Posterous theme by Cory Watilo
Jr High Drop Out

Jr High Drop Out

The Ramblings of a Reformed Screw Up

What? You expected something better? Taste my mediocrity, world!

TwitterPicasa

Filed under: Science

A new drug that could cure everything from colds to HIV

Breakthrough: A new drug that could cure everything from colds to HIV

Creating a single antiviral drug that could kill lots of different viruses is a longstanding dream of medical researchers. Beyond all the obvious benefits of such an honest-to-goodness wonder drug, an all-purpose antiviral would give us a much better chance of fighting back against outbreaks of exotic viruses like SARS and swine flu. As a minor but still rather nice bonus, it could also be that long awaited cure for the common cold.

via io9.com

Curing the various virii that plague us (quite literally) would be transformative to our culture and our species. I look forward to the day when we are no longer worried about bacteria and viral infection. And on a more personal note, I'm excited about the idea of dramatically increasing my lifespan. Each such advance, even those that don't pan out, improve the collective survivability of our species, but also the individual survivability of each of us. In other words, awesomesauce!

Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arms

via youtube.com

Bit by bit. Piece by piece. We are slowly learning to replace each part of the human body with a synthetic variant. Right now those variants are a downgrade from the original, but that won't always be the case. Soon enough, we will be able to upgrade parts of ourselves. Newer, stronger, faster, more durable, less prone to defect or disease, impervious to cancer or harmful bacteria. These new bodies will be better in every measurable way. But they will pose an existential question we've not had to work through before. Is there a point at which I'm no longer me, but rather a simulacrum of me, if I replace enough of my body with these upgrades and if so am I upgraded or replaced?

Hubble finds dark matter ring in galaxy cluster

An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that was formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. It is the first time that a dark matter distribution has been found that differs substantially from the distribution of ordinary matter. This image shows the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 (ZwCl 0024+1652) as seen by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The image displays faint faraway background galaxies that had their light bent by the cluster's strong gravitational field. By mapping the distorted light and using it to deduce how dark matter is distributed in the cluster, astronomers spotted the ring of dark matter. One of the background galaxies is located about two times further away than the yellow cluster galaxies in the foreground, and has been multiple-imaged into five separate arc-shaped components, seen in blue.

File

The mysterious 'Garden-sprinkler' nebula

There are many mysterious objects seen in the night sky which are not really well understood. For example, astronomers are puzzled by the 'jets' emerging from planetary nebulae. However, the S-shaped jet from Henize 3-1475 is the most perplexing of all. 'Jets' are long outflows of fast-moving gas found near many objects in the Universe, such as around young stars, or coming from black holes, neutron stars, and planetary nebulae, for example. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the young planetary nebula Henize 3-1475 and its bizarre jet. Astronomers have nicknamed it the 'Garden-sprinkler' Nebula.

File

​