Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis working with diabetic mice have found dendritic cells in the islets of Langerhans carrying insulin and fragments of insulin-producing cells known as beta cells, which could trigger an immune attack on beta cells.Washington University in St. Louis News Release (Source: )

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and California Institute of Technology researchers used fMRI scans to observe the brain making morally charged tradeoffs between two different motivations.Volunteers were scanned as they decided between pairs of difficult options on how to distribute scarce meals to children at an orphanage. The choices reflected a balance between avoiding inequity (one child receiving less food than others) and maximizing ... More

University of Oxford and Open University researchers have found the fruit fly equivalent of WRN, the gene that causes the premature-aging of Werner syndrome.Finding this gene means that these flies can now be used to study the effects aging has on DNA. Patients with Werner syndrome have a damaged WRN gene that causes instability in their genomes. They age rapidly after puberty, rarely living beyond their early fifties, and often have cancer. Biot... More

Princeton University researchers have found that bacteria can evolve to predict upcoming events based on environmental cues.When E. coli enters the body, it experiences warmth (in the mouth) and then low oxygen (in the gut). The researchers found that warm temperatures alone triggered the E. coli to switch to a less efficient, low-oxygen mode. When they grew the bacteria in controlled conditions that divorced the rise in temperature from a change ... More

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center have proposed building a new class of supercomputers based on 20 million semi-custom ASICs (embedded microprocessors) customized for modeling climate conditions.The proposal would enable the petascale computing required for a detailed model without the high cost and extreme power requirements of supercomputers based on conventional general... More

Larry Page is optimistic about our ability to solve global challenges.Category: Social IssuesYear: 2008Tags: larrypage, google, goog, googlefounder

MIT students work on a new kind of solar generator that employs low-cost materials. A team of students, led by mechanical engineering graduate student Spencer Ahrens, has spent the last few months assembling a prototype for a concentrating solar p...Category: EnergyYear: GeneralTags: energy, solarenergy, alternativeenergy, mit

If Moore's Law is leading us to The Singularity, is the acceleration of solar power capability leading us to a solar singularity?Category: EnergyYear: GeneralTags: bowermaster, speculist, thespeculist, solar, solarsingularity, singularity

In his airplane seat, Dr. Lee?s jaw is dropping. Not a movie-goer, he didn?t catch the movie in theatres when it came out last Christmas, although a colleague at McGill thought he should. ?That?s my research. I can?t believe it, that?s my researc...Category: BiotechnologyYear: GeneralTags: iamlegend, cancer, reovirus, virus

Originally this article was supposed to be a book review of the upcoming O'Reilly title Subject to Change, but I was so appalled by its content that I felt compelled to shift focus to the more important issue of ethics in publishing. This book ref...Category: Business & WorkYear: GeneralTags: publishing, techbooks, o'reilly, pandering, marketing

What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you. It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.Category: CultureYear: GeneralTags: pastpredictions, future

The first patent for a mechanical suit appeared in 1890, but exoskeletons, both real and imagined, took off only recently. - Check out this PopSci timeline of a technology that has recently received so much attention.Category: SecurityYear: GeneralTags: exoskeleton, history

LCDs and plasma screens may be the dominant choice for TVs today, and LCDs the displays of choice for almost every other application, but a pair of upstart technologies is vying to replace them. Organic LEDs, which have already made inroads in the...Category: TechnologyYear: GeneralTags: oled, led, plasma

SGI and Intel Corp. are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will hit 10 PFLOPS by 2012. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.The system will be used for NASA's next-generation rocket for getting to the moon and then eventually to Mars, and to model the ocean, study global warming, and build the next-generation engine and aircraft. (Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?comman... More

NASA plans to use Orion, the Space Shuttle replacement, for a three to six month round-trip to an asteroid, with astronauts spending a week or two on the rock's surface. The mission will give space officials a taste of more complex missions, and samples taken from the rock could help scientists understand more about the birth of the solar system and how best to defend against asteroids that veer into Earth's path. (Source: http://www.guardian.co... More

Pennsylvania State University chemists have built micro/nanofluidic pumps that transduce energy catalytically. The catalytic conversion of chemical to mechanical energy is ubiquitous in biology, powering such important and diverse processes as cell division, skeletal muscle movement, protein synthesis, and transport of cargo within cells.The chemists have demonstrated that one can build nanomotors from scratch that mimic biological motors by using... More

Florida Atlantic University scientists have invented a unique robotic device to assist with the physical rehabilitation process of patients suffering from neurological damages to their upper extremities such as those due to stroke or Parkinson's disease. (Florida Atlantic University)The invention is composed of motors, cables and spools enclosed within an acrylic case with a joystick that is indirectly connected to the system through magnetic attr... More

The world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing center with computing power of 100 petaflops that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change, with the intent of generating useful forecasts of water supply, droughts, health, and future food supply. (Source: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13855-climate-scientists-call-for-their-own-manhattan-project.htmlcientists)

A WiMAX network to be deployed across the United States by a joint venture between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire dubbed "Clearwire" may render cable or phone line Internet obsolete and set the stage for free Google mobile telephones supported by advertising.The WiMAX wireless data-streaming format quickly moves large amounts of digital data such as video or picture files across kilometers, compared to Wi-Fi connections, where signals reach a few hun... More

Players of a new online game called Foldit will help design three-dimensional protein structures for HIV vaccines, and enzymes for repairing DNA in diseased tissues.David Baker, a leading protein scientist at the University of Washington, teamed up with computer scientists to create the game. (Foldit) (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20738/?a=f)

MIT researcher Seth Lloyd believes that a new architecture for low-energy quantum access memory (QRAM) could be used to reduce the energy wasted by RAM, and also for completely anonymous Internet search. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news129289258.html)

Scientists at Harvard University and the German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen have developed a new technique for fabricating nanowire photonic and electronic integrated circuits that may one day be suitable for high-volume commercial production.By incorporating spin-on glass technology (used in silicon integrated circuits manufacturing) and photolithography (transferring a circuit pattern onto a substrate with light), the team demons... More

University of Wisconsin, Madison and Dartmouth College researchers found that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results could predict if a medication, venlafaxine (an antidepressant that also treats anxiety), was going to be effective in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).They found that the larger the prefrontal cortex reaction, and the smaller the amygdala reaction, the more likely it was that the patient had a positive ... More

An international team led by scientists at the Arthritis Research Campaign has profiled how injuries change gene expression in cartilage cells.They used microarray technology, PCR and immunohistochemistry to compare gene expression in injured and uninjured cartilage. They found 690 genes whose expression was increased or decreased at least 2-fold in injured cartilage compared with uninjured samples.The may lead to finding out why injuries to join... More

Northwestern University researchers have found that in the worm C. elegans, specialized neurons organize and control how cells respond to environmental stress, rather than the cells responding individually.The researchers suggest that other organisms, including humans, may have a central neuronal control switch for regulating temperature and the expression of genes that protect the health of proteins.The results may lead to new ways to study stres... More