Quantum Dots May Be Toxic To Cells And Environment Under Certain Conditions

Researchers in Texas are reporting that quantum dots (QDs) -- a product of the revolution in nanotechnology increasingly used in electronics, solar cells, and medical imaging devices -- may be toxic to cells under acidic or alkaline conditions. Their study is the first to report on how different pH levels may affect the safety of QDs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Stanford Writes In World's Smallest Letters

Stanford researchers have reclaimed bragging rights for creating the world's smallest writing, a distinction the university first gained in 1985 and lost in 1990. How small is the writing? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

No Such Thing As A 'Born Leader,' Study In Fish Finds

Followers are just as important to good leadership as are the leaders themselves, reveals a new study of stickleback fish. By randomly pairing fish of varying degrees of "boldness," the researchers showed that each member of a pair adopts the role of leader or follower. More importantly, they found, the behavior of each member of the pair is strongly influenced by its partner.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Skin Color Studies On Tadpoles Lead To Cancer Advance

The humble tadpole could provide the key to developing effective anti-skin cancer drugs, thanks to a new discovery.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Blue Light Destroys Antibiotic-resistant Staph Infection

Two common strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA, were virtually eradicated in the laboratory by exposing them to a wavelength of blue light, in a process called photo-irradiation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

Fewer Days Of Extreme Cold And More Days Of Extreme Heat In Europe

Scientists have selected 262 European observatories which analyzed the series of minimum and maximum daily temperatures from 1955 to 1998 to estimate trend variations in extreme temperature events. According to the study, in Europe days of extreme cold are decreasing and days of extreme heat increasing. From 0.5ºC to 1ºC in the average minimum temperature, and from 0.5ºC to 2ºC in the average maximum temperature.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Feb 2009 | 1:00 am

'Healthy' Obesity May Be Explained By Newly Identified Protein

Mice whose fat cells were allowed to grow larger than fat cells in normal mice developed "healthy" obesity when fed a high-fat diet, researchers found in a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Lung Transplants: Hospitals Doing More Transplants Are Better And Safer, Study Suggests

Transplant surgeons have evidence that hospitals performing at least 20 lung transplant procedures a year, on average, have the best overall patient survival rates and lowest number of deaths from the complex surgery.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Genes Linked To Parkinson's Side Effects Identified

What causes motor complications of Parkinson’s treatment? Researchers have now identified two molecules whose expression in the brain is altered in the brains of animals with side effects related to Parkinson's disease. The results may lead to new approaches to the treatment of these side effects in Parkinson's patients.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Chemists Shed Light On Health Benefits Of Garlic

Researchers have widely believed that the organic compound, allicin -- which gives the pungent vegetable its aroma and flavor -- acts as an antioxidant. But until now it hasn't been clear how allicin works, or how it stacks up compared to more common antioxidants such as Vitamin E and coenzyme Q10, which stop the damaging effects of radicals. Researchers now trace benefits to acid produced in the decomposing organic compound.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

British protests against foreign energy workers spread (AFP)

AFP - Wildcat strikes against foreign workers spread through oil refineries and other energy facilities in Britain, fuelled by fears of rising job cuts.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 5:31 am

Stem Cell Transplants Help MS Victims (HealthDay)

HealthDay - THURSDAY, Jan. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Stem cell transplantation seems to stop and, in some cases, undo neurological damage in people with multiple sclerosis, a small study shows.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 4:48 am

Life after ice storm dire, getting worse in spots (AP)

AP - In some parts of rural Kentucky, they're getting water the old-fashioned way — with pails from a creek. There's not room for one more sleeping bag on the shelter floor. The creative are flushing their toilets with melted snow.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 1:59 am

Royal society hunts for Britain's oldest working lightbulb

The search is on for Britain's oldest working lightbulb, still glowing after many decades - and possibly beating what are claimed to be the world's oldest working bulbs in the US, both allegedly still burning after a century.

It will pain the Royal Society of Chemistry if there isn't an older bulb somewhere among Britain's estimated 903.6m domestic bulbs, given that it was a British scientist and inventor who first demonstrated a working lightbulb, at a Literary and Philosophical Society lecture in Newcastle upon Tyne, on 3 February 1879.

On Monday, the 130th anniversary, the chemists will present a Chemical Landmark plaque to the Newcastle society, where a replica of Joseph Swan's pioneering design will be lit.

Although the American Thomas Edison is generally credited with inventing the incandescent light bulb, in fact Swan and Edison were working neck and neck on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and after bitter patent battles, eventually joined forces to form what became the Swan and Edison corporation.

By late 1879 Swan was installing light bulbs in homes and institutions across England, and at the time of his death in 1914 millions of buildings were lit by electricity.

The Society of Chemistry has heard anecdotes of ancient working bulbs, but is now offering a £500 reward for the oldest authenticated one in Britain. In the US a lightbulb at Livermore fire station in California is said to have been donated and installed in 1901, and is still burning. Another bulb, installed at the Fort Worth Palace theatre on 21 September 1908, is now in a museum, but still working.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 31 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

Review: Darwin's Island by Steve Jones and Darwin's Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore

Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England
by Steve Jones
320pp, Little, Brown, £20

Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
512pp, Allen Lane, £25

Over the past 150 years Darwin has become many people and many opinions. On the Origin of Species has been used to justify ideologies quite at odds with each other, including socialism and fascism; he has been claimed as an atheist yet also represented as an empiricist hardly aware of the implications of his own theory. His determined silence in the Origin on the effects of his ideas for humankind may have been intended - as he said - to be "diplomatic", but instead shook the foundations of human pride in our separate status. His reluctance to apply evolutionary principles directly to social reform, as his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace did, has led some to view him as unconcerned with social justice. Darwin takes it for granted that we are part of the animal kingdom. And he takes that understanding further: we are kin to all organic life forms, extant and extinct.

In the telling of Darwin's story, emphasis is often put on his presence as a family man, the devoted husband and father of 10 children who had the free run of the house and even his study. Darwin certainly lived in the midst of his own family and among those of his immediate kin, present and for several generations back. But in the Origin Darwin also expanded the idea of family, away from the human only, away from what he called the exclusiveness of "pedigrees and armorial bearings", to embrace all "the past and present inhabitants of the world" - and by "inhabitant" he did not mean simply the human. Instead of being "special creations", all organic beings are, as an outcome of his theory, "lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch". We are all "the offspring of common parents", and for Darwin this inclusiveness is the "grand fact" he has uncovered.

In the conclusion to the Origin, Darwin seeks to hearten and reassure the reader: "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendents of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled." We are part of the grandest of all families, he suggests, because we are part of the oldest family (that criterion by which the grandeur of aristocratic families is judged). His theory challenges apartheid in all its forms, including that between the living and the dead.

Two important new books consider Darwin's achievement and the radical changes brought about by his thinking. In Darwin's Island, Steve Jones places his work in a continuum that reaches into the present of scientific research, as well as emphasising its extraordinary prescience; in Darwin's Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore investigate the social and personal forces that formed his thinking. Jones looks forward, and laterally across all the areas to which Darwin's work contributed; Desmond and Moore plumb the past and seek a central explanation for Darwin's drive. Both books enhance our understanding of Darwin's significance. They are exhilarating in the freedom and precision with which they track ideas. Though both treat Darwin as a "great man", they are not at the mercy of the great-man view of history. They recognise that the powerful individual is shaped and conditioned by - as well as breaking free from - the times in which he or she lives. There is a difference between them, though: Jones has no truck with the idea that Darwin's theories are inherently social, though their effects are colossally so. Desmond and Moore emphasise the inspiration that political ideas provided, and see them as intrinsic to Darwin's theories.

Both books draw on Darwin's insistence that all organisms are kin and from common stock. They set out to rescue him from some false assumptions and to demonstrate the range and impassioned foresight of his work, as well as its relation to his own life experience. And both engage with the whole corpus of his writing, not just the Origin. That in itself is a great gain: Darwin was an indefatigable writer as well as a scrupulous observer throughout his adult life, from the 1830s to the early 1880s. In that time, he published a continuous stream of books, many of them founding documents of a range of different disciplines. The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Animal Kingdom (1876), for example, was about hermaphrodite plants and was, Jones argues, "a first step in the scientific study of sex".

As Jones demonstrates, Darwin's concern with sexed and unsexed species and with their inventive means of exchanging genes had its bearing on his anxieties about first-cousin marriages - such as his own. But the outcome of his investigation was not controlled by these concerns. Jones also goes on to show where later research has reinforced or corrected Darwin's views: "He denied the importance of selfing in animals and was again mistaken - I myself once worked on hermaphrodite slugs, who manage quite well with sex within their own skins."

Jones shows how Darwin, living a family life in the English countryside, was able to attain radical insights and experimental results from the materials of his garden and greenhouses and from the fields that surrounded his house. These insights and results, he argues, are as vital to evolutionary theory and its future as those Darwin gleaned from his visit to the Galápagos islands. He shows, too, that despite the illness that hampered much of his adult life, Darwin travelled quite widely within Britain (often accompanied by subjects of study such as "pots of orchids or of insect-eating plants . . . at considerable inconvenience").

The delight in reading Jones's book is the zest with which he explores facts and sets them together to yield more than anyone could have expected, in true Darwinian style. This is a copious, branching book. Although he insists on the crucial experimental presence of the British Isles in Darwin's researches, he does not confine himself to these shores. Jones demonstrates the coherence of Darwin's output, showing how much of his thinking radiates out from his studies of barnacles and climbing plants, insects and worms. The finches and the tortoises of the Galápagos are part of the throng of life-forms, not the sole topic of his investigations.

Darwin himself had geology as his founding imagination and, writing to his friend and cousin William Darwin Fox, just before he arrived at the Galápagos, he was excited mostly at the prospect of finding rock strata there. Jones's own predominant interest is in biology, but he doesn't neglect that past lived world impacted or crumbled in the strata of the earth because, as he sees, those lost aeons and once-living forms were essential for Darwin's theories to work.

To Darwin, nothing was trivial, since his entire theory depended on transmission of slight variations which over time produce huge consequences. On the contrary, as Jones makes clear, he saw how things small and large in scale relate intimately to each other and how organisms remote in time and place share processes with others close at hand. Jones relishes Darwin's own puzzlement, even occasional exasperation, at the sheer inventiveness of forms in nature. Of orchids, Darwin writes: "Hardly any fact has struck me so much as the endless diversities of structure, the prodigality of resources, for gaining the very same end, namely, the fertilisation of one flower by the pollen from another plant."

Jones comments that "he glimpsed but a small part of the game played by all plants as they fulfil their sexual identity" and goes on to ruminate on cheats, stupidity, reproductive dishonesty and identity fraud in plants, with some side-glances at human parallels. (He notes with some glee Darwin's assumption that females are monogamous, which led him to refuse the idea of reproductive fraud in mammals.)

Jones is still startled by the investigations he records and by the potentialities of science. He demurs at anything that too closely identifies the scientist with the science, yet he emphasises the "magic" of connection: "There is something magical in the way that scientific rationalism connects raindrops with heartbeats, and battered trees with depressed infants."

Occasionally, I found his insistence on the language of competition and struggle misleading: the "biological war between flower and insect" might be seen as biological collaboration. He insists that "the whole of evolution involves an endless set of tactics, but no strategy". That is, Darwinian theory isn't predictive. The intricacy of connections and deviations certainly makes it impossible to foresee the future. Nor, Jones asserts, does natural selection have any "inbuilt tendency to improve matters". Here he differs from Darwin who, whether we like it or not, frequently links the idea of selection with that of improvement.

That difference cannot be glossed over. Jones seems to assume Darwin's assent, but in the Origin we read: "old forms will be supplanted by new and improved forms"; "the later and more improved forms have conquered the older and less improved organic beings in the struggle for life". And in his autobiography Darwin writes of his dismay at the distant fate of Earth's organic life as the planet cools: "Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he is now, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress."

Natural selection does not produce perfection (indeed, imperfection, as of the eye, is evidence of natural selection in process) but Darwin does draw the idea of improvement tightly into his understanding of its outcome. Looking back, we may see this insistence as tinctured with the Victorian belief in progress and the hierarchical views of race-theorists, which colour Darwin's efforts even as he tries to think himself free of those assumptions. That's not to his discredit, but it is important to acknowledge the degree to which he both worked within and struggled against the assumptions of his time, especially when they are not our assumptions.

Desmond and Moore concentrate on the human implications of Darwin's argument that all life-forms are kin. Their theme is the appalling practice of slavery and the history of the anti-slavery movement. They explore the Darwin family's place in that movement and show the ways in which scientific debate was fundamental to the struggle between those who tolerated or supported slavery and those, such as Darwin, who had both a visceral and an intellectual loathing of it. They go further, to suggest that the initial drive behind Darwin's investigation of species formation was his personal loathing of slavery.

To this end, they marshal an admirable and exciting mass of research into Darwin family history and Darwin's early life, bringing out the importance of his mother's Unitarianism and his Wedgwood relatives' activism. Their account of Darwin's rather unhappy year at Edinburgh University struggling to study as a doctor is particularly illuminating. This episode is usually written off as a fruitless period in Darwin's young life and intellectual formation. Certainly, he found the experience of watching operations before the coming of anaesthetics quite intolerable. The authors explain his reaction in terms of him being "a polished young gentleman", one who had a particular "horror of bleeding". But given that one of these operations was on a child, it's not hard to share his horror at pain. His capacity for empathy was a quality that was to stand him in good stead in his scientific practice later, so that their vague summary sentence is disappointing: "It was clearly the aura as much as the anatomy that he hated."

But much else in these early chapters is revelatory, in part because Desmond and Moore bring so many strands together - though their characterisation of Walter Scott's novels as emphasising continuity and medievalism misses a trick. In fact, novels such as Waverley and Old Mortality confronted what was then quite recent upheaval, resistance and change: the forces of discontinuity and of struggle for territory.

Desmond and Moore explore the opinions and histories of Darwin's teachers and fellow-students, their relations to phrenology, philanthropy, taxonomy and taxidermy. The last proved especially fruitful for Darwin: one winter he bought 40 hours of instruction in stuffing birds from a black freedman, "John", and late in life recalled that "I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man". Desmond and Moore's point is that Darwin, from quite early on, had learned to appreciate the capacities of people who elsewhere would be subject to slavery. Moreover, since "John" had travelled with his master, Waterton, through jungle country, Darwin would have had access to a different view of the communities they had explored from that to be found in travel books. In Edinburgh, when Darwin was studying there, "issues of environmental versus anatomical determinism, and a self-animated versus a Creatively animated nature, were being thrashed out all around him".

"Already the shadow of slavery as a dark corollary was emerging," Desmond and Moore write, "never stated, but looming larger as explanations of subjugation came to the fore." Slavery features everywhere in their account: from Darwin's immediate family circle, to his later testy relations with his early mentor, the great geologist Charles Lyell, who failed fully to acknowledge the evils of slavery.

Although there are times where Desmond and Moore's assiduity in finding side-references to slavery becomes somewhat oppressive, the authors do succeed in demonstrating the degree to which current events merged into Victorian scientific inquiry and inflected its findings. Moreover, they highlight Darwin's ability to treat equally people of many backgrounds, including the impressive Richard Hill - naturalist and anti-slavery activist and "the first gentleman 'of colour' in the Jamaican magistracy, assigned to adjudicate between former slave-holders and slaves". Such ties were personal but also always in the service of experimental investigation and scientific theory.

The authors set out to establish not only the centrality of race relations, and specifically slavery, in Darwin's investigations, but to demonstrate that he formed the concept of sexual selection much earlier than is often thought and that it owes much to these racial controversies. The Descent of Man thus becomes all about sexual selection rather than this idea being loosely added at the end.

There may be more unevenness in Darwin's attitudes than this book can quite tolerate, particularly in relation to hierarchy among human races. And absences, like that of humankind from the Origin, can be filled with many meanings: perhaps Darwin was not as preoccupied with the human as are his commentators. But in the main they are justified in their claims: Darwin never forgot the cries he heard from an anonymous house while on a land journey from the Beagle, and this haunting first-hand experience of liberal impotence in the face of cruel and degrading suffering fuelled his thinking.

• On the Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer, is published by OUP. You can buy Darwin's Island and Darwin's Sacred Cause at the Guardian bookshop

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 31 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

Space Station Crew Backs Steelers in Super Bowl (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station is pulling for the Pittsburgh Steelers in this weekend's Super Bowl showdown against the Arizona Cardinals.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 Jan 2009 | 12:00 am

Dino-right! Fix is in for misnamed Texas dinosaur (AP)

AP - Pleurocoelus has served ably as the official dinosaur of Texas. Sure, it was a plant-noshing herbivore in a fiercely barbecue-proud state, but the sauropod dwarfed most other dinos and lumbered with a 20-ton swagger.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 10:57 pm

Earth-hunter telescope prepared for launch

TITUSVILLE, Florida (Reuters) - NASA unveiled a modest telescope on Friday with a sweeping mission -- to discover if there are any Earth-type planets orbiting distant stars.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 10:48 pm

Windy state

If Iowa can't go green, what chance does the US have?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Jan 2009 | 9:07 pm

White House Wants Your Green Ideas

A greener economy remain a focus of the new administration.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 9:03 pm

Obama urged not to backburner climate change (AP)

AP - Don't put off action on global warming just because times are lean — that's the message Al Gore, world environmental leaders and U.S. executives sent Friday to President Barack Obama.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 9:01 pm

EU to debate cloning for food, wary of trade impact

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU regulators will discuss again in a few months whether to allow meat and milk products from cloned animals into the food chain, despite local consumer opposition and inconclusive data, officials said on Friday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 7:59 pm

Zapping the Brain Improves Fine Motor Skills (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - A mild electrical jolt to a particular area of the brain can rev up a person's motor skills, a new study suggests. The finding, detailed in the Jan. 20 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could hold promise for enhancing rehabilitation for people with traumatic brain injury, stroke and other conditions that can impact motor skills. Motor skills are the controlled, voluntary movements of the muscles in the hands, feet, eyes and other body parts that are learned from infancy onward. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 7:48 pm

Dumping Crops at Sea Proposed as Way to Bury Carbon

Scientists propose dumping crop remains at sea to sequester carbon.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 7:20 pm

Make Your Own Scientific Super Bowl Snacks

The problem with Super Bowl snacks is that they're boring. It's time for something new.

On Sunday, most of America will gorge on typical salty, fatty and totally unhealthy foods: buffalo wings, nachos, pizza. And that's just fine. The Super Bowl is all but an official federal holiday, and holiday feasts aren't supposed to scrupulous. But they should be scrumptious.

Wired Science asked leading molecular gastronomists for their own preferred finger foods recipes. Inspired by the experimental spirit of science, they've come up with new variations on old standbys, from Wylie Dufresne's pizza pebbles to Homaro Cantu's olive dipping chips.

"With the vanishing of preconceptions over recent years of what we can do in the kitchen in regards to taste, technique and technology, food is becoming much more influenced by science," said chef Kevin Sousa, designer of the puffed sauerkraut pictured above. "Every time an advance is made with an ingredient or piece of equipment, that advance inspires countless chefs to push themselves to create a dish that is equally ambitious."

Wylie Dufresne: Pizza Pebbles

PIZZA PEBBLES

Ingredients: 105 grams toast powder • 30 grams tomato powder • 45 grams parmesan powder • 45 grams buttermilk powder • 67.5 grams garlic confit oil

Procedure: Mix the toast, tomato, parmesan and buttermilk powder together in a bowl. Drizzle in the garlic confit oil (see recipe below). Mix well until it resembles wet sand. Form into small spheres about the size of a dime in diameter and reserve. When rolling is complete, place in sauté pan over medium heat and swirl pan continuously until spheres begin to form smooth “pebbles”. Pour onto a tray, let cool and serve.

Note: Dufresne purchases his powders here — but in the grand spirit of kitchen tinkering, it shouldn't be too hard to make your own.

GARLIC CONFIT OIL

Ingredients: 285 grams garlic clove, peeled • 445 grams grapeseed oil

Procedure: Combine ingredients and heat gently until garlic is tender. Puree with a pinch of salt.

Homaro Cantu: Greek Chips & Dip

OLIVE CHIPS

Ingredients: 100g tapioca starch (this can be purchased from most asian markets) • 100g kalamata olives, do not use oil cured olives as they will not work properly (including juice)

Procedure: Puree olives with juice in a food processor. Fold in tapioca starch until it forms a workable ball of dough. Place the dough in between 2 pieces of plastic wrap and roll out to 1/8th inch thickness. Steam until opaque. Allow to cool and cut into strips that are 1 inch by 2 inches. Dry overnight on a metal rack, they should look like shriveled purple leather.

Fry in 400 degrees Fahrenheit oil to puff up and allow to cool, they will more than triple in size.

FETA-PARSLEY PUREE

Ingredients: ¼ bunch parsley, leaves only • Boiling salted water for blanching • Ice water for shocking parsley • 200 grams feta cheese • 30 grams whole milk • Kosher salt to taste

Procedure: Blanch parsley in boiling salted water for 30 seconds and quickly shock in ice water. Place parsley, feta and milk into a blender and blend until it reaches a smooth and silky consistency. Season with salt to taste. The puree should be bright green.

To plate: Spread a small amount on chips and serve immediately.

Kevin Sousa: Puffed Sauerkraut

PUFFED SAUERKRAUT

Ingredients: 220 grams prepared sauerkraut • 200 grams small tapioca pearls, coarse ground in spice mill • 40 grams sauerkraut juice • Salt to taste

Procedure: Puree all ingredients in food processor until a dough forms. Roll in between two sheets of plastic wrap, steam for ten minutes over on the underside of a pan inverted over a steam bath covered tightly. When cool, remove plastic wrap and dry in 180 degrees Fahrenheit. oven until completely dry and brittle. Break in desired sized pieces and deep fry at 350 degrees until crisp and puffed to about three times original size. Season and reserve.

POTATO-CHEDDAR CHEESE DIP

Ingredients: 228 grams Idaho potato (approximately one potato) • 100 grams aged cheddar cheese • 80 grams warm chicken stock • 18 grams microplaned garlic • 9 grams ultratex 3 • Salt and black pepper to taste

Procedure: Peel and quarter one large Idaho potato, place in vacuum bag and Cryovac. Cook sous vide at 180 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 hours. Place hot potato in food processor with blades at high speed. Add cheddar, garlic and two thirds chicken stock. Add ultratex and adjust consistency (it should be that of slightly loose cream cheese). Season with salt and black pepper, cool, and place in a squeeze bottle with an 1/8" opening. Reserve.

EAST END BIG HOP BRATWURST PUREE

Ingredients: 230 grams bratwurst (removed from casing) • 200 grams caramelized red onion, cooled • 1 liter plus East End Big Hop beer (substitute brew of your choice) • 3 sheets gelatin (bloomed in cold water) • 3 grams agar agar • Salt and black pepper to taste

Procedure: In medium saucepan, bring half of beer to a boil, add bratwurst and reduce heat, reduce liquid by half, add caramelized red onion and cook for an additional five minutes. Transfer to blender and blend on high until smooth adjusting consistency with more beer if necessary, reserve.

Place other half liter of beer in a small saucepan and add agar agar, puree with immersion blender and place over medium heat while constantly whisking, bring to a simmer and add bloomed gelatin (squeezed of excess water). Return to a simmer and turn off heat. Combine bratwurst mixture and agar mixture in high speed blender and puree until smooth and creamy, push through a tamis or fine mesh screen, season and cool. Pipe mixture into a squeeze bottle with a pastry bag.

BRAISED MUSTARD SEEDS

Ingredients: 50 grams yellow mustard seeds • 1 liter water • 20 grams apple cider vinegar • 10 grams spicy mustard • 40 grams grapeseed oil • Salt to taste

Procedure: In small saucepan, combine mustard seeds and water. Bring to a boil, reduce to a low simmer, and cook until seeds are soft and liquid is semi-gelatinous. Cool to room temperature. In a small bowl, whisk together vinegar, mustard and grapeseed oil. Dress seeds and season. Cool completely and reserve.

CREME FRAICHE PUDDING

Ingredients: 200 grams crème fraiche • 4 grams ultratex 3 • 1 gram locust bean gum • Salt to taste

Procedure: In a high speed blender, puree all ingredients until smooth and creamy. Strain through a chinoise and place in a squeeze bottle. Cool.

To Plate: Place sauerkraut puff in center of plate. In a long smooth motion squeeze potato cheddar dip in one strip over the puff. Squeeze five dollops of the bratwurst beer puree randomly in close proximity to the puff. Spoon the mustard seeds on to the puff, using them according to your tastes; drizzle the crème fraiche over the puff and finish with baby caraway leaves.

Marc Lepine & Michael Holland: Beer Ice Cream with Pretzel Crust and Dipping Sauces

BEER ICE CREAM

Ingredients: 460 grams 35% cream • 165 grams sugar • 6 egg yolks • 400 mL beer • 100 grams honey • 100ml beer • 100 grams pretzels

Directions: Place sugar and yolks in bowl and 35% cream in pot. Bring cream to a boil and slowly temper yolk mixture. Place back on heat and cook to anglaise stage, coating back of spatula. Cool down immediately in ice bath. Place ice cream mix and beer in a mixer with paddle attachment (a whisk and bowl works, too.) On low speed, gradually add liquid nitrogen ½ cup at a time until mixture is frozen and becomes thick enough to pipe. (Note: If you can't get liquid nitrogen, an ice cream maker will do.)

With a plain round piping tip, pipe lines on frozen steel tray. Leave there until ready to bread ice cream.

For breading, take some honey and small amount of beer and mix until smooth and slightly thicker than water. Place pretzels in blender and blend until fine, sifting out powder. Place pretzels in bowl.

Take frozen beer ice cream off the tray, one at a time, and dip into honey•beer mixture completely coating  it, then placing into bowl of crushed pretzels. Using your hands, squeeze crushed pretzels into ice cream tightly to ensure it sticks. Place immediately into freezer for 6 hours.

MUSTARD SABAYON

Ingredients: 125 mL water • 50 grams Dijon mustard • 20 grams grainy mustard • 45 grams honey • 8 egg yolks

Place all ingredients in a bowl. Cook at 175 degrees for 6-8 minutes, then blend thoroughly in a mixer. Cool immediately in ice bath, and keep in covered container in fridge.

BLUE CHEESE WHIZ

Ingredients: 200 grams blue cheese • 200 mL milk • 2.8 grams sodium citrate • 250 grams cream cheese

Procedure: Place blue cheese, milk and sodium citrate in pot. Heat until cheese is melted and mixture is smooth. Cool mixture in fridge. Take cream cheese and blend in mixer with paddle attachment (or with a whisk and bowl) until smooth. Slowly add blue cheese mixture to cream cheese, blending until smooth. Place in fridge 3-4 before using to set cheese mixture.

WHIPPED FRANK'S HOT SAUCE

Ingredients: 150 grams egg whites • 300 grams sugar • 125 grams Frank’s Hot Sauce • 50 grams water

Directions: Combine sugar, Frank’s hot sauce, and water in pot. Bring to boil and cook to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Slowly whip egg whites to stiff peak timing it with the temperature of the boiled syrup. Once syrup reaches 350 degrees, slowly pour into egg whites and continue whipping until mixture thickens and cools down. Place in piping bag and keep in fridge until ready to use.

To plate: Spread blue cheese whiz onto plate with offset spatula.  Pipe a rosette of whipped Frank’s hot sauce, and place a spoonful of mustard sabayon.  Place Beer Pretzel next to dipping sauces.

Will Goldfarb & Jennifer Leuzzi: "Dry" Olive Oil Popcorn

OLIVE OIL POWDER

Ingredients: 3 tablespoons (1.5 ounces) extra virgin Olive Oil • 1 tablespoon (0.5 ounces) tapioca maltodextrin

Procedure: In a bowl, pour the olive oil in a slow thin stream into the tapioca maltodextrin while whisking. Whisk until well blended, but still dry and coarse.
Place a tamis or fine mesh strainer over a mixing bowl. Using a spatula, press a ¼ of the mixture through a tamis or fine mesh strainer. Repeat.
Store powder in an air-tight container for up to one month.

To plate: Sprinkle it on popcorn, salads, pizza, toast, pasta. It will become your favorite condiment. (For popcorn, add 2 tablespoons powder per 1 cup of popped corn.)

Recipe Variation: You can use other oils for this recipe. But as oils have different consistencies, test a small quantity first using the 3:1 ratio to see how it works. If it's too runny add more tapioca maltodextrin.

Image: Emilie Baltz

Richard Blais: The Aroma Dome

Grab your Smoking Gun. Or your hookah. Or that tube-like apparatus from college.

Fill with spices or hickory chips.

Find a big glass bowl. Serve your food under the inverted bowl.

Fire up the smoker; place the tube under the dome to capture the smoke. 

When serving, remove the dome and — voilà! — the smokey flavor swirling underneath hits the guests.

Image: Flickr/Jan Krömer

See Also:

• A Willy Wonka Who Wants to Feed the World
• The Nanotech Antidote to Food Poisoning
• Video: Would You Eat Lab Grown Meat?
• Farmed Chickens Can't Walk; Just Grow Them in Vats Already
• Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 30 Jan 2009 | 7:07 pm

Inside Alaska's Explosive Redoubt Volcano

Alaska's Mount Redoubt could erupt at any moment.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 6:26 pm

First Chemical Warfare Felled Roman Fort

Persian soldiers gas-bombed a Roman fort 2,000 years ago in a brutal siege.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 6:00 pm

Reading Bridget Jones could improve your love life, new study shows

It's the news we've all been waiting for: reading a good book prepares you for real life. Scientists have found that, far from being a way to avoid reality, burying yourself in the disastrous romantic adventures of Bridget Jones or following Oliver Twist in his journey from rags to riches could make you better able to cope with similar situations in the real world.

A brain-imaging study carried out by psychologists at Washington University in St Louis used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track brain activity as participants read short stories, finding that reading is by no means a passive activity. Instead, as participants read from a 1940s text about the daily activities of a young boy, activity in different brain regions increased depending on what was going on in the story.

So, if the character in the book "pulled a light cord", brain activity increased in the frontal lobe region which controls grasping motions. As the character in the story "went through the front door into the kitchen", activity went up in the relevant temporal lobes.

"There has been good evidence for a while that mental simulation - imagination - can improve performance in sport and other skilled behaviours. This study suggests that readers do mental simulation when they comprehend a story," Jeffrey Zacks, a co-author of the study and director of the university's dynamic cognition laboratory, said today. "It could well be that the simulations we perform when reading function like skilled practice. I was reading a cooking magazine last night, and I certainly hope that helps me get better with a whisk."

Participants in the study were shown four stories of fewer than 1,500 words from One Boy's Day, a record of everything one boy in a small town did over the course of a day. A computer screen displayed one word at a time from the texts, which the researchers had carefully coded so they knew when important features of the story were changing. "It's a wonderful document - worth an essay or a dissertation in its own right," said Zacks. "It was collected by a team of observers working in shifts; one team would observe for a little while and then rotate out and write everything they had seen while it was still fresh ... I think of it as something like Ulysses, just really boring if you read chapters at a time."

The lead author of the study, which is soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, was Nicole Speer, who is now a research associate with the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education mental health programme in Boulder, Colorado.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jan 2009 | 5:12 pm

SLIDE SHOW: This Week's Top Stories

A look back at images from stories in Discovery News this week.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 4:50 pm

Video: David Attenborough on Charles Darwin's legacy

Sir David discusses how Charles Darwin helped shape his career

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jan 2009 | 4:16 pm

Dolphins are capable sea chefs, scientists say

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Dolphins are the chefs of the seas, having been seen going through precise and elaborate preparations to rid cuttlefish of ink and bone to produce a soft meal of calamari, Australian scientists say.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 3:57 pm

For Woman, 8+6=14 Babies Now

The woman who gave birth to octuplets last week already had six children, bringing her brood to a whopping 14.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 3:48 pm

Acid oceans 'need urgent action'

Marine ecosystems are at risk from ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Jan 2009 | 3:42 pm

Belly Button Beauty Cues Potential Mates

The seemingly useless belly button may hold more meaning than you thought.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 3:09 pm

Alaskans Brace for Possible Eruption

As geologists warn an eruption at Mount Redoubt is imminent, Alaskans get ready.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 3:00 pm

High Altitude Balloons Creating New Jobs

ESA backed high altitude balloon experiments are training students for high demand careers in science and engineering.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:40 pm

Julian Glover: A meeting of scientists at Davos celebrated the end of the antedeluvian Bush years

At Davos this morning some of America and Britain's leading scientists came together to share their delight in the downfall of George Bush's antedeluvian administration.

An American stem cell researcher, who has been dragged before Congress 160 times to defend his right to work, spoke of the sudden freedom he felt under President Obama. A British astronomer, Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, shared the excitement at the new American leader's promise to restore science to its proper place, made in his inaugural address.

Is science overcoming unreason? Speakers at the meeting predicted that the next decade could see an explosion of new technologies and knowledge – nuclear fusion; carbon capture; regenerative medicine that will see heart attack victims injected with cells to regrow damaged organs.

A physicist, Brian Cox from Cern, where the large hadron collider is about to be powered up again, promised that "within five years we will know the origins of mass in the universe without a doubt".

"We have enough energy in that machine to go to a new place," he said.

John Gearhart, from the University of Pennsylvania, said that American scientists had decided to fight back against the anti-science culture that had threatened their freedoms. "We get into the political arena whenever we can," he said.

His university now goes out to teach developmental biology in middle schools, a move that is being copied up and down the east coast. Creationism may have met its match.

Hanging over the session, however, was a fear – that the response to climate change will be too slow, and too small. There was strong support for huge investment in energy research – into new means of transmitting and storing power, as well as of creating it. That will cost money, of course, which is one thing in short supply at Davos this year.

Energy companies always have done badly, and may be cutting back. The depressing truth is that America's big oil companies spend less as a proportion of their income on research and development than the nation's pet food producers.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:40 pm

Ponder your putt too long and you may make things worse

Golfers who think too much about their technique between shots could be seriously affecting their performance, a study suggests.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:32 pm

Zapping the Brain Improves Fine Motor Skills

Electrical stimulation improves brain processing of motor skills.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:31 pm

Water Plays Surprising Role in Climate Change

Hawaii is the ideal place to study low-humidity air and the processes that dehydrate the atmosphere.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:26 pm

Gorilla Diary

Convincing militia leaders to lay down their weapons
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:25 pm

8 Is Enough: The Limits to Human Reproduction

It's great those octuplets are here and healthy, but really, humans aren't designed to have litters.
Source: Livescience.com | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:24 pm

GPS-Laced Footballs to Offer Keen Play by Play

A football embedded with satellite positioning sensors will beam its location, in real time.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:10 pm

Underground Particles Forecast Winter Storms

Scientists consult a strange source -- cosmic rays -- to predict winter weather.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 30 Jan 2009 | 2:02 pm

Alaskans brace for Redoubt Volcano eruption (AP)

AP - Hardware stores and auto parts shops scored a post-holiday run of business this week as Anchorage-area residents stocked up on protective eyewear and masks ahead of a possible eruption of Mount Redoubt.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Jan 2009 | 12:32 pm