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What, indeed. This week's archive gallery takes a look at Popular Science's best beauty advice, some of which is spot-on (use a stencil to keep your lipstick from smudging!), some of which is less so (electrocute yourself to get rid of a double chin!).
Enter the gallery above to learn how to get gussied up, PopSci style.
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Plenty of microbes live beneath ocean sediments — about 90 percent of the planet’s unicellular organisms are found there, and they’ve long been subjects of study among biologists interested in extreme environments. Hans Røy and colleagues wanted to dig even deeper to examine the most barren places, where food supplies are scarce or nonexistent and where oxygen barely reaches.
Røy and colleagues from Denmark and Germany surveyed red clays buried deep in the Pacific Ocean, along the equator and into the North Pacific Gyre current system. From the research R/V Knorr, they drilled core samples 92 feet into the ocean floor, dating to the time of the dinosaurs, and tested the cores with oxygen sensors. They found that organisms live in the deepest parts of these sediments and that they’re using oxygen for respiration — only incredibly slowly. The deeper the sediments, the less food and oxygen is present, and the less oxygen is used up, too. These organisms have not had access to a fresh food supply since their burial, 70 to 86 million years ago.
It takes the microbes about 1,000 years to double their biomass, which could also mean it takes them 1,000 years to divide, Røy and his colleagues found. E. coli, by contrast, takes 17 to 30 minutes. Put another way, to be sure these things were actually living — meaning undergoing metabolic processes and growing biomass — you would have to wait 1,000 years.
Røy and colleagues believe these microbial communities are living at the absolute limit — they have the bare minimum energy required to keep their DNA intact and their proteins functioning. This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, these life forms are definitely odd, and they suggest that scientists’ knowledge of prokaryotes is incomplete at best. The way unicellular organisms live in the lab is nothing like the way they live beneath the ocean. Second, they once again prove that live persists where it would seem physically impossible — and that is an interesting finding if you’re interested in astrobiology. Even in the harshest environments on this planet, where access to any form of energy is limited at best, microbes can live. Could they live somewhere off this planet, too?
The study appears in the journal Science.
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Yet somehow Gage survived, though not really as Phineas Gage. The previously likeable young man underwent severe personality changes, becoming irritable and profane, far from the person he once was. Scientists studied his case for the dozen years he survived after the accident, and have been fascinated with Gage’s brain ever since--up to an amazing reconstruction just completed.
Studying Gage’s brain today has proven difficult, and scientists have long argued over just how much of his brain matter was removed or damaged in the incident--key data that could help explain both his profound changes in behavior and the causes and effects of certain deleterious frontal lobe disorders like Alzheimer’s. When Gage died there was no recorded autopsy, and while his skull was preserved it is now deteriorating. As such, the last time it was allowed to be imaged was in 2001, and those computed tomography scans were quickly lost somewhere at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an affiliate of Harvard. The last, best data on Gage went missing.
But the authors of a paper publishing in yesterday’s issue of the journal PLoS ONE were able to finally recover the CT data files that had been lost for more than a decade, and using them they have reconstructed Gage’s brain using modern-day brain images of males matching Gage’s age and handedness (he was a righty). These new models are the best look yet at what most likely happened to Gage’s brain.
The real question here isn’t how he survived, but one of the architecture of the brain and how it’s wired together. The researchers, from UCLA, found that their models show that nearly 11 percent of Gage’s white matter was damaged, as well as 4 percent of the cortex. That basically means that while the cortical damage was restricted to Gage’s left frontal lobe, the disruption to his brain’s connectivity via the white matter damage reverberated throughout the brain, severing connections between the left frontal, left temporal, and right frontal cortices as well as the left limbic structures of his brain even though the rod completely missed those areas.
This explains why this iron tamping rod--which gruesome as it may sound only physically impacted a small portion of his brain--had such widespread impact on behaviors governed by other brain regions. Gage’s injury is not unlike many traumatic brain injuries, or even certain degenerative diseases. So understanding what went on in Gage’s head should inform the way neurologists thing about the human brain even a century-and-a-half later.
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Lee’s prototype ZeroN is a small metal orb floating in free space that users can manipulate by moving around and placing in midair. Suspended by a highly tuned electromagnetic field, the orb really does seem to levitate, and the degree to which the system keeps the ball stable even as it is moved around on all three axes is pretty mind-blowing. The ball floats until it is moved, and when placed in a point in space it stays there. And with an added layer of software surrounding it, the orb becomes a tool for all sorts of applications.
For instance, the ZeroN can be used as the stand-in for a camera in a 3-D scene (imagine a scale architectural model placed in the ZeroN’s working space; the ball can be moved around the model, changing the point-of-view of the 3-D representation in a graphic representation). The ZeroN can also remember how it has been moved in the past, retracing a path that it was previously moved along (the ZeroN doesn’t have to be moved by a human hand, but can also be moved around the space by the computer).
The trick to all this is a precision electromagnet fitted to a moving actuator above the ZeroN’s workspace. The electromagnet can move around the space above and rapidly adjust its magnetic pull or resistance based on where the ZeroN is in space, a value that is measured every few milliseconds by an array of IR cameras. So while the ZeroN appears to float as if in defiance of gravity, the setup is purely mechanical. All it really requires is a very precise electromagnet and the right software to keep the orb stable.
Next up: replacing the actuator with solenoids, which might allow the system to place several objects in the same ZeroN workspace at the same time, allowing for whole new applications. More on this over at Co.Design and in the video below.
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The test could be approved for sale later this year
Made by Bethlehem, Penn.,-based Orasure, the test uses an oral swab to return an HIV diagnosis in a matter of minutes. It is already available for use in clinical settings, and while it’s not quite as accurate as actual lab diagnostics it could help curb the spread of HIV by allowing for discrete, more regular testing. HIV and AIDS are largely spread via sexual contact from one partner to the other by those who do not realize they are infected with the virus.
If the advisory panel is right, the impact could be significant. Estimates indicate that roughly 240,000 people among the 1.2 million HIV carriers in the U.S. are unaware they are infected. That’s a full one-fifth. Education and other means of prevention have held the rate of new infections more or less steady at about 50,000 per year over the past 20 years in the U.S. The test has shown to be accurate in positively identifying HIV in trials 93 percent of the time. That means if everyone was testing regularly, Orasure’s test would still miss roughly 3,800 cases. But it would correctly diagnose 45,000 infected individuals. The FDA estimates that overall, the test could prevent 4,000 new cases each year.
Other at-home HIV tests can be purchased over the counter, but they still rely on consumers to take a blood sample and send it in to a lab for testing. Making HIV testing easy will encourage it as a regular practice, authorities hope, while also adding a layer of discretion and privacy around a sensitive topic. A survey showed that 84 percent of gay and bisexual men would test themselves more regularly if they could do so in their own home with an over-the-counter test (men who engage in sexual contact with other men are generally considered at higher risk for acquiring HIV).
The endorsement by the panel, however, does not spell approval for Orasure’s at-home 20-minute test. It still has to pass top-level FDA approval, a process that will take the panels findings into account. A final decision is expected later this year. The clinical version of the test reportedly retails to doctors for $17.50, but there's no word on what consumer pricing might be.
[R&D]
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This ambitious project, called the Map of Life, uses a Google Maps platform to map the known distribution of 30,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates. Many more are still being added, with the eventual goal of curating hundreds of thousands of plants, birds, fish, reptiles and everything else under the sun. Meanwhile, there’s still plenty to search. The project just opened to the public.
“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, who leads the project.
It's supported by NASA, international research institutions and the Encyclopedia of Life project, itself a monumental undertaking that aims to catalog all there is to know about every species on the planet.
Visit the MappingLife page and you’ll see a plain Google Maps view of Earth, which you can pan and zoom like any other. A series of filters lets you search by species, whose known distributions appear as points on the map. You can display records from specific study areas, like nature reserves or large regions. You can even see what species are located in the vicinity of any location on the planet — set the search radius and group of interest (birds, mammals, etc.) and right-click on any point of the map. A list appears with every species found in your radius.
Also notice the sources for some of this data. It includes museums, local checklists and research institutions, published studies and global groups like the World Wildlife Fund. The goal is to share knowledge and identify gaps — it’s surprising how little is known about some species, the team says. Improving that information will require collaboration from lots of groups. The more complete it is, the more useful it will be for conservation organizations, wildlife managers and the public, helping people follow species’ changes over time.
It’s essentially an infrastructure, Jetz said in a Yale news release: “Something to help us all collaborate, improve, share, and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.”
You can play with it here.
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