World's Oldest Sperm Is Discovered In Shrimp Fossil, And It's Huge

Researchers found the oldest sperm ever discovered--belonging to a small crustacean called a seed shrimp up to 23 million years old--in a pile of bat poop, but lost the robotic submersible Nereus when it imploded thousands of miles below the surface of the ocean in the Kermadec Trench near New Zealand. Elephant seals have as much carbon monoxide in their blood as a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker; this possibly helps them survive deep dives in the ocean while hunting.

The oldest petrified sperm ever discovered is gargantuan, at least for a gamete.

The sperm comes from the early Miocene epoch, between about 23 million and 16 million years ago, and belonged to a tiny crustacean called a seed shrimp or ostracod. Seed shrimp are bivalves like mussels, but sport tiny appendages that make them look like walking beans. Though they measure just millimeters long, their sperm often reaches more than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) in length.

The new fossilized sperm comes from an ancient cave deposit in Australia, where bat guano falling into the water may have helped preserve the cells.

"We can distinguish the typical helical organization of the organelles in the sperm cell, which makes its surface look like a hawser or cable," study researcher Renate Matzke-Karasz, a geobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Germany, said in a statement. "But the most astounding aspect of our findings is that it strongly suggests that the mode of reproduction in these tiny crustaceans has remained virtually unchanged to this day." [See images of the giant sperm and ancient ostracods]

Ancient animals, strange sperm

Seed shrimp aren't the only organisms with absurdly long sperm. The longest sperm in nature today belongs to Drosophila bifurca, a fruit fly whose seed stretches to more than 2 inches (5 centimeters).

A modern ostracod (Newnhamia). These tiny crustaceans create sperm longer than their own bodies.

But ostracod sperm is extra odd, because it lacks the familiar tail, or flagellum, thatpropels most sperm cells. Instead, ostracod sperm consists of a large, elongate head. This entire structures moves by contracting organelles along its membrane, which causes the sperm cell to ripple and rotate.

Matzke-Karasz and her colleagues discovered the fossilized sperm cells in five specimens of ostracods from the Riversleigh fossil site in northwest Queensland, Australia. This site preserves what was once a cave, with copious ancient bat bones and cave formations. Ostracods once lived in standing water inside the cave.

The sperm are at least 16 million years old and fossilized in rock, making them the oldest petrified sperm cells ever discovered. (The previous oldest-known ostracod sperm was only a few thousand years old.) One other sperm find does beat out the ostracod find in age: An insect-like springtail trapped in amber about 40 million years ago had sperm inside its body. But preservation in amber is different than preservation in rock, as amber frequently preserves soft tissue and rock rarely does.

Giant sperm

Matzke-Karasz and her colleagues studied 66 ostracod fossils from the Queensland site using X-ray tomography, which enables a three-dimensional peek inside the fossils.

In 2009, Matzke-Karasz and her team discovered a 100-million-year-old female ostracod with large receptacles for giant sperm, but the cells inside had degraded. The new study proved more fruitful. The researchers discovered sperm cells in various states of preservation in one male and three female ostracods of the speciesHeterocypris collaris, and one female of the species Newnhamia mckenziana.

A cross section of a male Heterocypris collaris, showing Zenker organs, which act as sperm pumps, as well as sperm stored in the seminal vesicle and ducts.

The researchers could not discern the length of the sperm in all of the fossils, but the researchers estimate that the 0.05-inch-long (1.26 mm) H. collaris male had sperm almost exactly its own length — 0.047 to 0.051 inches long (1.2 to 1.3 mm).

The fossils also preserved the ducts in the female ostracod anatomy where the sperm would enter the body. These spiral ducts are longer even than ostracod sperm, sometimes reaching lengths four times that of the ostracod body. The discovery of the giant sperm and giant receptacle ducts provides evidence that these body parts co-evolved and have changed little in millions of years, the researchers report today (May 13) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Jodie Foster Joins Alien Hunt

Jodie Foster, Academy Award winning actor, producer and director, was among 2,557 donors helping SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence -- collective name for a number of activities people undertake to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life) in its lookout for alien radio signal from outer space.

With no successful alien-spotting to boast of, SETI was going through a severe cash crunch due to dwindling interest of funding agencies and high profile individual donors. However, the latest news from the institute will revive the lost interest, as it has announced raising $223,000, exceeding its $200,000 goal. Setistars.org has a big red bold lettered message on the site, "Thank you for all your support to resume."

"The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is good to go and we need to return it to the task of searching newly discovered planetary worlds for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence," Foster was quoted by AFP. She said the telescopes "could turn science fiction into science fact, but only if it is actively searching the skies. I support the effort to bring the array out of hibernation."

SETI officials didn't disclose Foster's donation amount.

"We are so grateful to our donors," said Tom Pierson, who co-founded the SETI Institute with Jill Tarter. "We believe we will be back on the air in September."

Bill Anders, Apollo 8 mission astronaut, said: "... it is absolutely irresponsible of the human race not to be searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence."

The failure of the SETI program to announce an alien radio signal had partially dimmed hopes of humans' encounter with life forms outside Earth. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) went offline in April this year following a SETI announcement about the lack of funding for the institute. The Allen Telescope Array is a facility dedicated to detecting electromagnetic transmission from outer space. 

SETI had announced taking down ATA as the funds from NASA and a number of wealthy donors, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, had exhausted and the institute needed an estimated $5 million to operate for the next two years.

Sources:

Jodie Foster Helps Revive SETI ET Search

Jodie Foster Funds Alien Hunt

THE “CHEMISTRY” OF FALLING IN LOVE

THE “CHEMISTRY” OF FALLING IN LOVE.

  

A psychologist conducted an experiment on how to make two strangers fall in love in 34 minutes. And two subjects got married afterwards!

Still remember the first time you fall in love?  Of course you do! Everybody does! The unexplainable feeling of nervousness when the person you fancy walk across the room. The sweating palms. The irregular sound of your heartbeat. The butterfly in your stomach. The mind that remembers only him and nothing else.

I still remember when one of my good friend, pretty Lisa, get into this madness of falling in love with the guy with bulky arms playing basketball in a court across our apartment. At first it was only “Wow, check out the body!” on one fine afternoon. Then, all of a sudden she knows how to play basketball. Next, she began to dress up and smiling more. The next thing I know, she is receiving unstamped letters on a weekly basis. Her performance in work dropped a bit the first 3 months but after that she flew high. Why are we experiencing all this when we fall in love? 

Stages of Love

 
Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Jersey has proposed 3 stages of love – lust, attraction and attachment. Each stage are driven by different hormones and chemicals produced by the body.

Stage 1 : Lust

This is the first stage of love and is driven by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen in both men and women. These hormones set you up to go out there looking for a potential lover.

Stage 2: Attraction

This is the truly “struck-by-cupid-arrow” phase where both men both become madly in love. When people fall in love they can think of nothing else. They might even lose their appetite and sleep less, preferring to spend hours at a time daydreaming about their new lover. 3 hormones are responsible for this.

·  Dopamine – when released, the body will require less sleep, less food, increased energy, more focused and detail attention to the love ones. It has the same effect of the brain taking cocaine or nicotine.

·  Norepinephrine / Adrenaline - The initial stages of falling for someone activates your stress response, increasing your blood levels of adrenalin. When you unexpectedly bump into your new love, you start to sweat, your heart races and your mouth goes dry.

·  Serotonin - One of love's most important chemicals. The image of the love ones keeps appearing in your thoughts making the person temporarily insane.

Stage 3: Attachment

Attachment is the bond that bonds the couples together for them to have and raise children. Scientists think there might be two major hormones involved in this feeling of attachment; oxytocin and vasopressin.  

Oxytocin (The cuddle hormone) - This is released by the hypothalamus gland during child birth and also helps the breast express milk. It helps cement the strong bond between mother and child. It is also released by both sexes during orgasm and it is thought that it promotes bonding when adults are intimate. The theory goes that the more sex a couple has, the deeper their bond becomes

§         Vasopressin -  is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex. Vasopressin (also called anti-diuretic hormone) works with your kidneys to control thirst. Studies shows that this hormone promotes devotion and protection towards the other partner

How to fall in love?

Understanding the chemical reactions while falling in love and how it happen means that falling in love can be created any time and any where scientifically. York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love and came out with a very simple technique to get the chemistry going. 3 easy steps to follow :

§         Find a complete stranger.

§         Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.

§         Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for 4 minutes

He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married. Cautious! Only try this if you are SINGLE and AVAILABLE!!

Some people find their true love the first time they fall in love and live happily ever after. Some people, on the other hand, have a less favourable experience. No matter how good or bad it turned out to be, the experience will always have a special place in your heart. Want to know what happened to my friend pretty Lisa, with the basketball guy? Well, they dated for a year, getting to know each other. After a year the relationship became sour. Lisa learned that the only thing that she liked about him was his body, and they seemed unable to move beyond that. That’s what happens when you let the “chemistry” of love takes over your mind!

Even Einstein Could Not Have Imagined Technology Used to Directly Detect Gravitational Waves

The director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics talks about the news this week of indirect evidence for gravitational waves and his work to obtain direct evidence.

Physicists were thrilled this week at news of strong evidence for gravitational waves, perturbations of the early universe that confirm it expanded rapidly following the big bang during a period called inflation.

To gain a different perspective on these findings, Carsten Koenneker of Scientific American’s German-language editionSpektrum interviewed Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, about the BICEP2 experiment that detected these long-sought waves.

You study gravitational waves. How important are the new findings from BICEP2 for physics?

These are very important, because they provide "missing evidence" for an inflationary phase in the early history of the universe. Also important: This gravitational-wave evidence is stronger than many of us, including me, had expected. It demonstrates how gravitational waves let us "look at" things that we cannot see in other ways.

Why did it take 100 years for us to detect such a strong signal of these waves, which were predicted long ago by Einstein in his theory of general relativity?

The BICEP results are indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves. There is other indirect evidence, for example the decay of the orbit of the binary pulsar PSR 1913+16 or of the double pulsar PSR J0737-3039. In the coming years we expect to make the first direct observations with the LIGO, VIRGO, GEO600 and KAGRA experiments. These are possible because in the 98 years since Einstein's 1916 prediction there has been a lot of technological progress in lasers, precision optics, electronic control systems, and computers and data analysis. Einstein could not have imagined that, 100 years ago!

Some commentators compare this result with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Do you agree?

Not quite. For me, the important thing is not the confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves. The important thing is that this is strong evidence supporting an inflationary early history in the universe. If this gravitational wave background had not been found, it would have been similar to the Higgs boson not being found: It would have forced us to reconsider this very well-studied model of the early universe.

If these results are confirmed, what would this mean for theoretical physics?

There are an enormous number of different inflationary models. If these results are confirmed, they will rule out a large number of these models. This is very healthy for theoretical physics!

You conduct gravitational wave experiments within the GEO600 experiment in Hannover together with colleagues from Glasgow and Cardiff. What are the differences between your work and BICEP2?

The LIGO, VIRGO and GEO600 experiments are looking for gravitational waves that are passing by Earth right now. These come from neutron stars and black holes that exist in our universe now—today. The BICEP experiment is observing the effects of gravitational waves from almost 14 billion years ago, before stars and planets even formed. The BICEP experiment is looking at very-low-frequency gravitational waves (80 cycles in 14 billion years). The LIGO, VIRGO and GEO600 experiments are looking for gravitational waves with frequencies of hundreds of hertz. The sources are very different!

Do you think that you might directly confirm the existence of gravitational waves with GEO600 independently from BICEP2?

Yes. In the coming years LIGO, VIRGO and GEO are expected to make direct detections of gravitational waves as they fly by Earth. This is different than the indirect detections (the signs of gravitational waves) being seen by BICEP2 in the cosmic background radiation.

These Are North Korea’s 28 State-Approved Hairstyles

It looks a lot of this year's male Oscar winners wouldn't survive the Communist state of North Korea without a haircut.

David Guttenfelder / AP

Photos showing example hair styles hang inside a hair salon in Pyongyang, North Korea on Feb. 20, 2013.

It looks a lot of this year’s male Oscar winners wouldn’t survive the Communist state of North Korea without a haircut.

The Telegraph reports that the world’s favorite hermit state is implementing state-sanctioned haircuts for men and women. Women are allowed to choose one of 14 styles; married women are instructed to keep their tresses short, while the single ladies are allowed let loose with longer, curlier locks. (We’re partial to no. 6 on the ladies’ list, which pays homage to the fabulous feathering that dominated so much of 1980s.)

Men are prohibited from growing their hair longer than 5 cm — less than 2 inches — while older men can get away with up to 7 cm (3 inches).
Oddly enough, the list falls short of including its young leader Kim Jong Un’s current look — a variation on the high-and-tight that may be too much of a power ‘do for North Korea’s non-elite.

David Guttenfelder / AP

Photos showing example hair styles hang inside a barber shop in Pyongyang, North Korea on Feb. 20, 2013.

But hair conformity is nothing new in North Korea. The Daily Mail reports that in 2005 state TV aired a five part series on haircut guidelines for today’s modern socialist lifestyle, and it seems the concept is reemerging under North Korea’s new leader. There are a couple theories as to why this mandate is in place, including that Kim is not a fan of previous styles. Perhaps he just wants to avoid having to grow a pompadour like his father’s.

Cube-Shaped Building Bisected by Sculptural Void

Zaha Hadid Architects turns plan for a set of traditional office towers into a stunning architectural destination.

The master plan for a new business district in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, called for two traditional office towers on adjacent sites in the heart of the development. But when architects began considering the towers’ design, they envisioned fusing the two buildings to form a single monolithic structure. The result is a cube-shaped building with a dramatic free-form void through its center.

The Opus, as the building is known, is under construction as part of Business Bay, a new 195 million m2 development that is expected to become the region’s central business district. The building will rise from two plots at the core of the development, offering views of the tallest building in the world—the Burj Khalifa—as well as the Dubai Stock Exchange and other notable structures. The building will also be adjacent to a new extension of Dubai Creek. The Dubai-based development firm Omniyat Properties owns the project, and following consultations with several architecture firms selected Zaha Hadid Architects, headquartered in London, to design the building.

Even though the development’s master plan called for two separate 30-story tall towers, the architects were drawn by the idea of joining the towers and leaving a void between them. The idea was inspired by the notion of carving space out of a solid block and by the importance of negative space in architecture. “It’s about the visible and the invisible, the solid and the void, and about black and white,” says Christos Passas, the project’s director for Zaha Hadid Architects. As the concept took hold, the architects improved the building’s efficiency by reducing its height to 20 stories and increasing the size of its floor plates. “We compressed and connected the towers to create this structure with a void in the middle and generate about 85,000 square meters of aboveground space,” he says.

The building was initially designed expressly as an office tower but has since evolved to accommodate multiple functions. The first four levels will house an opulent boutique hotel, Michelin-starred destination restaurants, and a cafe, all under an undulating glass roof. Levels 5 through 17 will house offices, and the top three levels—including the “bridge” that links the tops of the two towers—will house luxury apartments. The building will also have seven below-grade levels for parking and back-of-house facilities. “It’s going to be a very exciting layout because the whole building becomes a mixed-use development,” Passas says. “You will have residents in the upper levels, the workforce in the middle levels, and the people who want to go to a hotel and enjoy a night or two in Dubai in the lower levels, all using the building in a different way.”

The building will rise as two towers from a shared podium. Each of the towers will have a concrete core and will be framed in concrete using a posttensioned slab system. So-called “dancing” columns will be angled in various directions to frame the irregularly shaped void between the towers. “Those columns are not vertical because, of course, they follow the form of the void and [the] glazing on the outside of the building,” Passas says. The 50 m long bridge linking the tops of the towers will be framed using steel trusses and will serve as the essential element for completing the void’s sculptural shape. Ramboll, an engineering firm headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, provided structural engineering services in the initial design stages, and BG+E, an engineering firm headquartered in Perth, Western Australia, is serving as the structural engineer as the project moves forward. 

The dark blue-tinted glass within the void will be illuminated at night by light-emitting diodes, which will be programmed to slowly flash, giving the impression that the void is pulsating like a heart.

The void between the two towers will do more than create an intriguing sculptural expression; it will also increase the opportunity for views out of and into the building, which will be clad entirely in glass. The dark blue-tinted glass within the void will be thermoformed to achieve the undulating shape of each panel and will be illuminated at night by light-emitting diodes, which will be programmed to slowly flash, giving the impression that the void is pulsating like a heart. The exterior glass will be somewhat silvery and covered to a fair extent by a dotted pattern—a mirrored frit. “On one hand, the dots obscure the penetration of solar radiation inside the building, and on the other hand, they also reflect the surrounding site,” Passas says. “So when someone stands in front of the building, they can see inside of the building, but they can also see the reflection behind them.”

After being delayed as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis, the building is now under construction and completion is anticipated in May 2016. At that time, the building is expected to join the ranks of Dubai’s growing list of architecturally stunning structures. “It is going to be an architectural destination with substance and good taste; it’s not a building that tries to do too many things,” Passas says. As a result, he says, “It’s going to be a place that people enjoy traveling to see simply because it is beautiful.”

The 3D Economy

The 3D Economy

Forget guns, what happens when everyone prints their own shoes?

Last May, Cody Wilson produced an ingeniously brief but nuanced manifesto about individual liberty in the age of the ever-encroaching techno-state-a single shot fired by a plastic pistol fabricated on a leased 3D printer. While Wilson dubbed his gun The Liberator, his interests and concerns are broader than merely protecting the Second Amendment. As Senior Editor Brian Doherty documented in a December reason profile, Wilson is ultimately aiming for the "transcendence of the state." And yet because of the nature of his invention, many observers reacted to his message as reductively as can be: "OMG, guns!"

Local legislators were especially prone to this response. In California, New York, and Washington, D.C., officials all floated proposals to regulate 3D printed guns. In Philadelphia, the city council successfully passed a measure prohibiting their unlicensed manufacture, with a maximum fine of $2,000.

But if armies of Davids really want to transcend the state, there are even stronger weapons at their disposal: toothbrush holders, wall vases, bottle openers, shower caddies, and tape dispensers. All these consumer goods and more you either can or will soon be able to produce using 3D printers.

Imagine what will happen when millions of people start using the tools that produced The Liberator to make, copy, swap, barter, buy, and sell all the quotidian stuff with which they furnish their lives. Rest in peace, Bed, Bath & Beyond. Thanks for all the stuff, Foxconn, but we get our gadgets from Pirate Bay and MEGA now.

Once the retail and manufacturing carnage starts to scale, the government carnage will soon follow. How can it not, when only old people pay sales tax, fewer citizens obtain their incomes from traditional easy-to-tax jobs, and large corporate taxpayers start folding like daily newspapers? Without big business, big government can't function.

3D printing is a painstaking process, with extruders or lasers methodically building up objects one layer at a time. Most consumer-level devices currently only print in plastic, and only in one color. At online platforms such as Thingiverse.com, where 3D printing enthusiasts share open-source design files and post photos of their wares, the final products often look a little rough around the edges, without the spectacular gloss and streamlining we've come to expect from, say, a Dollar General toilet bowl scrubber.

In many ways, 3D printing barely seems ready to disrupt the monochromatic knick-knacks industry, much less the world. When it takes hours to produce a pencil cup, transcending the state may prove to be a tall order.

And yet in the industrial realm, where 3D printing has been around for decades and goes by the name "additive manufacturing," companies such as Boeing and General Electric are using much more sophisticated machines to produce parts for jet engines. Medical device companies use them to custom-manufacture hearing aids, replacement knees, and designer prosthetics. In time, Cornell University professor Hod Lipson predicts in the 2013 book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Wiley), 3D printers will be capable of constructing houses with plumbing and wiring in place, and printing "vanity organs" for people who want new or improved athletic abilities.

Inevitably, such technologies and capabilities will trickle down, and probably faster and more radically than many people anticipate. While MakerBot Replicators may still look a little too DIY for those of us who have yet to fully exploit the capacities of our microwave ovens, ease of use is evolving rapidly.

In January, Adobe announced that it is adding 3D printing capabilities to Photoshop, giving users the ability to design three-dimensional objects and send them to their own printers or 3D printers in the cloud. A California startup called AIO Robotics is developing a machine that points the way toward a future where the goods in the picture frame aisle at Target become just as easy to duplicate and manipulate as Metallica's back catalog. It's called Zeus. It looks like an unusually stylish kitchen appliance, and its creators, who met as students at the University of Southern California, describe it as the "world's first 3D copy machine."

Place an object in its central chamber, then push a button. Zeus scans the object in 3D. Push another button, and Zeus uses the 3D file it has created to reproduce an exact plastic replica of your object. In essence, Zeus makes "making" even easier than consuming. If you decide you really, really like the pasta bowl your mom gave you for Christmas, you don't even have to go to the mall, or surf Amazon.com to get another. Just throw it in Zeus and push a button!

In almost all visions of the 3D printed future, manufacturing changes dramatically. If a high-end 3D printer can fabricate a pistol or a panini press on demand, why bother with huge production runs, global distribution networks, warehoused inventories, and the cheap human labor that only under-regulated developing nations can provide? While it will still make sense to produce some goods in large quantities using traditional methods, manufacturing is poised to become a far more local, just-in-time, customized endeavor.

But if the nature of manufacturing is poised to change dramatically, what about the nature of consumption? In many ways, it's even harder to imagine a city of, say, 50,000 without big-box retailers than it is to imagine it without a daily newspaper. So perhaps 3D printing won't alter our old habits that substantially. We'll demand locally made kitchen mops, but we'll still get them at Target. We'll acquire a taste for craft automobile tires, but we'll obtain them from some third party that specializes in their production. Commercial transactions will still occur.

But if history is any guide, more and more of us will soon be engaging in all sorts of other behaviors too. Making our own goods. Sharing, swapping, and engaging in peer-to-peer commerce. Appropriating the ideas and designs of others and applying them to our own ends. Combining resources and collaborating on extremely large and ambitious projects we couldn't hope to accomplish alone. And over time these new behaviors will have consequential impacts on scores of products, companies, and industries.

Already, according to a study authored by Michigan Technological University engineering professor Joshua Pearce and six others, there are significant economic incentives for consumers to pursue 3D printing. According to Pearce's calculations, a person who constructs an open-source 3D printer called the RepRap at a cost of around $575 for parts can theoretically avoid paying between $290 and $1,920 a year to retailers simply by using the device to print 20 common items (iPhone case, shower curtain rings, shoe orthotics, etc.).

If you are willing to invest some time in its construction-Pearce estimates that the RepRap takes around 24 hours to build-the printer can quickly pay for itself, even if you don't use it all that often. If you start making orthotics for your neighbors, who knows, it could even turn into a profit center.

Soon, we'll begin to see the rise of manufacturing Matt Drudges and printer-sharing Reddits. So many different producers will be producing so many different products that it will become harder and harder for even well-established and trusted brands to charge for anything but the scarcest and most coveted goods. In a bid to survive, places like Walmart and Best Buy will begin to offer stuff as a subscription-you'll get 200 lbs. of goods per year for a monthly fee of $19.99.

But maybe even that will seem too steep to you, or just not as autonomous as you'd like. Ultimately, 3D printers and the distributed manufacturing they enable will democratize and mainstream survivalism. You won't need five remote acres, heavy equipment, and a lot of practical know-how to live off the grid. In the realm of your commercial life, at least, you'll be able to DIY in New York City.

Be prepared, however, to expect some pushback from your local regulators. Over the past decade or so, as newer technologies and fewer opportunities for traditional employment have prompted more people to act in entrepreneurially innovative ways, government's response has been the same: Consumers must be protected against strawberry balsamic jam made in home kitchens. Tourists must be protected against immaculately maintained carriage houses that can be rented on a daily basis for below-hotel rates. Travelers must be protected from cheap rides from the airport.

When government realizes that self-produced plastic shower curtain rings are far more potentially disruptive than self-produced plastic pistols, it'll be more than libertarian entrepreneur-iconoclasts at risk.

Engineers design ‘living materials’

Engineers design ‘living materials’

Hybrid materials combine bacterial cells with nonliving elements that can conduct electricity or emit light.

An artist's rendering of a bacterial cell engineered to produce amyloid nanofibers that incorporate particles such as quantum dots (red and green spheres) or gold nanoparticles. 

Inspired by natural materials such as bone — a matrix of minerals and other substances, including living cells — MIT engineers have coaxed bacterial cells to produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots.

These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells, which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales, with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.

The new materials represent a simple demonstration of the power of this approach, which could one day be used to design more complex devices such as solar cells, self-healing materials, or diagnostic sensors, says Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering. Lu is the senior author of a paper describing the living functional materials in the March 23 issue of Nature Materials.

“Our idea is to put the living and the nonliving worlds together to make hybrid materials that have living cells in them and are functional,” Lu says. “It’s an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis, which is very different from what people do now, which is usually a top-down approach.”

The paper’s lead author is Allen Chen, an MIT-Harvard MD-PhD student. Other authors are postdocs Zhengtao Deng, Amanda Billings, Urartu Seker, and Bijan Zakeri; recent MIT graduate Michelle Lu; and graduate student Robert Citorik.

Self-assembling materials

Lu and his colleagues chose to work with the bacterium E. coli because it naturally produces biofilms that contain so-called “curli fibers” — amyloid proteins that help E. coli attach to surfaces. Each curli fiber is made from a repeating chain of identical protein subunits called CsgA, which can be modified by adding protein fragments called peptides. These peptides can capture nonliving materials such as gold nanoparticles, incorporating them into the biofilms.

By programming cells to produce different types of curli fibers under certain conditions, the researchers were able to control the biofilms’ properties and create gold nanowires, conducting biofilms, and films studded with quantum dots, or tiny crystals that exhibit quantum mechanical properties. They also engineered the cells so they could communicate with each other and change the composition of the biofilm over time.

First, the MIT team disabled the bacterial cells’ natural ability to produce CsgA, then replaced it with an engineered genetic circuit that produces CsgA but only under certain conditions — specifically, when a molecule called AHL is present. This puts control of curli fiber production in the hands of the researchers, who can adjust the amount of AHL in the cells’ environment. When AHL is present, the cells secrete CsgA, which forms curli fibers that coalesce into a biofilm, coating the surface where the bacteria are growing.

The researchers then engineered E. coli cells to produce CsgA tagged with peptides composed of clusters of the amino acid histidine, but only when a molecule called aTc is present. The two types of engineered cells can be grown together in a colony, allowing researchers to control the material composition of the biofilm by varying the amounts of AHL and aTc in the environment. If both are present, the film will contain a mix of tagged and untagged fibers. If gold nanoparticles are added to the environment, the histidine tags will grab onto them, creating rows of gold nanowires, and a network that conducts electricity. 

‘Cells that talk to each other’

The researchers also demonstrated that the cells can coordinate with each other to control the composition of the biofilm. They designed cells that produce untagged CsgA and also AHL, which then stimulates other cells to start producing histidine-tagged CsgA.

“It’s a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that’s increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time,” Lu says. “Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals.”

To add quantum dots to the curli fibers, the researchers engineered cells that produce curli fibers along with a different peptide tag, called SpyTag, which binds to quantum dots that are coated with SpyCatcher, a protein that is SpyTag’s partner. These cells can be grown along with the bacteria that produce histidine-tagged fibers, resulting in a material that contains both quantum dots and gold nanoparticles.

These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells, Lu says. The researchers are also interested in coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels. Other potential applications include diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering.

“I think this is really fantastic work that represents a great integration of synthetic biology and materials engineering,” says Lingchong You, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University who was not part of the research team. 

The research was funded by the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the Hertz Foundation, the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Can Men Breastfeed?

Male lactation(Male breastfeeding)

Newborn babies of both sexes can produce milk, this is called neonatal milk. This is caused by combination of effects of maternal harmouns before birth. Breast milk production occurs in about 5% newborns and can remain till 2 months.

We can't consider neonatal milk as male lactation. Male lactation was of some interest toAlexander von Humboldt, who reports in Voyage aux rgions quinoxiales du Nouveau Continent of a citizen of the village Arenas (close to Cumana ) who allegedly nurtured his son for three months when his wife was ill.

Male mammals of many species have been observed to lactate under unusual or pathogenic conditions such as extreme stress, feeding castrated animals with phytoestrogens or animals with pituitary tumors. Hence it was hypothesized that while most mammals could easily develop the ability to lactate this does not provide the males, or the species with any evolutionary advantage. While the males could in theory improve the chance to pass on their genes by improving the feeding their offspring by male lactation, most of them have developed other strategies such as mating with additional partners. Presently only very few species are known where male lactation occurs and it is not well understood what evolutionary factors control the development of this trait.

There are several stories that human male can breastfeed. The stories include a sailor who put his son to his breast to quiet him and started producing milk; a South American peasant who sustained his child with his own breast milk during his wife's illness; and a Chippewa man who put his infant to his breast following the death of his wife and produced enough milk to rear the child.

The phenomenon hasn't stopped. In 2002, a Sri Lankan man named B. Wijeratne lost his wife and was left to care for their 18- month-old daughter. When the child refused powdered milk, Wijeratne tried something different. "Unable to see her cry, I offered my breast,"Wijeratne told a Sri Lankan newspaper. "That's when I discovered I could breastfeed."

Men posses mammary glands and pituitary glands which are vital components for lactating.

For a human to breastfeed these glands have to be activated somehow. In women this happens during pregnancy.

All men produce small amounts of prolactin during their lifetime. For example it's released after organism and may be responsible for the feeling of satisfaction and relaxation. But it's never present in large amount for men to breastfeed.

This often happens to mother who adopt children and suddenly find they can nurse. And according to some researchers there a long history of it happening in men too.

Simple Ways To Improve Eye Sight

More than 25 million people worldwide are affected by age-related macular degeneration and cataracts, which according to the American Optometric Association is the leading cause of blindness in people over age 55. These diseases are often caused by oxidation and inflammation of the eyes.

The good news: The most common diseases — age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), cataracts, glaucoma, and dry eye disease — are all preventable to some extent. The first step, if you smoke, then it is need to be stopped. Smoking increases your risk of cataracts, glaucoma, dry eyes, and age-related macular degeneration.

1  Eat foods that promote eye health

Research has found that foods rich in the nutrients lutein and zeaxanthin can reduce the risk of chronic eye diseases. Other studies have found that a diet rich in vitamins C and E, beta carotene, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids can also prevent age-related eye diseases. Try to incorporate these foods into your meals:

Green, leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale, and collards

Salmon, tuna, and other oily fish

Eggs, nuts, beans, and other non-meat protein sources

Oranges and other citrus fruits or juices

2. Move your computer screen to just below eye level 

The major reason for losing eye vision is our continuous watching television and sitting in front of computer screen  and laptop . Your eyes will close slightly when you’re staring at the computer, minimizing fluid evaporation and the risk of dry eye syndrome, says John Sheppard, M.D., who directs the ophthalmology residency program at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.

  3. Wear Sunglasses  

The right kind of sunglasses will help protect your eyes from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays.

Choose sunglasses that block 99% to 100% of both UVA and UVB rays. Wraparound lenses help protect your eyes from the side. Polarized lenses reduce glare when driving.

If you wear contact lenses, some offer UV protection. It's still a good idea to wear sunglasses for more protection.

4. Rest Properly

Taking Enough sleep and break during the work may also help us in improving eye sight. It is  important to rest your eyes once in a while! If you work on a computer all day, your eyes are probably under a lot of strain. Take a break for about 10 minutes for every 50 minutes spent in front of the screen. Simply close your eyes for a minute or get up and walk around the office. Focus on something that isn’t a screen. You can also rest your eyes by following the 10-10-10 rule. This means you should look at something 10 feet away for 10 seconds for every 10 minutes you spend working on the computer.

Additionally, getting around eight hours of sleep a night is incredibly important for your eye health. If your eyes are well-rested, they will be in much better condition! If you currently do not sleep enough or take enough breaks at work, try it out for a week and see the difference it can make!

5. Exercise the muscles around your eyes

 This exercise is done to stimulate the muscles around your eye balls (that are present within the eye socket). Rotate your eyeballs, first to the right and left, then upwards and downwards. Do this in the clockwise and anti-clockwise direction for about three to four repetitions.

6. Bat those eyelids

Blinking is the eyes natural way to renew the moisture in the eyes and give it some much needed relief. To help your eyes relax, make it a habit to blink after every five to six seconds.

7. Turn down the heat in your house. 

Heat dries out the air, which, in turn, dries out your eyes. In the winter, you might also try adding some humidity with a humidifier or even bunching a lot of plants together in the room in which you spend the most time.

 Reference:

Rebuild Your Vision