Interesting Phenomenon: Sine-Wave Speech

This is a interesting perceptual phenomenon which will mess with your head a little bit.

Sine wave speech is artificially degraded speech that sounds like just beeps and whistles until you have been primed to hear it as speech.

Try it here, you will be amazed!

Twining motion of vines

This movie shows the extreme nutational movements of morning glory vines. Climbing vines need to find a suitable support on which to grow. Shortly after germinating, the young plant begins what appears to be a hunting motion in which the shoot tip rotates in a nutational movement. This swinging around of the tip is thought to help the plant bump into a support. If the shoot rubs against a support with the right shape, the rubbing induces a thigmotropic response (tropism induced by touch) and the shoot begins to curl around the support. This movie shows three morning glory plants at the stage where they have just begun "looking" for a support to climb. Vines typically show the most extreme nutational movements. The images were captured at 10 min intervals.

Deadly infections increasingly able to win against antibiotics

These organisms are very small, but they are still smarter than we are.

Since commercial production of penicillin began in the 1940s, antibiotics have been the miracle drugs of modern medicine, suppressing infectious diseases that have afflicted human beings for thousands of years. But today, as a generation of Baby Boomers begins to enter a phase of life marked by the ailments of aging, we are running out of miracles against bacteria.

"Within just a few years, we could be seeing that most of our microorganisms are resistant to most of our antibiotics," said Dr. Jack Edwards, chief of infectious diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Terry Hazen, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and director of its ecology program, is not at all surprised by the tenacity of our bacterial foes. "We are talking about 3.5 billion years of evolution," he said. "They are the dominant life on Earth."

Bacteria have invaded virtually every ecological niche on the planet. Human explorers of extreme environments such as deep wells and mines are still finding new bacterial species. "As you go deeper into the subsurface, thousands and thousands of feet, you find bacteria that have been isolated for millions of years - and you find multiple antibiotic resistance," Hazen said.

In his view, when bacteria develop resistance to modern antibiotics, they are merely rolling out old tricks they mastered eons ago in their struggle to live in harsh environments in competition with similarly resilient species.

Via SFGate.com

Nanotubes for treating brain tumors

Dance of SuperNova Explosions

Newly released optical images of DEM L316 made with GMOS on Gemini South. These images were obtained as part of the Gemini Legacy Imaging Survey which is led by: P. Michaud, S. Fisher, and R. Carrasco from Gemini and T. Rector from the Univ. of Alaska at Anchorage

Stunning Views of Multiple Universes

For those who didn't see yet, I suggest visiting an incredible page which gives a stunning visual effect of universes one within the other beginning with the quarks to a view of Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. After viewing Milky Way at the end, maybe you will think that all this universe we have known is just an atom in another one. Why not?

Alert For Everest : Crowded, littered and dangerous

The call of Everest is an irresistible pull for hundreds of climbers every year despite the odds - one in 10 never comes back.

Named by the British after Sir George Everest, the former British surveyor general, the 29,029ft mountain is the highest on Earth, and a major tourist attraction in Nepal.

Climbers aged between 15 and 71 have scaled its summit in the years since Edmund Hillary's 1953 triumph.

But it is not quite the virgin territory it was then. Recent visitors have described the mountain as a polluted rubbish dump.

According to the Kathmandu Post: "The trail leading to the summit remains littered with more than 200 tonnes of garbage."

Read More

Saturn's moon Epimetheus : Close Image by Cassini

The Cassini spacecraft's very close flyby of Epimetheus in December 2007 returned great images of the moon's south polar region.

The view shows what might be the remains of a large impact crater covering most of this face, and which could be responsible for the somewhat flattened shape of the southern part of Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) seen previously at much lower resolution.

The image also shows two terrain types: darker, smoother areas, and brighter, slightly more yellowish, fractured terrain. One interpretation of this image is that the darker material evidently moves down slopes, and probably has a lower ice content than the brighter material, which appears more like "bedrock." Nonetheless, materials in both terrains are likely to be rich in water ice.

One More Step to The Final Solution of Cancer Spreads

British scientists have solved one of the secrets behind how cancer invades the body.

The breakthrough, carried out at Manchester University, could help pave the way for a generation of drugs that would halt up to 90 per cent of cancers in their tracks.

Such drugs could be particularly effective against breast and lung tumors - two of the biggest killers.

More than 150,000 Britons a year are killed by cancer, and breast and lung tumors account for almost a third of those deaths.

Read More

NASA Mars Images Have a Strange "Doorway" Structure

There is a strange door-like structure at the base of the mountain formation from a NASA image of Mars that is causing a stir. The first person to notice it wasn’t a NASA scientist, however, but rather a Russian reader of the portal R&D.Cnews, Alexander Novgorodov. Taking a closer look at an image taken by the spacecraft Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, he noticed an unusual morphology, which looks strikingly like a manmade doorway.

Read and see more images here

Stunning Nanotechnology Images

The 2007 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting concluded in Boston on November 30. The images was taken from Science as Art competition that was held at MRS.



Nano-Explosions Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level.


Dirty Dice Self-assembled 200 micron size nickel dice, imaged using scanning electron microscopy in the lower secondary electron (LEI) mode. The dice were colorized using Adobe Photoshop.


Bamboos for Vibration Control Ni-Mn-Ga melt-extracted fibers with an approximate diameter of 100 µm showing a bamboo-type structure


Beauty of Nature SEM image of CuInSe₂ film with Cu₂Se (plates) and InSe (needles) crystals on the surface.



Layered steps in Lanthanum Cobaltite The picture shows a colored image of the layered steps formed inside closed pores of La_0.8Ca_0.2CoO₃, which were revealed due to fracture of the material.

Do we dream to train ourselves?

I would like to share with you a great article about dreams.

An interesting Theory discussing the possibility that we dream to train ourselves, a Theatre of Threats.

Interesting ideas represented.

Check it out at Psychology Today!

Smart Butterflies trick ants into raising their offspring

Nature is just amazing!

The Alcon blue butterfly deposits its larvae on marsh gentian plants where exploring ants find them, identify the chemical coating, and take the butterfly larvae back to the ant colony and feed them until they grow up and leave.

Read the whole article here

A Great Discovery to Understand Planet Formations

Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have recently discovered the youngest known extrasolar planet. Its host star is still surrounded by the disk of gas and dust from which it was only recently born. This discovery is an important milestone allowing scientists to draw important conclusions about the timing of planet formation. Some of the questions need answers are the following. How do planetary systems form? How common are they? What is planetary system architecture? And the most important one. How many habitable earth-like planets exist in the Milky Way? Read More