Babies exposed to certain microbes carried by dogs may build up immunity against asthma, according to research by a team of biologists from the University of California.
from Wired Top Stories
From Gizmodo: Scientist Creates Pizza Healthy Enough to Eat 3 Times a Day, Every Day
Pizza is so good that most of us would be happy to eat it breakfast, lunch and dinner, if it weren’t for the fact that it was more than a little unhealthy. But now a scientist has created what he claims is the first nutritionally balanced pizza—and it’s OK to eat it three times a day, ever day. More »
from Gizmodo
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Video: MIT Alumni Bring Spacesuit Tech to Temperature-Regulating Dress Shirts
Apollo Dress Shirt Ministry of Supply
It happens to the best of us: you slog through the summer heat on your morning commute and wind up a messy ball of sweat by the time you make it to the sweet comfort of your air-conditioned office. Now a team of MIT grads is trying to solve that problem by borrowing temperature-control technology from NASA.
The team, Ministry of Supply, is taking donations via Kickstarter for their Apollo line of dress shirts, which use phase-change materials to absorb heat from your body to cool you off when it’s hot, then release it when things cool down. It’s similar to technology used in NASA-approved spacesuits. The shirts keep sweat and moisture off of you, and use an anti-microbial coating to keep you smelling fresh.
The shirt has been a hit on Kickstarter so far, blowing past its initial goal of $30,000. To keep the funding rolling in, the team has been offering incentives, like new colors or patterns for reaching certain goals. At last count they were at more than $178,000.
[Kickstarter via Tech Crunch]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Technology Review RSS Feeds: Spray-On Batteries Could Reshape Energy Storage
Rice University researchers make the components of batteries with paints. When combined with spray-on solar cells, the technique opens up a range of possibilities for energy producing and storing devices.
Imagine spray painting the side of your house and it not only produces power from the sun, but can store the energy for later as well. A novel approach to battery design from Rice University researchers could enable that and other types of spray-on batteries.
From Discover Magazine: Tomatoes! | Gene Expression
This story in The New York Times, Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds, is pretty cool:
Yes, they are often picked green and shipped long distances. Often they are refrigerated, which destroys their flavor and texture. But now researchers have discovered a genetic reason that diminishes a tomato’s flavor even if the fruit is picked ripe and coddled.
The unexpected culprit is a gene mutation that occurred by chance and that was discovered by tomato breeders. It was deliberately bred into almost all tomatoes because it conferred an advantage: It made them a uniform luscious scarlet when ripe.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Science, researchers report that the very gene that was inactivated by that mutation plays an important role in producing the sugar and aromas that are the essence of a fragrant, flavorful tomato. And these findings provide a road map for plant breeders to make better-tasting, evenly red tomatoes.
Modern tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) varieties are bred for uniform ripening (u) light green fruit phenotypes to facilitate harvests of evenly …
from Discover Magazine
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: With New Nicotine Vaccine, Cigarettes Give You No Pleasure
Smoking Kills Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin via Wikimedia
By denaturing nicotine before it reaches the heart and brain, a new vaccine could mute the addictiveness of tobacco productsNicotine addiction is a hard habit to break. But what if you could never get hooked in the first place? Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York report in the journal Science Translational Medicine that they have developed a potential vaccine for nicotine addiction. In mice, the vaccine inhibits the effects of nicotine before they reach the heart or brain, making it seem as though the nicotine never entered the bloodstream.
The vaccine works by using the liver to churn out a steady flow of antibodies that destroy nicotine as it enters the bloodstream, before it can make the circulatory loop to the brain and the heart. Previous therapies have proven effective at doing this, but they have to be administered on a regular basis. In mice, one dose of the vaccine activated the antibody-producing function in the liver for life.
That raises the possibility of a single vaccination, introduced to a person once in his or her lifetime, that would free that person from nicotine’s addictive qualities for life. That person could still choose to enjoy a cigarette for the sheer pleasure of sucking sweet, sweet tarred tobacco smoke into his or her lungs, but the capacity for addiction would be muted. It could also be used to treat smokers who have exhausted other quitting aids.
[C-Health]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: A Heatsink That Could Be 30 Times More Efficient Than Today’s Setups
Sandia Cooler Sandia
Computers get hot. Heat is bad for computers. To whisk it away, we use a combination of heatsinks and fans to snatch heat away from the internals and blast it out of the computer’s case. But Sandia has a concept that combines the two in a way that, they claim, increases heat-removing efficiency by up to 30 times.
Essentially the Sandia Cooler is just a combination heatsink/fan, which, now that we think about it, is kind of obvious. It’s a heatsink that spins at 2,000 rpm–slow for a fan–but is more efficient because it actually lifts off the chip, floating in midair by about a thousandth of an inch, removing thermal resistance. The air is drawn up through the center of the spinner and flung out through the grooves, which look mostly like a curved heatsink. Because the entire thing moves, it also cuts down on dust buildup, which has a serious effect on a cooling system’s efficiency. Oh, and due to its speed and the way it floats (sort of like hydroplaning), the system is much quieter than typical fans.
The creation has already been optioned by a computer company, so we should actually see it in machines relatively soon.
[via Geek]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now