The end-of-year shows are always great fun but there is never enough time to highlight all the ‘Science Sensation‘ and ‘Science Silly Sausage‘ stories that I would like to talk about. So, I’ll take the opportunity to do that here!
Here are my favourite stories that I have presented or discussed during 2008. My favourite topics of biology and space feature heavily but there are also a few other interesting topics. Einstein A Go Go will be back in February, 2009. Thank you for listening to our show/podcast and for visting our webpage. Have a happy and safe holiday from all at EAGG.
– Danger Mouse Dave
SCIENCE SENSATIONS
Astronomers discover distant solar system similar to our own — A host of amateur astronomers have helped researchers discover a distant solar system remarkably similar to our own, a study released by Science magazine says. Initial observations found two planets orbiting a star some 5,000 light years away that appear to be slightly smaller versions of our own Jupiter and Saturn. (The Daily Galaxy, ABC News)
Mercury flyby brings data “goldmine” – The latest set of photos beamed back by NASA’s Messenger probe have revealed more interesting features from Mercury. Earlier this month photos from Messenger showed huge cliffs, now the mission has found a strange ‘spider’ feature and been forced to increase estimates of the size of a massive basin on the planet. (Nature blogs, Astronomy Picture of the Day)
NASA Extends Cassini’s Grand Tour of Saturn — NASA is extending the international Cassini-Huygens mission by two years. The historic spacecraft’s stunning discoveries and images have revolutionized our knowledge of Saturn and its moons. (NASA) (Cassini-Huygens mission homepage)
NASA Confirms Liquid Lake On Saturn Moon — NASA scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn’s moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified the presence of ethane. This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface. (NASA – Cassini Mission)
Phoenix Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended — Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples. “We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.” (NASA, Scientific American, Cosmos Magazine)
China the third country to perform a space walk (YouTube, NPR)
Beating heart created in laboratory — US researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory and say the discovery may lead to customised organ transplants for people. The study, which appears in the latest Nature Medicine journal, offers a way to fulfil the promise of using stem cells to grow tailor-made organs for transplant. (ABC News in Science)
Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterial Genome — A team of 17 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. This work is the second of three key steps toward the team’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. (ScienceDaily)
Lifting of the moratorium on GM canola (Department of Primary Industries)
The Global Seed Vault (aka Doomsday Vault) opens for business in Svalbard, Norway. The first batch of the world’s crop seeds is now packed away deep in the cold Svalbard mountainside, and the vault’s doors, for the time being, are once again sealed. In total, more than 100 million seeds, representing some 250,000 individual strains of almost 100 major crops, from sorghum to sunflowers, have been loaded up in vault number 2. (Nature blogs)
Watching football can be hazardous to your health — Researchers studying the cardiovascular effects of World Cup soccer matches on residents in Bavaria, Germany, found that the rate of heart attacks and other coronary events in men was three times higher, and in women was nearly two times higher, on days when Germany was playing, suggesting the emotional stress of watching their national team compete caused the events. (Medical News Today, NPR)
Extinct tiger gene resurrected in a mouse – DNA from the extinct Tasmanian tiger has been successfully extracted and used to resurrect a functioning version of a gene fragment in a mouse, Australian scientists have announced. This is the first time anyone has been able to transfer genetic material from an extinct species into a living animal. (There are many media reports covering this story. Here are two of the better ones; they convey the science more accurately than many of the others - MSNBC, Cosmos)
Dance a universal language for bees — The world’s nine honeybee species separated about 30 million years ago and have since developed their own dance “languages”, which scout bees use to share information about discoveries such as food. New research has suggested that honeybees can learn “foreign” languages and use the power of dance to communicate with bees from the other side of the world. (The Age, PLoS One research article)
Though not exactly party animals, sloths more active than thought — Scientists monitoring brain activity in wild, three-toed sloths in Panama have helped the famously sluggish animal dispel a spurious rumor: that they are lazy. Sloths in captivity have been known to sleep an average of 16 hours a day. But, thanks to miniaturized electroencephalograms (EEG) that fit into a made-for-sloths helmets and recorded their sleep patterns, scientists now know that, in the wild, sloths aren’t perpetually snoozing. (Scientific American - scroll down to third news story)
New fossils close the gap between fish and land animals — Exquisitely preserved fossils of an ancient, four-limbed creature have helped to fill in the blanks on a key event in our own evolutionary history when our ancestors left the water and ventured onto land. One of those pioneers, Ventastega curonica, was first described in 1994 but previously has been known only from fragmentary remains unearthed from 365-million-year-old rocks at a site in western Latvia. Fossils found at the site during subsequent excavations now allow scientists to more fully reconstruct the creature. (Uppsala University, ScienceDaily, BBC, CNN, ScienceNews)
Sticky tape X-rays — Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers. (Livescience)
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 is awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP. (Nobel prizes)
Pigeons Show Superior Self-recognition Abilities To Three Year Old Humans – Keio University scientists have shown that pigeons are able to discriminate video images of themselves even with a 5-7 second delay, thus having self-cognitive abilities higher than 3-year-old children who have difficulty recognizing their self-image with only a 2 second delay. (ScienceDaily)
Underwater world an eye-opener for scientists – As part of Australia’s International Polar Year projects, vessels have returned from Antarctica after taking a census of life in the icy Southern Ocean. They have returned with their decks overflowing with a vast array of ocean life including a number of previously unknown species collected from the cold waters near the East Antarctic land mass. In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life. It seems gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters with huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates. (Australian Antarctic Division, ABC News)
Schoolboy explodes goldfish memory myth – A 15-year-old South Australian school student has busted the myth that goldfish have a three second memory. He conducted an experiment to test the commonly held theory that goldfish have short memory spans. He was also keen to open people’s minds to the cruelty of keeping fish in small tanks. (The Age)
SCIENCE SILLY SAUSAGES
The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners – NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is. (IgNobel Prizes)
Genetic modification joins lust on mortal sins list — A senior member of the Vatican has drawn up a new list of mortal sins, and science features prominently. Not all of science of course, but Catholic researchers might face some tough choices. (Nature blog)
Flying penguins found by BBC programme — The BBC will today screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution. BBC1 viewers will see the penguins not only take flight from the Antarctic wastes, but fly thousands of miles to the Amazonian rainforest to find winter sun. (The Telegraph)
Scientists taking drugs to boost brain power: study – Twenty per cent of scientists admit to using performance-enhancing prescription drugs for non-medical reasons, according to a survey released by Nature, Britain’s top science journal. The overwhelming majority of respondents said they indulged in order to “improve concentration”, and 60 per cent said they did so on a daily or weekly basis. (ABC News)
Fast-track gene in hot demand – Hundreds of Australian parents have used genetic testing to determine if their children have the makings of a great athlete. And now the word has spread to English football clubs. Melbourne company Genetic Technologies has produced the only commercially available genetic testing kit in the world that determines if a person has a variant gene called R577X in the fast-twitch muscle gene ACTN3. (The Age, ScienceDaily, AAAS)
Federal budget — the new budget brings in a means test for the solar panel rebate.
Fido 2.0 – Best Friends Again? – In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from a somatic donor cell using the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Since then several other mammals have been cloned using SCNT, including dogs and cats. Now, not surprisingly, a commercial company is behind the Best Friends Again Project and is offering a dog cloning service to the general public through a series of auctions. The starting bid is $100,000 for the first auction and increases in subsequent auctions.
