Period.
The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. 
Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.
Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.
Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects.
But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.
It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs.
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Ripped out from telegraph.co.uk, it has an entry of a list made by TIME which lists the top 10 discoveries made by humans in 2008.
1 – Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, was finally launched in September this year on the French-Swiss border after taking nearly 20 years and £4.4 billion to build. It aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged some 13.7 billion years ago
2. The North Pole – of Mars
In May NASA’s Phoenix lander touched down in Mars’s far north, which had never before been visited. This is where the greatest concentrations of ice and water are to be found. Phoenix discovered nothing that changes the picture of Mars as a “dead world”, but it reinforced the planet’s image as a once-wet place that could have teemed with organisms.
3. Creating Life
Geneticist J. Craig Venter – one of the two men credited with mapping the human genome – managed to invent a new bacterium. Venter stitched together the 582,000 base pairs necessary to invent the genetic information for a whole new bacterium. Step two is to boot up that DNA programming in a living bacterium to see if it takes charge of the organism.
4. China Soars into Space
The Chinese launched their first manned mission in 2003, their second in 2005 and their third this year. They began with a one-person ship, then a two-seater, then a three-man version, and during that last mission they completed a successful spacewalk. By all spacefaring measures, that’s impressive – going from a standing start to a sprint in five years.
5. More Gorillas in the Mist
New surveys this summer by the Wildlife Conservation Society put the numbers of western lowland gorilla’s in the wild far higher than scientists had thought. The forests and swamps of the northern Republic of Congo are now thought to be home to 125,000 gorillas, or up to twice the previous estimates.
6. Brave New Worlds
In June, Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor found 45 exoplanets which orbit stars other than the Sun. All of them were far too hot to harbour life, but Mayor’s instruments – which detect planets by the gravitational wobbles they cause their suns – should be sensitive enough to find ones with larger orbits that place them out in cooler, arguably habitable regions.
7. The Power of Invisibility
Scientists from the University of California announced they’d invented an invisibility cloak this year. Using nanowires grown inside a porous aluminium tube to create a sheeting 10 times thinner than a piece of paper, they proved that they could wrap an object in the material and bend light waves around it, making it effectively invisible.
8. Cenozoic Park?
In November Penn State biochemistry professor Stevan Schuster announced that he had reconstructed 80 per cent of the genome of the long extinct woolly mammoth, using clumps of hair from the remains of several of the creatures.
9. Can You Spell Science?
Between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of scientifically literate adults in the US doubled – to 17 per cent. This year, a survey by a professor of political science at the University of Michigan found that that dismal showing may have improved, but only a little. In practical terms says the investigator, that means that only one in four adults can read and understand the stories in the weekly science section of The New York Times.
10. First Family
Researchers in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, found the oldest nuclear family ever uncovered when they excavated 4,600-year-old graves of a group of Stone-Age people who appeared to have been killed together in a raid. Among the remains was a foursome interred together – an adult male and female and two boys, one of them eight to nine years old, the other four to five. Analysing molecular DNA evidence, the investigators confirmed what the tableau suggested: This was a family. Certainly this is not the oldest one that ever existed, but merely the oldest ever unearthed.
Posted in Amusement, Uncategorized | Tagged 10, 2008, amazing, brave, by, china, cloak, collider, creating, descovered, descoveries, discoveries, DNA, evidence, exoplanets, family, found, genes, genetic, genome, gorillas, hadron, in, into, invisibility, invisible, is, large, life, literacy, literate, mammoth, mars, material, mayor, michel, mist, more, nanowires, new, north, nuclear, of, old, pole, possible, recovered, science, scientific, space, spacemissions, survery, the, top, underground, US, using, worlds | 1 Comment »
There are moments when you are simply amazed by pictures that truly make you wonder. Is it either the simplicity of the picture or surprisingly, its complexity. The previous statement may have confused you but the pictures I will be posting shortly will be amazing you, thus clarifying my poorly stated statement. Sit back and enjoy.
1. The astronaut repairing the satellite, yet you can see earth in the background.
2. The unseen side of the moon.
As you may all know the moon orbits around the earth with one face as the moon itself doesn’t rotate around itself, unlike the earth. So during all humanity, we only knew and saw one side. Technology, though, shows us the other side.
3. 3 Galaxies and a comet, all in one night sky.
4. Glowing brain cells in a Larval Zebrafish.
This is actually real, its made by inserting a gene into the fish’s DNA that makes the nerve cells glow in different colors.
5. Martian ground. (My favorite, it made me shout “FUCK!”)
6. Picture of Earth taken by Voyager, which is now by the way, out of our solar system.
Voyager has traveled far away now, infact it reached 4 billion miles away from earth in 1990, the year I was born. Well it was launched at 1977, Voyager 1 and 2. In 1990, they instructed Voyager 1 to look at Earth, and take a picture. It was then called the Pale Blue Dot. Makes you wonder doesnt it? This Voyager has been traveling for more than 30 years. Signals now take 15 hours to reach it, thats the speed of light to reach there. I present you Earth, 4 billion miles away, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990.
7. Asteroid called Eros, pictures taken by Galileo Spacecraft.
The spaceship actually reached the closest approach to the asteroid at 250 meters taking this astonishing picture. My god.
8. The birth of a galaxy.
9. Concussion waves due to huge force exerted from released projectile
10. Breathtaking 12 frame travel.
This sequence of 12 frames was taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft over a span of about 45 minutes on March 12, 2008. In that brief time, Cassini covered almost 40,000 kilometers in its approach to a flyby encounter with Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. The overexposure and smearing of the images gives a hint of the raw speed involved – 14.4 km/sec (or 32,211 mph). Shortly after this sequence, at its closest, Cassini approached within 52 km (32.3 miles) of the surface of Enceladus.
Posted in Amusement, Uncategorized | Tagged amazing, amusing, asteroid, boggling, breathtaking, cassini, close, magnificent, mars, mind, moon, nice, omg, picture, pictures, saturn, shot, snapshop, space, up, wow | Leave a Comment »
Analysis of DNA obtained from Neanderthal remains has revealed key differences from modern humans that suggest their bodies produced excess heat. 
While in the cold climate of an ice age this would have provided the species with an advantage, as the earth warmed they would have been less able to cope. Ultimately this would have caused their extinction around 24,000 years ago.
Scientists at Newcastle University have put forward the theory after examining a particular form of genetic material which was obtained from the fossilised bones of Neanderthals.
By comparing it with that found in modern humans, they discovered that Neanderthals had key differences in the sections responsible for producing energy in all living cells.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, a neurogeneticist at Newcastle University, believes the differences in this mitochondrial DNA could have caused Neanderthals to be inefficient at producing energy, meaning their cells leaked heat.
He said: “The question is why did Neanderthals disappear? There are lots of explanations to do with changes in climate and the food supply.
“Differences in these mitochondrial DNA sequences might explain why modern humans were able to survive while Neanderthals were not.
“We compared mitochondrial DNA sequences from Neanderthals that have been obtained by other researchers with a huge database of human sequences from around the world to see how different it was from modern humans.
“We found a number of differences within a certain part of the mitochondrial DNA that were quite unlike anything we see in modern humans.
“It is difficult to get a definitive answer, as it is rather like looking through a misty window. We can only get clues to what went on.”
Mitochondria are tiny structures found inside all living cells and are the biological power stations that produce the energy cells need to survive by converting sugar from food into energy.
The research by Professor Chinnery, which was recently presented at a conference held by the American Society on Human Genetics, is the latest attempt to find out why our ancient cousins died out.
Scientists have also been attempting to read the entire Neanderthal genome in the hope that it will shed more light on the differences between them and modern humans.
Recent work by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany revealed that Neanderthals shared a language gene that is only found in modern humans. The controversial findings raised the debate about whether Neanderthals were capable of speech.
Neanderthals are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor shared with modern humans around 400,000 years ago. It is thought they died out around 10,000 years after modern humans began spreading in to Europe.
There is a great deal of debate about what actually sealed Neanderthals fate, with the changing climate, dwindling food supplies and modern humans themselves all being blamed for killing the species off.
Posted in Amusement | Tagged body, change, climate, evolution, extinct, heating, homosapiens, neanderthals | Leave a Comment »
Haitham Nabeel Abdelhamid, 23, is accused of beating Islam Badr Ibrahim with a ruler before taking him outside the class and hitting him savagely in the stomach.
The boy then collapsed in a faint and was taken to hospital – but he died of heart failure.
The attack, which took place in October at the Saad Othman primary school near the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, caused national outrage in a country where people are already sceptical about the state.
While Egypt is known for a higher standard of development than many of its neighbours, the country suffers from a lack of resources in its teaching system: meaning inexperienced teachers are often put in charge of classes up to 100 strong.
With the eyes of the nation focused on the coming trial, Egypt’s education minister is expected to take the stand in the witness box.
“The problem is the teaching and the teachers because they cannot find good teachers,” said Islam’s father, Amr Badr Ibrahim. “The minister of education should be the first person accused. How can he agree to let such a young man teach children?”
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TOKYO (AFP) – A Japanese research team has revealed it had created a technology that could eventually display on a computer screen what people have on their minds, such as dreams. 
Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain, they said in a study unveiled ahead of publication in the US magazine Neuron.
While the team for now has managed to reproduce only simple images from the brain, they said the technology could eventually be used to figure out dreams and other secrets inside people’s minds.
“It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity,” the private institute said in a statement.
“By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams.”
When people look at an object, the eye’s retina recognises an image that is converted into electrical signals which go into the brain’s visual cortex.
The team, led by chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani, succeeded in catching the signals and then reconstructing what people see.
In their experiment, the researchers showed people the six letters in the word “neuron” and then succeeded in reconstructing the letters on a computer screen by measuring their brain activity.
The team said that it first figured out people’s individual brain patterns by showing them some 400 different still images.
Posted in Amusement | Tagged computer, dream-reading, dreams, mind dream, mind-reading, record, software, visualized | Leave a Comment »
A woman in a deep sleep sent emails to friends asking them over for wine and caviar in what doctors believe is the first reported case of ‘zzz-mailing’ – using the internet while asleep. 
The case of the 44-year-old woman is reported by researchers from the University of Toledo in the latest edition of the medical journal Sleep Medicine.
They said the woman went to bed about 10pm but got up two hours later and walked to her computer in the next room, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper reports.
She turned it on, connected to the internet, and logged on before composing and sending three emails.
Each was in a random mix of upper and lower cases, not well formatted and written in strange language, the researchers said.
One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4pm,. Bring wine and caviar only.”
Another said simply, “What the…”.
The new variation of sleepwalking has been described as “zzz-mailing”.
“We believe writing an email after turning the computer on, connecting to the internet and remembering the password displayed by our patient is novel,” the researchers said.
“To our knowledge this type of complex behaviour requiring co-ordinated movements has not been reported before in sleepwalking.
“She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them. She did not have any history of night terrors or sleepwalking as a child.”
The neurologists said that unlike simple sleep-walking, the activities their patient was involved in required complex behaviour and co-ordinated movements including typing, composing and writing the messages.
She was also able to remember her password and turn the computer on and connect to the internet, although she had no memory of the event.
It was thought that the woman’s sleep-walking may have been triggered by prescription medication, although the causes of the phenomenon are not fully understood.
Posted in Amusement | Tagged emailing, mailing, sleep, sleepwalking, unconsious, zzz-mailing | Leave a Comment »
Well, this disease is not fatal first of all. It’s related to the ear. I have thought to myself what makes me interested and be able to sit on this chair and type an averageof 200 words, and the answer was either science or facts. You may have noticed the trend in my posts. The reason I would like to inform the world about this disease is because one family member is suffering from it. But he/she is in the stage of bearing with it. He got past of the shock and all of a sudden vertigo, and also past the fact that he has something wrong with him/her.
To start,
what is Meniere’s disease?
It is a disease in the ear, that can cause episodes and fluctuations of hearing loss, episodes and fluctuations of vertigo, episodes and fluctuations of tinnitus(imaginary sound), episodes and fluctuations of aural fullness(you feel that your middle ear is under pressure, but its not, and meniere’s doesn’t even attack the middle ear).
Now I said episodes because they come and go, that easy. And by fluctuations I mean different intensities, some people get insane and rapid hearing loss and deafened AT THE MOMENT, and some loss hearing slowly over time, and it is a fact when I say that most patients actually never live long enough to be definitely deafened. Because the process takes too long for the human life-span to bear.
What causes Meniere’s disease?
For now the cause is unknown and is labeled as idiopathic, this means of no known cause.Yet I will list what researchers believe which might be the cause.
1. excess endolymphatic fluid in the ear, mainly cause when potassium rich endolymphatic fluid mixes with sodium rich endolymphatic fluid in the inner ear contaminating it.
2.a blood vessel in the ear pressing against a nerve
3. a virus infection
What is the treatment for Meniere's?
One of the most effective treatments, and by treatments I mean totally inexperiencing the symptoms, is lifestyle change. Eat less salt, avoid caffiene, avoid fats and avoid smoking.
Also such disease’s are most manageable when the patient can identify the trigger. For example my family member knows 2 triggers that I know of, and they are when he/she wakes and he didn’t have enough sleep, or when he’s/she’s in the bathroom where the is complete silence and no action at all and the brain then focuses on the tinnitus making the sound enlarged, volume wise.Some patients and im happily to say like my family member can manage it, and that comes during time. But we can thank god because other people have the symptoms so intense that they have no balance at all, and become TOTALLY disabeled.I have seen these people on wheel chairs, it all depends on your luck. Thank god again.
Is there research on Meniere’s?
Yes, infact, there is a huge amount and that’s where the problem is because most patients believe that there is none, but infact there is alot, and they are all trying to link it with the causes thus after that a cure can be obtained. Infact, 134 articles have been written to PubMed in 1 year! That’s over 1 article every 3 days! There is far far far far more than this, infact it’s too much for my bare hands to type, so I will post the link.http://www.menieresinfo.com/research.html
The last thing I would like to say is this disease is manageable, not fatal. You, the patient, should thank god, because I can list an almost infinite list of diseases far more severe. God can you bless you in anyway, and I think giving you this disease is better than Chronic Kidney Failure or Brain Cancer.
Posted in Amusement | Tagged disease, ear, meniere, meniere's, problem, problems, vertigo | 2 Comments »
