobserved, without any adverse symptoms. However, in some people with suppressed immune systems, mite populations can dramatically increase, resulting in a condition know as demodicosis. The symptoms include ocular irritation including dry eyes, itching, scaling of lids, decreased vision and madarosis (loss of lashes). …

Treatment of demodicosis of the eyelids can last for months. It includes tea tree oil, yellow mercurial ointment, sulphur ointment, camphorated oil, steroids, antibiotics and metronidazole gel or ointment.

Prevention: Many attribute tear function and ocular surface improvements to suppression of inflammatory mediators by the iron-binding protein, lactoferrin. Through its unique combination of antimicrobial action and anti-inflammatory activities, lactoferrin in the tear film provides a protective effect against a large variety of microorganisms including parasites, bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

Lactoferrin is produced by neutrophils, lacrimal glands, ocular surface epithelial cells, and meibomian glands. Lactoferrin has been suggested to dampen the complement activation pathway by binding to markers of inflammation (think Il-1 and Il-6), while pathogen-associated molecular patterns, such as lipopolysaccharides are targeted by lactoferrin for removal through tears and hydrodynamic flushing. …

via Demodex Mites and Dry Eyes | The Optical Vision Site.

How to kill them:

… We know from the paper In vitro and in vivo killing of ocular Demodex by tea tree oil, that various oils and solutions can kill demodex mites quite quickly in the test tube. …

Solution	Demodex Kill Time
100% alcohol	4 minutes
50% tea tree oil	15 minutes
100% tea tree oil	4 minutes

Tea Tree Oil is sourced from the Melaluca tree which is native to eastern Australia. Tea Tree Oil has been shown to kill demodex mites in as little as 4 minutes. External application of undiluted tea tree oil and/or at inappropriate high doses has been associated with toxicity, including death, in cats and other animals.

There is so much interest in the properties of tea tree oil that a research group has been created within the School of Biomedical, Biomolecular and Chemical Sciences at The University of Western Australia.

In a recent study, TTO was used to eliminate demodex mites living in the eyelashes of ocular rosacea sufferers. Study participants were given weekly lid scrubs with 50% tea tree oil and a daily lid scrub with a tea tree shampoo. After six weeks all 6 participants showed improvement in conjuctival irritation and inflammation.

TTO is not soluble in water, but is soluble in alcohol, but sadly that would be unsuitable for use around the eye. Tea Tree Oil can be diluted 50% in Macadamia nut oil for use around the eyes. Lid scrubs with 50% Tea Tree Oil did produce irritation in the participants but the effect was found to be minimised if care was used to avoid spilling it into the eye.

Full strength tea tree oil should never be used anywhere on the face. …

1. Use Tea Tree Oil Soap (Soapworks brand) to cleanse face and body.
2. Use Tea Tree Oil Cream (Regime brand) once to twice a day (You could alternate with Regime’s Calendula Cream if using the Tea Tree Oil Cream twice a day is too irritating).
3. Shampoo with a Tea Tree Oil Shampoo (Treemenda brand) once a day or another tea tree oil shampoo without alcohol in it.
4. When you wash your linens for your bed use 10 drops of tea tree oil in your laundry in addition to your perfume free detergent. (Nature Clean makes an excellent Liquid Laundry Soap available at Bulk Barn stores).

via RosaceaSupport

What I use is Tea Tree Oil mouthwash (Desert Essence brand) on my eyebrows and very carefully around my eyelids with a q-tip. I’ve asked them what the percentage of tea tree oil is because it is not listed on the web site or on the product container as far as I can tell.

DARPA releases video of HTV-2 hypersonic glider flight

An unmanned glider streaks over the Pacific Ocean at 20 times the speed of sound in a video released Thursday by a U.S. defense research agency experimenting with technology that could give the military the ability to strike any part of the globe within an hour.

The Aug. 11 test ended early when a problem caused the craft’s safety system to force it down into the ocean but the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said valuable data was collected in the nearly three minutes of free flight at the hypersonic speed of Mach 20 – about 13,000 mph.

The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle-2 was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., atop a Minotaur 4 rocket that carried it to the edge of space, performed what DARPA described as a series of aggressive banks and turns, and then released the glider.

The video taken by a crewmember on a tracking ship shows the rocket and vehicle together as a fast-moving contrail and then the HTV-2 as a faint dot zipping away on its own.

“It gives us a visceral feel for what it means to fly at Mach 20,” DARPA Director Regina Dugan said in a statement.

Hypersonic is the term for speeds greater than Mach 5. Various hypersonic programs have typically produced brief flights – measured in seconds or minutes.

This month’s test was the second of two missions in DARPA’s HTV-2 program, which is aimed at learning how to fly at such speeds and advancing the technologies needed for long-duration hypersonic flight.

via DARPA releases video of HTV-2 hypersonic glider flight.

Mach 20 is about 15,200 miles per hour. How does this compare to the speed of a meteor?

… not all meteors travel at the same speed.  The slowest travel at 25,000 miles per hour (m.p.h.) and
the fastest at 160,000 m.p.h.  It will take a fast meteor about 90 minutes to travel the distance from the moon to the Earth. … – link

 

 

Study: Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals

Neanderthals, as well as hominids known as Denisovans, contributed key types of immune genes still found in human populations, scientists say.As recently as 2008, scientists thought that Neanderthals and modern humans had never mated.

Then, last year, they said that the two species had, but that the few Neanderthal genes that survived in modern human DNA were not functional.

Now researchers believe that key versions of immune system genes in modern humans appear to have been passed down by archaic relatives, including Neanderthals, after all.

Indeed, DNA inherited from Neanderthals and newly discovered hominids dubbed the Denisovans has contributed to key types of immune genes still present among populations in Europe, Asia and Oceania. And scientists speculate that these gene variants must have been highly beneficial to modern humans, helping them thrive as they migrated throughout the world.

This DNA has had “a very profound functional impact in the immune systems of modern humans,” said study first author Laurent Abi-Rached, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Peter Parham of the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Neanderthals were stocky hunter-gatherers who populated Europe and parts of Asia until about 30,000 years ago. In 2010, a team of biologists led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced the Neanderthal genome via DNA extracted from ancient bones.

From this, they estimated that 1% to 4% of modern Eurasian genomes came from our close hominid relatives.

No one knows what Denisovans looked like: The only confirmed evidence of the group, which is thought to have split from the Neanderthals about 350,000 years ago and migrated east, are a tooth and a pinkie finger bone found in a Siberian cave in 2008.

When Paabo and coworkers sequenced DNA extracted from the pinkie in 2010, they calculated that 4% to 6% of modern Melanesian genomes came from Denisovans.

In the new study, Abi-Rached and coauthors decided to focus on a small set of genes on chromosome 6 known as the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I genes.

HLA genes carry instruction for making HLA proteins, which help the immune system spot evidence of problems in cells — infection or cancer, for instance — so that it can wipe out abnormalities to fight disease. The genes come in many forms that vary in frequency around the world, probably because our genomes have been tailored by evolution to fight specific disease threats that exist in particular places. …

via Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals, study finds – latimes.com.

Black Hole Caught in Act of Swallowing Star

For the first time, a black hole has been caught in the act of tearing apart and swallowing a star that got too close.

Scientists, who until now had witnessed only the aftermath of such events, say the observation is shedding light on “relativistic jets,” bursts of matter that shoot out at nearly the speed of light.

At the centers of virtually all large galaxies are supermassive black holes. These monsters, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, can rip apart passers-by, gravitationally pulling at stars in gigantic versions of how our moon tugs on Earth’s oceans to generate tides. …

via Black Hole Caught in Act of Swallowing Star | Black Holes, Stars & Galaxies | How Black Holes Form & Supermassive Black Holes | Space.com.

Snow White and the Frozen Dwarfs

On August 24, 2006 the International Astronomical Union adopted fixed definitions for various objects in the Solar System.

“Snow White,” otherwise known as 2007 OR10, is a dwarf planet about 13 billion kilometers from the Sun. Its orbit, canted by almost 31 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic, is so large that it was closest to the Sun in 1856 and will not reach its farthest point until 2130, taking more than 550 years to revolve.

Snow White joins many other icy worlds so far from the Sun that it would be hard to pick out that luminary from the star field. It is in a similar orbit with its sister dwarf Eris (2003 UB313) within a region occupied by so-called “Trans-Neptunian Objects” (TNO) or “Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO).”

Astronomers Kenneth Edgeworth and Gerard Kuiper proposed a Kuiper Belt theory in 1951. In 1992, the as yet unnamed 1992 QB1 was discovered, confirming the idea that a group of frigid objects beyond Neptune was in orbit around the Sun.

Dwarf planets are also part of the TNO designation, although they are in a subclass by themselves. In 2006, a controversial vote was cast at a meeting of astronomers in Prague that provided a way to classify various celestial bodies. …

According to the vote, a “planet” is a celestial body that orbits the Sun, has a nearly round shape, and has “cleared” its orbit of extraneous debris. Another classification was added to the terms used by astronomers: “dwarf planet.” A dwarf planet is essentially something that looks like a planet but is not a planet. Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet, as is the asteroid Ceres. Along with the aforementioned Eris and Snow White, Haumea, Makemake, Sedna, Quaoar, and Orcus are also likely to be dwarf planets. Pluto’s moon Charon would also fit if it were not a moon. There are dozens more that await further investigation. …

via Snow White and the Frozen Dwarfs.

At the average human walking speed of 3.1 miles per hour (mph), could a person in a space suit hike all the way around Pluto (4493.75 mile circumference) in 60 days?

 

Signed Beatles single Please Please Me fetches $14,730

A copy of the Beatles hit single Please Please Me signed on both sides by all four members of the band has fetched £9,000 at auction in Liverpool.

The 1963 record was sold by a Liverpool woman who asked the group to sign it after listening to them at the city’s Cavern venue as a youngster.

The “very, very rare” item was among 322 lots at the annual Beatles memorabilia auction.

Among other highlights was a cap owned by John Lennon which sold for £3,200. …

via BBC News – Signed Beatles single Please Please Me fetches £9,000.

Electric ice a shock to the solar system

ELECTRIC ice may pervade space. This strange form of water is more persistent than was previously thought, and the discovery could change our understanding of how the solar system formed. It might even give ice a new role in the emergence of the complex organic molecules needed for life.

In a single molecule of water – H2O – there is a charge separation. That’s because the two positively charged hydrogen atoms cluster at one end, away from the single negatively charged oxygen.

However, the charges get mixed up when ordinary ice, known as ice Ih, forms. While the oxygen atoms arrange themselves in a repeating pattern, the pairs of hydrogen atoms that extend from them don’t. Instead, they randomly take one of a number of positions (see graphic).

Cool ice to about 60 kelvin (-213.15 °C), though, and the hydrogens rearrange themselves so they are aligned. In the resulting, perfectly regular crystal, called ice XI, there are distinct regions of positive and negative charge.

That polarisation makes ice XI clump together much more readily than ordinary ice 1h, in the same way that dust particles are drawn together by static electricity. If the early solar system contained a lot of the stuff, it could mean that planets formed much more quickly than current models assume. Electric ice could also attract organic compounds, possibly accelerating the emergence of complex molecules and eventually life.

While claims that ice XI may exist naturally in Antarctica have yet to be verified, astronomers have long suspected that it hangs out in the outer solar system. They haven’t directly detected it there, however.

In 2006, Masashi Arakawa, now at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and colleagues produced ice XI in the lab between 57K and 66K. This is about the temperature found on Uranus and its moons, but too narrow a range for ice XI to be a major player in planet formation.

But ice XI turns out to be hard to kill. Tiny flecks of the stuff embedded in ordinary ice can help convert all of it to electric ice, a little like the ice dreamed up by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle, a single crystal of which could freeze the world’s oceans. Crucially, the conversion of ice Ih to ice XI occurs at higher temperatures than if ice XI forms from scratch.

Arakawa’s team cooled disordered, run-of-the-mill snowflake ice until it transformed into ice XI at 60 K. Then they warmed it to 100 K so that it reverted to ordinary ice. When they turned the thermostat back down, ice XI returned at a higher temperature than before: 72 K. Yet cooling regular ice to 72 K did not change its structure (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2011GL048217).

The researchers think that nanoscale regions of ice XI survive the heat, providing a template for neighbouring regions, which then seem to “remember” how to become ice XI. “There are little seeds of XI inside the Ih,” says astrochemist Rachel Mastrapa of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, who was not involved in the work. “Given the right conditions, those seeds can grow.”

via Electric ice a shock to the solar system – space – 25 August 2011 – New Scientist.