Telstar 1 enabled the first transatlantic TV broadcasts, was the proof that communications satellites were viable, and began start of an industry. It also provided the first US #1 Billboard song hit, from a song about Telstar 1 by a group called the Tornados. The song was simply called 'Telstar' and is also notable as an early piece of electronica.
Oxford BioMedica plc, a gene-based biopharmaceutical company, and Cardiff University announced a Phase II trial to assess the safety and immunological activity of TroVax(R), a therapeutic vaccine for patients with inoperable metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC). The study will be funded by Cardiff University, with some funding awarded by Cancer Research Wales, and Oxford BioMedica will provide TroVax(R). The trial is supported by the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC), Cardiff.
Why do some extremely faint galaxies in our backyard contain so few stars? An international team of astronomers has helped solve the mystery of why these galaxies are starved of stars - and why so few of them have been found.
Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major dwarf galaxies all started forming stars more than 13 billion years ago - and then abruptly stopped shortly after the Big Bang.The extreme age of their stars is similar to Messier 92, the oldest known globular cluster in the Milky Way.
Are we on the road to uploading our brains to computers and living forever?
Singularity proponents require a two-pronged approach to believing so; wildly overstating the technology curve of what future computers and programmers will accomplish and wildly understating the complexity of the human brain. If you believe strongly enough, the future looks bright for an eternal...future.
Over the last half century, it has been established that fish and migratory birds use the planet's magnetic field to help find their way, an interesting zoological mystery. Researchers have now identified cells with internal compass needles for the perception of the field, and that can explain why high-tension cables perturb their magnetic orientation.
Although many animal species can sense the geomagnetic field and exploit it for spatial orientation, efforts to pinpoint the cells that detect the field and convert the information into nerve impulses had not been successful.
Science 2.0 fave Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently sent a funny thing
across his Twitter feed:
Q: What do you call Alternative Medicine that survives double-blind laboratory tests?
A: Regular Medicine.
And that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? There's no Big Pharm conspiracy against homeopathy, for example. What multi-national conglomerate wouldn't love to slosh some magic water in a bottle and sell it for 10 bucks or more? It just doesn't work.
A novel anticancer drug is designed to travel, undetected by normal cells, through the bloodstream until it becomes activated by specific cancer proteins. It's basically a sleeper cell for tumors.
The drug, called G202, is chemically derived from a common Mediterranean weed called Thapsia garganica, and has been shown to destroy cancers and their direct blood supplies, acting like a 'molecular grenade' but sparing healthy blood vessels and tissues.
When you think of the northern lights (aurora borealis) you don't think of sounds. The famous blues, greens and reds rippling in the sky have been described by visitors and also handed down in stories as long as people have been visiting. Astronomers of King Nebuchadnezzar II documented it in 568 B.C.
But later travelers described sounds to go with the light show.
The lights happen when gas from the sun reaches earth's magnetic field; the charged particles flow along the planet's magnetic lines, but that is too far away for people to hear anything.
How soon after the claim that the Higgs discovery is 'international' did self-loathing Americans and Europeans ridicule the American institutions that issued press releases noting their part in the work?
About a day. The smug intimation was because America did not want to fund the whole LHC completely - understandable given the fiasco of the Superconducting Supercollider - that we somehow 'lost out' on the discovery and made no contributions worth mentioning.
A new study has assessed the effectiveness of two somatostatin vaccinations, JH17 and JH18, in reducing weight gain and increasing weight loss in mice.
Somatostatin is a peptide hormone which inhibits the action of growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), both of which increase metabolism and result in weight loss. Vaccination with modified somatostatin caused the body to generate antibodies to somatostatin, effectively removing this inhibition without directly interfering with the growth hormones and subsequently increasing energy expenditure and weight loss.
