An upper layer of Earth s atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads NASA announced Thursday.

The layer of gas – called the thermosphere – is now rebounding again. This type of collapse is not rare but its magnitude shocked scientists.

“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years ” said John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “It s a Space Age record.”

The collapse occurred during a period of relative solar inactivity – called a solar minimum from 2008 to 2009. These minimums are known to cool and contract the thermosphere however the recent collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

“Something is going on that we do not understand ” Emmert said.

via SPACE.com — Record Collapse of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere Puzzles Scientists.

Scientists find antibodies that prevent most HIV strains from infecting human cells — Science Blog.

Not only that, but presenting people with facts can entrench them further in their beliefs. People willfully ignore facts that don’t correspond to their opinions.

“This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.”

A very good article

How facts backfire – The Boston Globe.

It could potentially also be used to regenerate bones

Tooth Regeneration Gel Could Replace Painful Fillings : Discovery News.

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.

via Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions — Ackerman et al. 328 (5986): 1712 — Science.

Stem cells can be made to grow around a three dimensional scaffold in your mouth in as quick as around nine weeks. Much better than dental implants!

Columbia University Medical Center Press Release.

The UK Metropolitan Police has been recording the frequency variations on the National Grid every second and a half for the past five years. When examining recordings, scientists are able to match the variations in the recordings with the database and establish exactly when the recording was made. If there are multiple matches, the recording was edited, and scientists can find out when. The process takes about 10 minutes.

via Met lab claims ‘biggest breakthrough since Watergate’ • The Register.

They now know where it is and where it’s going. Einstein said it couldn’t be done.

Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle — Li et al., 10.1126/science.1189403 — Science.

Entangled photons have been able to instantaneously transmit their states over 500 m before, but the Chinese have managed to increase this range massively, allowing them to be used for communicative purposes.

Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km.

What they did is email genetic code to a machine, which constructed DNA and implanted that in a virus cell, after removing the old DNA. The synthetic DNA then reproduced and it’s reproductions also carried the synthetic DNA. The reproduction is the ‘life’ bit.

They’re calling it Cynthia.

Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell – WSJ.com.

YouTube – Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything.

Scientists have found the first multicellular animals that apparently live entirely without oxygen. The creatures reside deep in one of the harshest environments on earth: the Mediterranean Ocean's L'Atalante basin, which contains salt brine so dense that it doesn't mix with the oxygen-containing waters above. Previous samples taken from the water and sediments in the basin showed that single-celled life was present, but a new study published this week in BMC Biology has identified multi-cellular animals that apparently live and reproduce in the sediments under the salt brine. Italian and Danish researchers describe three new species of tiny animals called Loricifera.

via ScienceShot: Animals That Live Without Oxygen – ScienceNOW.

Chinese doctors have used arsenic in the treatment of APL (leukemia) with cure rates of 90% since 1992 without the side-effects of chemo (hair loss, suppression of bone marrow function).

A paper from Shanghai shows that it works by targetting specific proteins that feed the cancer.

China scientists show how arsenic treats blood cancer | Reuters.

Using Google search technology you can now browse through the entire archive of Popular Science magazine and read the old issues online.

New! Browse the Complete PopSci Archive | Popular Science.

And we’ve known this since the 1890s. Experiments repeatedly show that multitasking basically makes you perform badly at any of the tasks you’re performing. Now, however, it turns out that not only do you do badly at the tasks, but it also destroys your capacity for reasoning.

This article walks quickly through the history of the research on multitasking and brings you up to date with methods to practically use single tasking, from the extreme in classrooms to the more mundane.

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A team of US research scientists have made a startling breakthrough in solar-cell development, creating flexible wire-based cell substrates that use just one per cent of the silicon needed for brittle and comparatively heavy conventional cells.

Solar cells made from this material would not only be less expensive than current photovoltaics, but due to their low weight and bendable structure the could be used in a wide variety of applications.

The trick in this new method is to bundle one-micrometer-thick silicon wires and embed the resulting array vertically in a flexible polymer. Thus bundled, the paper claims, the array could capture and transmit up to 96 per cent of light in peak conditions while requiring only one per cent of the silicon needed by conventional cells.

via US lab births flexy, stingy solar cells • The Register.

Professor Jones [NB  the guy who sent all the wierd emails that were uncovered revealing that data was spurious and that he'd hammer into the ground all global warming sceptic scientists] also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

via Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online.

These guys are doing huge wetware experiments in their own home, at a fraction of the cost of government / academic projects. They have a large community and have a repository of hardware plans to get you started for a fraction of the price of a full lab.

DIY Bio: A Growing Movement Takes on Aging | h+ Magazine.

The nanorobotic arm is built out of DNA origami: large strands of DNA gently encouraged to fold in precise ways by interaction with a few hundred short DNA strands. The products, around 100 nanometers in diameter, are eight times larger and three times more complex than what could be built with a simple crystalline DNA array, vastly expanding the space of possible structures. Other nanoscale structures or machines built by Dr. Seeman and his collaborators including a nanoscale walking biped, truncated DNA octahedrons, and sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays. Dr. Seeman has exploited structural features of DNA thought to be used in genetic recombination to operate his nanoscale devices, tapping into the very processes underlying all life.

via Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy | h+ Magazine.

“Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D,” Murphy said. “Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth

via New Device Prints Human Tissue | LiveScience.

A female scientist was fed up of hearing comments on the parking abilities of women and found that not only do they take 20 seconds longer on average to park, they’re 5% worse at it than men.

Men really ARE better at parking… and that’s a woman professor talking | Mail Online.

Using ECoG (electrocorticography) and overlaying electrodes directly on the surface of the brain, scientists can record reactions when letters are flashed on a screen and then play back the letters when that thought pattern is brought up. It’s around 8 letters per minute, but it’s something.

There’s also a piece where they translate thought patterns into music. An interesting article.

By Thought Alone: Mind Over Keyboard | h+ Magazine.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

via Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming – Telegraph Blogs.

A synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8155

The Allan Hills 84001 Meteorite which landed on earth has been examined and they’ve discovered that the tiny magnetite crystals it contains are chemically consistent with being formed in bacteria – they’re basically little fossils. They’re pretty sure the rock, which has floated around for around 16 million years, comes from Mars as it matches chemical compositions with the relative proportions of various gases measured in observations of the atmosphere of Mars made by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970s.

Evidence of life on Mars lurks beneath surface of meteorite, Nasa experts claim – Times Online.