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Mars Base

Bacteria-eating viruses 'magic bullets in the war on superbugs' - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...131016212558.htm

scibyte107 ViewerFeedback

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A specialist team of scientists from the University of Leicester has isolated viruses that eat bacteria -- called phages -- to specifically target the highly infectious hospital superbug Clostridium difficile
  • predominantly been funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC).
  • been investigating an alternative approach to antibiotics, which utilizes naturally occurring viruses called bacteriophages, meaning 'eaters of bacteria'.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • since the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin, antibiotics
  • have saved countless lives and impacted on the well-being of humanity
  • the future impact of antibiotics is dwindling
  • with more and more bacteria
  • 'out-evolving' these miracle drugs
  • bacteriophages
  • are specific in what they kill and will generally only infect one particular species, or even strain, of bacteria
  • Following attachment to their hosts, they inject their DNA into the bacterium, which then replicates many times over, ultimately causing the bacterial cell to burst open
  • team have
  • , a specific mixture of phages have been proved, through extensive laboratory testing, to be effective against 90% of the most clinically relevant C. diff strains currently seen in the U.K
  • US-based biopharmaceutical company and pioneers in developing phage-based therapeutics
  • have already made progress in developing phages targeted against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogen that causes acute, life-threatening lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients
  • funding further development and testing
  • phages developed
  • is to have a phage mixture ready to go into phase 1 and 2 clinical trials
  • Evaluations of the efficacy of bacteriophage therapy and optimisation of dosing regimes will be carried out
  • bacteria primarily affect our digestive system
  • pose a serious threat when our natural digestive environment is disrupted or depleted, such as after chronic antibiotic use
  • antibiotics also destroy the 'good' gut bacteria, in turn increasing the potential for relapse or new infections
  • The key advantage of using phages over antibiotics
  • A phage will infect and kill only a specific strain/species of bacteria.
  • Antibacterial resistance is a major and growing threat to health globally
  • This study
  • examines a new way to kill bacteria to circumvent resistance formation
Mars Base

The Skull | Joe the Dinosaur - 0 views

dinosaurjoe.org/...the-skull

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • exposing structures on the inside of the skull that would otherwise be inaccessible
  • split into left and right halves by erosion
  • The skull of “Joe” is remarkably complete
Mars Base

India's First Mars Probe Launch Set for Nov. 5 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/s-orbiter-november-launch.html

scibyte107 SpacecraftUpdate

shared by Mars Base on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • India's 4.5 billion rupee ($73.5 million) mission to Mars, the nation’s first true interplanetary probe, is now slated to lift off Nov.
  • , Mangalyan will leave Earth orbit in November and cruise in deep space for 10 months using an onboard propulsion system
  • elliptical orbit around Mars
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • ISRO says the primary objectives of the orbiter are to demonstrate India’s technological capability, look for signs of life and study the planet’s atmospheric composition
  • Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
Mars Base

European Satellite, Out of Fuel, Will Plunge to Earth Next Month | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/goce-satellite-fall-earth.html

scibyte107

shared by Mars Base on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A European gravity-mapping satellite has run out of fuel and will likely die a fiery death in Earth's atmosphere
  • Oct. 21
  • The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, or GOCE for short, exhausted its supply of xenon fuel on
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • most of the satellite will disintegrate in the atmosphere, some smaller parts are expected to reach Earth’s surface
  • GOCE satellite launched in March 2009 on a planned two-year mission to map the variations in Earth's gravity field.
  • The spacecraft consumed fuel at a much lower rate than expected, however, allowing GOCE to continue gathering data far beyond its expected lifespan
  • the most accurate gravity data ever available to scientists
Mars Base

An Autonomous, Self-Steering Robo-Cane, And Other Co-Robots to Come | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...-cane-and-other-co-robots-come

scibyte107 MedicalDevice

shared by Mars Base on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • National Robotics Initiative, a federal program that aims to push the development of co-robots, or bots that work alongside—and occasionally inside—humans
  • NRI is a panoply of loosely-related ideas, few of which are photogenic
  • But this research is worth a closer look
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • the bots that could become part of our lives, in our own lifetimes, won’t look like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, or NASA’s (and GM’s) Robonaut 2. Chances are, they’ll look a lot more like a walking stick, with a bunch of stuff bolted onto it.
  • a navigation-aid,
  • the robotic cane being developed by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock acts as a kind of seeing-eye walking stick
  • It maps the user’s path with a vision and 3D camera, and picks out stairways, low overhangs, and other features of interest to the visually-impaired
  • the bot will be able to verbally warn or guide the operator, speaking through a Bluetooth earpiece (and possibly through tactile feedback), it will also be able to perform limited steering maneuvers
  • . “In navaid mode, the device's roller tip is activated, and may drive the cane and point it towards the desired direction of travel
  • The six-degree-of-freedom roller isn’t driving the operator, but making suggestions, and can be toggled on and off by switching between navaid and white cane modes
  • robots designed by companies like iRobot can already drive themselves around indoors with a minimum of collisions
  • problems of obstacle detection and avoidance are far from licked
  • The margin of failure for a robot cane has to be vanishingly small, and that level of accuracy could also benefit systems that aren’t attached to humans
  • the co-robotic cane was co-funded for a three-year period by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the National Eye Institute (NEI), both of which are part of NIH
  • One of the new projects funded by NSF is an effort to make robots that can better read the emotional needs of Parkinson’s sufferers, specifically those whose faces have been significantly paralyzed
  • In order to serve as mediators between victims of “facial masking” and their caregivers
  • the project aims to “develop a robotic architecture endowed with moral emotional control mechanisms, abstract moral reasoning, and a theory of mind that allow corobots to be sensitive to human affective and ethical demands
  • whether it will be an existing system, or a new one
  • is unclear
  • one of the project’s collaborators is
  • the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) roboticist who proposed the use of so-called “ethical governors” for autonomous military robots
Mars Base

Joe's Fossil Skull | Joe the Dinosaur - 0 views

dinosaurjoe.org/...joes-fossil-skull

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The right and left halves were separated by weathering, and the left is the best preserved. The model here was created from CT scan data, and shows all of the features exactly as they are in the original specimen
Mars Base

High-School Student Finds Bumpy-Headed Baby Dino | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/2-baby-dinosaur-discovery.html

scibyte107 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A dinosaur skeleton discovered by
  • d high-school student turns out to be the smallest, youngest and most complete duck-billed dinosaur of its kind ever found.
  • This Cretaceous-era herbivore, Parasaurolophus, walked the Earth some 75 million years ago.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • dinosaurs in this genus are best known for their impressive tube-shaped head crests, which may have been used for display or perhaps to amplify the animals' calls
  • specimen
  • was so young that its crest was a mere bump on its head.
  • Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif
  • is affiliated with The Webb Schools, a private high-school campus outside of Los Angeles
  • The students at the schools participate in paleontology fieldwork as part of their coursework
  • in 2009
  • a group of students were prospecting for fossils in Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, surveying ground
  • already covered
  • spotted a little sliver of bone sticking out from under a boulder and alerted
  • thought it looked like a piece of dinosaur rib — nice, but not really worth the trouble of excavating.
  • the other side of the boulder
  • what looked like a large cobblestone
  • . A dinosaur skull
  • The team had to line up permits to excavate on the public land
  • returned in 2010 to dig the bones from the ground
  • 800-pound (363 kilograms) armor of rock, the bones had to be airlifted out of the rugged backcountry by helicopter
  • After 1,300 painstaking hours of cleaning, chiseling and picking, technicians revealed the fossil buried in all that stone
  • paleontologists realized they had an amazing example of a baby Parasaurolophus
  • they were able to sample the baby's leg bone. As dinosaur bones grow, they develop ring patterns, much like trees
  • didn't have any rings at all
  • that this animal was under a year old when it died
  • The infant dinosaur was already 6 feet (1.8 meters) long
  • duck-billed dinos hatched at about the same size as a human infant
  • "Joe" was already sprouting a crest bump so young suggests that Parasaurolophus started growing its crest earlier than other duck-billed dinosaurs.
  • "Joe" will go on display at the Alf museum beginning
  • Oct. 22
  • A digital exploration of the skeleton will also be available at dinosaurjoe.com.
  • the student who found the little duck-bill,
  • now in college, studying geology
  • understand how Parasaurolophus evolved that big crest, just by shifting around events in its development
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