Weird Science Thread

[Smoove_B]

Interesting. I don't recall alcohol being an option (I'm pretty sure it's a high school dating sim), but I'll keep an eye out.

[Isgrimnur]

Jurassic Park technology comes to life - genetic kill switches for GM bacteria:

Now, scientists releasing two separate papers in the journal Nature think they have a solution. They unveiled two different approaches to modifying a strain of E. coli to make it dependent on artificial nutrients. In a controlled environment, such as a research lab or factory, scientists would provide that sustenance. But if the bacteria break free, they wouldn’t be able to make the compounds themselves, and would die.

Scientists have previously used similar approaches, making GMO bacteria reliant on synthetic nutrients. But in the past, the GMO bacteria have evolved the ability to live without the synthetic nutrients. Bacteria have ejected the part of their DNA that made them reliant on the nutrients, or they figured out how to cobble together an equivalent of those nutrients from the natural world.

In separate projects, teams led by Yale molecular biologist Farren Isaacs and Harvard molecular geneticist George Church have genetically modified E. coli so that it is totally dependent on synthetic amino acids. And in both cases that need is built in to multiple parts of the bacteria’s genome – 49 times in the Harvard study – so that the likelihood that the bacteria would evolve to overcome the restriction is unlikely. And both strains showed an undetectably small escape rate – the number of E. coli able to survive without being fed the synthetic amino acid.

[Isgrimnur]

Waterproof metal without chemicals:

Apart from being freaky to watch in action, the first-of-its kind material may have important applications--from making better devices for collecting rainwater in water-scarce developing countries, to improving the sanitation of toilets, to making airplane wings and solar panels resistant to rusting or icing over.

How did the scientists create this seemingly magical material? They used a powerful laser to etch minute micro- and nanoscale patterns onto brass, titanium, and platinum.

The process takes a while--up to a full hour to treat a single square inch of metal--but it's said to have key advantages over chemical coatings like Teflon, which can wear away.
...
Before trying to commercialize the process, the researchers plan to try the laser patterning technique on non-metallic materials--and look for ways to speed up the etching process.

[Isgrimnur]

There's gold in them thar turds!

[A] city of roughly one million inhabitants flushes $13 million worth of precious metals down toilets and sewer drains on an annual basis, according to a new study from scientists at Arizona State University. Although those scientists didn’t say whether extracting these metals from sewage sludge is economically feasible, they are encouraging us to look at wastewater as a commodity, rather than, well, waste.

In order to arrive at their conclusion, scientists needed to get knee-deep in you-know-what. They used samples of biosolids — dried sewage sludge — that were collected in 2001 as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Sewage Sludge Survey (and you thought working for the census was rough). The samples, which are stored at the National Biosolids Repository in Arizona, came from 94 different wastewater treatment plants in 32 different states.

Researchers analyzed each biosolid sample by using a mass spectrometer, which identifies different elements as they are ionized through super-heating. They identified 13 of the most prevalent minerals in sewage sludge, which included gold, platinum, silver and copper. From this, they calculated that every metric ton of sludge could yield about $280 worth of these 13 lucrative metals. For example, a metric ton of sludge contained about 16 grams of silver and about 0.3 grams of gold.

[Isgrimnur]

Google's AI could beat you at Atari.

A team of scientists at Google created an artificially intelligent computer program that can teach itself to play Atari 2600 video games, using only minimal background information to learn how to play.

By mimicking some principles of the human brain, the program is able to play at the same level as a professional human gamer, or better, on most of the games, researchers reported today (Feb. 25) in the journal Nature.

[Isgrimnur]

The aluminum can

Roughly one in seven new energy drinks are too corrosive to put in cans.

[Isgrimnur]

Don't Date Robots!

The patent awarded to Google on March 31, 2015, focuses on the idea of creating robot personalities that could be downloaded as software and transferred between different robots through an online service. It also describes the idea of creating customizable robot personalities tailored to the preferences of human users. That lays the groundwork for a future where robotic hardware could update and switch their software personalities based on the specific human customers they’re serving. The patent also covers the idea of a base personality that act out different moods such as happiness, fear, surprise, and thoughtfulness. Google’s patent even uses well-known celebrities — such as a perplexed “Woody Allen robot” or a derisive “Rodney Dangerfield robot” — to describe a range of possible robot moods.

[Isgrimnur]

I would have thought that would have gotten some responses. Oh, well.

Have a warm-blooded fish:

In a paper published today in Science, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describe the unique mechanism that enables the opah, a deepwater predatory fish, to keep its body warm. The secret lies in a specially designed set of blood vessels in the fish’s gills, which allows the fish to circle warm blood throughout its entire body.

Scientists already suspected the opah was special, says Heidi Dewar, a researcher at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and one of the paper’s authors. Most fish who live where the opah does — that is, hundreds of feet deep, in some of the ocean’s darkest and coldest places — are sluggish, thanks to the low temperatures. At these depths, even predatory fish tend to be slow-moving, waiting patiently for prey to come by rather than actively chasing it down. But the opah, which spends all its time in these deep places, has many features usually associated with a quick-moving, active predator, such as a large heart, lots of muscle and big eyes. These characteristics made the opah “a curiosity,” Dewar says.

[Ralph-Wiggum]

Pretty cool. There are a number of fish that are regionally endothermic (such as the tuna) but this is first discovered to be whole body endothermic. Of course, the real difference between endothems and ectotherms is the ability to maintain and not lose the heat produced by the body. These fish seem to have to solved some of that problem through insulation in key areas.

[Isgrimnur]

They mention those in the full article, but I thought it was a little esoteric for quotation purposes.

[LordMortis]

Self Healing Concrete

[Isgrimnur]

Homebrew morphine

In the near future, amateur basement brewers mulling over their next batch may struggle to choose between concocting an IPA or an opioid.

Scientists have recently announced that they’ve genetically engineered brewer’s yeast to convert common sugars into pain-killing opioids like codeine and morphine. The process is simple enough that hobbyists could easily brew morphine with a run-of-the-mill brewing kit — if they get their hands on yeast with the right genetic tweaks.
...
To create tiny morphine factories, scientists added to yeast genetic components from poppy, sugar beets, and a soil bacterium. The result was three strains of yeast that, when used in sequence, could convert glucose to morphine. Theoretically these three could easily be combined into one single strain to complete the whole process, the team reported in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

The technique isn’t very efficient: A single 30-milligram dose of morphine requires 300 liters of genetically modified yeast. However, scientists believe that efficiency will improve with time.

[Isgrimnur]

Google patented creepy networked toys:

Google's R&D team has looked into making internet-connected toys that control smart home appliances.

The firm has published a patent that describes devices that would turn their heads towards users and listen to what they were saying, before sending commands to remote computer servers.

The three-year old patent was spotted recently by the technology law firm SmartUp.
...
The patent was originally filed back in February 2012, but has only just been published.
...
'Its inventor is named as Richard Wayne DeVaul, whose job title is "director of rapid evaluation and mad science" at Google X - the firm's secretive "skunkworks" lab.

The patent describes how the toys would include microphones, speakers, cameras and motors as well as a wireless connection to the internet.

It states that a trigger word would cause them to wake up and turn their gaze towards the person addressing them, and would be able to check if the person talking was making eye contact.

[stessier]

You think you know cold - this is cold!

Atomic telescope brings atoms to standstill

This is only the start though. Like all lenses, a magnetic lens has an intrinsic limit to how well it can focus (or, in this case, collimate) the atoms. Ultimately, this limitation is given by the quantum uncertainty in the atom's momentum and position. If the lensing technique performed at these physical limits, then the cloud's transverse temperature would end up at a few femtoKelvin (10-15). That would be absolutely incredible.

A really nice side effect is that combinations of lenses can be used like telescopes to compress or expand the cloud while leaving the transverse temperature very cold. It may then be possible to tune how strongly the atoms' waves overlap and control the speed at which the transition from quantum to classical occurs. This would allow the researchers to explore the transition over a large range of conditions and make their findings more general.

[Max Peck]

A chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak has been developed by scientists

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid is believed to have crashed into Earth. The impact wiped out huge numbers of species, including almost all of the dinosaurs. One group of dinosaurs managed to survive the disaster. Today, we know them as birds. The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has been around since the 19th century, when scientists discovered the fossil of an early bird called Archaeopteryx. It had wings and feathers, but it also looked a lot like a dinosaur. More recent fossils look similar. But these early birds didn't look the same as modern ones. In particular, they didn't have beaks: they had snouts, like those of their dinosaur ancestors. To understand how one changed into another, a team has been tampering with the molecular processes that make up a beak in chickens. By doing so, they have managed to create a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout and palate, similar to that of small feathered dinosaurs like Velociraptor. The results are published in the journal Evolution.

Control chicken embryo, altered chicken embryo and alligator embryo.

[Max Peck]

This little guy looks like he came straight out of my last game of Spore.

It was a creature so strange that experts literally could not make heads nor tails of it. But scientists said on Wednesday a new analysis of fossils of Hallucigenia, so named for its fantastical appearance, has given them for the first time a complete understanding of this little sea oddball that lived about 508 million years ago. Hallucigenia is one of the species emblematic of the Cambrian Period, a pivotal juncture in the history of life on Earth when most major groups of animals first appeared and many unusual body designs came and went. "It is nice to finally know rather fundamental things such as how many legs it has, and to know its head from its tail," University of Cambridge paleontologist Martin Smith said.

[Isgrimnur]

Scientists have figured out why your eyes get red and irritated while swimming in the ool.

People have always assumed that chlorine was the chemical devil behind their red, irritated eyes after a dip in the pool. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) annual healthy swimming report says that isn’t actually the case.

The true cause, it says, is nitrogen in urine binding to chlorine to form chloramine—a derivative of ammonia. “It’s not the chlorine itself,” Michele Hlavsa, chief of the CDC’s healthy swimming program, told Today. “It’s chlorine mixed with poop and sweat and a lot of other things we bring into the water with us.” The compound can also make swimmers’ noses run and cause them to cough.

And pools’ “chlorine” smell isn’t actually the chlorine either. The stronger a pool’s scent, the more it is filled with pee, poop, sweat and dirt, says the CDC. “Healthy pools...don’t have a strong chemical smell.”

Chlorine is in pools not to deal with the pee but to kill harmful germs like E. coli. When urine is added in large quantities, tackling it becomes chlorine’s full-time job, which allows germs to linger in the water.
...
The CDC’s report isn’t meant to turn pools into ghost towns this summer, but to provide some tips for healthier visits. For instance, avoid opaque, smelly pools and take children to visit the bathroom every hour...for everyone’s sake.

[The Meal]

For instance, avoid opaque, smelly pools

Wow, thanks for the good advice!

[Max Peck]

Neutrinos are mildly weird, I guess. Is there a plain old Science thread?

Fastest ever neutrino among slew of fresh findings

In 2013 IceCube announced the first ever detection of neutrinos from outside the Solar System: 28 of the particles were caught moving at energies far beyond the reach of humanity's best particle accelerators. Since then, the count of such "cosmic neutrinos" has climbed above 50.

This week at a conference in the Netherlands, the team announced a record-breaking event that their icy instrument witnessed in June 2014. They have evidence for a neutrino arriving with at least 2,600 trillion electronvolts (teraelectronvolts, TeV) of energy - hundreds of times more than protons inside the Large Hadron Collider, even after its historic revamp. IceCube's previous record was 2,000 TeV. That makes this neutrino the most energetic space particle ever detected. It is also the fastest, but only by a whisker: all neutrinos travel perilously close (but not above) the speed of light, and a tiny speed increase requires a huge energy boost. What is more, that energy value is only a minimum.

The neutrino itself never made it into the detector; what IceCube glimpsed was a different particle called a muon - the product of a "muon neutrino" (one of three different flavours) arriving from the north. "It was made by a neutrino that came through the Earth somewhere below our detector," said IceCube's principal investigator Francis Halzen, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By doing what Prof Halzen calls "back of an envelope" physics calculations, his team can reconstruct the neutrino interaction that spat the muon into the ice, where it dumped those 2,600 TeV.

For a slippery, near-massless particle, this neutrino packed a punch. "Using standard model physics, the energy of this neutrino is somewhere around 5,000-10,000 TeV, with the most likely value somewhere in the middle," Prof Halzen explained. "This neutrino packs about 1,000 times the energy of the LHC beam. It is spectacular."

The IceCube experiment is located near the South Pole but can "look" both upward and downward

[Max Peck]

The phrase "out of thin air" is not quite as idiomatic as once it was.

Carbon nanofibres made from CO2 in the air

Scientists in the US have found a way to take carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and make carbon nanofibres, a valuable manufacturing material. Their solar-powered system runs just a few volts of electricity through a vat full of a hot, molten salt; CO2 is absorbed and the nanofibres gradually assemble at one of the electrodes. It currently produces 10g in an hour. The team suggests it could be scaled up and make an impact on CO2 emissions, but other researchers are unsure. Nonetheless, it could offer a cheaper way of making carbon nanofibres than existing methods.

[Max Peck]

Open Bionics robotic hand for amputees wins Dyson Award

A prototype 3D-printed robotic hand that can be made faster and more cheaply than current alternatives is this year's UK winner of the James Dyson Award. The Bristol-raised creator of the Open Bionics project says he can 3D-scan an amputee and build them a custom-fitted socket and hand in less than two days. It typically takes weeks or months to obtain existing products. Joel Gibbard says he aims to start selling the prosthetics next year.

"We have a device at the lower-end of the pricing scale and the upper end of functionality," he told the BBC. "At the same time it is very lightweight and it can be customised for each person. "The hand is basically a skeleton with a 'skin' on top. So, we can do different things to the skin - we can put patterns on it, we can change the styling and design. There's quite a lot of flexibility there."

The 25-year-old inventor intends to charge customers £2,000 for the device, including the cost of a fitting. Although prosthetic arms fitted with hooks typically can be bought for similar prices, ones with controllable fingers are usually sold for between £20,000 and £60,000. That cost can sometimes be prohibitive for children, who usually need to change their prosthetic once or twice a year to take account of their growth.

[GreenGoo]

And pools’ “chlorine” smell isn’t actually the chlorine either. The stronger a pool’s scent, the more it is filled with pee, poop, sweat and dirt, says the CDC. “Healthy pools...don’t have a strong chemical smell.”

Lol, well that explains the indoor public pool smell. And I just thought they were making sure they used enough chlorine.

Hilarious.

[paulbaxter]

I thought this was very interesting, though it looks like it needs much more research.

Dolphins, like humans, can get metabolic syndrome, the precursor to type II diabetes. This syndrome in dolphins, though, can be controlled/eliminated by ADDING a certain type of fat to the diet. This type of fat is found in, among other places, butter and whole milk.

Article here

[Max Peck]

Hawking: Black holes store information

Physicists have long argued about what happens to information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes. It was thought that this information was destroyed, but it turned out that this violated laws of quantum physics.

Prof Hawking now says the information may not make it into the black hole at all, but is held on its boundary. "The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary - the event horizon," he told a conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

In broad terms, black holes are a region in space where the gravity is so strong that nothing that gets pulled in - even light - can escape. At the same time, the laws of quantum mechanics dictate that everything in our world can be broken down into information, for example, a string of 1s and 0s. And according to those laws, this information should never disappear, not even if it gets sucked into a black hole. But according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the information must be destroyed. This quandary is known as the information paradox.

Prof Hawking believes the information doesn't make it inside the black hole at all. Instead, it is transformed into a 2D hologram at the surface of the black hole's event horizon. This is a boundary, or point of no return, where escape from the gravitational pull of the black hole becomes impossible. Working with Cambridge colleague Prof Malcolm Perry and Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, Hawking believes that information is stored in the form of what are known as super translations. "The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles," Hawking explained. "Thus, they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost."

[Max Peck]

Rare nautilus with hairy shell photographed in South Pacific

An animal so rare that only two people are thought to have ever seen it until now has been photographed and briefly captured in the South Pacific. The creature is a species of nautilus, a group of animals related to squid that have a spiral shell like a snail. They're known as living fossils as they have existed for almost 500 million years — since shortly after the first trilobites evolved during the Cambrian period.

The rare nautilus is a species known as Allonautilus scrobiculatus, which has a distinctive, slimy, hairy coating on its shell. Its gills, jaws, shell shape and male reproductive organs are also very different from those of other nautilus species, according to Peter Ward, the University of Washington biologist who saw and captured it, along with other some other nautilus species. He and his colleagues took small tissue, shell and mucous samples last July before releasing the animals back into the ocean where they had been caught, about 180 metres below the surface near Ndrova Island off Papua New Guinea, said a news release from the University of Washington.

[Enough]

That's awesome!

[stessier]

Quantum mechanics always falls under weird science for me.

Experiment confirms that quantum mechanics scoffs at our local reality

The things we can do...

To get around this, the researchers started with the diamonds over a kilometer apart in two different labs at the Delft University of Technology. They entangled each electron spin with a photon, then sent the photons over fiber optic cable to a third lab somewhere in between. There, the photons were entangled, which in turn caused the electrons in the diamonds to be entangled as well.

The whole process was horribly inefficient, with a success rate of 6.4 × 10−9, mostly because photons kept getting lost in the fiber optic cables. But, over the course of nine days, the setup managed to successfully entangle the nitrogen vacancies 245 times.

[Paingod]

The whole process was horribly inefficient, with a success rate of 6.4 × 10−9, mostly because photons kept getting lost in the fiber optic cables. But, over the course of nine days, the setup managed to successfully entangle the nitrogen vacancies 245 times.

I look forward to setting up a quantum network someday, maybe utilizing a quantum hub that interlinks every device and then instead of servers I have the ability to harness the computational power and space of every device on the network at once.

[Max Peck]

Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa

Homo naledi is a previously-unknown species of extinct hominin discovered within the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. This species is characterized by body mass and stature similar to small-bodied human populations but a small endocranial volume similar to australopiths. Cranial morphology of H. naledi is unique, but most similar to early Homo species including Homo erectus, Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis. While primitive, the dentition is generally small and simple in occlusal morphology. H. naledi has humanlike manipulatory adaptations of the hand and wrist. It also exhibits a humanlike foot and lower limb. These humanlike aspects are contrasted in the postcrania with a more primitive or australopith-like trunk, shoulder, pelvis and proximal femur. Representing at least 15 individuals with most skeletal elements repeated multiple times, this is the largest assemblage of a single species of hominins yet discovered in Africa.

[Max Peck]

This one is as weird as it gets -- and even has a little science to explain how it was possible.

The chicken that lived for 18 months without a head

Seventy years ago, a farmer beheaded a chicken in Colorado, and it refused to die. Mike, as the bird became known, survived for 18 months and became famous. But how did he live without a head for so long, asks Chris Stokel-Walker.

On 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen and his wife Clara were killing chickens, on their farm in Fruita, Colorado. Olsen would decapitate the birds, his wife would clean them up. But one of the 40 or 50 animals that went under Olsen's hatchet that day didn't behave like the rest.

"They got down to the end and had one who was still alive, up and walking around," says the couple's great-grandson, Troy Waters, himself a farmer in Fruita. The chicken kicked and ran, and didn't stop.

It was placed in an old apple box on the farm's screened porch for the night, and when Lloyd Olsen woke the following morning, he stepped outside to see what had happened. "The damn thing was still alive," says Waters.

[Kraken]

That's weird all right.

[Max Peck]

What would you be willing to do in the name of "Science!"? Perhaps conduct a series of experiments wherein honey bees repeated sting you in places such as your penis? If you have ever answered "Hell yeah!" to this or similar questions, then you too may one day be the proud "winner" of an Ig Nobel prize.

Chemistry - Callum Ormonde (University of Western Australia) and colleagues, for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.

Physics - Patricia Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) and colleagues, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).

Literature - Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) and colleagues, for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language - and for not being quite sure why.

Management - Gennaro Bernile (Singapore Management University) and colleagues, for discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that - for them - had no dire personal consequences.

Economics - The Bangkok Metropolitan Police (Thailand) for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.

Medicine - joint award: Hajime Kimata (Kimata Hajime Clinic, Japan) and also Jaroslava Durdiaková (Comenius University, Slovakia) and her collagues, for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).

Mathematics - Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer (University of Vienna, Austria) for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.

Biology - Bruno Grossi (University of Chile) and colleagues, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

Diagnostic medicine - Diallah Karim (Stoke Mandeville Hospital, UK) and colleagues, for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps.

Physiology and entomology - Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt (Southwest Biological Institute, US) for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith (Cornell University, US), for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).

[Max Peck]

If it doesn't fit, you must acquit. -- J. Cochran

Snake 'not guilty of killing Cleopatra'

The story that Cleopatra, ancient queen of Egypt, was killed by a snake bite has been rejected as "impossible" by University of Manchester academics. Egyptologists and snake experts have combined to examine the plausibility of the tale of the queen being killed by a cobra hidden in a basket of figs. They believe a snake big enough to kill the queen and two maids would not have been small enough to be concealed. They also challenge the credibility of three consecutive fatal bites.

Cleopatra, who died at the age of 39 in 30BC, was a ruler of Egypt who became embroiled in power struggles within the Roman empire. But her story and her death have become part of popular legend, portrayed in fictional form from Hollywood epics to Carry On films and television comedy. From Roman sources onwards, her death has often been attributed to a poisonous snake or "asp", with the queen using the fatal bite as a way of ending her own life.

But Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley and Andrew Gray, curator of herpetology at Manchester Museum, say the supposed culprit - a cobra - would have been too physically big to be concealed in the way that has been portrayed. Even if such a snake had been smuggled in to Cleopatra, they say it would have been very unlikely that it could have killed Cleopatra and two of her servants in quick succession. "Not only are cobras too big, but there's just a 10% chance you would die from a snake bite: most bites are dry bites that don't inject venom," said Mr Gray. "That's not to say they aren't dangerous: the venom causes necrosis and will certainly kill you, but quite slowly. So it would be impossible to use a snake to kill two or three people one after the other."

[Isgrimnur]

Shockwave desalination

[T]he system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes salty water to one side of the flow and fresh water to the other, allowing easy separation of the two streams. The new approach is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, in a paper by professor of chemical engineering and mathematics Martin Bazant, graduate student Sven Schlumpberger, undergraduate Nancy Lu, and former postdoc Matthew Suss.
...
In the new process, called shock electrodialysis, water flows through a porous material —in this case, made of tiny glass particles, called a frit — with membranes or electrodes sandwiching the porous material on each side. When an electric current flows through the system, the salty water divides into regions where the salt concentration is either depleted or enriched. When that current is increased to a certain point, it generates a shockwave between these two zones, sharply dividing the streams and allowing the fresh and salty regions to be separated by a simple physical barrier at the center of the flow.
...
Even though the system can use membranes on each side of the porous material, Bazant explains, the water flows across those membranes, not through them. That means they are not as vulnerable to fouling — a buildup of filtered material — or to degradation due to water pressure, as happens with conventional membrane-based desalination, including conventional electrodialysis. “The salt doesn’t have to push through something,” Bazant says. The charged salt particles, or ions, “just move to one side,” he says.
...
Initially at least, this process would not be competitive with methods such as reverse osmosis for large-scale seawater desalination. But it could find other uses in the cleanup of contaminated water, Schlumpberger says.

Unlike some other approaches to desalination, he adds, this one requires little infrastructure, so it might be useful for portable systems for use in remote locations, or for emergencies where water supplies are disrupted by storms or earthquakes.

[Max Peck]

The Antibiotic Apocalypse

The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed. Their report, in the Lancet, identifies bacteria able to shrug off colistin in patients and livestock in China. They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections. Experts said the worrying development needed to act as a global wake-up call. Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment - also known as the antibiotic apocalypse - could plunge medicine back into the dark ages. Common infections would kill once again, while surgery and cancer therapies, which are reliant on antibiotics, would be under threat.

Chinese scientists identified a new mutation, dubbed the MCR-1 gene, that prevented colistin from killing bacteria. It was found in a fifth of animals tested, 15% of raw meat samples and in 16 patients. And the resistance had spread between a range of bacterial strains and species, including E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. There is also evidence that it has spread to Laos and Malaysia.

Prof Timothy Walsh, who collaborated on the study, from the University of Cardiff, told the BBC News website: "All the key players are now in place to make the post-antibiotic world a reality. "If MRC-1 becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era. "At that point if a patient is seriously ill, say with E. coli, then there is virtually nothing you can do."

Resistance to colistin has emerged before. However, the crucial difference this time is the mutation has arisen in a way that is very easily shared between bacteria. "The transfer rate of this resistance gene is ridiculously high, that doesn't look good," said Prof Mark Wilcox, from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. His hospital is now dealing with multiple cases "where we're struggling to find an antibiotic" every month - an event he describes as being as "rare as hens' teeth" five years ago. He said there was no single event that would mark the start of the antibiotic apocalypse, but it was clear "we're losing the battle".

The concern is that the new resistance gene will hook up with others plaguing hospitals, leading to bacteria resistant to all treatment - what is known as pan-resistance. Prof Wilcox told the BBC News website: "Do I fear we'll get to an untreatable organism situation? Ultimately yes. Whether that happens this year, or next year, or the year after, it's very hard to say."

Early indications suggest the Chinese government is moving swiftly to address the problem. Prof Walsh is meeting both the agricultural and health ministries this weekend to discuss whether colistin should be banned for agricultural use. Prof Laura Piddock, from the campaign group Antibiotic Action, said the same antibiotics "should not be used in veterinary and human medicine". She told the BBC News website: "Hopefully the post-antibiotic era is not upon us yet. However, this is a wake-up call to the world." She argued the dawning of the post-antibiotic era "really depends on the infection, the patient and whether there are alternative treatment options available" as combinations of antibiotics may still be effective.

A commentary in the Lancet concluded the "implications [of this study] are enormous" and unless something significant changes, doctors would "face increasing numbers of patients for whom we will need to say, 'Sorry, there is nothing I can do to cure your infection.'"

[Paingod]

This doesn't sound like fun at all. We've been way too sloppy with antibiotics. The last time my wife was sick, she went to the doctor and all but demanded antibiotics even though he doubted it was bacterial. She still got them.

Waging war on the most rapidly adaptable organisms on the planet can't possibly end well for us. We'll have to start creating bacteria to kill bacteria now, or maybe accelerate nanotechnologies so we can make little robots to kill the buggers. Yeah, that'll end well too...

[Jeff V]

This doesn't sound like fun at all. We've been way too sloppy with antibiotics. The last time my wife was sick, she went to the doctor and all but demanded antibiotics even though he doubted it was bacterial. She still got them.

My wife got sick my second trip to the Philippines and asked me to go to a convenience store in a nearby shopping strip alongside a gas station. The roughly 17 year old girl working at the store informed me she was to take two right away, then one every 4 hours until gone.

When I told my doctor this story, I expected him to say something about the danger of superbugs, but he instead agreed and thought we should do the same here. While doctors still could prescribe specific, uncommon antibiotics (I did get such prescriptions when my leg got badly infected in a subsequent visit), a pharmacist could presumably recommend specific types among common antibiotics to match a particular symptom.

[Kraken]

They'll develop a new generation of antibiotics when they can charge $10,000 per dose. Big Pharma isn't researching them because there's no money in it.

[morlac]

They'll develop a new generation of antibiotics when they can charge $10,000 per dose. Big Pharma isn't researching them because there's no money in it.

Nah. Already happening. I'm not worried.


http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com ... ixobactin/
"In January 2015, a collaboration of four institutes in the US and Germany together with two pharmaceutical companies, reported that they had isolated and characterized a new antibiotic, killing "without detectable resistance."Teixobactin was discovered by screening previously unculturable bacteria present in a sample of soil from “a grassy field in Maine,” using the iChip (isolation chip).

"Teixobactin is the first novel antibiotic with drug potential isolated from bacteria in decades, and appears to represent a new class of antibiotics, raising hopes that the new isolation techniques employed could lead to further antibiotic discoveries"

Also, a quote about the technology/technique they used to discover Teixobactin called iChip.

"So far, iChip is off to an exciting start. It’s collected roughly 10 thousand strains of uncultured soil bugs and uncovered a handful of new antibiotics, including teixobactin. And this is just the beginning—remember, the majority of antibiotics we’ve discovered and developed so far come from a mere 1 percent of soil bacteria. In the remaining 99 percent, we expect to find hundreds to thousands more, as well as anti-inflammatories, anti-virals, anti-cancer agents, and immunosuppressives. A veritable treasure trove of drugs. "

So drugs from dirt, interesting.

[Max Peck]

Parasitic worm 'increases women's fertility'

Infection with a species of parasitic worm increases the fertility of women, say scientists. A study of 986 indigenous women in Bolivia indicated a lifetime of Ascaris lumbricoides, a type of roundworm, infection led to an extra two children. Researchers, writing in the journal Science, suggest the worm is altering the immune system to make it easier to become pregnant. Experts said the findings could lead to "novel fertility enhancing drugs". Nine children is the average family size for Tsimane women in Bolivia. And about 70% of the population has a parasitic worm infection.