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Shark fin soup
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A new estimate suggests 100 million sharks are slaughtered worldwide every year, numbers that are completely unsustainable according to researchers. The majority of the time, the fin is the only part of the body used. The rest is simply thrown away.
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3357 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
Amputations will now be a thing of the past
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The very first bionic hand that allows the amputee to actually feel what the hand is touching will be transplanted later this year. According to doctors involved in the surgery the hand will be attached directly to the patient’s nervous system via electrodes clipped onto two of the arm’s main nerves. This will allow the patient to control the hand directly with his thoughts, and receive sensory signals to his brain from the bionic hand. This will be a major breakthrough in prosthetics and could open the door to a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception. ...
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5654 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
Tractor beam
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Scientists at University of St Andrews in Scotland and the Institute of Scientific Instruments (ISI) in the Czech Republic have designed a minute but completely functional tractor beam. Reminiscent of Star Trek, they use a beam of light to draw objects towards the light source on a microscopic level.
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5779 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
Sun ballet
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Sometimes, the Sun itself seems to dance. On just this past New Years Eve, for example, NASAs Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressive prominence erupting from the Suns surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the above time lapse video covering four hours. Of particular interest is the tangled magnetic field that directs a type of solar ballet for the hot plasma as it falls back to the Sun. The scale of the disintegrating prominence is huge -- the entire Earth would easily fit under the flowing curtain of hot gas. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection expelling hot gas into the Solar System. The energy mechanism that creates a ...
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5167 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
Compact Planetary Systems
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A new study from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) estimates that our galaxy contains at least 100 billion planets. The team made their estimate while analysing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32 - planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority in the galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.
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10660 |
bio_man |
11 years ago |
H2O2 vapor used to kill superbugs in hospital
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Infection control experts at The Johns Hopkins Hospital have found that a combination of robot-like devices that disperse hydrogen peroxide vapor into the air and then detoxify the disinfecting chemical are highly effective at killing and preventing the spread of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria. Of special note, researchers say, was that enhanced cleaning with the vapor reduced by 80 percent a patient's chances of becoming colonized by a particularly aggressive and hard-to-treat bacterium, vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). ...
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11464 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
Capturing an asteroid
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According to scientists at The Keck Institute for Space Studies in California, NASA is seriously considering capturing an asteroid to put in a high orbit around the moon. If the idea is implemented, we could be looking at a manned mission to "capture" an asteroid in the 2020s. This idea is thought to tie in with the Obama administration's enthusiasm for sending a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid. If NASA were able to capture an object and lock it into an orbit around the moon, it could be safely used as a practise mission without the need for astronauts to move beyond the range of a rescue mission. ...
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11885 |
duddy |
11 years ago |