Latex could silence noisy neighbours
“The rumbling bass from the party animals next door need no longer keep you awake at night. Cheap and effective soundproofing can be yours in the shape of novel tiles made from latex and a few plastic buttons.
Low-frequency sounds, especially, seem to seep through most domestic walls. That’s because of their long wavelength, says Zhiyu Yang at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon. Bass sounds at 100 hertz have a wavelength of over 3 metres in air, “and several times longer in solids”, he says.
To block out all sound, buildings would need walls several metres thick. Now Yang and his team have developed soundproof panels made of latex and plastic buttons, that will do the job.
With these panels you can soundproof homes, says Yang. And the panel’s weight is equivalent to ceramic bathroom tiles, “although it’s slightly thicker at 15 millimetres”, he adds.”
Read more at New Scientist
Killer ants with taste for cat food attack toads
“The war against Australia’s cane toad has a new tool: cat food.
Using cat food to lure meat ants makes the insects more likely to attack large baby cane toads, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.
Cane toads were introduced to Australia in 1935 to control beetles destroying sugar cane crops. But they’ve since spread and become an invasive menace by eating and poisoning native species.
Unlike many native Australian animals, meat ants can eat toads because they can tolerate the toxic chemicals found within them.
Lead researcher Rick Shine told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “It’s not exactly rocket science. We went out and put out a little bit of cat food right beside the area where the baby toads were coming out of the ponds. The ants rapidly discovered the cat food and thought it tasted great.”
But the cat food was just the appetiser. “When the young toads left the water, they were a perfectly-sized snack for the hungry ants,”"
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks Eliza)
Hormone could heal brain damage
“A female sex hormone involved in pregnancy has been found to be so successful in repairing brain damage in both men and women that a large-scale clinical trial is scheduled to begin next month on more than 1,000 victims of severe head injuries.
Progesterone, a “sex steroid” produced in women as part of the menstrual cycle, is to be injected into patients who suffer brain injuries within hours of their accident in an attempt to limit or even reverse the long-term damage that normally results from severe trauma.
Earlier tests on laboratory animals and a smaller clinical trial have shown that the hormone is safe to use and can help the brain recover to the extent that disability was reduced and deaths halved, scientists said yesterday.”
Read more at The Independent
In Learning, The Brain Forgets Things On Purpose
“Scientists have known that newly acquired, short-term memories are often fleeting. But a new study in flies suggests that kind of forgetfulness doesn’t just happen. Rather, an active process of erasing memories may in some ways be as important as the ability to lay down new memories, say researchers who report their findings in the February 19th issue of the journal Cell.
“Learning activates the biochemical formation of memory,” says Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “But you need to remove memories for new information to come in. We’ve found that forgetting is an active process to remove memory.”
The researchers have traced that process to a molecular pathway including a small protein known as Rac. When that mechanism is blocked, flies hold on to newly acquired memories for longer than they otherwise would.”
Read more at Science Daily
Stunning Video: Water Drop at 2000 Frames per Second
Stunning video from “Discovery Channel’s series ‘Time Warp’ where MIT scientist and teacher Jeff Lieberman and digital-imaging expert Matt Kearney use the latest in high-speed photography to turn never-before-seen wonders into an experience of beauty and learning.”
Via flixxy.com (Thanks Chris)
Amazing Ant Carries 100 Times Its Body Weight
“An incredible image of a tiny ant carrying 100 times its own body weight, while hanging upside down from a glass-like surface, has won first prize in a national science photo competition.
The amazing picture was snapped by scientists at Cambridge University by a team in the department of zoology investigating the extraordinary sticky feet of ants and other insects.
The image, taken by Dr Thomas Endlein, shows an Asian weaver ant, upside down on a smooth surface, carrying a 500mg weight in its jaws.
Other pictures in the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) science photo competition included a crow using a stick to fish food, a killer whale and a salmon caught in a net.
‘It won first prize because it was a beautiful image and managed to convey complex science,’ said the BBSRC.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, KirstyJ)
No Miracle As Brain-Damaged Patient Proved Unable To Communicate
“It seemed to be a medical miracle: the car crash victim assumed for 23 years to be in a coma who was suddenly found to be conscious and able to communicate by tapping on a computer.
The sceptics said it was impossible – and it was. The story of Rom Houben of Belgium, which made headlines worldwide last November when he was shown to be “talking”, was today revealed to have been nothing of the sort.
Dr Steven Laureys, one of the doctors treating him, acknowledged that his patient could not make himself understood after all. Facilitated communication, the technique said to have made Houben’s apparent contact with the outside world possible, did not work, Laureys declared.”
Read more at The Guardian
Printing People Parts: World’s First Human Organ Bio-Printer
“Will we one day be able to print anything and everything we need? 3D printers have been used in architectural schools for quite some time already (and self-replicating home models are becoming more and more common), a 3D food printer is under development, and now several sources are working on 3D bio-printers: machines that will “print” organs so patients will no longer have to wait for transplant donations. Recently, the first commercial organ printer was built by biomedical company Invetech and delivered to Organovo, a company that has pioneered the bioprinting technology.
The printer is already capable of producing arteries, which doctors will be able to use in bypass surgeries in as little as five years. Other, more complex body parts should be possible within ten years: bones and hearts, for example. The printer works by using two print heads. One lays down a scaffold and the other places human cells into the shape of whatever organ is being formed. There’s little threat of the new organ being rejected since it’s made of the patient’s own cells.”
Read more at Gajitz
Repression Debunked
“Psychologists in Denmark may have hammered the final nail into the coffin containing ‘repression’ – the idea, made popular by psychoanalysis, that negative, emotional memories are particularly prone to be being locked up out of conscious reach.
Simon Nørby and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen presented dozens of undergrad participants with word pairs, each made up of a cue word and an unrelated target word. Past research has suggested that people are able to deliberately forget some target words while remembering others. But this has been over very short time periods. Nørby’s team wanted to test the effects of deliberate forgetting over a longer time period – a week – and they also wanted to revisit the question of whether emotional words can be deliberately forgotten as easily, or more easily, than neutral words. Past research has suggested they can, but these studies have tended to block emotional word pairs altogether in series of themed trials, thus raising the possibility that their impact may have been diminished by habituation. Norby’s team avoided this problem by jumbling up neutral and emotional words altogether.”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
Atheistic Billboards Disturb God-Fearing America
“In a country where more than eight in 10 people regard themselves as religious, it takes more than a little guts to preach about a world without God. But that’s the message that is creeping across America, spreading ripples of dissent in its wake.
From Tampa in Florida, to Cincinnati, Ohio, and all the way across to Sacramento in California, billboards have been cropping up with messages that run across the grain of America’s normally devout discourse. “Don’t believe in God? You’re not alone!” were the first posters to be put up, in Arizona, Colorado, Texas and parts of the north-east. “Being a good person doesn’t require God,” read another.
The billboards are the work of a national group of atheists – or nontheists, as they call themselves – called United Coalition of Reason that seeks to encourage nonbelievers throughout America by bringing them together.”
Read more at The Guardian (thanks, KirstyJ)
