Researchers Say Organic Food Contains Less Pesticide and Antibiotic Residue

A new study by Stanford University’s Center for Health Policy reckons ‘Organic Foods Are No More Nutritious then Conventional Foods’, which is a pretty bland statement, comparing the vitamin C levels of organic vs conventional oranges kind of misses the point!

The study qualified this logic defying statement by saying that Organic Food might reduce our exposure to pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a new study has found.

What the study DID find was that organic fruits and vegetables are 30 per cent less likely to be contaminated with pesticides than their conventional counterparts, that children on organic diets had lower levels of pesticides in their urine, compared to those on conventional diets.

Before you read on, we must qualify by saying that Stanford’s study isn’t a standalone piece of research, it’s a comprehensive meta-analysis of various studies, Stanford’s research  is published in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine  :: Read the full article »»»»

Magnetic Pulse Brain Stimulation Helps Stroke Patients Regain Speech

Australian scientists are confident magnenetic pulse brain stimulation research will help long-term stroke and Parkinson’s disease patients speak again. The approach, being pioneered by Professor Bruce Murdoch, Director of the Centre for Neurogenic Communication Disorders Research from the University of Queensland, uses magnetic pulses to stimulate damaged areas of the brain.

The technique, known as Transcranial Magnetc Stimulation – TMS – was previously used to treat depression and pain management. It’s the first time the therapy has been looked at for language or communication loss due to neurological damage.

The treatment  is literally an on off switch for the brain, switching on brain function in Parkinson and off in stroke victims suffering from aphasia. TMS is a non-invasive method to cause depolarization or hyperpolarization in the neurons of the brain. TMS uses electromagnetic induction to induce weak electric currents using a rapidly changing magnetic field, causing activity in specific or general parts of the brain with minimal discomfort.

Aphasia in stroke victims is a condition where suffers have impaired language abilities, the range of the disorder includes memory difficulties for words, all the way through to a complete inability to speak

This isn’t a first for TMS use in Parkinsons or stroke, in 2009 Dr Jean-Pascal Le faucheur of Physiology department at Hospital Henri Mondor in France successfully used the therapy with pain management and Parkinsons :: Read the full article »»»»

Sci-Fi Author Ray Bradbury Dies Age 91

Prolific Ray Bradbury, American Sci-Fi author who was pivotal in popularising the genre with works like as The Martian Chronicles, has died at the age of 91.

“Mr Bradbury died peacefully, last night, in Los Angeles, after a long illness,” a spokesman for his publisher HarperCollins said.

“The world has lost one of the best writers it’s ever known, and one of the dearest men to my heart. RIP Ray Bradbury – Ol’ Gramps,” Bradbury’s grandson Danny Karapetian said via Twitter.

Born August 2, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, the gregarious Bradbury left a massive body of work, including Fahrenheit 451, Now and Forever, I live in the Invisible, The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes Bradbury is credited with writing 27 novels and over 600 short stories. More than eight million copies of his works, published in over 36 languages, have been sold around the world :: Read the full article »»»»

DARPA Funds Interstellar Starship

That US behemoth, DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aka the Department of Everything – has teamed up with that other US giant, the fiscally challenged NASA to create a program that would see interstellar travel within the next 100 years. The duo have awarded $US500,00 in seed funding to the Dorothy Jemison Foundation to form the aptly named 100 Year Starship - 100YSS – program.

The initiative will call on expert opinion from a wide range of disciplines, engineers, scientists and artists will contribute to a single shared vision, to develop the capability for mankind to achieve interstellar flight within the next 100 years.

A public symposium will be held this year, in Houston, Texas from September 14 to 16. In what will become an annual event. Has the real world finally caught up with the strangely accurate  transfictontrek world of Gene Roddenberry?   :: Read the full article »»»»

RUSSIA :: Green Clouds Spark Apocalypse Fears

Russian officials have spent the last 24 hours attempting to reassure Moscow residents that green-tinged clouds over the capital were not an alien invasion, but tree pollen. The clouds crept up on the Russian capital from the south in the morning and reached the centre by the afternoon, causing office workers to gawk at the suspiciously coloured sky.

“Today Muscovites felt like characters in a disaster film about an alien invasion: people living in the south-west of the city saw that the sky had been coloured green,” Russia’s weather service said on its website. The odd natural phenomenon mystically coincided with the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which caused further speculation about the authorities withholding information :: Read the full article »»»»

Homo Sapiens: The Cerebral Giant

Learning to work in teams may explain why humans evolved a bigger brain, according to a new study. Compared to his hominid predecessors, Homo sapiens is a cerebral giant, a riddle that scientists have long tried to solve.

The answer, according to researchers in Ireland and Scotland, may lie in social interaction.

Working with others helped humans to survive, but he had to develop a brain big enough to cope with all the social complexities, they believe. In a computer model, the team simulated the human brain, allowing a network of neurons to evolve in response to a series of social challenges.

There were two scenarios. The first entailed two partners in crime who had been caught by the police, each having to decide whether or not to inform on the other. The second had two individuals trapped in a car in a snowdrift and having to weigh whether to cooperate to dig themselves out or just sit back and let the other do it. Read the full article »»»»

Australian Nanotechnology: UNSW Single Atom Transistor

An Australian team of physicists have created the world’s first – and smallest – functioning single-atom transistor, which could prove a critical building block toward the development of super-fast computers. In what can only be described as nanotechnology at it’s purest – the ability to control matter at the atomic scale, build devices with atomic precision, is the central definition of nanotechnology. Though several groups have attempted this amazing feat before, never has it been accomplished with such puristic accuracy. As if nonotechnology wasn’t already übercool: The transistor itself is composed of a single phosphorous-31 isotope, which has been precisely placed on a base of silicon using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope in an ultra-high vacuum chamber. What’s particularly amazing about their technique is that they were able to position the individual phosphorous atoms precisely.

The Australian teams tiny electronic device – described in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology - uses as its active component an individual phosphorus atom patterned between atomic-scale electrodes and electrostatic control gates. The Nanotechnology paper elegantly describes a brilliant process: Researchers fabricated a single-atom transistor in which a single phosphorus atom is positioned between highly doped source and drain leads with a lateral spatial accuracy of ±1 atomic lattice spacing. researchers demonstrate that they were able to register source, drain and gate contacts to the individual donor atom and observe well-controlled transitions for 0, 1 and 2 electron states, in agreement with atomistic modelling of the device. What was also amazing said Dr Fuechsle was that the electronic characteristics exactly matched theoretical predictions undertaken with Professor Gerhard Klimeck’s group - using NEMO-3D, a Nanoelectronic Modeling tool - at Purdue University in the US and Professor Hollenberg’s group at the University of Melbourne.  Read the full article »»»»