If Google is hoarding all of the information in the world, I want in on some of it.  Lured by the siren song of  the new ocean features in Google Earth 5, I took the plunge.  Embarked upon my maiden voyage.  Threw myself in with the sharks.  Ran out of sea cliches.  Downloaded Google 5 in all of its beta-riffic glory.

Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown for the first time that the active training of the working memory brings about visible changes in the number of dopamine receptors in the human brain. The study, which is published in the prestigious scientific journal Science, was conducted with the help of PET scanning and provides deeper insight into the complex interplay between cognition and the brain's biological structure.

"Brain biochemistry doesn't just underpin our mental activity; our mental activity and thinking process can also affect the biochemistry," says Professor Torkel Klingberg, who led the study. "This hasn't been demonstrated in humans before, and opens up a floodgate of fascinating questions."

Sensors able to identify individuals’ brain patterns and heart rhythms could become part of security systems which also use more traditional forms of biometric recognition, thanks to pioneering work being done by European researchers. 

Since 9/11, the need to secure important facilities from terrorist attack has become a top priority around the world. And one of the keys to this is making sure the right people are allowed into sensitive areas and the wrong people are kept out.

A range of technologies and systems have been deployed in the past few years, but the more successful they are the more obtrusive they tend to be, causing disruptions and delays.

Want to learn how to survive in exteme environments?   A marine bacterium living 8,000 feet below the ocean's surface can show you the way.   

The bacterium Nautilia profundicola, a microbe that survives near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, was found in a fleece-like lining on the backs of Pompeii worms, a type of tubeworm that lives at hydrothermal vents, and in bacterial mats on the surfaces of the vents' chimney structures.

One gene, called rgy, allows the bacterium to manufacture a protein called reverse gyrase when it encounters extremely hot fluids from the Earth's interior released from the sea floor.

Show Me The Science Month Day 11

Imagine a world where the major source of human nutrition was beer. That may sound fantastic to some of you, but now imagine that, in this beer-world, there are no bottle openers and no twist-off caps. To get at the beer, you have to open the bottles with your teeth. Day in, day out, you're opening bottles with your teeth. If the world continued like this for a few thousand generations, how would the human jaw evolve into a better beer bottle opener?

2 million years ago, our ancestors lived in such a world. OK, so it didn't involve beer-bottles, but our ancestors did have to use their teeth to get at what was essentially armored but highly nutritious food - nuts and seeds.

Oral medication is convenient, but its specificity is lousy.  Your stomach gets a concentrated dose of every pill you take, and the rest of it gets dispersed where your stomach sees fit.  Even the treatment of the subsequent organs in the digestive tract requires a means to sidestep the stomach.  

A notable feature of the gastrointestinal tract is its well-defined acidity gradient, starting in the harsh stomach and steadily tapering toward neutral in the colon.   By creating a polymer that automatically responds to acidity, researchers are develop drug delivery methods that passively target specific locations in the GI tract.  

Oramed Pharmaceuticals, a drug development company aiming to make alternative delivery systems to injectable medication, has dedicated research to finding a solution to make oral insulin, thus making managing diabetes easier and painless.

Parallel to developing an effective oral medication, they have come upon another delivery method, bypassing the harsh portion of the gastrointestinal system altogether. Oramed recently announced that they have concluded proof of concept on their other alternative to injectable insulin: insulin suppositories.

Based on their research, the insulin suppositories showed rapid insulin absorption and actively lowered blood glucose levels. These results were well tolerated by participants and no adverse symptoms were seen.

Throughout history, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and PhD students lacking funding for actual research have turned to the thought experiment in hopes of discovering something publishable, thereby retaining tenure and/or attracting the admiration of comely undergraduates.



The best thought experiments throw light into dark corners of the universe and also provide other scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and destitute PhD students a way to kill time while waiting for the bus.



Below is a classic thought experiment, pillaged from my book The Geeks' Guide to World Domination (Be Afraid, Beautiful People). I'll post a new thought experiment each day this week.

Cooperation, despite being now considered the third force of evolution, just behind mutation and natural selection, is difficult to explain in the context of an evolutionary process based on competition between individuals and selfish behaviour. But this puzzle, that has haunted scientists for decades, is now a little closer to be solved by research about to be published on the journal Physical Review Letters.

Scientists can easily explain the structural order that makes steel and aluminium out of molten metal and they have discovered the molecular changes that take place as water turns to ice, but glass blowers have been plying their trade since the first century BC and we have only just begun to understand what makes molten glass solid.

One hundred and fifty years after the construction of Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition, scientists at The University of Nottingham and the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with the University of Bath, have presented an explanation of how atoms behave as glass cools and hardens. Their research has just been published online in Science Express, in advance of publication in Science.