“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
(Source: philphys)
Happy Friday! Love, Fluid Dynamics
To celebrate the weekend, do yourself a favor and kick back, crank up your volume, hit full screen, and be mesmerized by Compressed Experiments, by Kim Pimmel.
And, yes, that is the Katamari Damacy theme song in the video.
Paralyzed woman uses her brain to control robotic arm
Two stroke victims unable to move or speak can now control a robotic arm with their minds.
By thinking about moving her own paralyzed arm, one woman in the experiment used an artificial limb to serve herself coffee for the first time in 15 years. It’s the most complex task yet achieved with a brain-computer interface.
“When the woman with the brain stem stroke reached out for that thermos of coffee and put it to her mouth and then she put it back down, the smile on her face was remarkable,” said Brown University neurologist and engineer Leigh Hochberg, who led the study published May 16 in Nature.
Hochberg directs the BrainGate2 clinical trial, an ongoing test of the BrainGate system. With a 4-millimeter-wide, brain-implanted chip as its centerpiece, the system conducts signals from motion-controlling neurons to a computer that decodes the signals and turns them into software commands.
(Source: Wired)
The cheapest and most effective way to purify your water? Leave it in the sun.
That’s what the WHO recommends, at least, and I’ll take their word for it; it doesn’t get much cheaper than free. After just six hours, the UV rays from the sun have destroyed all the microbes in your water, making it safe to drink.
Recent research shows two hacks, both equally easy and nearly as cheap, to improve water purification. Add a dash of salt, of the table salt variety, to cause sediment to clump and fall out of suspension. And use some lime juice, which contains chemical compounds called psoralens, to cut the UV wait time from 6 hours to 30 minutes.
Click through the link to read more.
Scientists find oldest example of pollination
Peering inside an ancient piece of amber, scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence of pollination: insects covered in pollen grains, likely from a gingko tree, from between 105 and 110 million years ago. These insects—a new genus of thrips, insects that still scuttle around today—had likely gathered pollen for food, trailing it from plant to plant along the way. To get an even closer look at the specimens (without cracking open the amber), the researchers took the lump to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. There, they used synchrotron X-ray tomography to generate a detailed 3-D image of the bugs, revealing tiny, specialized hairs they used to collect pollen grains (which are shown here in yellow).
Flowering plants first evolved about 130 million years ago, making them relative evolutionary newcomers; dinosaurs had already been around for 100 million years by then. Since early on, these plants have been aided in reproduction by insects that spread their pollen from one flower to the next, and in turn helped the insects by providing sustenance. “The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story,” said Carmen Soriano, one of the researchers, in a prepared statement—a story that, through finds like this one, we can watch as it unfolded.
After Life: The Strange Science of Decay [BBC, full] (by iasedu)
Don’t look now, but the world’s fisheries are plummeting.
