Saturday 20 June 2015

Nanoparticles target and kill cancer stem cells that drive tumor growth

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Many cancer patients survive treatment only to have a recurrence within a few years. Recurrences and tumor spreading

The post Nanoparticles target and kill cancer stem cells that drive tumor growth has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Vintage Astronomy Star Chart Planisphaeri Coeleste Posters

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


tagged with: historian, maps, travel, old, world, decor, fine art, art, history, geography, panoramic, vintage map, vintage maps, antique map, antique maps, ancient, ancient maps, old world, historic, historical, ancient history, artwork, vintage artwork, vintage art, framed prints, framed posters, framed art, canvas, travel posters, vintage travel, antique travel, room decor, wall decor, den decor, vamp, the vintage vamp, thevintagevamp

A wonderful antique star chart depicting the constellations titled Planispaeri Coeleste This wonderful old constellation chart would be perfect for your home wall decor. Add a frame and it would make the perfect retro decoration in your bar, cafe, restaurant, home theater, office or kitchen. Framed canvas prints also make an exceptional gift for any occasion or holiday.

At The Vintage Vamp we obtain high quality images of vintage artwork. Then we use state of the art technology and editing to bring back to life the most compelling images from the past. Unlike a lot of reproductions sold on the Internet, ours have been refurbished to bring out the original colors and fix as many imperfections as possible. We use only PNG format and the largest PPI (pixels per inch) possible, which is the very best for printing. This assures that your image will print with the highest quality possible, no matter what size you choose. Credit: Library of Congress & Wikipedia




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Why climate change is the public policy problem from hell

Science Focus

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The last several months have been a microcosm of why climate change is the public policy problem from hell. Several scientific developments have come to light, any of which on their own should have inspired massive action around the globe. But because the projected effects are so complicated and far in the future, the political impact has been nil.

The latest study comes from Stefan Rahmsdorf and colleagues in the journal Nature Climate Change. They've done a study on the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the system of currents of which the Gulf Stream is an important part. This system appears to be weakening rapidly, which may explain the shocking cold measured in the ocean south of Greenland — perhaps the only part of the entire world that experienced record cold last winter.

There is not very good or extensive data on Atlantic circulation, but Rahmsdorf and his team constructed a proxy data reconstruction going back to 900 AD. His conclusion:

This shows that despite the substantial uncertainties in the proxy reconstruction, the weakness of the flow after 1975 is unique in more than a 1,000 years, with at least 99 percent probability. This strongly suggests that the weak overturning is not due to natural variability but rather a result of global warming. [RealClimate]

These Atlantic currents are part of a global system of ocean circulation, driven by wind, temperature, and changes in salinity. As the Gulf Stream flows north, for instance, it cools through evaporation, which makes it relatively more salty. A decrease in temperature and an increase in salinity make water more dense, which causes it to sink towards the ocean floor, pushing along slower currents on the ocean floor that eventually reach the surface again. Such currents keep places like Britain and Norway warmer, while seeding tropical waters with critical nutrients.

The massive melting happening on Greenland is a likely explanation for this weakening trend. Land glaciers are made of fresh water, so when they melt, they dilute the salinity of the surrounding ocean — thus throwing a wrench straight into the circulatory mechanism.

Many write-ups of this research used the action-shlock film The Day After Tomorrow as a hook, but a better popular reference is Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital series. Robinson always does meticulous research, and the second book has a solid version of what might happen if the Gulf Stream were to collapse suddenly. Without it, there is a recurrence of the Younger Dryas, with most of Europe and the Eastern Seaboard experiencing an extremely cold winter, while the rest of the earth continues to warm.

Meanwhile, California is experiencing the opposite problem: extreme heat and drought. Its water storage is system is down to perhaps three years' supply if the drought doesn't break. Whether this particular drought can be tied to climate change with total certainty is disputed, though largely beside the point — as David Roberts points out, the thing to remember is that more warming means more droughts generally.

All this comes on the heels of two studies just in the last couple months projecting massively accelerated melting of Antarctica over the coming decades. All told, something like 20 feet of sea level rise due to Antarctic melting is now likely locked in. It may take centuries to fully shake out, but given the amount of capital invested in, say, New York City, one would imagine this would be grounds for swift action.

But these studies have had precisely zero impact on the political discourse. Instead, climate denier Ted Cruz has announced he is running for president, while Florida Gov. Rick Scott has banned use of the phrase "climate change" among state employees.

The only people actually doing anything constructive are the water managers in California, who have been forced into desperate action. But nobody is changing public policy to attack the root cause of all this — carbon dioxide emissions. It ought to be a reminder that even if the world doesn't collapse overnight like in The Day After Tomorrow, the long-term negative effects can still pile up at alarming rates.

 
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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/546128/why-climate-change-public-policy-problem-from-hell
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Trifid Nebula, Messier 16 Square Sticker

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


tagged with: breathtaking astronomy images, star forming nebulae, trfdnbl, star nurseries, galaxies, nebulae, star factory, trifid nebula, european southern observatory, clusters of stars, factories for stars, eso, vista

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A fantastic picture from our universe featuring the massive star factory known as the Trifid Nebula.

It was captured in all its glory with the Wide-Field Imager camera attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in northern Chile.
So named for the dark dust bands that trisect its glowing heart, the Trifid Nebula is a rare combination of three nebulae types that reveal the fury of freshly formed stars and point to more star birth in the future. The field of view of the image is approximately 13 x 17 arcminutes.
It's an awe-inspiring, breathtaking image that reveals some of the wonder that is our universe.

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image code: trfdnbl

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

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Hubble's Messier 5

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"Beautiful Nebula discovered between the Balance [Libra] & the Serpent [Serpens] ..." begins the description of the 5th entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous catalog of nebulae and star clusters. Though it appeared to Messier to be fuzzy and round and without stars, Messier 5 (M5) is now known to be a globular star cluster, 100,000 stars or more, bound by gravity and packed into a region around 165 light-years in diameter. It lies some 25,000 light-years away. Roaming the halo of our galaxy, globular star clusters are ancient members of the Milky Way. M5 is one of the oldest globulars, its stars estimated to be nearly 13 billion years old. The beautiful star cluster is a popular target for Earthbound telescopes. Of course, deployed in low Earth orbit on April 25, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has also captured its own stunning close-up view that spans about 20 light-years near the central region of M5. Even close to its dense core at the left, the cluster's aging red and blue giant stars and rejuvenated blue stragglers stand out in yellow and blue hues in the sharp color image.

Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Personalized Purple Galaxy Cluster Case-Mate Case

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!


tagged with: blue, purple, nasa, hubble, galaxies, personalized, galaxy cluster, space images, macs j0717, stars, pretty, macsj0717

Galaxy Cluster MACS J0717 thanks to NASA and Hubble program.

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Rice researchers make ultrasensitive conductivity measurements

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Researchers at Rice University have discovered a new way to make ultrasensitive conductivity measurements at optical frequencies on

The post Rice researchers make ultrasensitive conductivity measurements has been published on Technology Org.

 
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A Stunning View of the Orion Nebula Print

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


tagged with: astronomy, space, hubble, nasa, print, prints, posters, beautiful, photographs, pictures, gifts, miscellaneous

A Stunning View of the Orion Nebula Print. This dramatic image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image. Some of them have never been seen in visible light. These stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. The bright central region is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium stars are stars still young enough to have disks of material encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary disks or "proplyds" and are too small to see clearly in this image. The disks are the building blocks of solar systems. The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light. Astronomers call the region a miniature Orion Nebula because only one star is sculpting the landscape. The Orion Nebula has four such stars. Next to M43 are dense, dark pillars of dust and gas that point toward the Trapezium. These pillars are resisting erosion from the Trapezium's intense ultraviolet light. The glowing region on the right reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected from the Trapezium stars — collide with material. The faint red stars near the bottom are the myriad brown dwarfs that Hubble spied for the first time in the nebula in visible light. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are cool objects that are too small to be ordinary stars because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our Sun does. The dark red column, below, left, shows an illuminated edge of the cavity wall. The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately the apparent angular size of the full moon. The Orion observations were taken between 2004 and 2005. Source:NASA.

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Stellar Nurseries RCW120 Rectangular Sticker

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


tagged with: envelope sealers, nebulae, gstlnrsr, rcw120, breathtaking astronomy images, star nurseries, ionised gas clouds, star forming regions, european southern observatory, clusters of stars, galaxies, starfields, eso, 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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Take a Number: 37.2 Trillion: Galaxies or Human Cells?

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The counting does not come easily, or exactly, but there are estimates for the number of cells in the human body and galaxies in the observable universe.








via New York Times