Yes, I know, you’ve made blue roses before by sticking a white rose in some blue food coloring and waiting a day or two. Bully for you. But up until now, naturally blue roses have been an impossibility, for the simple reason that rose petals lack the enzyme necessary to produce the color blue. Naturally blue roses may still be an impossibility, but a little bit of clever genetic engineering has enabled researchers in Japan to stick some blue petunia enzymes into some naturally purple roses to end up with something actually blue.
Or, blue-ish.
It’s got some blue in it, anyway.
In the same way that yellow roses signify friendship and red roses signify love, blue roses signify the impossible, and I kinda think that still holds true, ’cause they look rather purple to me. You should be able to buy a more or less blue rose for that certain impossible someone early next year.
Have you ever been to a science center or museum and watched someone’s hair stand on end while they were touching that giant metal sphere contraption? Well that device is known as a Van de Graaff generator, and this wand from ThinkGeek is basically a handheld version of that, but with considerable less ‘oomph.’ However, it can build up enough static charge to make a set of included 3D mylar shapes appear to levitate and move about at your command. Here’s a video of it in action from ThinkGeek:
While that guy might not be Hogwart’s material, the wand does look like you could easily blow the minds of a group of 5 year olds. And that’s $26.99 well spent.
The sun is totally, like, hot, you know? And if you get enough bits of sunlight together in the same spot, you can do some pretty spectacular things with the resulting 2,400 degrees (Fahrenheit, I assume) of heat. Like melting a tidy little hole through a solid steel plate in mere seconds. If they’d just hook up a Stirling Engine to this thing, our energy problems would be solved. And if not, well… It’d make a pretty badass death ray.
This “Si” is the smallest “Si” ever. The dots in this image are individual silicon atoms, and an atomic force microscope has stuck them one by one (over a period of an hour and a half these two letters) onto a surface of tin atoms. The letters measure about 2 nanometers across, meaning that you’d have to write “Si” over 125,000 times just to make it around one human hair.
As a researcher involved in the project says, “it’s not possible to write any smaller than this.” Not just impossible right now, but impossible ever, since atoms are the absolute smallest things stable enough to let us push them around. Yep, this is it, folks. You’re looking at it. End of the line, smallest “Si” ever, in the entire universe, until the end of time. Mission accomplished.
I have no idea who comes up with this stuff, but researchers at UCLA have apparently constructed a machine that takes X-rays images using a roll of Scotch tape being peeled up as a radiation source. Seriously, that’s all there is to it: put a roll of tape in a vacuum, slowly unpeel it, and if you stick your finger on the thing with some film behind it, you’ll give yourself an honest-to-goodness x-ray.
What seems to happen is that as the tape unsticks itself, electrons jump from the roll to the sticky side of the tape that is being pulled away. When they hit the tape, they slow down a bunch, and release their excess energy in the form of X-rays powerful enough to justify lead underpants. It only works in a vacuum, though, so unless you’re an astronaut, you probably don’t have to worry about developing superpowers after a day of arts ‘n crafts.
Even in Star Trek, erasing specific memories is a difficult, if not impossible, task. Seems like Star Trek was being a little pessimistic about the future, though, since scientists announced yesterday that they have been able to selectively target and erase a specific memory in the brain of a genetically modified mouse, without altering any other memories or harming the mouse at all.
Researchers at the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine stimulated a protein critical to communication between brain cells just as the mouse was trying to remember something specific, and over-expressing that particular protein caused the one single memory that the mouse was remembering to disappear. For example, researchers gave a mouse a toy, then zapped its memory while the mouse was thinking about the toy. Then they gave the mouse the same toy, and the mouse was like, “hey, new toy!”
The idea is that eventually, this procedure could be used to remove incapacitating and traumatic memories from people. That would be pretty awesome, but can’t you just imagine the possibilities? Buy a video game, play it through, zap yourself, rinse, repeat. Movies with plot-twists. Ex-girlfriends. The US election. Sooo much potential here.
Human testing probably won’t happen any time soon, but researchers are already envisioning drugs that mimic this protein over-expression technique, for humans to take whenever we have an especially bad day.
Carbon nanotubes are pretty amazing things. They’re the strongest and stiffest material on Earth: a 1 millimeter diameter thread of them can support a weight of about 7 tons. The problem is that they’re expensive (and tricky) to produce, especially in any quantity that isn’t just broken bits of tubes. The journal Science is reporting that researchers at the NanoTech Institute of the University of Texas at Dallas have come up with a way of cheaply and quickly manufacturing large sheets (we’re talking meters) of long nanotube strands that are completely transparent and stronger than steel. The sheets are “spun” out of a self-assembled nanotube forest, and can be created with fairly simple machinery at a rate of up to 10 meters per minute. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why the sheets couldn’t be made as long or wide as you wanted. The last picture in the series above shows a nanotube sheet supporting droplets of water and juice that weigh about 50,000 times more than the sheet itself… Pretty cool. No information on cost, though. Read the paper here (PDF).
This electron micrograph of long finned squid suckers is one of National Geographic’s Best Science Images of 2008. Have a look at the entire gallery here, or see the first place winner (a picture of diatoms on an invertebrate) after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Well technically, I guess stargazing isn’t all that difficult, all you have to do is look up at night. But knowing what all those dots of light are called? Now that’s the tricky part. You could visit your local observatory and have an astronomer explain what you’re looking at, or you could pick up this nifty software/hardware combo called StellarWindow and stargaze from the comfort of your own backyard. It was developed by a group of Waseda University students in Japan, and it relies on a special USB dongle that features tilt sensors and an electronic compass. You just install the software on your laptop or tablet PC and attach the dongle, and once your position is calibrated, the StellarWindow program will provide a detailed explanation of the night sky you see before you. It even features voice recognition so all you have to do is ask it to find a particular heavenly body and the software will tell you what direction to look. The student’s startup company, Fairy Devices Inc., is expected to release StellarWindow before 2009 for about $244.
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By Evan Ackerman
