Infotainment

Posts

TRUE FRIENDS

A story tells that two friends were walking through the desert During some point of the Journey they had an Argument, and one friend Slapped the other one In the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand: TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE . They kept on walking until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him. After he recovered from the near drowning, he wrote on a stone: TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SAVED MY LIFE. The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now, you write on a stone, why?" The other friend replied "When someone hurts us we should write it down in sand where winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must

the secrets of Saturn and its moons

NASA’s Cassini space probe has been one of the agency’s most successful missions ever. It has been collecting intelligence on Saturn for a decade now, giving astronomers amazing new insights while several times exceeding expectations for its overall lifespan. Perhaps more importantly, the probe has supplemented its scientific data with incredible optical photos that have captured the public imagination on more than one occasion; Cassini actually managed to squeeze some real enthusiasm from a jaded and desensitized population. Now, though, its time has finally come. In 2016, after more than 11 years spent circling the famously ringed planet, Cassini will embark on its last mission ever. Now that we have a plan for the probe’s final days, it’s worth taking a look back at its incredible, decade-long history. Cassini (actually called the Cassini-Huygens Probe) launched with a wide array of goals. NASA wanted to learn about the composition and flow of the rings, the che

What came first, black holes or galaxies?

What came first, black holes or galaxies? "For decades, this was an ideological argument primarily between Americans, who favored a bottom-up approach, and Soviets, who favored a top-down approach. Here’s the difference: Bottom-up: The Universe starts off with large-magnitude fluctuations on small scales and not on large scales. The overdense regions grow over time, producing small mass clumps that grow, merge, and cluster together, eventually growing into large galaxies and clusters of galaxies. In this scenario, black holes would form first along with small stellar clumps, and only at much later times would they grow into what we consider galaxies. Top-down: The Universe starts off with large-magnitude fluctuations on large scales and not on small scales. The overdense regions, being very large, gravitationally collapse down from irregularly-shaped triaxial ellipsoids along their shortest axis, formin

the Sun-Powered Yacht Race

Monaco has always been known for its annual Formula 1 Grand Prix, in which racers whip around the hairpin turns of the principality's narrow streets, and its annual yacht show, in which some of the world's largest and most luxurious boats dock in Port Hercule. This summer, Solar1Races, the Monaco Yacht Club, and Dutch design firm Vripack are combining the two to launch the first solar-powered-yacht Grand Prix at the Solar1 race, set to take place July 10 to 12 in Monaco. The solar-powered race began as the Dong Energy Solar Challenge in Holland eight years ago, with two divisions: the hobby-level cruising class and a professional yachting class that was prohibitively expensive to most entrants. After competing for three years in the hobby class, the engineers at Vripack wanted to introduce a uniform racing division, where the boats would be more uniform but less expensive than the professional ones. For the new division, the design team developed the V20

Super-stretchable graphene yarn

Researchers at Penn State and Shinshu University in Japan have developed a simple, scalable method of making graphene oxide (GO) fibers that are strong, stretchable and can be easily scrolled into yarns with strengths approaching that of Kevlar. The researchers made a thin film of graphene oxide by chemically exfoliating graphite into graphene flakes, which were then mixed with water and concentrated by centrifugation into a thick slurry. The slurry was then spread by bar coating -- something like a squeegee -- across a large plate. When the slurry dries, it becomes a large-area transparent film that can be carefully lifted off without tearing. The film is then cut into narrow strips and wound on itself with an automatic fiber scroller, resulting in a fiber that can be knotted and stretched without fracturing. "We found this graphene oxide fiber was very strong, much better than other carbon fibers. We believe that pockets of air inside the fiber keep it from be

Interactome Analysis: tissue-specific protein interactions linked to hereditary diseases

PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY , RUTH BARSHIR ET A Genes that cause hereditary diseases are often expressed across a wide range of cells in the human body, but the diseases they cause can be specific to a few tissues or organs. Many of these genes are expressed at higher levels in diseased tissues, and their proteins have a significantly greater tendency for tissue-specific protein interactions, according to a study published last week (June 12) in PLOS Computational Biology . “Together the two factors we identified are relevant for as many as two thirds of the tissue-specific hereditary diseases [studied here],” Esti Yeger-Lotem from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and her colleagues wrote in their paper. The researchers suggested that these tissue-specific interactions, known as an interactome, highlight disease mechanisms, and can provide an efficient filter to identify causal genes within diseased tissues. To identify these interactomes,