Tag: Science & Tech

No Whey? Yes Whey: The Truth About Greek Yogurt

The truth about greek yogurtA few years ago, a new product hit your grocer’s dairy case seemingly out of nowhere: Greek yogurt. It’s an extra-thick, extra-creamy, and protein-heavy version of. The main difference, besides the thick, almost cheesecake-like consistency: There’s very little liquid in a container. Popular brands include Yoplait and Chobani. And Ben and Jerry’s has a frozen version. How popular is Greek yogurt? In New York state alone, production at yogurt plants has tripled over the last five years to more than a billion pounds per year. Want to know the truth about Greek yogurt?

The World’s Smallest Movie

world's smallest movieThis tiny film doesn’t feature any big stars like Brad Pitt, or even any littler stars—because there literally wasn’t enough room for them. Instead, A Boy and His Atom stars, amazingly, just a few microscopic particles. Guinness World Records has declared the stop-motion-animated short film “the world’s smallest movie.” The 90-second film consists of a “boy” bouncing an atom-sized ball while dancing and jumping around. There’s not much of a plot but given the methods involved, it’s pretty incredible.

IBM scientists created the film with a “scanning tunneling microscope” that manipulated a few dozen carbon atoms placed atop a copper surface. First they had to chill the microscope to just above absolute zero (-450° F) because at a higher temp, the “excitable” atoms would have ignored their stage directions.

Big Noise, Little Bug: The Cicadas are Coming!

As the East Coast prepares for the cicadas invasion due sometime in the next month, we dig in our vault to find some more information about this tiny, yet noisy bug. The following article is from Uncle John’s Fully Loaded Bathroom Reader.

BIG NOISE, LITTLE BUG

Cicadas are the vuvuzelas of the insect world. (What are vuvuzelas? Those loud horns that nearly caused soccer fans’ brains to explode during the 2010 World Cup.) Vuvuzelas reach a decibel level of 60, but cicadas? These little bugs can reach a decibel level twice that loud.That’s as loud as a rock concert or a jet engine.

BROODY BUGS

CicadasCicadas are bizarre, especially the “periodical cicadas” that live only in eastern North America. What’s odd about them is that they’re on either a 13- or a 17-year cycle. They emerge in “broods” of so many bugs it’s like some shock-and-awe insect invasion, make a lot of deafening noise, mate, lay eggs, and, within just a few weeks, die. Then they disappear again for an another exact number—13 or 17—of years. Entomologists are still trying to figure out what makes periodical cicadas tick. The main problem: those long cycles. It’s difficult for scientists to study an insect that shows up only once or twice in their careers. The name cicada is Latin for “tree cricket,” which is actually incorrect: cicadas are not crickets. And though one species is commonly called the “17-year locust,” they’re not locusts, either. Locusts are “eating machines” that can devour entire crops. Cicadas don’t eat leaves; they’re sapsuckers, like their closest relatives leafhoppers and spittlebugs. Cicadas have also been called “jar flies,” “harvest flies,” and “dust flies,” but their Australian nickname, “galang-galang,” which echoes the racket they make, may be the most fitting.

Japanese Scientists “Read Dreams” Via MRI Scans

Holy cow:

In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, western Japan, used MRI scans to locate exactly, which part of the brain was active during the first moments of sleep.

They then woke up the dreamer and asked him or her what images they had seen, a process that was repeated 200 times. These answers were compared with the brain maps that the MRI scanner produced.

Researchers were then able to predict what images the volunteers had seen with a 60 per cent accuracy rate, rising to more than 70 per cent with around 15 specific items including men, words and books, they said.

Billboard in Peru Turns Air Into Drinking Water

No way. (Way!)

Just outside Lima, Peru, a billboard provides drinking water to whomever needs it – mainly, its neighbours.

The panel produces clean water from the humidity in the air, through filters.

Researchers at the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima and advertising agency Mayo Peru DraftFCB joined forces to launch it.

So far it’s made more than 9,000 liters of water – or about 96 liters a day. And it goes into a storage vat that has a tap at street level – so nyone can go up to it and get some water. And they need it, because, even though it’s very humid there (up to 98% humidity in the mornings! ow!), it hardly rains at all! Check this out:

Meteorite Hits Frozen Lake? And a Joke

The Guardian has a great – and large – collection of videos, photos, and reports from news media and just regular folks on the wild meteor event that occurred in Russia last night. Including this shot:

Space.com says it was the largest meteor event in 100 years. The blast: it was more powrful than that produced by the nuclear weapon detonated by North Korea the other day. (Wow!)

NASA says, based on very preliminary data, the meteor was almost 50 feet in circumfrence:

Based on the duration of the event, it was a very shallow entry. It was larger than the meteor over Indonesia on Oct. 8, 2009. Measurements are still coming in, and a more precise measure of the energy may be available later. The size of the object before hitting the atmosphere was about 49 feet (15 meters) and had a mass of about 7,000 tons.

The meteor, which was about one-third the diameter of asteroid 2012 DA14, was brighter than the sun. Its trail was visible for about 30 seconds, so it was a grazing impact through the atmosphere.

But here’s what we want to note:

The Beer-Powered Hospital

Take it away, Homer: “Beer—is there anything it can’t do?”:

Beer and health care may sound like an odd mix. In one case however, the two have formed an unlikely partnership to get creative with renewable energy.

City Brewery in La Crosse, Wisconsin is using all of its biogas byproduct from the brewing process to create three million kilowatt hours per year of electricity by employing a capturing, cleaning and burning process through an engine called a jenbacher.

Down the road from the brewery is Gundersen Lutheran Health System which is credited for the electricity produced by City Brewery. And while this only accounts for 10-13 percent of their total needs, it means they are on their way to meeting complete energy independence by 2014.

So very good.

And there’s even a beer-powered hospital video:

When in China, Do as the Romans Do

Truly fascinating story about a legendary lost Roman army legion—and their possible descendants in remote China:

“Tests found that the DNA of some villagers in Liqian, on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in north-western China, was 56 per cent Caucasian in origin.”

Ledes We Love

Here’s another edition of “Ledes We Love,” accounts of openings to news stories that are so good you hardly have to read any further—but you’re going to. Because you must. Today’s entry:

Manitoban Janis Ollson and family are in magazine ads for the esteemed Mayo Clinic for a very good reason: she’s the first person surgeons cut in half, removed much of a cancerous midsection, then put back together with a happy ending.

We’re Running Out of Helium

This story almost has the feel of a hoax:

“It is the second-lightest element in the Universe, has the lowest boiling-point of any gas and is commonly used through the world to inflate party balloons. But helium is also a non-renewable resource and the world’s reserves of the precious gas are about to run out, a shortage that is likely to have far-reaching repercussions.

Jupiter Has Lost a Stripe

It was there a few months ago—but now it’s gone. Astronomers have no idea why:

Jupiter has lost one of its prominent stripes, leaving its southern half looking unusually blank. […]

The band was present at the end of 2009, right before Jupiter moved too close to the sun in the sky to be observed from Earth. When the planet emerged from the sun’s glare again in early April, its south equatorial belt was nowhere to be seen.

Check it out:

Asteroid Sample Coming to Earth in June

Here’s a fascinating story we haven’t heard a word about from one of our favorite science blogs, Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy:

The Japanese mission Hayabusa (“Falcon”) has been nothing if not ambitious. Launched in 2004, it reached the bizarre asteroid Itokawa a little over a year later. It took phenomenal images and other measurements, and even landed on the asteroid itself to take samples, destined to be returned to Earth.

But it has suffered a series of crippling mishaps that have threatened the mission time and again with failure. However, despite all that, the end game is in sight: Hayabusa is almost back home, and on June 13, sometime around 14:00 UT, the sample recovery capsule will parachute down to the Earth.

Ancient Weapons Found in Melting Arctic Ice

We now bring you another exciting edition of As the World Melts:

A treasure trove of ancient weapons has emerged from melting ice patches in the Canadian Arctic, revealing hunting strategies thousands of years old.

The weapons, which include a 2,400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years, have been found high in the remote Mackenzie Mountains, a region where Mountain Boreal caribou abound in the summer months.

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