10 Mind-Blowing Discoveries This Week - July 5th 2012

Via AlterNet.org

Some of these have their own threads going, but I thought this article was cool, and if you want a quick recap of cool # discovered this week, here ya go friends!

1. High, how are ya?
Natalie Wolchover of Life’s Little Mysteries quotes Dr. Bruce Goldberger, professor and director of toxicology at the University of Florida who said that blaming Eugene’s behavior on pot is “outrageous and out of the question. Marijuana will not cause this type of behavior.” There has been a link between marijuana and the early onset of psychosis (here’s an NPR story from 2011). But Goldberger told LLM "This behavior exhibited by Eugene is well beyond the scope of someone suffering from acute psychosis.”


Instead, it might still have been a synthetic version of bath salts that went undetected. Patrick Kyle, director of clinical chemistry and toxicology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center told LLM that synthetic versions of the drug are being made so fast and in such variations that labs “cannot keep up,” and that it’s unlikely labs could screen against all such drugs

Hmmm.. So is the fact that all he had was marijuana in his system a way of continued criminiization of the drug? They also say he may have a synthetic version of the bath salts, that would evade detection within his system.. who knows?!

2. Copy dogs
Researchers at the Universidad de Porto in Portugal have found that humans don’t just catch yawns from each other -- dogs catch them from their owners. The researchers played different yawns for the dogs: the yawns of their owners and of strangers and yawns played backwards as a control sound. The dogs who responded yawned “significantly more often when they were listening to their owner’s yawns,” writes Jennifer Welsh of Live Science. Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy in humans as well as baboons and chimps who yawn in response to the yawns of those they’re close to.

Hmm not that mind-blowing but still kinda cool. I read somewhere that in old tribes in Africa (and maybe other places) that when the chief yawned, it meant the whole village/tribe had to go to bed.. and it is true.. just reading the word yawn, made me yawn a couple times while writing this!

3. Stayin’ alive (without breathing)

What?!

Boston Children’s Hospital has developed a fatty oxygen particle that doctors can inject into a patient who has gone into respiratory failure that will put enough oxygen in their blood to keep the patient alive for up to 30 minutes. Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo describes it as a “seemingly magical elixir,” which can be easily carried and used by paramedics and other emergency crews. Injected right into the blood stream the particle, which carries up to four times the amount of oxygen as red blood cells, quickly oxygenates the body and allows doctors to work “without risking heart attack or permanent brain injuries to the patient.”

Very, very interesting! I dunno why it reminds me of the abyss.. that movie with Ed harris? Where they all wear suits with liquid oxygen and they can breath... the part where they have dogs and other animals swimming around underwater and not having to breath cause of the liquid oxy.. kinda cool. This discovery seems like it could save a lot of lives or at least give people a chance to get to a hospital where there is better equipment than in an ambulance! Cool!

4. Brush-on batteries…
While we’re on the subject of miraculous innovation, a team from Rice University and Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium have come up with a battery you can spray paint into objects.


Whatever you’re thinking, yes, it would probably work. The team tried it on ceramic tile and beer steins and “in one experiment they hooked a solar cell up to one of the batteries and powered an LED display,” writes Evelyn Lamb of Scientific American.


Batteries consist of five layers and the team had to come up with a way for each conductive layer to work “with various polymers to create a paint that could be sprayed onto surfaces.” Singh said research is shifting into batteries that could be built into a variety of objects and “her team's work is filling a need in the socially critical field of energy storage for new battery designs.” It may not be far off that with the “paintable solar cells on top of paintable solar batteries,” Singh envisions that, as Lamb writes, “Houses could become solar-energy capture-and-storage devices.”

Weird, and cool! Could be a way of circumventing the power grid.. although im sure it wouldn;t be cheap. Very interesting idea though..

The rest I'll just list here and if you want to check them out, please click the link above.. and feel free to dicuss the discoveries I have left out of the OP,

5. …and rechargeable T-shirts? - pretty cool idea
6. A cosmic gift
7. Your flies are open…to reinterpretation
8. The buzz on reverse aging
9. From “yea” to zzzzzzz - regarding the brain and sleep

And of course the biggest discovery of the week,

10. The Higgs found (cautiously)

Here are some threads on the Higgs,
Higgs live feed
Does the Higgs-Boson discovery pave the way for long distance space travel?,
The Fantastic Machine That Found the Higgs Boson

Thoughts?!

hmmm interesting.


not sure if ALL are true, can never trust what people say these days...


peace.

reply to post by Nspekta


They got the oxygen idea from seals. Seals have cells that are biologically designed to carry massive amounts of oxygen, allowing for extended submersion. Scientists were discussing creating nanobots to carry oxygen in the blood-stream, allowing divers to make easier trips for longer lengths of time.

Looks like they didn't need the nanotechnology after all. Can a person injected with this substance still function, though? That's the big question. And remember: all serious technology is screened by the military for potential application long before anyone else has a crack at it.

If this technology has been released to the public, you can bet that it's relatively safe.

Our world's technological advances are increasing at such a rapid rate, I can't imagine what will be released next year, let alone 10-50 years later like we used to wonder. I'm just glad the CERN tests were successful to an extent without blowing the world up.

Really some one had to research the dog yawning thing?

me and my dog can have a yawn off at any given day, with either her starting it or me...

Keep up the good work academia