Soon the world will learn who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Do you remember Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon of the following announcement?
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 “for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes”, with one half of the prize to
Peter Agre
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA
“for the discovery of water channels”
and one half of the prize to
Roderick MacKinnon
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, USA
“for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”. [1]
Two Cell Membrane Channels
There is a subset of people in the environmental conservation movement who hate their fellow man - they like nature but don't think anyone outside of their companies should enjoy it, they should just pay companies to raise money for advocacy.
Do you remember the "e-e-gamma-gamma-met" event ? I am sure you do not. It is an incredibly striking event that appeared toward the end of the Tevatron Run I in the CDF data. One event that was so incredibly striking, so impossible to produce through standard model processes, that many in my experiment felt sure that it was going to be the portal through which we would enter the realm of Supersymmetry, or other fancy new physics scenarios.
Most years, we generally don't worry about the flu (unless we're paid to worry about it, or we belong to an especially susceptible population). Yet some years, like this one, threats of a pandemic flu virus make it on everyone's radar screen. So exactly what is it that makes a flu virus reach pandemic proportions?
A group of researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control, Mt. Sinai and Harvard
recently used engineered versions of the disastrous 1918 flu virus (don't try this at home!) to learn just what makes a flu virus go global.
Just why do we have a space station, anyway? That's a question of relevance, because it turns out we might not have one after 2015. The International Space Science Station (ISS) is a football-field sized structure able to support six people 220 miles above us. It is a symbol of international cooperation, a marvel of technology, a new site for tourism and, to some, a project to be terminated in 2015.
What we've gotten from it? Some intangibles, some useful stuff.
- advancing our space capability
- increasing our limits on how long people can live in orbit
- keeping nuclear scientists from going rogue after the breakup of the Soviet Union
- research that benefits Earth
Men suffer noise-induced hearing loss more than women, it seems. Guys just rock out more, you might think. Better to burn out than fade away, and all that.
But it's primarily married white guys who can't turn the volume down, which means our families will have the next 70 years of repeating everything twice, and louder, because, let's face it, guys with rock star fantasies won't wear hearing aids. What's to be done?
Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is a preventable though increasingly prevalent hearing disorder that results from exposure to high-intensity sound, especially over a long period of time. Thanks, iPod. Now turn down the Journey, gentlemen. If you haven't stopped believin' by now, you never will.
In the
last article we considered the formation of choices as providing a set of predetermined responses to various situations. It is this phase of data gathering and assessment that sets the groundwork for our moral responsibility.
Specifically it is erroneous to consider that choices are evaluated and determined solely at the point of action, but rather, default states may well be set within the brain based on our training and indoctrination. It is these default states that represent the possibility of choices that we can base a decision on.
Everyone's heard of open heart surgery but closed heart surgery could one day be just as ubiquitous, according to research from the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota in the FASEB Journal.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart failure is a condition where the heart cannot pump enough blood and oxygen to meet the needs of other body organs. Approximately 5 million people in the United States have heart failure, about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, and more than 287,000 people in the United States die each year of heart failure. The most common causes of heart failure are coronary artery disease, hypertension or high blood pressure, and diabetes.
You've heard of the Mercury 7 astronauts; they became the backbone of the NASA program and inspiration to an entire generation of young people. But you may not have known there were also a Mercury 13 - and they were women.
In the early years of the space race two men sought to test a scientifically simple yet culturally complicated theory - that women might be better suited for space travel than men.
In 1960 a woman in space instead of a man was a revolutionary idea: 75% of American women did not work outside the home and females were banned from military flight service. Wives were required to have their husband's permission to take out a bank loan, buy property, or purchase large household goods such as a refrigerator.
'Blue haze' is a natural occurrence over heavily forested areas around the world but natural does not always mean good. Still, while blue haze may be formed by natural emissions of chemicals, human activities can worsen it to the point of affecting the world's weather and even cause potential climate problems, according to a new study.
When you walk through a forest or even a large grassy area, it's not uncommon to be able to smell the plants around you, such as pine trees or other vegetation. That smell is nature's way of naturally making organic gases produced by the plants themselves, often millions of tons per day.
