"Partícula de Deus"

Cientistas crêem ter descoberto a "Partícula de Deus"

foto FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP

Um gráfico que mostra a colisão de partículas

A Organização Europeia para Pesquisa Nuclear anunciou, esta quarta-feira, que descobriu uma partícula nova que pode ser o bosão de Higgs, conhecido como a "partícula de Deus", porque confere ordem e massa ao universo.

 físicos têm tentado encontrar provas da existência do bosão de Higgs há quase 50 anos e, nos últimos dias, poderão ter finalmente encontrado a partícula, anunciaram hoje os cientistas, explicando que a nova partícula tem características de massa e comportamento previstas para o bosão de Higgs.

O bosão de Higgs combina duas forças da natureza e mostra que são, de facto, aspetos diferentes de uma mesma força maior, sendo que esta partícula é a responsável pela existência de massa nas partículas elementares.

Os resultados das pesquisas, que não são conclusivos, porque os cientistas preferem manter a prudência, são hoje explicados numa conferência de imprensa.

Japanese Researchers Develop Bubble-Vision

An international research team consisting mainly of Japanese students have developed what they believe to be the new world’s thinnest video screen, with the application of soap bubbles as the unconventional means of displaying images.

The 3-strong team from Japan and the USA consisted of Yoichi Ochiai (University of Tokyo (Japan)), Keisuke Toyoshima (University of Tsukuba (Japan)), and Alexis Oyama (Carnegie Mellon University (USA)), and they claim to be able to beam images onto the membrane of a bubble, with the move already rumoured to be one that could offer new developments in the ‘thin and flexible’ screen market, by going even smaller than before, with the ‘screen’ having the added natural benefit of being completely transparent when ‘switched off’.The process is noted as working with the introduction of projecting ultrasonic sound to the bubble (held in-place and modified through a new solution to be more resilient), which in turn alters the ‘properties’ of the membrane to project an image or video, with 3D footage also claimed to be possible through the method. Reporters already claim that the mixture could be used in the process of creating new commercial TV screens, as well as a possible new way to create ‘flexi-screens’ (as seen by Samsung in November last year)

Read more internet tv news: Japanese Researchers Develop Bubble-Vision http://www.worldtvpc.com/blog/japanese-researchers-develop-bubble-vision/#ixzz1zeMaOp5Q

Mimi, the largest known virus. - redrawing of the tree of life.

A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth

by Charles Siebert, Photography by Jörg Brockmann
From the March 2006 issue, published online March 15, 2006
Discover_magazine


Few things on Earth are spookier than viruses. The very name virus, from the Latin word for "poisonous slime," speaks to our lowly regard for them. Their anatomy is equally dubious: loose, tiny envelopes of molecules—protein-coated DNA or RNA—that inhabit some netherworld between life and nonlife. Viruses do not have cell membranes, as bacteria do; they are not even cells. They seem most lifelike only when they invade and co-opt the machinery of living cells in order to make more of themselves, often killing their hosts in the process. Their efficiency at doing so ranks them among the most fearsome killers: Ebola virus, HIV, smallpox, flu. Yet they go untouched by antibiotics, having nothing really biotic about them.

Now, with the recent discovery of a truly monstrous virus, scientists are again casting about for how best to characterize these spectral life-forms. The new virus, officially known as Mimivirus (because it mimics a bacterium), is a creature "so bizarre," as The London Telegraph described it, "and unlike anything else seen by scientists . . . that . . . it could qualify for a new domain in the tree of life." Indeed, Mimivirus is so much more genetically complex than all previously known viruses, not to mention a number of bacteria, that it seems to call for a dramatic redrawing of the tree of life.
"We have a lot of evidence with Mimivirus that the virus phylum is at least as old as the other branches of life and that viruses were involved very early on in the evolutionary emergence of life."
With the discovery of Mimi, scientists are close to ascribing to viruses the last role that anyone would have conceived for them: that of life's prime mover.

Are Viruses Alive?

From Microbial Life - Educational Resources

Created by George Rice, Montana State University

"Viruses straddle the definition of life. They lie somewhere between supra molecular complexes and very simple biological entities. Viruses contain some of the structures and exhibit some of the activities that are common to organic life, but they are missing many of the others. In general, viruses are entirely composed of a single strand of genetic information encased within a protein capsule. Viruses lack most of the internal structure and machinery which characterize 'life', including the biosynthetic machinery that is necessary for reproduction. In order for a virus to replicate it must infect a suitable host cell".

"Viruses exist in two distinct states. When not in contact with a host cell, the virus remains entirely dormant. During this time there are no internal biological activities occurring within the virus, and in essence the virus is no more than a static organic particle. In this simple, clearly non-living state viruses are referred to as 'virions'. Virions can remain in this dormant state for extended periods of time, waiting patiently to come into contact with the appropriate host. When the virion comes into contact with the appropriate host, it becomes active and is then referred to as a virus. It now displays properties typified by living organisms, such as reacting to its environment and directing its efforts toward self-replication".

Viruses infect all forms of life, are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth, and are the most abundant type of biological entity on the planet.

...if a different criterion for defining life would be the ability to move a genetic blueprint into future generations, thereby regenerating your likeness..., viruses are definitely alive. They are undeniably the most efficient entities on this planet at propagating their genetic information.

Although there is no definitive resolution to the question of whether viruses can be considered living entities, their ability to pass on genetic information to future generations makes them major players in an evolutionary sense.
It is a surprise to most who think of viruses simply as parasites that they make up the largest component of biomass on this planet . When considering that not only is viral presence on this planet all encompassing, but every sequenced organism to date has a major component of its genome that is viral in origin, it becomes apparent that viruses are integral players in the evolution of what we presently consider life.

Maybe the pertinent question is not whether viruses are alive, but rather to what extent do they play a role in the movement and molding of life as we perceive it today?

Swine Flu

Swine flu throughout the United States and worldwide

Mapa interactivo do The New York Times com actualização permante de novos casos

The secret life of the brain

People have long envisaged the brain as being like a computer on standby, lying dormant until called upon to do a task, such as solving a Sudoku, reading a newspaper, or looking for a face in a crowd.

This amazing organ, which accounts for only 2 per cent of our body mass but devours 20 per cent of the calories we eat, fritters away much of that energy doing, as far as we can tell, absolutely nothing.

Some call it the neural dynamo of daydreaming. Others assign it a more mysterious role, possibly selecting memories and knitting them seamlessly into a personal narrative. Whatever it does, it fires up whenever the brain is otherwise unoccupied and burns white hot, guzzling more oxygen, gram for gram, than your beating heart.

Daydreaming may sound like a mental luxury, but its purpose is deadly serious: Buckner and his Harvard colleague Daniel Gilbert see it as the ultimate tool for incorporating lessons learned in the past into our plans for the future. So important is this exercise, it seems, that the brain engages in it whenever possible, breaking off only when it has to divert its limited supply of blood, oxygen and glucose to a more urgent task.

Each day we soak up a mountain of short-term memories but only a few are actually worth adding to the personal narrative that guides our lives.

Raichle now believes that the default network is involved, selectively storing and updating memories based on their importance from a personal perspective - whether they're good, threatening, emotionally painful, and so on. To prevent a backlog of unstored memories building up, the network returns to its duties whenever it can.the default network's pattern of activity is disrupted in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

The default network also turns out to be disrupted in other maladies including depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism and schizophrenia.
The meditating mind

New Scientist , 05 November 2008 by Douglas Fox

'Elixir of youth' drug could fight HIV and ageing

A drug extracted from a plant used in Chinese medicine has helped immune cells fight HIV and raises the possibility of slowing the ageing process in other parts of our bodies

TAT2 is a drug extracted from the root of a plant called Astragalus that is thought to boost telomerase production and is traditionally used in Chinese medicine as a boost for the immune system.

TAT2 could also find applications in other diseases and general ageing.

Journal reference: The Journal of Immunology (vol 181, p 7400)
New Scientist , 13 November 2008 by Linda Geddes

The hunt for the God particle.

Physicists from all over the world are racing to prove the existence of a particle that's surmised to be at the heart of the matter: the Higgs boson also known as the "God particle" because it might ultimately lead to a grand theory of the universe.

Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons; protons and neutrons are made of odd things called quarks and gluons—but already we're into a fuzzy zone. If there's one truly extraordinary concept to emerge from the past century of inquiry, it's that the cosmos we see was once smaller than an atom.
Our existence, our entire universe, emerged from things that happened at the smallest imaginable scale. The big bang theory tells us that the known universe once had no dimensions at all—no up or down, no left or right, no passage of time, and laws of physics beyond our vision.
How does an infinitely dense universe become a vast and spacious one? And how is it filled with matter?

Space, time, matter... everything originated in the Big Bang, an incommensurably huge explosion that happened 13.7 billion years ago. The Universe was then incredibly hot and dense but only a few moments after, as it started to cool down, the conditions were just right to give rise to the building blocks of matter – in particular, the quarks and electrons of which we are all made. A few millionths of a second later, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons, which in turn were bundled into nuclei three minutes later.
Then, as the Universe continued to expand and cool, things began to happen more slowly. It took 380,000 years for the electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms. These were mainly helium and hydrogen, which are still by far the most abundant elements in the Universe.
Another 1.6 million years later, gravity began to take control as clouds of gas began to form stars and galaxies.

The Most of the everything in the Universe is found to be made from twelve basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how these twelve particles and three of the forces are related to each other is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particles and forces. An essential ingredient of the Standard Model, a particle called the Higgs boson, has yet to be found in an experiment. The race is on to hunt for the Higgs – the key to the origin of particle mass.

No experiment has yet directly detected the Higgs boson; the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instrument, which came on line on 10 September 2008, is expected to provide experimental evidence that will confirm or reject the particle's existence when fully operational in 2009.

.

Adaptader from National Geographic Society 2008 and European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

Quem me avisa meu amigo é...

O crescimento da população mundial atingiu valores sem precedentes ( 6674687334); nos ultimos 40 anos duplicou e continua a aumentar a um ritmo de 140 novas pessoas cada minuto. Este facto é assustador tendo em consideração que só temos um pequeno planeta para viver...

O crescimento fortemente assimétrico da população mundial é outro facto deveras preocupante para os Europeus:

Como seria de esperar nas proximas décadas a China e a India vão manter a supremacia populacional absoluta, com a India a revelar-se como o pais com o maior crescimento populacional.

Qual a segunda lingua ideal para aprender ?

"Writing in The New York Times a few years back, Gregory Rodriguez noted a projection that, by 2050, "Half the planet is expected to be more or less proficient in English."

Martian soil 'could support life'

Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - or, at least, asparagus - Nasa scientists believe.

Preliminary analysis by the $420m (£210m) Phoenix Mars Lander mission on the planet's soil found it to be much more alkaline than expected.

BBC

Brain Pacemakers Tackle Depression

Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press e-mail

May 27, 2008 -- It's a new frontier for psychiatric illness: Brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients' nerve circuitry fires.

Still, the early results are promising. Dramatic video shows one patient visibly brightening as doctors turn on her brain pacemaker and she says in surprise: "I'm starting to smile." And new reports this month show that some worst-case patients -- whose depression wasn't relieved by medication, psychotherapy, even controversial shock treatment -- are finding lasting relief.

Ler mais...

Cancer-Sniffing Dog to Be Cloned

May 21, 2008 -- A Japanese center which says it has trained a dog to sniff out human cancer cells is cloning the animal in South Korea, a Seoul-based biotechnology company and the dog's owner said Wednesday.
Cloned fetuses from the black labrador retriever named Marine were last month implanted into a surrogate mother dog.
"We are going to see the clones around the end of this month" .
"It's the world's first cloning of a cancer-sniffing
dog.


"

Discovery Channel

Bacteria-Run Computer Solves Math Puzzle

Eric Bland, Discovery News

May 28, 2008 -- A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.

While this bacteria-based computer is more proof of concept than practical, a living computer might one day solve complex mathematical problems faster than silicon supercomputers.

In a biology-based computer, each bacterium becomes a single computer that runs a different part of the problem simultaneously. Since a million bacteria-based computers can fit into a single drop of water, all of them working together could speed up the calculations dramatically.

"this will open the door to a wide variety of biological computing."

Half of Universe's Missing Matter Found

Space: Not So Empty

This graphic represents a slice of the spider-web-like structure of the universe, called the "cosmic web." These great filaments are made largely of dark matter located in the space between galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope probed the structure of intergalactic space to look for missing ordinary matter, called baryons, that is gravitationally attracted to the cosmic web.

Tasmanian tiger DNA 'resurrected'

A fragment of DNA from the Tasmanian tiger has been brought back to life.

Australian scientists extracted genetic material from a 100-year-old museum specimen, and put it into a mouse embryo to study how it worked.

"As more and more species of animals become extinct, we are continuing to lose critical knowledge of gene function and its potential," he said.

The Tasmanian tiger was hunted to extinction in the wild in the early 1900s.

Some researchers think the method could help reveal the function of genes in species such as the Neanderthals or mammoths.

Ecografia pré natal tridimensional

You can see incredible fetal images (3D ultrasound) and real-time movements (4D ultrasound)

Telescópio Hubble descobre molécula orgânica em exoplaneta

Washington, 19 mar (EFE) - Cientistas do Laboratório de Propulsão a Jato (JPL) descobriram, através do telescópio espacial Hubble, a primeira molécula orgânica na atmosfera de um exoplaneta do tamanho de Júpiter, informou o organismo da Nasa, a agência espacial americana.

A descoberta, que também confirma a presença de água na atmosfera do planeta, "é um importante passo" nos esforços para identificar sinais de vida em um planeta fora do sistema solar, indicou o JPL em comunicado.

O laboratório acrescentou que a molécula é do gás metano, "que, sob as circunstâncias adequadas, pode desempenhar um papel-chave na química pré-biótica", ou seja, nas reações consideradas necessárias para formar vida como existe na Terra, apontou.

A presença de água nesse planeta, identificado como HD 189733 b, a 63 anos luz da Terra, na constelação Vulpecula, tinha sido detectada pelo telescópio Spitzer no ano passado.

O HD 189733 b é um enorme "Júpiter incandescente", com temperatura média de 930 graus Celsius e tão próximo à sua estrela que só demora dois dias para completar uma órbita de translação.

Yahoo Noticias

NANO-FUTURO

Para alguns de nós (poucos curiosamente ) que se interrogam sobre qual será a orientação tecnológica que nos espera nas próximas decadas, é fundamental ter a noção do que é a nanotecnologia.




Para isso é preciso ter uma ideia de que tipo de unidades de medida estamos a considerar:


1metro=100cm (centésima parte do metro)
1metro=1000mm (milesima parte do metro)
1metro=1000 000micrometros (milionésima parte do metro)
1metro=1000 000 000 nanometros (nm)(bilionésima parte do metro) NANOESCALA

Apesar de um nanómetro ser muito pequeno ainda assim é grande quando comparado com a escala atómica. Os atómos (blocos de que é feita toda a matéria do universo) têm um diametro de cerca de 0.1 nm. A natureza aperfeiçou a capacidade de construir a matéria a nivel molecular, por ex. as celulas são NANOMÁQUINAS feitas pela natureza .





Dominar a nanoescala poderá ser ainda mais interessante do que a escala atómica, uma vez que a nonoescala é o primeiro ponto em que podemos construir algo a partir de elementos menores (atómos).

Como futuras utilizações é possivel especular:
Nanorobos construtores e replicadores, que poderiam construir produtos com total substituição dos métodos tradicionais com redução drastica nos custos de produção. Replicação de eventualmente tudo incluindo água e comida.

O maior impacto previsivel será contudo na industria médica. Os doentes poderão ingerir nanorobots programados para atacar e reconstruir células doentes ou realizar microcirurgia.


Certo é que o futuro da nanotecnologia terá vastas aplicações nas gerações futuras...


Adaptado de howstuffworks

População mundial a perspectiva assustadora...

By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.

Current World Population: 6.4billion

It has doubled in the past 40 years, is increasing by over 140 people every minute ... equivalent to another Los Angeles plus another Chicago every month.

Right now, with "only" 6.4 billion of us: (1) We are driving over 50 species of plants and animals to extinction per day! (2) We are destroying rain forests many times faster than they can regenerate. (3) We are consuming stored solar energy (fossil fuels) at rates thousands of times faster than it is regenerating. (4) There are regions in the U.S. where we are consuming fresh water at least 10 times faster than it is being replenished. (5) We are causing soil salinization and erosion several-fold faster than rates of restoration. (6) We are over-fishing our oceans, radically changing the species balance in many places.
For several years population has been increasing faster than many vital non-renewable and renewable resources.
This means the amount of these resources per person is declining, in spite of modern technology.

As Dimensões Populacionais estimadas para a India e China são avassaladoras...

A Idade do Universo

Gauging Age of Universe Becomes More Precise

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: March 9, 2008
The New York Times
The universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take 120 million years, astronomers said last week.That age is based on precision measurements of the oldest light in the universe.


About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine into hydrogen atoms. That released a burst of light, which over the billions of years since has cooled to a bath of microwaves pervading the cosmos.