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."

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