Science Addict

In 1953, Stanley L Miller and Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago conducted an experiment that is now considered to be the classic experiment concerning the origin of life. It simulated conditions (hypothetically) present on the primitive Earth and it proved the occurrence of chemical evolution. It was based on Oparin and Haldane’s hypothesis that chemical reactions that could synthesize organic compounds from inorganic components were favored on the early Earth.

In a nutshell, the experiment proved that amino acids could be created from exposing inorganic molecules to electricity. But it seems that this was not all to Miller’s experiments. Two other experiments, neither published, have been conducted. The vials containing products from those experiments have been recently recovered and they have been analyzed using today’s technology. Continue Reading…

Computers just keep getting better and better, but for most tasks they still need human input. Human input needs time, and oh well, we don’t have a lot of time to spare in our days.

Have you ever surfed the net looking for an image that contains things that you want ? You might of noticed that you can search pictures by tags, but those tags can be fake and/or incomplete. And from the other side of the gun, when people post pictures they don’t usually have the patience to cover all the tags. And you spend at least half an hour if you want to find an image that contains all the elements you want.

But a team of researchers from Penn State developed a nice little thing called “Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR)”. This is a statistical approach to photos that can make our task of finding photographs on the Internet much easier. Continue Reading…

Scientists at the Ohio State University have developed a new solar energy material that has two major advantages over current materials : it can use the all the energy that comes from the sunlight and makes it easier to capture the electrons it generates. The hybrid material is a result of combining electrically conductive plastic with molybdenum, titanium and other metals.

The study, lead by Malcom Chisholm, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State, is presented in the Oct 16 edition of the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)”. “There are other such hybrids out there, but the advantage of our material is that we can cover the entire range of the solar spectrum,” said Chisholm.

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We’ve all seen movies where certain indigenous people mix up a cocktail of some plants and come up with a cure for practically anything. It seems that Hollywood is not always wrong. Scientists at the University of Washington are currently updating a traditional Chinese medicine in order to create a drug that is more than 1200 times more efficient in killing cancer cells than the drugs currently available in medicine. This means that a new chemotherapy drug with minimal side effects can be created in the future.

This new compound is based on a currently available drug for malaria, called artemisinin. This drug, artemisinin, is derived from the sweet wormwood plant. Chinese medicine has been using this plant in herbs for the past couple of millenniums and some Asian countries eat it in their salads.

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Scientists know that Earth’s magnetic field reversed it’s direction hundreds of times before, but so far they did not know why. But a recent study made on ancient lava flows may give us a better understanding of what happens and why.

First of all, what is the Earth’s magnetic field?

Earth’s magnetic field (and the surface magnetic field) is approximately a magnetic dipole, with one pole near the geographic North Pole and the other near the geographic South Pole. The earth’s outer liquid core is mostly made up of iron that convects very rapidly, acting as a “dynamo” that generates a magnetic field. An imaginary line joining the magnetic poles would be inclined by approximately 11.3° from the planet’s axis of rotation. The locations of the magnetic poles are not static but they wander as much as 15 km every year. Continue Reading…