ET: waiting for your call?
If you had the chance to send a message into space, what would it say? “Greetings, fellow sentient beings”? “We come in peace”? “Hi… we’ve kind of messed up our planet, and we wondered if by chance anyone out there had a spare one?”
 

Directed panspermia missions could target interstellar clouds such as the Rho Ophiuchus cloud complex located about 500 light-years away.
Eventually, the day will come when life on Earth ends. Whether that’s tomorrow or five billion years from now, whether by nuclear war, climate change, or the Sun burning up its fuel, the last living cell on [...]

“We don’t stop living when we go to work and, very often today, we don’t stop working when we arrive home.”
The line between work and home is disappearing, says former Financial Times columnist Richard Donkin in his new book.  “We don’t stop living when we go to work and, very often today, we don’t stop [...]

Google hopes to build on its existing translation database of 52 languages.
 Search giant Google has said that it is working on a phone that can translate live, automatically between languages.
Live language translation on mobile phones could be just two years away, according to search giant Google. The company already offers text translation services and [...]

Ford Figo
Ford Motor Co. (F) Friday began producing its first small car in India and its engines as the U.S. auto maker tries to challenge Suzuki Motor Corp. (7269.TO) and Hyundai Motor Co. (007380.SE) in this growing market for automobiles.
 

Mimetic races of Heliconius erato (left) and Heliconius melpomene (right) from the Tarapoto area of Peru.
How two butterfly species have evolved exactly the same striking wing colour and pattern has intrigued biologists since Darwin’s day. Now, scientists at Cambridge have found “hotspots” in the butterflies’ genes that they believe will explain one of the most [...]

NIST postdoctoral researcher James Chin-wen Chou with the world’s most precise clock, based on the vibrations of a single aluminum ion (electrically charged atom).
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world’s most [...]

A new study sheds light on the flight behaviours that enable insects to undertake long-distance migrations, and highlights the remarkable abilities of these insect migrants.
A study published in Science, by researchers at Rothamsted Research (an institute of the BBSRC), the Met Office, the Natural Resources Institute, and the Universities of Exeter, Greenwich and York, sheds [...]

Artist’s rendering of cell structure.
Monash University biochemists have found a critical piece in the evolutionary puzzle that explains how life on Earth evolved millions of centuries ago.

3D illustration of the knee. Damaged cartilage can lead to joint pain and loss of physical function and eventually to osteoarthritis.
Northwestern University researchers are the first to design a bioactive nanomaterial that promotes the growth of new cartilage in vivo and without the use of expensive growth factors. Minimally invasive, the therapy activates the bone [...]

Teenagers and young adults spent less time blogging during the past three years as social networks like Facebook became more popular, according to a Pew Research Center study released Wednesday.
Still, one social network, Twitter, has failed to catch on with the vast majority of younger teenagers, according to the Pew study of social media and [...]

Google Store View?
New York retailer Oh Nuts experienced an odd thing the other day: a Google photographer came in and took pictures of the entire store in all directions, stopping every 6 feet. Sounds a lot like Google Street View, except inside a retail esteblishment.
 

BrightFarm Rooftop Greenhouse
Solar is not the only green feature appearing on affordable housing projects these days. In fact, a project in the South Bronx is hoping to combat food miles and food deserts at the same time, growing fresh, nutritious vegetables in a 10,000 sq ft rooftop greenhouse on top of a six story affordable [...]

Debris objects in Earth’s orbit is an increasingly troublesome issue.
An international air traffic control for outer space should be set up to prevent damage to satellites and spacecraft orbiting the Earth, according to proposal to be discussed at the United Nations next week.  Space experts from around the world will discuss ways of tackling the [...]

Acrylic microcapsules are filled with a paraffin wax that can absorb heat from buildings.

Building materials that absorb heat during the day and release it at night, eliminating the need for air-conditioning in some climates, will soon be on the market in the United States. The North Carolina company National Gypsum is testing drywall sheets–the plaster [...]

Bodywork could one day double as a car’s battery
Parts of a car’s bodywork could one day double up as its battery, according to the scientists behind a new €3.4 million project announced today.
Researchers from Imperial College London, UK, and their European partners, including Volvo Car Corporation, are developing a prototype material which can store and [...]

Chalk Crayon Under an SEM Scanning Electron Microscope
ASPEX is the world’s only SEM Elemental Analysis company that allows anyone to send in their sample to get scanned by our SEM.  Ever wonder what something looks like up close? Really close? Most people have seen objects under a standard optical microscope, but few have seen what [...]

California’s global warming law calls for utilities to increase their use of renewable energy to at least 30 percent by 2020
Conservatives propose an initiative that would delay curbs on greenhouse gas emissions until the state’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5%, a level not seen since 2007.
 

According to a new mathematical analysis, the mysterious “3/4 law of metabolism” — proposed by Max Kleiber in 1932 and later described as “extended to all life forms” from bacteria to whales — is wrong.
Apparently, the mysterious “3/4 law of metabolism” — proposed by Max Kleiber in 1932, printed in biology textbooks for decades, explained [...]

Try living in the mountains to lose weight
Obese people should try living in the mountains if they want to lose weight, according to scientists.  Fat is much easier to burn off where the air is thin, researchers said, a phenomenon that could lead to tents that mimic the atmosphere of countries like Tibet and Argentina.
 

Isabel’s parents never consented to DNA testing
When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.
While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further [...]

No matter how often some people workout they still don’t feel any fitter
Spent hours sweating it out in the gym but don’t feel any fitter? Blame your parents.  One in five of us has inherited ‘unfitness genes’ that mean no matter how often we pound the treadmill, we’ll still be out of puff.
 

Bacteria (Streptococcus pneumoniae, red) under attack by a neutrophil (blue).
Scientists have long pondered the seeming contradiction that taking broad-spectrum antibiotics over a long period of time can lead to severe secondary bacterial infections. Now researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine may have figured out why.

In rejecting the soup theory the researchers turned to the Earth’s chemistry to identify the energy source which could power the first primitive predecessors of living organisms: geochemical gradients across a honeycomb of microscopic natural caverns at hydrothermal vents. These catalytic cells generated lipids, proteins and nucleotides which may have given rise to the first [...]

A small but significant proportion of morbidly obese people are missing a section of their DNA, according to new research.
A small but significant proportion of morbidly obese people are missing a section of their DNA, according to research published February 3 in Nature. The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and ten other [...]