Saturday 21 June 2014

Preserving bread longer: A new edible film made with essential oils

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Essential oils have boomed in popularity as more people seek out alternatives to replace their synthetic cleaning products, anti-mosquito sprays and medicines. Now scientists are tapping them as candidates to preserve food in a more consumer-friendly way. A study from ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reports the development of new edible films containing oils from clove and oregano that preserve bread longer than commercial additives. Nilda de F. F. Soares and colleagues note that the search for new ways to keep packaged food from spoiling has led some scientists to essential oils, which can keep bacteria and mold at bay. Oils from clove and oregano had already been incorporated into edible films. But scientists still needed to optimize the effectiveness of these films and test them under real-life conditions for other uses. So Soares’s team decided to test how well different edible films with clove and oregano essential oils could maintain bread’s freshness and see how they measured up against a commercial antimicrobial agent. Bread is a common staple around the world and is often kept fresh with calcium propionate. Though naturally occurring, some research suggesting negative side effects have tarnished its popularity. The scientists bought preservative-free bread and placed

The post Preserving bread longer: A new edible film made with essential oils has been published on Technology Org.

 
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NASA selects studies for the asteroid redirect mission

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NASA has selected 18 proposals for studies under the Asteroid Redirect Mission Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). These six-month studies will mature system concepts and key technologies and assess the feasibility of potential commercial partnerships to support the agency's Asteroid Redirect Mission, a key part of the agency's stepping stone path to send humans to Mars.

via Science Daily

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Major step forward for the world's largest optical/infrared telescope

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The next major milestone towards ESO’s European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) has been completed. Part of the 3000-meter peak of Cerro Armazones was blasted away as a step towards leveling the summit in preparation for the construction of the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world.

via Science Daily

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Super-stretchable yarn is made of graphene

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Researchers have developed a simple, scalable method of making graphene oxide fibers that are strong, stretchable and can be easily scrolled into yarns with strengths approaching that of Kevlar.

via Science Daily

Vintage Astronomy, Phases of the Moon with Sun Print

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: vintage, moon, sun, celestial, sky, nostalgic, retro, earth, nostalgia, americana

Vintage illustration astronomy celestial image featuring the different phases of the moon around the earth and the sun.

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The science of sexy: 6 things that can make you irresistible

Science Focus

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1. Humor is sexy

Humor is attractive to men and women — but not in the same way. The research shows women like men who make them laugh, and men like women who laugh at their jokes.

Recent research suggests that while both men and women say they like a "good sense of humor" in a potential mate, they differ in what they mean by this phrase. Women tend to prefer men who make them laugh, whereas men tend to prefer women who laugh at their jokes.

Consistent with this, Robert Provine analyzed more than 3000 singles ads and found that women were more likely to describe their good humor appreciation...

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/262300/the-science-of-sexy-6-things-that-can-make-you-irresistible
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VIDEO: Meet Bob, the robo-security guard

Science Focus

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Scientists at Birmingham University are running a project that puts an autonomous robot in a working office environment to do a real job. 
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 » see original post http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27863947#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Trapped between life and death

Science Focus

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IMAGINE YOU WAKE UP, locked inside a box," says Adrian Owen, a neurologist at the University of Western Ontario. "It's only just big enough to hold your body but sufficiently small that you can't move. It's a perfect fit, down to every last one of your fingers and toes. It's a strange box because you can listen to absolutely everything going on around you, yet your voice cannot be heard. In fact, the box fits so tightly around your face and lips that you can't speak, or make a noise. Although you can see everything going on around the box, the world outside is oblivious to what's going on inside...

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/article/index/262735/trapped-between-life-and-death
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Cats Eye Nebula Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: nebulae, amazing astronomy images, tcenebnch, hubble chandra images, cats eye nebula, stellar evolution, dying star, red giant evolution, galaxies, outer space pictures, stars, nasa

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous design featuring a composite image of the Cat's Eye nebula from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.
This famous nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution after a star like our Sun runs out of fuel. In this phase, a star becomes an expanding red giant and sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures.
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image code: tcenebnch

Image credit: NASA/Chandra www.nasa.gov

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Lisbon Honey Moon

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The Sun set on Friday the 13th as a full Honey Moon rose, captured in this well-planned time-lapse sequence. Lisbon, Portugal's Christ the King monument is in the foreground, about 6 kilometers distant from camera and telephoto lens. During the days surrounding today's solstice (June 21, 10:51 UT) the Sun follows its highest arc through northern hemisphere skies as it travels along the ecliptic plane. At night the ecliptic plane is low, and the Full Moon's path close to the ecliptic was also low, the rising Moon separating more slowly from the distant horizon. Northern moon watchers were likely to experience the mysterious Moon Illusion, the lunar orb appearing impossibly large while near the horizon. But the photo sequence shows the Moon's apparent size did not not change at all. Its light was initially scattered by the long line-of-sight through the atmosphere though, and a deeper reddened color gave way to a paler gold as the Full Moon rose into the night.

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Spiral Galaxy Case For The iPad Mini

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


Spiral Galaxy

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The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

All-Natural Mixture Yields Promising Fire Retardant

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What sounds like fixings for a wizard’s potion—a dash of clay, a dab of fiber from crab shells, and a dollop of DNA—actually are the ingredients of promising green fire retardants invented by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Applied to polyurethane foam, the bio-based coatings greatly reduced the flammability of the common furniture padding after it was exposed to an open flame. Peak and average rates of heat release—two key indicators of the magnitude of a fire hazard—were reduced by 48 percent and 77 percent, respectively, the NIST team reports in the journal Green Materials.* “This is the biggest reduction in flammability that we have achieved to date,” says team leader Rick Davis. The all-natural coatings outperform other promising experimental fire-retardants that the NIST researchers have devised with their layer-by-layer assembly method.** But Davis says the bio-based coatings must be applied more generously, in stacks of about 20 layers as compared with six or seven layers. Although still under study, the all-natural formulations might offer an alternative to existing fire retardants, including some that have been linked to human health risks and environmental problems. The new coatings use negatively charged DNA molecules to link two positively

The post All-Natural Mixture Yields Promising Fire Retardant has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Vintage Celestial, Astronomy, Queen of the Night Posters

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: sky, nostalgia, nostalgic, stars, opera, celestial, retro, americana, vintage, constellations

Vintage illustration astronomy celestial image featuring "The Arrival of the Queen of the Night" by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1815.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) was a Prussian architect and painter; he was one of the most prominent German architects and the best example of neoclassicism.

The Arrival of the Queen of the Night (Act 1, Scene 1) was a stage set for the Opera "The Magic Flute," an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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Stellar Nurseries RCW120 Stickers

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, star clusters, nebulae, gstlnrsr, rcw120, breathtaking astronomy images, star nurseries, inspirational stars, ionised gas clouds, star forming regions, galaxies, starfields, heavens, eso, european southern observatory, vista

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

A fantastic set of stickers, with a monogram for you to change, featuring a colour composite image of RCW120.

It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed.

The 870-micron submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope. Here, the submillimetre emission is shown as the blue clouds surrounding the reddish glow of the ionised gas (shown with data from the SuperCosmos H-alpha survey). The image also contains data from the Second Generation Digitized Sky Survey (I-band shown in blue, R-band shown in red).

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Image code: gstlnrsr

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

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Crab Nebula Wall Sticker

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: crab nebula, supernova, remnant, pulsar, wind nebula, nebulae, space, astronomy, universe

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus.

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