TED– One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness…

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”

© TED, 2008

Photo by flickr user brain_blogger

THE GLOBE AND MAIL INC – In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline.

This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

We’re not talking “biofuels” – not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no “feedstock,” no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these “inputs,” it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as “artificial photosynthesis.”

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

Continue reading about A Brave New World of Fossil Fuels on Demand.

Article by Neil Reynolds

© The Globe and Mail, Inc., 2011. All Rights Reserved.

Photograph by flickr user Ben Seidelman

LIVE SCIENCE – Ten things you didn’t know about the brain…

10. Human brains are big…

The average adult brain weighs just under 3 pounds (between 1.3 and 1.4 kilograms). Some neurosurgeons describe the texture of a living brain as that of toothpaste, but according to neurosurgeon Katrina Firlik, a better analogy can be found in the local health-food store.

“[The brain] doesn’t spread like toothpaste. It doesn’t adhere to your fingers the way toothpaste does,” Firlik writes in her memoir, “Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside” (Random House, 2006). “Tofu — the soft variety, if you know tofu — may be a more accurate comparison.”

If you aren’t charmed by that description, consider this: About 80 percent of the contents of your cranium is brain, while equal amounts of blood and cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that buffers neural tissue, make up the rest. If you were to blend up all of that brain, blood and fluid, it would come to about 1.7 liters, or not quite enough to fill a 2-liter soda bottle.

9. …But they’re getting smaller

Don’t get too cocky about your soda-bottle-sized brain. Humans 5,000 years ago had brains that were even larger.

Continue reading about 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain.

© Copyright Live Science, 2011

Photograph by moujemouje

HUFFINGTON POST – 34,000 year-old bacteria were found in Death Valley… alive.

A new paper published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today tells the story of the bacteria, which remained in a virtual “suspended animation” for millennia. “They’re alive, but they’re not using any energy to swim around, they’re not reproducing,” Brian Schubert, the bacteria’s discoverer, told OurAmazingPlanet. “They’re not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves.”

From Live Science:

“It was actually a very big surprise to me,” said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.

“It’s permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules,” said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert’s advisor at the time.

In a Seussian twist to the discovery, the tiny ecosystems discovered in this salt crystals seem to be able to maintain themselves, creating a microscopic, self-sustaining environment, according to LiveScience. However, researchers don’t quite know how the bacteria managed to stay alive so long, as DNA typically degrades over time.

Article by Dean Praetorius

© Huffington Post, 2011

Photograph by flickr user Murat Ertürk

BBC NEWS – Astronomers have discovered the smallest planet outside our Solar System, and the first that is undoubtedly rocky like Earth.

Measurements of unprecedented precision have shown that the planet, Kepler 10b, has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth, and a mass 4.6 times higher.

However, because it orbits its host star so closely, the planet could not harbour life.

The discovery has been hailed as “among the most profound in human history”.

The result was announced at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, US, by Nasa’s Kepler team.

Continue reading about Rocky Exo-planet: An Earth-like World.

Article by Jason Palmer

© BBC, 2011

Photograph by flickr user sezzles