Convertible airplane just doesn't have a good ring to it

Boeing Urges Tests on 737s After More Cracks Are Found

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Published: April 4, 2011

The Boeing Company said inspections should be extended after a hole ripped through the roof of a Southwest jet on Friday.

My dad was supposed to be on a SouthWest flight from Phoenix to Sacramento last night which was canceled because of plane changes. Just so happens that's the exact plane he would have taken a day later.

Roooneeeyyy...ManU pull off the comeback to increase their premiership lead

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/team/_/id/360/manchester-united?cc=5901



WH2v4MU by FootballSoccerHighlights

Utilizing bacteria to produce AND deliver drugs

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37242/?nlid=4296

Engineering bacteria to not only make drugs, but also to deliver them directly to the cells in the body that require them.

Finger-tip packs a powerful IT punch

Store data in your body without cyborg modification - tech - 01 April 2011 - New Scientist

How Stem Cells Are Changing the Way We Think About Disease

How Stem Cells Are Changing the Way We Think About Disease

If you don't know too much about stem cells, this TIME article gives you a good idea of where the technology is at now and how it can evolve to solve most medical problems.

Bonobos: Hippies of the jungle

Peaceful bonobos may have something to teach humans


Humans share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, but we share one important similarity with one species of chimp, the common chimpanzee, that we don't share with the other, the bonobo. That similarity is violence. While humans and the common chimpanzee wage war and kill each other, bonobos do not. "There has never been a recorded case in captivity or in the wild of a bonobo killing another bonobo," notes anthropologist Brian Hare.

Science Rhyme Time: A little exercise everyday can cause aging to delay

Regular exercise can delay the aging process

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Canadian scientists working with mice genetically modified to age twice as fast as normal has found regular exercise keeps them young.

You might want to think twice before deciding to run a marathon...

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/when-exercise-is-too-much-of-a-good-thing/?nl=health&emc=healthupdateema11


Exercise is indisputably good for your health. But some recent studies suggest that it's also possible to do too much of a good thing.

Can a magazine with one subscriber survive? Absolutely!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704758904576188621188047068.html

Each morning, the President of the United States gets briefed on the day's news by some of the smartest advisers around. The rest of us aren't so lucky. We have to sift through newspapers, magazines and websites to find out what's going on around us. Now, thanks to a free iPad app called Zite, the news-gathering process may get a lot easier for those of us who aren't leaders of the free world.

A new iPad app called Zite crawls the Web and uses your social network and online reading behavior to cull reading material you might like. WSJ's Katie Boehret compares this app to the similar Flipboard app.

Zite, by a Vancouver company of the same name, crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to you, according to your social network and/or online reading behavior. It evaluates this potential content by tracking signals (like tweets, comments, tags and sharing) from stories that indicate a certain level of social interest and momentum in the story. The result is a personalized magazine that gets more accurately targeted toward its reader the more it's used.

A light-and-heat combo makes for a great infrared sauna experience (& a way to track cancer and deliver drugs)

Organic nanoparticle uses sound and heat to find and treat tumors

Scientists have created an organic nanoparticle that is non-toxic, biodegradable, and nimble in the way it uses light and heat to treat cancer and deliver drugs, says principal investigator Dr. Gang Zheng, Senior Scientist, Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI) at Princess Margaret Hospital.

Personal health care...there's an app for that

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/technology/01iht-srhealth01.html?_r=1

For more and more people, computers and software are becoming a critical part of their health care.

Thanks to an array of small devices and applications for smartphones that gather vital health information and store it electronically, consumers can take a more active role in managing their own care, often treating chronic illnesses — and preventing acute ones — without the direct aid of a physician.

After Jeopardy, Watson 1, Mankind 0. Next up...doctors

IBM to Collaborate with Nuance to Apply Watson Analytics Technology to Healthcare

IBM and Nuance Communications, Inc. have announced a research agreement to explore, develop and commercialize the Watson computing system’s advanced analytics capabilities in the healthcare industry.

Sprinkle a little water on some sodium silicide and presto...battery power

Technology breakthrough fuels laptops and phones, recharges scientist's 60-year career




How does a scientist fuel his enthusiasm for chemistry after 60 years? By discovering a new energy source, of course.

Cheat sheet for surgeons, cut there and not there

Nerves Light Up to Warn Surgeons Away - Technology Review

Surgeons take pains to avoid injuring nerves in and around surgical sites—a stray cut could lead to muscle weakness, pain, numbness, or even paralysis. In delicate operations like prostate removal, for instance, accidentally damaging nerves can lead to incontinence or erectile dysfunction. Scientists at University of California San Diego have announced a new method for lighting up nerves in the body with fluorescent peptides, which could act as markers to keep surgeons away.

If you don't yet know about Ray Kurzweil, you have some catching up to do...

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

Love it or hate it, Ray Kurzweil's theory of 'The Singularity' must be accepted as a legitimate possibility of what the future holds in store for humanity.

GOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL

Best goal of the 2010-2011 EPL season scored by Wayne Rooney of the greatest team on the planet, ManU.

Drawing blood safer than shedding skin in terms of generating stem cells

"Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found a better way to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells — adult cells reprogrammed with the properties of embryonic stem cells — from a small blood sample. This new method, described last week in Cell Research, avoids creating DNA changes that could lead to tumor formation.

Johns Hopkins researchers created the safer iPS cells by transferring a circular piece of DNA into blood cells from anonymous donors to deliver the needed genetic components. The traditional way is to use viruses to carry DNA into a cell’s genome. Unlike the viral methods, the circular DNA the Hopkins team used is designed to stay separate from the host cell’s genome. After the iPS cells formed, the circular DNA delivered into the blood cells was gradually lost.

Linzhao Cheng, Ph.D says the new method is also more efficient than the traditional use of skin cells to make iPS cells. “After a skin biopsy, it takes a full month to grow the skin cells before they are ready to be reprogrammed into iPS cells, unlike the blood cells that only need to grow for eight or nine days,” says Cheng. “The time it takes to reprogram the iPS cells from blood cells is also shortened to two weeks, compared to the month it takes when using skin cells.”

Safer way to make induced pluripotent stem cells | KurzweilAI

Popeye proved right...eating spinach is good for your muscles

(PhysOrg.com) -- After taking a small dose of inorganic nitrate for three days, healthy people consume less oxygen while riding an exercise bike. A new study in the February issue of Cell Metabolism traces that improved performance to increased efficiency of the mitochondria that power our cells.

...up until recently nitrate wasn't thought to have any nutritional value at all. It has even been suggested that this component of vegetables might be toxic. But Eddie Weitzberg [of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden] and his colleague Jon Lundberg earlier showed that dietary nitrate feeds into a pathway that produces nitric oxide with the help of friendly bacteria found in our mouths. Nitric oxide has been known for two decades as a physiologically important molecule.

Want more efficient muscles? Eat your spinach

Key ingredient for the origin of life on earth...clay?

Physicists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.

The research, published online this week in the journal Soft Matter,shows that clay vesicles provide an ideal container for the compartmentalization of complex organic molecules.

The authors say the discovery opens the possibility that primitive cells might have formed inside inorganic clay microcompartments.

Clay-armored bubbles may have formed first protocells | KurzweilAI

Under The Radar: The Internet Just Ran Out of Numbers

On February 3, it finally happened: the clock ran out on the Internet as we know it. That was the day that the stash of Internet protocol addresses that are used to identify and locate computers connected to the Internet—the telephone numbers of the online world—was exhausted.

The Internet Just Ran Out of Numbers - Technology Review