It’s SCIENCE TIME, kids! So boot up your tablets, stick your earphones in your ear holes, drink your Special Science Drink (With Extra Science), put your amazing Thinking Cap of Science on, and get ready for some of the coolest science news from the last week.
Everybody ready? Then LET’S GO!
First, let’s get this out of the way : scientists claim to have found evidence of other universes.
They did it by studying the cosmic background radiation that is commonly referred to as the last echoes of the Big Bang. They found circular areas in the texture (so to speak) of this radiation that they say are evidence of our universe having “collided” with others and left a “bruise”.
Color me very skeptical. To me, this is when astrophysics turns into metaphysics, and I am reluctant to accept such indirect evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
Isn’t one universe enough?
Much cooler : great news for the future of graphene.
Graphene is a substance consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a lattice. It has the potential to be the strongest substance ever created, but only if it lacks defects.
Before now, the only way to get graphene was to pore over a graphite crystal to find areas of graphene and then peel them off. Not the sort of thing that scales up to industrial production levels.
But now, a team has worked some of the kinks out of another method called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which basically stitches together smaller bits of graphene into a larger sheet.
The main kick was that the graphene was much weaker along the joins, rendering it basically useless. But now, a team has figured out that this damage to the structure was caused by the chemical used to peel the graphene off the substrate where it formed.
With a new chemical, graphene is back. The CVD graphene is just as strong as the flaked kind. How strong?
…so strong that, as Hone observed, “it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.”
So much for the nice clean physics portion. After this, it’s all organic!
First up, vat grown meat is a reality.
A Dutch team has created artificially grown hamburger for the first time in history. It’s not cheap… the project cost around $300K. But it could just open the door to a future where humans can eat all the meat they like, knowing that no animals died to produce it.
I’m quite keen on the idea. Not only is it a moral gain, but it could be a massive efficiency gain as well. Right now, raising animals for meat is one of the most inefficient ways to create food.
But in a vat-grown meat future, meat will be grown almost like any other crop, and people all over the world may then be able to afford it.
And that could change things for the bottom billion like nothing else that came before.
Next up, a unusual way to gauge brain health : by looking at your retinas.
The theory is that the width of the blood vessels in a patient’s retinas are a good indicator for how healthy the ones inside the brain are as well. Counterintuitively, the wider the blood vessels, the more likely it is that the brain behind those eyes is unwell.
Individuals who had wider retinal venules showed evidence of general cognitive deficits, with lower scores on numerous measures of neurospsychological functioning, including verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and executive function.
I suppose the theory is that wide blood vessels would by less efficient at getting to every single cell in the brain, and thus drag the efficiency of the entire brain down.
So next time someone is looking deeply into your eyes, it might not be love.
They might just be trying to figure out if you’re retarded.
And the medical news just keeps coming : we are one step closer to a lab grown liver.
It is a crucial step. Basically, the problem has been getting liver cells to function in the lab. For some reason, the minute you take the liver cell out of the person, it loses all its functions, making it very hard to study said functions.
All that changed with a paper in the June 2 issue of Nature Chemical Biology that lists a dozen biochemical factors needed to keep those liver cells alive and functional outside the human body.
If this can be extended into getting the liver cells to grow in the lab, then we will be able to apply modern tissue engineering techniques to them and make a patient a brand new liver.
And that would effectively bring an end to liver disease as we know it.
Finally, great news for the hairless : scientists have figured out what signals the body uses to signal the regrowth of hair follicles on wounded skin.
The hope is that with this knowledge, we could come up with a way to encourage the regrowth of hair follicles more or less wherever we want them.
This would be great news for people with various skin conditions like alopecia, but we all know what this is really going to be used for.
Male pattern baldness! Otherwise known as androgenic alopecia.
And I think that is fabulous. I think that male pattern baldness is a cruel disease, one that effects not the victim’s health but their dignity. My father lost all his hair when he was college age, and my brother started balding young too.
Luckily, that particular gene missed me. (Instead I got my father’s weakness versus sunstroke. Fair dinkum. ) But I still want it cured in others.
Well, that is all for this week, science fans! Take off your Science Helmet, put your earphones and your tablet away, wash and recycle the bottle from your Science Drink, and go to bed.
And dream a few big Science Dreams for me!