Albert EINSTEIN

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. 

  Imagination is more important than knowledge. 

Knowledge is limited. 

Imagination encircles the world".

CURIOSITY Mission - Landing on MARS

I've been following the CURIOSITY MISSION since it landed on Mars surface, last August 6th, 2012. 

Produced by Bard Canning and working frame-by-frame, I found this spectacular HD film based on the original shoots during the CURIOSITY landing.

Canning produced this film in ultra-resolution, smooth-motion, detail-enhanced, color-corrected, interpolated from the original 4 frames per second to 30 frames per second. 

This video plays real-time at the speed that Curiosity descended to the surface last Mars on August 6th, 2012.

Mars Curiosity Rover

Plankton - Life under a Microscope

I found on You Tube an interesting movie about one of the tiniest living forms on earth. Even so, these living creatures, which are drifting animals organisms, feed great predators and inhabit the pelagic zone of oceans, seas or bodies of fresh water.

Plankton includes organisms with a wide range of sizes, from microscopic to jellyfish forms.

The effects of global warming, on the plankton population, has been a case study for the past decade. Dependent on light levels and nutrient availability, no doubt that the environmental variations felt lately had its impact on these fragile organisms levels.

El Nino's heat wave, for instance, produced an abnormal decreased of world level plankton  influencing populations of zoo plankton, fishes, sea birds and marine mammals.

A Virus That Can Cure Cancer

Canadian scientists have developed a virus that can attack cancerous tumours without harming the rest of a patient's body. Tested in 23 patients, results were positive leaving good perspectives in what is considered a major step in therapy treatments, in a near future.

The team, at Ottawa's Hospital Research Institute, hope the breakthrough could provide a new and effective weapon in the fight against the disease. more here

First 3D Images of a Single Protein

3-D images from a single particle (A) a series of images of an ApoA-1 protein particle, taken from different angles as indicated. A succession of four computer enhancements (projections) clarifies the signal. In the right column is the 3-D image compiled from the clarified data. B) is a close-up of the reconstructed 3-D image. C) Analysis shows how the particle structure is formed by three ApoA-1 proteins (red, green, blue noodle-like models)

At the Molecular Foundry, Berkeley Lab’s acclaimed nanotechnology research center, Ren has pushed his Zeiss Libra 120 Cryo-Tem microscope to resolutions never envisioned by its German manufacturers.

The snapshots produced some unique images of detailed individual molecules which were only "seen", till today, through proteins models using X-ray diffraction, nuclear magnetic resonance, and conventional cryo-electron microscope (cryoEM) imaging.

Today, Ren and his colleague Lei Zhang are reporting the first 3-D images of an individual protein ever obtained with enough clarity to determine its structure.

He calls his technique “individual-particle electron tomography,” or IPET. The work is described in the January 24 issue of PLoS One, the open-source scientific journal, in an article entitled “IPET and FETR: Experimental Approach for Studying Molecular Structure Dynamics by Cryo-Electron Tomography of a Single-Molecule Structure.”  more here

Does our brain grow?

Photo: TZA (Flickr)

For its complexity scientist used to think that once the brain was matured it stopped growing. Nothing could be more wrong. In fact,brain has an immense hability to regenerate, to grow even further and to vigorously adapt to an increadible variety of new circunstances.
After all brain cells do not decrease. Instead, there's a birth place in the brain where new cells birth to life and, in some way, replace the old ones.

For example, scientists now know that there’s a mechanism in the hippocampus a brain part involved with memory, among other things that gives birth to new brain cells. Scientists don’t know exactly why the brain makes new cells or what the cells do. They may have something to do with forming memories, or be used to replace dead or damaged cells.  more here

Kadinsky : Muscle - Nerve - Skin

Kadinsky took the oportunity of a scientific study concerning small flies development and painted this 20 section fruit fly embryos, full of colour, revealing different kinds of tissues types.

Muscles, nerves and skin.

more here

Image: Courtesy of Yoosik Kim and Stanislav Y. Shvartsman Princeton University and Kwanghun Chung and Hang Lu Georgia Institute of Technology

The Public's appetite for Astronomy

Paul Crowther is a professor of astrophysics in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at The University of Sheffield. 

 

Has anyone else noticed that the mainstream media have gone slightly science gaga? Last week, Higgs-teria attracted front pages in broadsheets and lead stories in news bulletins, even though no more than “tantalizing hints” of the Higgs were announced. Before that, we had plenty of stories salivating over Kepler 22b, a.k.a. Earth 2.0, even though most exoplanet hunters were rather more cautious in their interpretation. Indeed, the Kepler team themselves only claimed Kepler 22b was a “milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin.” Only yesterday the first genuinely Earth-sized planets were reported, although they wouldn’t resemble our planet in any other respect, given their close proximity to their host star. And not to mention the shenanigans with those pesky Italian faster-than-light neutrinos that spurred nuclear physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, into promising to eat his boxer shorts on live TV should the result be confirmed. - the interview here

Image : Neutrino experiment