Former Head of SETI Says Aliens Totally Don’t Want To Eat Us. Well, In That Case… by Jill Pantozzi | 2:52 pm, May 25th Former SETI director Jill Tarter (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has felt the need to go on the record and let the public know aliens don’t really want to eat us. That’s all well and good but how could this be when most overdramatized science-fiction tells us different? Is Tarter in league with an alien race?? Is she an alien??? All of these answers, as well as the real story, after the jump. Tarter has dedicated her life to the study and/or discovery of extraterrestrial life. Thirty-five years of her life to be exact. But in a recent press release in advance ... Continue reading →
The needle and syringe are icons of modern medicine. But a device developed at MIT to squirt medicines quickly and pretty much painlessly through the skin suggests that the future of medicine could be needle-free. The idea is to shoot an extremely thin, extremely fast jet of medicine straight through skin and into muscle. "It's sort of like a laser beam," project leader and mechanical engineering professor Ian Hunter tells Shots. But because the jet is so thin — he compares it to a mosquito's proboscis — it's unlikely to produce much pain. Details of the prototype are published in the journal Medical Engineering and Physics. Needles, as we all know, can be quite painful, and it's estimated that at least 10 percent of the ... Continue reading →
The Science of Health | Health See Inside Would You Like a Side of Dirt with That? New findings suggest that ingesting soil is adaptive, not necessarily pathological By Philip T. B. Starks and Brittany L. Slabach | May 25, 2012 | 3 Image: Thomas Jackson/Getty Images In the fall of 2009 a group of biology students at Tufts University sat down together and ate some dirt. They ground up small clay tablets and swallowed the powder to find out, firsthand, what clay tastes like. This unusual taste test was part of a Darwinian medicine class taught by one of us (Starks). The students were studying the evolution of geophagia—the practice of eating dirt, especially claylike soils, which is something animals and people have been ... Continue reading →
19-year-old secretly squats in AOL offices for 2 months until finally discovered The entrepreneur had been sleeping on couches, living off company food, and showering in the corporate gym News | Computers AOL | Internet | Startups | Education | Weird Tech | Show AllAOL | Internet | Startups | Education | Weird Tech | Law | Show Less Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will go to extreme lengths to make their startup dreams a reality. For 19-year-old Eric Simons, making his internet startup a reality involved squatting in the AOL offices for two months, hiding from security guards as he slept on couches, and dining almost exclusively on the free food AOL provides for its employees.Simons' life as a permanent resident of the AOL offices ... Continue reading →
Public release date: 24-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Tara WomersleyTara.Womersley@ed.ac.uk 44-131-650-9836Public Library of Science Gene study could pave way for non-hormonal male contraceptive A new type of male contraceptive could be created thanks to the discovery of a key gene essential for sperm development A new type of male contraceptive could be created thanks to the discovery of a key gene essential for sperm development. The finding could lead to alternatives to the conventional male contraceptives that rely on disrupting the production of hormones, such as testosterone. These treatments can cause side-effects such as irritability, mood swings and acne. Research, led by the University of Edinburgh, has shown how a gene � Katnal1 � is critical to enable sperm to mature in ... Continue reading →