Scientists Print Sensors On Gummi Candy

Gut bug enzyme turns blood into type-O

Gut bug enzyme turns blood into type-O Scientists believe they have found a reliable way to transform donor blood into the universal type needed for safe, emergency blood transfusions. The discovery is enzymes from gut bacteria that can efficiently turn type-A human blood into type-O. Type-O blood is special because it can be donated to anyone without the risk of a bad mismatch reaction. The researchers, from the University of British Columbia, say clinical trials of the treatment could begin soon.

Thats amazing news :O

Hear the Haunting "Music" Detected Between Saturn and Enceladus | @curiositydotcom

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

— James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (via quotespile)

Heavy metal is in our blood!

Anytime you don’t feel powerful, remember this:

Supergiant stars are beasts! Their life is a fight between gravity pushing in and heat pushing out. They fuse heavier and heavier elements in their core until they get to iron. They can’t fuse any more. Iron absorbs more energy than it returns, so gravity takes over. The star’s core collapses and the star dies in an explosive supernova that outshines its entire galaxy.

The heat of a supernova fuses new elements during the explosion, which are then spread out into space via the nebula remnant. Nebulae are the birthplaces of new stars and solar systems.

The iron in your blood came from one of the most powerful explosions in the universe.

You have something in your blood that can kill stars and build solar systems.

GMO does NOT mean Generally Mean Organizations.

Why we need GMOs to survive climate change

Genetically modified organisms get a bad rap for many reasons, but we’ve actually been genetically altering what we eat since the dawn of human history.

“For 10,000 years, we have altered the genetic makeup of our crops,”explains UC Davis plant pathology professor Pamela Ronald.

“Today virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that we have genetically altered in one way or another.” (You can read more about Ronald’s thoughts on genetically engineered food here.)

Right now her focus is on rice. It’s one of our basic crops and without it, we would struggle to feed much of the world.

With climate change, we’re seeing an increase in flooding in places like India and Bangladesh, which makes it harder to grow this important food staple.

So Ronald and her lab have developed a flood-tolerant strain of rice. It’s known as Sub1a or “scuba rice” and millions of farmers in South Asia are now growing it in their fields. 

Today is National Food Day, a day dedicated to hunger awareness. But as we focus on food insecurity, we need to talk more about how global warming will make the problem worse.

As our climate continues to heat up, it has huge impacts on what foods we are able to grow. Will our crops be able to survive droughts and floods? The University of California leads six labs that are working to develop other climate-resilient crops including chickpea, cowpea and millet.

Find out what other scientists are doing to improve our food.

PINning down future problems

Study finds hackers could use brainwaves to steal passwords

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggest that brainwave-sensing headsets, also known as EEG or electroencephalograph headsets, need better security after a study reveals hackers could guess a user’s passwords by monitoring their brainwaves.

EEG headsets are advertised as allowing users to use only their brains to control robotic toys and video games specifically developed to be played with an EEG headset. There are only a handful on the market, and they range in price from $150 to $800.

Nitesh Saxena, Ph.D., associate professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and Ph.D. student Ajaya Neupane and former master’s student Md Lutfor Rahman, found that a person who paused a video game and logged into a bank account while wearing an EEG headset was at risk for having their passwords or other sensitive data stolen by a malicious software program.

“These emerging devices open immense opportunities for everyday users,” Saxena said. “However, they could also raise significant security and privacy threats as companies work to develop even more advanced brain-computer interface technology.”

Saxena and his team used one EEG headset currently available to consumers online and one clinical-grade headset used for scientific research to demonstrate how easily a malicious software program could passively eavesdrop on a user’s brainwaves. While typing, a user’s inputs correspond with their visual processing, as well as hand, eye and head muscle movements. All these movements are captured by EEG headsets. The team asked 12 people to type a series of randomly generated PINs and passwords into a text box as if they were logging into an online account while wearing an EEG headset, in order for the software to train itself on the user’s typing and the corresponding brainwave.

“In a real-world attack, a hacker could facilitate the training step required for the malicious program to be most accurate, by requesting that the user enter a predefined set of numbers in order to restart the game after pausing it to take a break, similar to the way CAPTCHA is used to verify users when logging onto websites,” Saxena said.

The team found that, after a user entered 200 characters, algorithms within the malicious software program could make educated guesses about new characters the user entered by monitoring the EEG data recorded. The algorithm was able to shorten the odds of a hacker’s guessing a four-digit numerical PIN from one in 10,000 to one in 20 and increased the chance of guessing a six-letter password from about 500,000 to roughly one in 500.

EEG has been used in the medical field for more than half a century as a noninvasive method for recording electrical activity in the brain. Electrodes are placed on the surface of the scalp to detect brain waves. An EEG machine then amplifies the signals and records them in a wave pattern on graph paper or a computer. EEG can be combined with a brain-computer interface to allow a person to control external devices. This technology was once highly expensive and used mostly for scientific research, like the production of neuroprosthetic applications to help disabled patients control prosthetic limbs by thinking about the movements. However, it is now being marketed to consumers in the form of a wireless headset and is becoming popular in the gaming and entertainment industries.

“Given the growing popularity of EEG headsets and the variety of ways in which they could be used, it is inevitable that they will become part of our daily lives, including while using other devices,” Saxena said. “It is important to analyze the potential security and privacy risks associated with this emerging technology to raise users’ awareness of the risks and develop viable solutions to malicious attacks.”

One potential solution proposed by Saxena and his team is the insertion of noise anytime a user types a password or PIN while wearing an EEG headset.

It seems nuCLEARer now

The Sun’s Energy Doesn’t Come From Fusing Hydrogen Into Helium (Mostly)

“It might surprise you to learn that hydrogen-fusing-into-helium makes up less than half of all nuclear reactions in our Sun, and that it’s also responsible for less than half of the energy that the Sun eventually outputs. There are strange, unearthly phenomena along the way: the diproton that usually just decays back to the original protons that made it, positrons spontaneously emitted from unstable nuclei, and in a small (but important) percentage of these reactions, a rare mass-8 nucleus, something you’ll never find naturally occurring here on Earth. But that’s the nuclear physics of where the Sun gets its energy from, and it’s so much richer than the simple fusion of hydrogen into helium!”

Ask anyone where the Sun (or any star) gets its energy from, and most people will correctly answer “nuclear fusion.” But if you ask what’s getting fused, most people – including most scientists – will tell you that the Sun fuses hydrogen into helium, and that’s what powers it. It’s true that the Sun uses hydrogen as its initial fuel, and that helium-4 is indeed the end product, but the individual reactions that take place to turn hydrogen into helium are surprisingly diverse and intricate. There are actually four major reactions that take place in the sun: fusing two protons into deuterium, fusing deuterium and a proton into helium-3, fusing two helium-3 nuclei into helium-4, and fusing helium-3 and helium-4 in a chain reaction to produce two helium-4 nuclei. Note that only one of those reactions actually turns hydrogen into helium, and that’s not what makes up either the majority of reactions or the majority of the Sun’s energy!

The Sun fuses hydrogen into helium, but that’s not the only thing that powers it. Come find out how the Sun really works today!

Two most important phenomens to live for: coffee and ISS in the space

Coffee in Space: Keeping Crew Members Grounded in Flight

Happy National Coffee Day, coffee lovers! 

On Earth, a double shot mocha latte with soymilk, low-fat whip and a caramel drizzle is just about as complicated as a cup of coffee gets. Aboard the International Space Station, however, even just a simple cup of black coffee presents obstacles for crew members.

Understanding how fluids behave in microgravity is crucial to bringing the joys of the coffee bean to the orbiting laboratory. Astronaut Don Pettit crafted a DIY space cup using a folded piece of overhead transparency film. Surface tension keeps the scalding liquid inside the cup, and the shape wicks the liquid up the sides of the device into the drinker’s mouth.

The Capillary Beverage investigation explored the process of drinking from specially designed containers that use fluid dynamics to mimic the effect of gravity. While fun, this study could provide information useful to engineers who design fuel tanks for commercial satellites!

The capillary beverage cup allows astronauts to drink much like they would on Earth. Rather than drinking from a shiny bag and straw, the cup allows the crew member to enjoy the aroma of the beverage they’re consuming.

On Earth, liquid is held in the cup by gravity. In microgravity, surface tension keeps the liquid stable in the container.

The ISSpresso machine brought the comforts of freshly-brewed coffees and teas to the space station. European astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti enjoyed the first cup of espresso brewed using the ISSpresso machine during Expedition 43.

Now, during Expedition 53, European astronaut Paolo Nespoli enjoys the same comforts. 

Astronaut Kjell Lindgren celebrated National Coffee Day during Expedition 45 by brewing the first cup of hand brewed coffee in space.

We have a latte going on over on our Snapchat account, so give us a follow to stay up to date! Also be sure to follow @ISS_Research on Twitter for your daily dose of space station science.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

It`s hunting season!

NASA’s incredible exoplanet-hunting telescope is about to launch

There is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It's TESS, short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which, if all goes well, will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

It’s been a hard month for space telescopes. First we learned that Kepler is running out of fuel, signaling the end of its second life as an exoplanet hunter. Then we got word that the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope faces yet another delay.

But there is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It’s TESS—short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. If all goes well, the new telescope will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s a relatively small satellite, but researchers have giant hopes for what it might discover. It has the potential to identify thousands of new planets, hundreds of rocky worlds like Earth, and dozens of planets hanging out in their star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on the surface), all within our own little corner of the galaxy.

Continue Reading.

Cracking eggshell nanostructure: New discovery could have important implications for food safety

How is it that fertilized chicken eggs manage to resist fracture from the outside, while at the same time, are weak enough to break from the inside during chick hatching? It’s all in the eggshell’s nanostructure, according to a new study led by McGill University scientists.

The findings, reported today in Science Advances, could have important implications for food safety in the agro-industry.

Birds have benefited from millions of years of evolution to make the perfect eggshell, a thin, protective biomineralized chamber for embryonic growth that contains all the nutrients required for the growth of a baby chick. The shell, being not too strong, but also not too weak (being “just right” Goldilocks might say), is resistant to fracture until it’s time for hatching.

But what exactly gives bird eggshells these unique features?

To find out, Marc McKee’s research team in McGill’s Faculty of Dentistry, together with Richard Chromik’s group in Engineering and other colleagues, used new sample-preparation techniques to expose the interior of the eggshells to study their molecular nanostructure and mechanical properties.

Read more.