Benefits Of Bike Riding

When they invented the bike for the first time, they had no idea that a time will come when it will have all these benefits, otherwise its price would have been too high to afford! — Here is my new infographic on the “Benefits Of Bike Riding”…

➤ Runs on Fat Not Fuel
➤ Reduces Stress
➤ Reduces Risk of Diabetes
➤ Reduces Risk of Blood Pressure
➤ Increases Muscle Tone
➤ Gives You Legs of Steel
➤ Helps You See The World Differently
➤ Unlimited Free Parking
➤ Faster & Easier Than Walking
➤ Zero Emission
➤ No Noise Pollution
➤ It Feels Like Flying
➤ It Carries Your Goodies Home
➤ Whizzes Past Traffic Jams
➤ Puts A Big Fat Smile on Your Face
➤ Bye Bye Spare Tire
➤ Reduces Roadkill & Saves Animals

Enlarge This Graphic : http://is.gd/FSF6R8

(Source: atomstargazer)

Skylab: America’s Humanity’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today

With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s Humanity’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.

Here’s a look back at the pioneering Skylab mission, including mechanical failures, an aborted rescue mission, a crew mutiny and an unplanned crash landing on Earth.

View Wired Skylab Gallery

video: NASA, space.com
article: wired.com

Astronauts, Space Walks and The ‘Overview Effect’

Nearly everyone is familiar with EVA’s (Extra-Vehicular Activities) or “Space Walks” - activities/tasks performed outside of a space craft by astronauts. However, since watching The Overview Effect when it first premiered, I haven’t come across a segment of interviews such as this.

This is a great tribute to the men and women who have actually stepped out into space and seen the Earth with their own eyes, only a thin sheet of protective material between their organic lenses and the natural beauty of our planet and universe.

Expect more of this. As humans progress above our atmosphere and further out into space, the psychological/neurological effects will become more widespread and unique to each individual, united by awe and humility. I encourage all of you to watch this 20-minute documentary, The Overview Effect, which truly exposes the cosmic perspective for what it is, which is solitary and distinctive to the human species. No one else in history has been able to grasp and articulate this perspective from the height of over 250 miles up from our planet’s surface.

We’ve speculated and verbally interpreted this viewpoint philosophically, psychologically, spiritually, historically and scientifically, but we now are able to share and partake in this human journey - via our ever-advancing technology - with other humans across the globe through multiple media forms; granting others such an experience, which, even for a moment, consumes our consciousness and peels back the layers of our biological, chemical, atomically-interwoven connectivity with all life on this planet and most probably, others.

Also, if you’re unfamiliar with entrepreneur/video game developer Richard Garriott, he is lesser-known as being the son of an astronaut. His father, Owen Garriott, lived on NASA’s Skylab/Spacelab-1 LEO facilities in the 70’s and 80’s. Richard Garriott’s lifelong dream was to follow in his father’s “bootsteps” and journey to space. Garriott underwent astronaut training in Star City where, with his Russian counterparts, he learned Russian (required as he flew abord the Soyuz craft) and via Space Adventures, became the first private citizen to venture into space and perform science experiments on board the International Space Station.

Since then, Richard Garriott has become the Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors for Space Adventures and trustee of the X-Prize Foundation, which we are all familiar with. The film not only excites with gorgeous photography/cinematography, but also educates, revealing the cultural significance and processes by which Russian astro/cosmonauts partake and endure along their journey to space.

His mission, from beginning to end, was documented and produced into a film, aptly entitled, “Man On A Mission.” Free up some time to watch this and share it with others. The more humans that venture into space, the more humans we will have returning to Earth (or not) sharing their experience and the importance of spaceflight upon our civilization and our psyche.

Ad Astra Per Aspera.

Mystery of ‘junk DNA’ solved

The findings suggest junk DNA really isn’t needed for healthy plants — and that may also hold for other organisms.

(Source: mothernaturenetwork, via mothernaturenetwork)

Do Electronic Cigarettes Really Help Smokers Quit?

Everyone knows that cigarettes are bad for you. Yet 45 million Americans smoke, a habit that shaves a decade off life expectancy and causes cancer as well as heart and lung diseases. Nearly 70 percent of smokers want to quit, but despite the deadly consequences, the vast majority of them fail.

Going cold turkey works for fewer than 10 percent of smokers. Even with counseling and the use of aids approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, such as the nicotine patch and non-nicotine medicines, 75 percent of smokers light up again within a year. 

To create treatments that are more up to snuff, researchers are tinkering with combinations of existing drugs, looking at the role genetics plays in who gets hooked and turning to social media as a counseling platform. What’s more, a new smoking cessation medicine could be approved this year: electronic cigarettes, which have existed for a decade but only recently become the focus of efficacy trials.

The grip of addiction

Smoking at once relaxes and stimulates the body. Seconds after inhalation nicotine reaches the brain and binds to receptor molecules on nerve cells, triggering the cells to release a flood of dopamine and other neurotransmitters that washes over pleasure centers. A few more puffs increase heart rate, raising alertness. The effect does not last long, however, spurring smokers to light up again. Over time the number of nicotinic receptors increases—and the need to smoke again to reduce withdrawal symptoms such as irritability. On top of that, smoking becomes linked with everyday behavior or moods: drinking coffee or a bout of boredom, for instance, might also trigger the desire to reach for a cigarette—all making it difficult to kick the habit. Smoking treatments help users gradually wean themselves off cigarettes or put an end to their cravings—most commonly via delivery of nicotine in patches or chewing gum. 

A reason for the limited success of nicotine treatments may be that they do not address a crucial aspect of cigarette use: the cues that prompt smoking. Electronic cigarettes have as a result become a popular alternative to lighting up for those seeking to quit. E-cig users inhale doses of vaporized nicotine from battery-powered devices that look like cigarettes. Carcinogen levels in e-cig vapor are about one thousandth that of cigarette smoke, according to a 2010 study in the Journal of Public Health Policy.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that the devices, on the market for about a decade, help smokers quit. Yet there’s little hard science to back up the claim, and the gadgets are not regulated as medicines. 

That’s about to change. Two e-cig trials will report results this year. The first is a study of 300 smokers in Italy. It is a follow-up to a similar study in which 22 of 40 hard-core smokers had after six months either quit or cut cigarette consumption by more than half. Nine gave up cigarettes entirely, although six continued using e-cigs. The findings of the larger study, which are under peer review, are “in line with those reported in our small pilot study,” says lead researcher Riccardo Polosa of the University of Catania in Italy.

Interestingly, he adds, a control group of smokers who used an e-cig without nicotine also showed a significant drop in tobacco cigarette consumption—although not as great as those using the nicotine e-cig. This decline, he says, “suggests that the dependence on the cigarette is not only a matter of nicotine but also of other factors involved,” like the need to relieve stress or activities that trigger smokers to reach for a cigarette.

“There’s no one way to quit,” Abrams says. “Improving the treatments that we have will go a long way toward beating this very severe addiction and saving millions of lives.”

(Source: we-are-star-stuff, via we-are-star-stuff)

Carl Sagan : responding to a Creationist on biological evolution

Space travel - not such an easy journey
Living and working in zero gravity affects all parts of your body, including muscular, skeletal and vestibular systems.

A stomach-churning experience
One of the most common effects of microgravity is space motion sickness, caused when the brain and inner ear receive mixed signals. Between 40 to 50% of astronauts experience this.

On Earth, we can tell which way is up and which way is down because gravity tells us so. Sensors in the inner ear feel this gravitational pull and send information to the brain about our body’s orientation.

In space there is no gravitational force telling the inner ear which way is ‘up’ and ‘down’. So while our eyes can certainly see a ceiling and floor in the spacecraft, our brains cannot register this. This causes nausea and dizziness. Fortunately, symptoms subside within the first few days of travel and common motion sickness medicine is just as effective in space.

Exercise, exercise, exercise
In zero gravity, muscles do not have to do as much to move around. If astronauts don’t work hard to counter this, they will face severe muscle loss. It’s exactly the same as lying in bed for months on end - if you tried to get up and move around afterwards, you’d find that your legs were very weak. The same applies to bones. Bones demineralise, losing calcium and strength in space. In effect, osteoporosis sets in.

To reduce muscle and bone loss, astronauts have to exercise for two or more hours every day. Odd looking contraptions have been designed to make exercising in zero gravity effective.

Under the ray gun
The Earth’s magnetic field protects us from harmful radiation. We are still exposed to small amounts, for example when we go for medical x-rays. However, astronauts are exposed to 10 times as much radiation - and that’s just in low Earth orbit.

In deep space, astronauts can be exposed to even higher doses. During solar storms, a single dose of radiation could be equivalent to several hundred chest x-rays. Therefore it’s essential that all spacecrafts have designated storm shelters because large amounts of radiation can cause severe damage by altering DNA in the genes.

Read more.

Image: Aki Hoshide on a spacewalk. NASA.

(via knowledgethroughscience)

‘Space Hackers’ Take On Citizen Science for Suborbital Spaceflight

The increasing demand for flying experiments in space was clearly in evidence over the weekend as a standing room only crowd of 100 people packed into a room here at the Hacker Dojo to hear about a new era of citizen science.

The attendees came to the first-ever Space Hacker Workshop on Saturday and Sunday (May 4 and 5) to learn about how they could build and fly experiments on a new generation of manned suborbital vehicles such as XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx space plane.

The event, which was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Space Center and Citizens in Space, attracted high-school and college students, university professors, space professionals, scientists, technology experts and others interested in this emerging field. [The Top 10 Private Spaceships]

New reusable vehicles slated to come online soon will provide affordable and repeated access to space for professional and amateur scientists and help to revolutionize microgravity research and science education, said Citizens in Space founder Ed Wright.

“With the suborbital vehicles being developed…there’s going to be an opportunity to fly many thousands of small payloads on suborbital vehicles every year,” Wright said.

Citizen Space Scientists
Citizens in Space is a program run by Wright’s Texas-based organization, the U.S. Rocket Academy, which has purchased 10 flights aboard the two-seat Lynx just for research. Ten lucky citizen scientists will get to fly in the passenger seat of the vehicle and operate the experiments that they have designed and built. Five of those slots already have been filled.

So, just how cheap will it be to fly experiments in space? Wright said that while a typical tiny CubeSat might cost between $3,000 and $5,000 to build and another $100,000 or more to launch into orbit, developing and flying scientific payloads aboard the Lynx will be many orders of magnitude cheaper.

“At the base level, you’re going to have people who are able to build an experiment for $200 or less and have an opportunity to fly in space through programs such as Citizens in Space, and I think this is just going to change everything,” Wright said.

“We may reach the point in five or 10 years where every high school science major will have the opportunity to build and fly a payload in space during the course of his academic career before he graduates,” he added.

The development of suborbital vehicles such as the Lynx and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is coming at a time when maker spaces are popping up all over the country. Wright said these joint work spaces are perfect places for people to build the types of do-it-yourself science experiments that Citizens in Space wants to fly.

Wright’s academy is developing the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier, a unit that can hold up to a dozen small experiments in a space behind the pilot’s seat. The carrier will give XCOR the ability to fly space tourists in the passenger’s seat while also carrying scientific experiments as secondary payloads.

A seat on Lynx costs $95,000, while a ticket to fly on SpaceShipTwo — which last week made its first-ever powered test flight — will set you back $200,000 at the moment. (Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said recently that ticket prices would soon temporarily rise to $250,000.) [Photos of SpaceShipTwo’s Test Flights]

A Range Of Experiments
Four XCOR employees traveled 300 miles (500 kilometers) north from the town of Mojave, where they are building the first Lynx, to address the Space Hacker audience and answer questions.

Khaki Rodway, XCOR’s director of payload sales and operations, gave an overview of Lynx’s capabilities and a progress update on the assembly of the first vehicle, which could fly by the end of this year.

“We’re doing it because there’s lots of stuff to do,” Rodway said of the emerging market for experiments.

During the two-day workshop, participants heard talks about the experiments that will be carried out in the microgravity environment and vacuum of space. These experiments will range across many different fields, including materials processing, fluid dynamics, life sciences, protein crystal growth and technology demonstrations.

NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle talked about sending odd “water bears” into space. Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are tiny organisms that are virtually impervious to heat, radiation and vacuum conditions. Cagle believes that by studying water bears, scientists can learn a great deal about how to help humans adapt to space.

Jason Reimuller, president of the company Integrated Spaceflight Services, told the audience about his Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM) campaign, which will use a Lynx to study the dynamics of clouds over the North Pole. The vehicle will operate out of a high-altitude spaceport in either Alaska or Sweden, Reimuller said.

Ryan Gillespie, an aerospace engineer from Sunnyvale, Calif., said he is interested in pursuing Citizens in Space’s High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge, which is offering cash prizes of up to $10,000 for the development of a device that will collect micro-organisms living at the edge of space.

“I’m not so much interested in the $10,000 — it’s more the fact that when you come up with anything, it needs a purpose,” Gillespie said. “Here’s something that actually has a purpose for mankind.”

Driving Technology Forward
Richard Mains of Mains Associates, who works with the NASA Flight Opportunities Program that funds experiments on suborbital vehicles, said these new spaceships are driving technology development at a much faster rate than traditional NASA programs tend to do.

“I think what’s actually going on here with these reusable suborbital launch vehicles is kind of a whole new paradigm where you’re not putting a payload up on the space station for six months,” Mains said. “And these vehicles aren’t that big. But they are flying very often, So these payloads now have to be small, smart, autonomous — very very easy to kind of activate and deactivate, reprogram, get data out of.”

“I see all of that driving technology in a very, very interesting fashion,” Mains added, mentioning the emergence of open-source platforms as another powerful driver. “So I’m very excited about what I’ve heard here.”

Silicon Valley was a perfect location to hold the workshop given that it’s at the leading edge of technology development, Mains said.

Wright said he was extremely pleased with the workshop, which sold all of its 95 tickets and had a waiting list on Saturday morning.

“I think it’s gone very well,” Wright said. “It’s really been a great turnout. It’s been very exciting for everyone here. The people from the NASA Flight Opportunities program were very excited about this. XCOR was very excited about this.”

Wright says he hopes to conduct five or six additional workshops in cities across the country over the next year.

Watch: SpaceShipTwo’s First Powered Testflight

(Source: spaceplasma)

The Skin We’re In

Nina Jablonski, distinguished professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, discusses why/how different levels of skin pigmentation evolved. She also talks about the impacts of the concept of race. She presented her work at the topical lecture, “The Evolution and Meanings of Skin Color,” at the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting.

by AAAS.

(Source: skeptv.net)

Scientists Are Making All Sorts of New Drugs From Animal Venom

We may associate a snake bite or jellyfish sting with pain or even death, but scientists are working on ways to manipulate these venoms for our benefit. As The Scientist explains, venoms are an incredibly complex assortment of proteins and peptides, developed over several millennia or so of evolution. Animal venom may prevent blood from clotting, for example, or shut down nerve cells. In the right circumstances, such functions may be highly useful for medicine.

This isn’t a new idea. Several venom-derived drugs are already approved on the market, The Scientist says, including a painkiller and medications for cardiovascular disease. One drug for hypertension was modeled after pit viper venom.

Right now, scientists are most excited about drugs derived from the sun anemone. This species lives in coral reefs in the Caribbean and stuns its shrimp prey with long, reaching tentacles. Researchers took the sun anemone’s potent toxins, which block nerve channels, and modified them into a safer version. The new, synthetic version of the venom dramatically reverses paralysis that accompanies multiple sclerosis in rodent models. Human trials, too, are currently underway, though it’s too early to tell how useful this venom derivative will be in the long run.

One of the first venom-based drug to earn approval from the Federal Drug Administration is ziconotide (sold under the name Prialt), which was derived from a peptide from the cone snail and works on the nervous systemas as potent pain killer. Currently there are only six FDA-approved drug derived from venom, ABC News reported last month, but other venom pain killers, not approved yet for sale, come from the venom of black mambas, king cobras or other species of cone snails. The Scientist elaborates:

These promising drug candidates are likely just the tip of the iceberg, researchers agree. It is estimated that less than 0.1 percent of the venom proteome of cone snails—thought to harbor around 100,000 peptides—has so far been tapped, and fewer than 0.01 percent of roughly 10 million active molecules found in spider venoms.

Maybe soon patients will be able to pick their painkiller poisoner —spider, snail, scorpion or snake.

Full Article

(Source: scinerds)

Hypertension Could Bring Increased Risk for Alzheimer’s disease

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Neurology suggests that controlling or preventing risk factors, such as hypertension, earlier in life may limit or delay the brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related neurological deterioration.

Dr. Karen Rodrigue, assistant professor in the UT Dallas Center for Vital Longevity (CVL), was lead author of a study that looked at whether people with both hypertension and a common gene had more buildup of a brain plaque called amyloid protein, which is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists believe amyloid is the first symptom of Alzheimer’s disease and shows up a decade or more before symptoms of memory impairment and other cognitive difficulties begin. The gene, known as APOE 4, is carried by 20 percent of the population.

Until recently, amyloid plaque could be seen only at autopsy, but new brain scanning techniques allow scientists to see plaque in living brains of healthy adults. Findings from both autopsy and amyloid brain scans show that at least 20 percent of typical older adults carry elevated levels of amyloid, a substance made up mostly of protein that is deposited in organs and tissues.

“I became interested in whether hypertension was related to increased risk of amyloid plaques in the brains of otherwise healthy people,” Rodrigue said. “Identifying the most significant risk factors for amyloid deposition in seemingly healthy adults will be critical in advancing medical efforts aimed at prevention and early detection.”

Based on evidence that hypertension was associated with Alzheimer’s disease, Rodrigue suspected that the combination of hypertension and the presence of the APOE-e4 gene might lead to particularly high levels of amyloid plaque in healthy adults.

(Source: neurosciencestuff)

Study finds bearded men are more attractive

“A newly published study out of the University of New South Wales concludes that men and women find bearded faces more attractive than shaven ones. “

What do you think - beards or no beards are better? 

For the record, I love my beard. It’s a comforting mandible-blanket.

(Source: kqedscience)

Diploid vs. Haploid Cells

In this video Paul Andersen explains the difference between diploid and haploid cells. He starts with a brief description of the central dogma and how genes code for proteins. He then uses the phenotype of red hair to explain that humans are diploid creatures. He discriminates between diploid somatic cells and haploid sex cells. He finishes with a brief description of different life cycles dominated by haploid and diploid individuals.

by Bozeman Biology.

(Source: skeptv.net)

Merging humans and technology.

The printable sensors are an extension of the Rogers Research Group’s electronic tattoos and can measure skin hydration, temperature and electric signals from muscle and brain and activity.

Once the sensors are printed on the skin, researchers use a commercially available spray-on bandage to protect the electronics, which keeps them in place for about two weeks. To achieve a longer lifespan, sensors would need to be embedded under the skin like read tattoos. Stay tuned. That can’t be far off.

(Source: alexob.co.uk)