Experiments on live nerve cells — donated from patients undergoing brain surgery — may turn up clues about how the human brain works. Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/experiment-live-human-brain-helps-scientists-map-nerve-cells4…
Tag: experiments
Physicists Overturn a 100-Year-Old Assumption On How Brain Cells Work
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A study published in 2017 has overturned a 100-year-old assumption on what exactly makes a neuron “fire,” posing new mechanisms behind certain neurological disorders. To understand why this is important, we need to go back to 1907 when a French neuroscientist named Louis Lapicque proposed a model to describe how the voltage of…
Staring down seagulls can stop them stealing your chips
In experiments conducted in UK seaside towns, only 26 per cent of herring gulls tried to steal chips when they were being watched Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2212592-staring-down-seagulls-can-stop-them-stealing-your-chips/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
How mosquitoes find us
For mosquitoes, finding the next blood meal is all about smelling and seeing. It’s our breath that gives us away. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/how-mosquitoes-find-us…
DoubleTree Hotels Wants The ISS Astronauts To Bake Cookies
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
The sight of a cookie had never made me grimace until this one showed up in my email inbox. DoubleTree by Hilton, the hotel chain, was announcing that it would soon send a little oven and a batch of cookie dough to the International Space Station so that astronauts could, for the first time, bake chocolate-chip…
Measurements induce a phase transition in entangled systems
Many famous experiments have shown that the simple act of observing a quantum system can change the properties of the system. This phenomenon, called the “observer effect,” appears, for example, when Schrödinger’s cat becomes either dead or alive (but no longer both) after someone peeks into its box. The observation destroys the superposition of the cat’s state, or in other words,…
The human placenta may not have a microbiome after all
Recent evidence that the placenta has its own community of microbes is now uncertain as it seems the experiments were corrupted by contamination Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2211529-the-human-placenta-may-not-have-a-microbiome-after-all/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Is Hiring Broken?
DevNull127 writes: Hiring is broken and yours is too,” argues a New York-based software developer whose LinkedIn profile says he’s worked at both Amazon and Google, as well as doing architecture verification work for both Oracle and Intel. Summarizing what he’s read about hiring just this year in numerous online articles, he lists out the arguments against virtually every popular hiring…
Japan Approves First Human-Animal Embryo Experiments
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to…
The Apollo experiment that keeps on giving
Neal Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins departed from the moon 50 years ago, but one of the experiments they left behind continues to return fresh data to this day: arrays of prisms that reflect light back toward its source, providing plentiful insights. Along with the Apollo 11 astronauts, those of Apollo 14 and 15 left arrays behind as well: The…