09 January, 2014 – Episode 446 – This Week in Science


Climate Change: It’s Our Fault, Penguins Climbing Cliffs, Dancing Bees, Seeing Sea Stars, Wiggling Worm Life, Consciousness Matters, Hairy Elbows, Vaccines On Demand, Nanoparticles Against Cancer, And Much More…

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This Week in Science… coming up next

Let’s talk End of the world…
Climate change is happening
Recent research highlights that it’s us doing the damage via greenhouse gases, not the sun, and that clouds are not going to offset the inevitable heating of our planet to come.

Oh, and it’s not easy being a penguin
Emperor penguins are adapting to reductions in sea ice by heading to more stable ice shelves, which forces them to climb cliffs of ice to lay their eggs.

Dancing bees explain where the honey is
Bees pay attention to polarized light, and then tell their friends how by shaking their rumps. If only human communication was that easy – unless… is it?!

Starfish navigate with their eyespots
Experimentation shows that starfish can see (kindof) where home is.

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Artificial life is a worm
An open-source project called Open Worm has been successful in getting a virtual worm, created from the cells up, to move. All aspects of the software program were developed using scientific information from biological organisms.

Consciousness is matter
Max Tegmark, assistant professor at MIT, thinks consciousness might be a state of matter.

SF may ban plastic bottles
But is it a good thing? and will it actually happen?

Hairy elbows… Some people have them.
A case study was presented in which parents brought their son to the doctor because he had hairy elbows.

Vaccines on demand?
It could happen! Researchers from Washington used calcium phosphate nanoparticles linked to a protein antigen to test immune response in mice, and found that the nanoparticles worked better than no nanoparticles at all.

Nanoparticles to attack cancer?
Yup. Researchers are developing a nanoparticle system that hunts cancer cells in the bloodstream, wherein a fat-based nanoparticle attaches a white blood cell to a protein called TRAIL that kills cancer cells. The system, tested in mice injected with cancer cells, reduced the number of cancers the mice developed most likely by decreasing the number of cancerous cells circulating in the blood.

Fish are fluorescent
More fish than previously thought, over 180 species, have the ability to fluoresce, which means there is probably a whole world of fish communication that we so far have overlooked.

Ardi is more human than chimp
The base of the Ardipethecus skull shares similarities with humans that suggest skeletal changes that allowed bipedality or brain development occurred one million years earlier than thought.

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