Snippets on Science and Tech today

well havent got the least idea as how many ppl will even care to give a glance this way..but i sincerely want to share certain things..and wasnt sure how it will be received in the general page..hence this page..

Saw Science and Tech interested in both, lets here more.

welcome Kevin/utah..glad to see someone in here..
Williamette Meteorite,is a 15-ton chunk of space rock that(molten iron and nickeore) fell to earth in Pacific Northwest 10,000 years ago,American Museum of Natural History(NY),has acquired this meteorite in 1906,and its placed in the center of planetarium wing now...i had a chance to see it recently when i visited the museum and it was a great experience to touch and feel the same..
i have a pic of it in my page.. you can have a look at it if you wish..

After spending weeks adrift in the ocean as tiny larvae, juvenile coral reef fish often return to their 'home reef' to settle down, researchers say.
Tracking these larvae is very tough and done by chemically tagging them while still in egg stage inside the mother fish!!scientist feel this particular behaviour may have impotant implication for the design of the marine reserve.

Well theve just seen the most massive stellar explosion of a star about 120 times the mass of our sun, it was in perseus about 240 million light-years away

well simulation of Lightning(cloud to earth)using the Van de Graaff Generators in the museum of science in Boston was really very absorbing...the high voltage discharge from the -vely charged clouds to the +vely charged ground thru an ionized air path is beautifully represented..enjoy the pic in my page..

one fourth of the diabetic population is at risk of foot ulcers and these lesions are prone for infection ,sometimes by antibiotic resistant bacteria.then its tough to treat it and so far no effective treatment has been found clinically.researchers are trying many methods,one of it is the maggots..these creatures chew away the infected tissues, and probably might secrete an antibacterial goo, or they might be just devouring the infected flesh. tho it sounds primitive it has shown positive result so far.
another method is by using a bio-gun which zaps infection by ionizing molecular oxygen and creating bug-beating superoxide radicals
whatever it is the maggots are considered on par with the hi tech methods in treating the ppl with infected feet and soon a break thru is likely..

Can't wait for the Encyclopedia of life pages, can't believe it will take 10 years to compile, but there are a lot of species out there including some that have not even been discovered yet,it will be great to have that kind of material to go through and learn.

A bit of a science buff myself, to quote a song, ''all this science I just don't understand it's just my job 5 days a week'', which is truely the case for me. The black box flight recorder was first developed at my work!
DSTO (then ARL) in Melbourne Australia

Can someone pls work out how this is done? appy? being the mathematician that you are luvvie...

1. First of all, pick the number of times a week that you would like to go out to eat.
(more than once but less than 10)
2. Multiply this number by 2 (just to be bold) 3. Add 5
4. Multiply it by 50
5. If you have already had your birthday this year add 1757 ....
If you haven't, add 1756.
6. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.


You should have a three digit number

The first digit of this was your original number
(i.e., how many times you would like to go out to restaurants in a week.)
The next two numbers are YOUR AGE! (Oh YES, it is!!!!!)

wrong page should be on the maths page...

The following msg i received thru mail..wonder how far its true..read on,and plz do share more info on that..
Drinking cold water after meal = Cancer! (this is not a joke)it is nice to have a cup of cold drink after a meal. However, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed.(i wonder how,for any food or drink once enter the system will never remain in the same temp,as our body temp plus the liquid content in the system will modify it the minute/sec it enters the stomach!) It will slow down the digestion. Once this 'sludge' reacted with the acid, it will
break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine.which eventually lead to cancer!!

Appy, first thing I noticed was the language, OILY STUFF is not very scientific language.

I found this on Urban ledgends at About.com, they have been a reliable reference for such e-mail de bunking. . . . .

Comments: Rule of thumb: don't take health advice from anonymous forwarded emails. I scoured every available medical database for articles confirming -- or even suggesting -- that drinking cold water with meals is harmful, and found not a single one. There's no scientific basis for the claim that cold water will 'solidify the oily stuff' you have just consumed, or that this 'sludge' will 'line the intestine,' let alone 'turn into fats' and 'lead to cancer.'

It's mumbo-jumbo, and self-contradictory mumbo-jumbo at that. The email states that drinking cold water 'slows down the digestion,' yet in the very next sentence declares that it will cause the your stomach contents to 'break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster.' Which is it?

appy it was reported in our newspapers in April that drinking too much water can kill you as it dilutes vital minerals which can then lead to swelling of the brain, this was reported after a young fit male aged 22 collapsed at The London Marathon after drinking too much water, he later died in hospital and the cause of death was the damage to his body due to excessive water intake. It is very worry to think that in drinking water, although I believe it was an extreme amount, we could be doing more damage to ourselves..

worry = worrying - sigh, glasses the eye test needs moving forward.

There was no mention of excessive wine drinking however, or at least none that I wished to read..

ANDRE, you are correct, excessive water can kill, but we are talking GALLONS, not glasses of water. Google Water Intoxication if you want more info about that.

There is a pending lawsuit in the USA, a radio contest where the person drinking the most water in a certain time frame won concert tickets. A young Mom trying to win tickets for her children died from water intoxication. I think her consumption was about 6 gallons of water. Disc Jock made on the air comments indicating they knew this woman was in trouble but did nothing to help.

A NEW species of limbless lizard said to be new to science has been located by group of zoologists in Orissa,India.Prof Sushil Kumar Dutta of the North Orissa University, Baripada, said,the lizard, which belonged to the family Scincidae, is new to science and is an important discovery from the biogeographic point of view.you can have a view of the same ..just click on the link...
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1143/527521085_85652 3d149_o.jpg

Speed, technically, is the distance covered in unit time interval. But the feeling of speed comes from the rate at which we cover the angular displacement corresponding to an object.while riding a bike we observe the objects in the proximity that protacts a large angle and when we go past this in a small time interval it gives us a feeling of high speed.
When we travel in a train, we observe only the distant objects, which subtend a smaller angle at our eye, thus it appears as if the object is almost static and we feel as if we are moving slowly.however if we observe the objects nearer to the train,or look down at the track,and adjacent to the track we can feel the actual speed of the train.

and thats the ans to the query in the general page..(today,15th jun,friday)

this Q&A is from our national daily The Hindu,sci&tech supplement..

I was thinking appy, that it takes so much energy and effort to get anywhere on a bike - that we think (and wish and hope) that we are getting to places really fast, whereas on a train there is nothing to do so time goes much slower and seems to take ages to get anywhere. When the train is really crowded and your nose is right against someone's armpit... it takes forever to get to your destination! I'm sure that my answer is much more scientific than yours!!!

Well this is Maths not Science, but I hope that it's OK to post anyway. Just learned that 1 metre = 1/10 millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator.
My Science question and something that's been bugging me for years. Is eye colour one of those dominant/recessive gene things or not? How can a blue eyed child be born to a parent who has no eye colour other than brown in their direct ancestors?

hi there Susan,first ans to the eye color..just tried to put whatevr little i know in the most simplest form..hope its comprehensive..and a bit informative..
Eye color in humans is primarily determined by the amount and localization of the pigment melanin on the front surface of the iris.This is directed by the Eye color Genes thru the proteins they encode.The genetic basis for eye color is actually far more complex.
'coz inheritance of eye color involves multiple genes(presently only two are identified,as far as i have read!),The once-held view that blue eye color is a simple recessive trait has been shown to be wrong.The genetics of eye color are so complex that almost any parent-child combination of eye colors can occur.so any mutation of a particular gene that has an influence on the pigment formation shall modify the color of the off spring..like i may even get a blue eyed grand son!(pray its not a green eyed monster afterall!!)
cheers

Thanks appy. I did have a very good reason for wanting to know about that. So what is it that you do that you are so knowledgeable about all things Science?

Fragile X syndrome: it is an illness characterized by hyperactivity, attention deficit, repetitive behavior, anxiety and cognitive difficulties ranging from learning disability to mental retardation.
Scientists at M.I.T. have identified the enzyme that causes this and have successfully reversed the condition by blocking it in mice.
They are confident of developing drugs that could be injected to such patients and correction of such genetic disorder is possible in future if detected during the early onset of the same.

My husband and I both have blue eyes and so do both of our daughters.... It was interesting to read that blue eyes are no longer considered a recessive trait. I didn't know that. If we had had a green eyed child hubby could have been very suspicious!

having started the color topic heres some fact on
color blindness..Many people have a misconception of what it is like to be colorblind. Rather than not being able to see colors, those who are colorblind have a hard time distinguishing between colors. Of the different forms of color blindness, someone who is color blind usually finds it difficult to determine red and green hues or blue and yellow hues. wanna know more abt the same??just click the link..
http://colorvisiontesting.com

'Those who had consumed the high-GI cereals actually recalled significantly more words than those who consumed the low-GI breakfast cereal,' says Smith.
from Aust ABC News. So Froot Loops for breakfast! Well, there are all sorts of ifs and buts, and the number of extra words remembered was actually 1.54, but if I can have sugar for breakfast maybe I should stop reading at the good news bit......

AFTER pondering the weighty question of the mass of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have come up with an answer: 42.

Trans fats come from two different sources - small amounts in some animal foods, larger amounts in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - used because they allow longer shelf-life and are more stable than other oils.

Well, I'm not a science person Anu, but I do know that pumpkin seed oil in a bottle does look red, and when it's in a thin layer on a plate, it looks green, so I assume it has something to do with the density of the oil. My best guess.

I cheated and googled 'pumpkin seed oil color'. An article in Science Daily came up. I have added Science Daily to my favourites - thank you Anu!!!

yes CGreg,saturation and brightness does depend on density,but the Hue(whether its bluish or greenish)is determined by the material property of the liquid..like a blood drop may look light/pale red,or crimson depending on its purity,but never green..got the point?so the color variation in the pumpkinseed oil is apparently how much color we actually see in a given quantity of the liquid.The perception of the eye to see the green more bright than a red,plus the light absorbing quality of the liquid at a shallow level makes it looks green when it is spread thin.On the other hand, when light passes through a thick layer of oil, a greater amount of green than red wavelengths are still transmitted, but the intensity of green drops much more than that of red, so it is much dimmer. Even our eyes' higher sensitivity to green cannot increase its apparent brilliance to match the red, hence the oil looks red. (oooops i hope i made it comprehensive!)

Today I was asked how to convert water hardness measurements from mg/l to mmol/l. Apparently a lot of new dishwashers quote hardness in mmol/l and require additives (salt?) for hard water. FYI - I worked out that the conversion is done by dividing by the molecular weight. The local hardness test is quoted as mg/l of calcium carbonate, so in our case we had to divide by 100 (the molecular weight of caco3)

From today's news - scientists want to rate El Nino and El Nina to predict effects; as much as 10 percent of the human genome has changed in some populations in the last 15,000 to 100,000 years (called 'very recent'); Putting bacteria on birth control could stop the spread of drug-resistant microbes - still in lab testing phase and only for e-coli so far, but promising....

Pet peeve - misleading headlines to news articles....

hi suzy interesting bits and pieces...keep up the good job and help the page to move forward..
well i seem to have got stuck with the color phenomenon..ever wondered what makes the sunset so glorious?/and of late its getting better day by day..i mean you see stunning sunsets with bright reds and oranges..
if you relly know the reason for it i doubt if you would ever enjoy a sunset at all!!

Its the pollution in the air that enhances the beauty of the sunset..the soot in the smoke thats expelled from the automobile exhaust mix in the air to form the smog and these suspended particles scatter the light ray from sun indiscriminately eliminating the cooler blues and violets and increases the overall brightness with prominent red and orange....
a more peachier ,healthier sunset is welcome that may result without all that atmospheric flotsam

Hi appy
It's fun to read the science news.... Does that make me weird???