Since the one-hour root-canal treatment, during which the a 38-year-old man from the UK was given a local anesthetic, the individual cannot remember anything beyond 90 minutes
and you thought your dentist visit was unpleasant
Tag: science
Hearing restoration
Patients with hearing loss will one day have their genome sequenced and their hearing restored by gene therapy. A proof-of-principle study takes a step in that direction, restoring hearing in deaf mice. Clinical trials of gene therapy for humans could be started within 5 to 10 years
Has life evolved multiple times?
Desert varnish – into which people have scraped petroglyphs for 1000s of years – appears layer by layer, growing only the width of a human hair each millennium. The varnish is replete with arsenic, iron and manganese, although the rocks it coats are not. No known geochemical or biological process can account for its ingredients. And yet there it is.
Collaborative bullet time photography
Bullet time has always been the preserve of high-budget movies, but now anyone can create films like this using collaborative photography techniques on their smartphones.
that should be really fun if it takes off.
A prion love story
i think this would make for a great movie with a science-literate plot:
Results showed she had the defective gene. Sonia and Eric hesitated briefly, and then decided to make it their life’s work to find a cure for Sonia before she got sick. They have 25 years to crack an amazingly difficult scientific puzzle, maybe 10 years more
Scanning quantum dot microscopy
Using a single molecule attached to an atomic force microscope as a more sensitive sensor, scientists have used a new “scanning quantum dot microscopy” method to image electric potential fields of electron shells of single molecules and even atoms with high precision for the first time, providing contact-free information on the distribution of charges. The breakthrough technique is relevant for diverse scientific fields including investigations into biomolecules and semiconductor materials.
Blurring the Metal-Insulator Line
SmB6 might be neither a textbook metal nor an insulator, but something more complicated that we don’t know how to imagine. On the basis of established wisdoms this cannot possibly happen, and henceforth completely new physics should be at work
Self-fertilization
hermaphroditic flatworms with needle-tipped male organs inject themselves with sperm in whatever body region is easy to stab.
Decrypting with radiation
The attack sends a few carefully-crafted ciphertexts, and when these are decrypted by the target computer, they trigger the occurrence of specially-structured values inside the decryption software. These special values cause observable fluctuations in the electromagnetic field surrounding the laptop, in a way that depends on the pattern of key bits. The secret key can be deduced from these fluctuations, through signal processing and cryptanalysis.
!!!
Manual mining of biomedical texts
teaching citizen scientists to precisely identify concepts and concept relationships in biomedical text. This is a task that anyone can learn to do and can perform better than any known computer program. Once these tasks are completed, advanced statistical algorithms take the data provided by the volunteers and use it to provide scientists with new tools for finding the information that they require within the sea of biomedical knowledge.
hopefully this is only a very short term solution as proper machine learning techniques take over. seems useful to bootstrap though.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 