Science & Technology News.

[Puremairmon]

Beetroot increase blood pressure..its a natural remedy for low Blood pressure having patients !!!

 

[Prometheus]

New armoured dinosaur with four foot horns on its head found by scientiasts

An armoured dinosaur as big as a tank that was even a match for Tyrannosaurus Rex has been discovered by scientists.

The giant rhino like creature, which was 22 ft long, was so formidable because it had two four foot horns sprouting from its head which could gouge even the largest predator.
Fossil bones of an adult animal, which weighed four to five tons and stood six to seven feet tall at the shoulder and hip, were recovered from a site in the state of Coahuila, southern Mexico, in 2003.
The plant-eater named Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna was an ancestor of the famous three-horned Triceratops.
Like other horned dinosaurs, or ceratopsids, it had a large bony plate behind its head which would have acted as a shield.
But Coahuilaceratops' most notable feature are the two enormous horns that jut out
from above its eyes. They are the biggest horns ever uncovered.
Scientists believe the horns were most often used in mating or jousting contests rather than to fight off predators.<
Lead researcher Dr Mark Loewen, from the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City, US, said: "The horned dinosaurs are an extraordinary example of vertebrate evolution.
"They evolved and diversified ... along a thin strip of land that stretched from Alaska to Mexico. Finding this horned dinosaur so far south in Mexico offers us a different picture of what the ancestors of Triceratops were like."
A description of the dinosaur appears in a book, New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs, published this week by Indiana University Press.
The site where the fossils were discovered, called the Cerro del Pueblo Formation, is in an arid Mexican desert.
However 72 million years ago the region was a humid estuary with lush vegetation.

 

[Prometheus]

A 'cascade' of brain activity as people die could explain near death experiences

Mysterious near death experiences may be caused by a surge of electrical activity in the brain moments before it dies, it has been claimed.
Doctors believe that a burst of brain activity occurs just before death and this could account for vivid "spiritual" experiences reported by those who come back from the brink.
The researchers suggest this surge could be why some patients who have been revived when close to death report sensations such as walking towards a bright light or a feeling that they are floating above their body.
“We think the near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy released as the brain runs out of oxygen,” said Dr Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University medical centre in Washington.
“As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations.”
Many revived patients have reported being bathed in bright light or suffused with a sense of peace as they start to walk into a light-filled tunnel.
A few even say they experienced visions of religious figures such as Jesus or Muhammad or Krishna, while others describe floating above their own deathbed, observing the scene.
Dr Chawla believes such experiences have a biological explanation rather than a metaphysical one.
In the research he used an electroencephalograph (EEG), a device that measures brain activity, to monitor seven terminally ill people.
The medical purpose of the devices was to make sure that the patients, suffering from conditions such as cancer and heart failure, were sufficiently sedated to be out of pain.
However, Dr Chawla noticed that moments before death the patients experienced a burst in brainwave activity lasting from 30 seconds to three minutes.
The activity was similar to that seen in people who are fully conscious, even though the patients appeared asleep and had no blood pressure. Soon after the surge abated, they were pronounced dead.
Dr Chawla’s research, published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, is thought to be the first to suggest that near-death experiences have a particular physiological cause.
Although it describes only seven patients, he says he has seen the same things happening “at least 50 times” as people die.A 'cascade' of brain activity as people die could explain near death experiences - Telegraph

 

[Hyde]

interesting video - so i thought why not share here

 

[Trident]

Volunteers begin Mars500 isolation

Six would-be cosmonauts have entered a sealed facility where they will spend 18 months with no windows and only e-mail contact with the outside world.

The men are taking part in the Mars500 project, which aims to simulate a mission to Mars.

They entered the craft, located at a medical institute in Moscow, just before 1100 BST on Thursday. Scientists say the study will help them understand how humans would cope on a long journey to another world. During a press conference on Thursday morning, the six men - three Russians, two Europeans and a Chinese man - all described what motivated them to take part in the experiment. Twenty-six year old Wang Yue from China, the youngest of the volunteers, said he was excited to be involved in a project that he felt would be "excellent for science and for all of humankind".

French volunteer Romain Charles acknowledged that it would be a "difficult" mission and said that he would miss his family and "the Sun and fresh air".

Space on Earth
The project has been designed to be as realistic as possible even though some elements - such as the weightless conditions of spaceflight - cannot be recreated here on Earth."They will have to cope with limited consumables, for example," said Dr Martin Zell from the European Space Agency, a key partner in the project.

full story

BBC News - Volunteers begin Mars500 isolation

 

[Kompromat]

Scientists identify cancer stem cells

Saturday, 05 Jun, 2010




HONG KONG: Hong Kong scientists say they have identified the cancer stem cells responsible for the spread of colorectal cancer to other organs and believe the find will revolutionise treatment.



Current treatments regard all cancer cells as alike, but the Hong Kong University researchers discovered that cancers contain a small number of stem cells responsible for starting and maintaining tumours.



&#8220;It will revolutionise the approach to cancer treatment in future,&#8221; one researcher, Ronnie Poon, told the South China Morning Post.



&#8220;If you just target mature cancer cells, you are not targeting the roots of the disease. What the industry needs to work on now is drugs that will target cancer stem cells,&#8221; the professor of surgery said.



The spread of colorectal cancer to other organs is usually fatal. The cancer is one of the most common in both men and women and kills around 50,000 people a year in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute.



The ground-breaking research will help doctors to predict patients whose cancers are liable to spread and help development of treatments to specifically target the cancer stem cells, called CD26+, which are more resistant to conventional treatments than more mature cancer cells.



&#8220;Identification and characterisation of this subpopulation of cancer stem cells will enable us to evaluate for different molecular targeting drugs that can specifically target these cells,&#8221; researcher Roberta Pang said in a press release on their findings.



&#8220;In the long term, it should facilitate the development of more useful, safe and specific drugs that can be used in combination with chemotherapy to completely eradicate the tumour.&#8221;



Colorectal cancer is the second-most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide.



Even with surgical removal of the primary tumour, cancer develops in other organs in more than 50 percent of patients, usually proving fatal despite further aggressive treatment and surgery. -AFP

DAWN.COM | Sci-Tech | Scientists identify cancer stem cells

 

[Silent observer]

Pakistani researchers have discovered the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element, so far only discovered and found in Pakistan , has been named Zardarium (Symbol = Zm). It has one Presitron, 1 Priministron, 77 Ministrons, 98 deputy Ministrons, 298 National Assemblions, and 100 Senatrons, giving it an atomic mass of 575.

These 575 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Zardarium has no electrons, it is inert, impotent and ineffective. However, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Zardarium can cause a reaction, that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete, depending upon the kick-back percentage that Zardarium can get. It is neither radioactive nor active and is largely inert except for its psychopathic attraction for corrupt morons, Ministrons, Assemblions and Senatrons. In this respect, another two important inert iso-dopes, Nawazium (Symbol = Nm) and Shahbazium (Symbol = Sm) play a vital role as catalysts by their moronic ineptitude.

Zardarium has a normal half-life of 2 to 5 years. It does not decay, but instead, the whole country undergoes a re-organisational decay in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. The most important chemical quality of Zardarium is its magnetic properties for gold, Dollars, and corrupt morons.

In fact, Zardarium 's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become Ministrons and forming iso-dopes as a by-product. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Zardarium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as a critical morass. When catalysed with money, Zardarium becomes Presidentium (symbol = Pz), an element that radiates just as much energy as Zardarium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

 

[FreekiN]

 

[xenia]

^is it hubble space?i mean its mechanism?

 

[gubbi]

^is it hubble space?i mean its mechanism?

Its not Hubble. The concept is fairly simple.

Light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 m / s. So one light year is the distance traveled by light in one year.

If there is a giant mirror somewhere in space at a distance of say a million light years (distance traveled by light in a million years), that mirror will basically reflect the light emanating from Earth a million years ago. The reflected light will then take another million years to travel back to Earth! So that means that when you look into the mirror using telescopes, you are basically looking in the past - 2 million years into Earth's past!!

Now, if only we had worm holes to go through to place such giant mirrors in strategic locations in space, we might as well have a visual record of Earth's past!

 

[xenia]

Its not Hubble. The concept is fairly simple.

Light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 m / s. So one light year is the distance traveled by light in one year.

If there is a giant mirror somewhere in space at a distance of say a million light years (distance traveled by light in a million years), that mirror will basically reflect the light emanating from Earth a million years ago. The reflected light will then take another million years to travel back to Earth! So that means that when you look into the mirror using telescopes, you are basically looking in the past - 2 million years into Earth's past!!

Now, if only we had worm holes to go through to place such giant mirrors in strategic locations in space, we might as well have a visual record of Earth's past!

thanks for ur explanation..cleard my head!
i was always confused by this "looking into past" thing of hubble!
is it following a somewhat similar mechanism?but it was launched years back!

 

[gubbi]

A 'cascade' of brain activity as people die could explain near death experiences

Mysterious near death experiences may be caused by a surge of electrical activity in the brain moments before it dies, it has been claimed.
Doctors believe that a burst of brain activity occurs just before death and this could account for vivid "spiritual" experiences reported by those who come back from the brink.A 'cascade' of brain activity as people die could explain near death experiences - Telegraph

This is so true. The burst of brain activity due to brain cells gasping for oxygen supply explains NDEs.

Surprisingly such NDEs can be experienced in laboratory conditions. It initially surprised anesthesiologists when patients talked about seeing a "light at the end of a tunnel" after being administered Ketamine - a general anesthetic!

Check out these links:
Biological analysis and theories

In the 1990s, Dr. Rick Strassman conducted research on the psychedelic drug Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) at the University of New Mexico.[40][41][42] Strassman advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near-death was the cause of the near-death experience phenomenon. Only two of his test subjects reported NDE-like aural or visual hallucinations, although many reported feeling as though they had entered a state similar to the classical NDE. His explanation for this was the possible lack of panic involved in the clinical setting and possible dosage differences between those administered and those encountered in actual NDE cases. All subjects in the study were also very experienced users of DMT and/or other psychedelic/entheogenic agents. Some speculators consider that if subjects without prior knowledge on the effects of DMT had been used during the experiment, it is possible more volunteers would have reported feeling as though they had experienced an NDE.
Dr. Karl Jansen, a New Zealand-born psychiatrist, claims to have reproduced the effects of NDEs through the use of ketamine, thus giving potential evidence of a biological cause of the experience.[43]
Critics have argued that neurobiological models often fail to explain NDEs that result from close brushes with death, where the brain does not actually suffer physical trauma, such as a near-miss automobile accident. Such events may however have neurobiological effects caused by stress.
In a new theory devised by Richard Kinseher in 2006, the knowledge of the Sensory Autonomic System is applied in the NDE phenomenon. His theory states that the experience of looming death is an extremely strange paradox to a living organism—and therefore it will start the NDE: during the NDE, the individual becomes capable of "seeing" the brain performing a scan of the whole episodic memory (even prenatal experiences), in order to find a stored experience which is comparable to the input information of death. All these scanned and retrieved bits of information are permanently evaluated by the actual mind, as it is searching for a coping mechanism out of the potentially fatal situation. Kinseher feels this is the reason why a near-death experience is so unusual.
The theory also states that out-of-body experiences, accompanied by NDEs, are an attempt by the brain to create a mental overview of the situation and the surrounding world. The brain then transforms the input from sense organs and stored experience (knowledge) into a dream-like idea about oneself and the surrounding area.
Whether or not these experiences are hallucinatory, they do have a profound impact on the observer. Many psychologists not necessarily pursuing the paranormal, such as Susan Blackmore, have recognized this. These scientists are not trying to debunk the experience, but are instead searching for biological causes of NDEs.[44]
According to Engmann,[45] near-death experiences of people who are clinically dead are psychopathological symptoms caused by a severe malfunction of the brain resulting from the cessation of cerebral blood circulation. An important question is whether it is possible to "translate" the bloomy experiences of the reanimated survivors into psychopathologically basic phenomena, e.g. acoasms, central narrowing of the visual field, autoscopia, visual hallucinations, activation of limbic and memory structures according to Moody's stages. The symptoms suppose a primary affliction of the occipital and temporal cortices under clinical death. This basis could be congruent with the thesis of pathoclisis—the inclination of special parts of the brain to be the first to be damaged in case of disease, lack of oxygen, or malnutrition—established eighty years ago by C. and O. Vogt.[46] According to that thesis, the basic phenomena should be similar in all patients with near-death experiences. But a crucial problem is to distinguish these basic psychopathological symptoms from the secondary mental associated experiences which may result from a reprocessing of the basic symptoms under the influence of the person's cultural and religious views.
An article by Netherlands researchers Pim van Lommel et al., argues, "With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one."[15]

The Ketamine Model of the Near Death Experience: A Central Role for the NMDA Receptor

How to Have a Near-Death Experience

Near-death experiences can be produced using a drug called ketamine which blocks receptors in the brain for the neurotransmitter glutamate. All features of a classic near-death experience can be produced by the intravenous administration of 50 - 100 mg of ketamine. Ketamine is a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic related to phencyclidine. Both drugs are arylcyclohexylamines - they are not opioids and are not related to LSD. In contrast to PCP, ketamine is relatively safe, an uncontrolled drug in most countries, and remains in use as an anesthetic for children. Anesthetists attempt to prevent patients from having near-death experiences (so-called "emergence phenomena") by the co-administration of benzodiazepines and other sedative substances which produce "true" unconsciousness rather than dissociation.

Ketamine produces an altered state of consciousness that is very different from that of the "psychedelic" drugs such as LSD. It can produce all the features of the near-death experience, including travel through a dark tunnel into light, the conviction that one is dead, telepathic communion with God, visions, out-of-body experiences and mystical states. If given intravenously, it has a short action with an abrupt end. One ketamine user talked of "becoming a disembodied mind or soul, dying and going to another world." Childhood events may also be re-lived. The loss of contact with ordinary reality and the sense of participation in another reality are more pronounced and less easily resisted than is usually the case with LSD. The dissociative experiences often seem so genuine that users are not sure that they have not actually left their bodies.

However, please DON'T try anything at home. Its dangerous and lethal, not to mention illegal in most countries.

 

[gubbi]

thanks for ur explanation..cleard my head!
i was always confused by this "looking into past" thing of hubble!
is it following a somewhat similar mechanism?but it was launched years back!

Actually yes. When Hubble peers into the black depths of space, any light that falls onto its mirrors started from the stars billions or millions of years ago. The light traveled the vast distances of space over a period of billions or millions of years before being captured by Hubble's mirrors.
So whatever light Hubble captures is actually millions of years old, so what we see now through Hubble is actually a peek into the Universe's past!
Interesting aint it?

And Hubble was launched only 20 years back!

 

[gubbi]

Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

A geek rap to explain CERN's LHC: n-joi!

 

[Prometheus]

Snakes in mysterious global decline

Snakes may be declining across the world, according to a global study.
Researchers examined records for 17 snake populations covering eight species over the last few decades, and found most had declined markedly.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, some populations shrank in number abruptly around 1998.
Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers describe the findings as "alarming" but say much more work is needed to understand the causes.
"This is the first time that data has been analysed in this way, and what we've shown is that in different parts of the world we seem to have this steep decline in a short period," said project leader Chris Reading.
"It surprised us when we realised what we were looking at," he told BBC News.
"And we don't have a clue what it was about that period of time (around 1998)."
Dr Reading's team at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology ran the study with institutions in Australia, France, Italy and Nigeria.
Data deficiencies

With so many populations in different places showing decline, it's more than co-incidence
Chris Reading
The main problem for anyone wanting to conduct a global survey such as this is simply lack of data.
Monitoring snake populations means marking the individuals in some way - typically by snipping a pattern into their scales, or implanting a microchip.
Field seasons can last for many months, and have to be repeated annually.
The researchers believe they amassed most, if not all, long-term datasets for this study - although "long-term" in this context means going back more than one decade, in some cases more than two.
Nevertheless, within this relatively short timeframe, eight of the 17 populations were seen to fall markedly in size - some by more than 90&#37; - with only one showing any sign of a rise.
Species in decline include the asp and the smooth snake from Europe, the Gabon viper and rhinoceros viper of West Africa, and the royal python.

Many of the studies involve tagging snakes so they can be followed
Populations shrank even in protected areas, suggesting that the progressive loss of habitat for wild animals being seen all over the world is not the only cause.
Similar steep declines observed in frogs and newts in an earlier period were eventually found to be caused by the fungal disease chytridiomycosis.
The year when many of the snake declines began - 1998 - raises the question of whether climatic factors might be involved, as very strong El Nino conditions contributed to making it the hottest year recorded in modern times.
Dr Reading's research group suggests many causes might be involved, and is appealing to other researchers to come forward with any more long-term datasets that might broaden the picture.
"The purpose of this paper was to say 'this is what we've found', and to say to other herpetologists 'now go and look at your own data'," he said.
"But I think that with so many populations in different places showing decline, it's more than co-incidence."BBC News - Snakes in mysterious global decline