Are exploding supernovae guiding life on Earth? If a new ground breaking theory is to be believed, the answer is yes.

According to the study by Henrik Svensmark published by the Royal Astronomy Society in London the explosions of stars relatively close to Earth has proven itself to be the variable for life on our planet.

In short, according to the Watts Up With That blog, this is as big of a claim as the theory of plate tectonics was for geology.

Here is the short, short, short, short version:

Here are the main results:

• The long-term diversity of life in the sea depends on the sea-level set by plate tectonics and the local supernova rate set by the astrophysics, and on virtually nothing else.

• The long-term primary productivity of life in the sea – the net growth of photosynthetic microbes – depends on the supernova rate, and on virtually nothing else.

• Exceptionally close supernovae account for short-lived falls in sea-level during the past 500 million years, long-known to geophysicists but never convincingly explained..

• As the geological and astronomical records converge, the match between climate and supernova rates gets better and better, with high rates bringing icy times.

The implications here are massive. Not only for our understanding of the natural world but even politically charged debates like climate change.

But this theory easily encapsulates the reason we write this blog. One day you can wake up and the world is radically different then when you went to sleep. Amazing.

[Watts Up With That]

The whiz kids at io9 have put together a compilation of research that explains why we see imaginary, monstrous faces when we look in the mirror for an elongated period of time. This is the very basis for sleepover games like Bloody Mary, designed to spook kids into wetting themselves while surrounded by their jerkwad friends.

Ah, youth.

Here’s the jist:

The brain, when faced with a lot of stimulation, only some of which is considered relevant, will tune out the non-relevant parts, filling in what it can from the general area. It’s a little like how the blind spot works, except this is a dynamic process. The brain will zoom in on a desired area, and the rest of the space will fade away. This is called the Troxler Effect, or Troxler Fading.

The post goes on to discuss a study where respondents looked in a mirror for 10 minutes and reported all manner of horrors staring back at them by the end of it. 10% explained seeing dead parents with key elements of their face rearranged.

[io9]

Peter Thiel has long been a heavy hitter in Silicon Valley. He was a co-founder and CEO of PayPal and made an early stage development in Facebook, even earning himself the “honor” of being portrayed in The Social Network film about the site’s founding.

But Thiel has bigger fish to fry. Fish like the creation of antimatter-based fuel. Or minting of artificial protein therapeutics. Of even the advancement of human cell reengineering.

All projects that are far too radical (as in improbable) to garner much money for serious research. Except for Thiel, who finds them much too radical (as in awesome) to not toss cash at.

His fund will be called Breakout Labs and it awarded six grants of $350,000 to the following companies.

3Scan: development of 3-D digital reconstruction of brain issue.
Arigos Biomedical: advanced organ cooling for long term storage
Immusoft: re-programming of immune cells
Inspirotec: identification and collection of any airborne toxin
Longevity Biotec: creation of therapeutic artificial protein technology
Positron Dynamics: production and collection of positron, could be used as fuel for space travel

The best part, the application process is open at Breakout. They will continue to award good money to insane causes until the future gets here.

[Kurzweil AI]

The big rock from the sky that crashed into Earth and proved an extinction level event for our dinosaur pals could also seed life on a far off planet. The meteorites launched into space by the impact carrying the ingredients for life itself have since spread across our solar system and far beyond.

A new table estimating the trajectories of the rocks provides many surprises, according to Ray Kurzweil’s blog. For example, it would take a trillion years for the Earth ejecta to spread the size of the Milky Way.

But most awesomely…

The probability is almost 1 (close to certain) that our solar system is visited by microorganisms that originated outside our solar system.

To tie this together with a post yesterday, this means that our ejecta could bring life to other planets and some point there might be a scientist there warning of our fearsome existence. Yes, my friends, WE ARE THE SUPER GENIUS SPACE DINOSAURS!

[KurzweilAI Blog]

You just got pelted with dark matter. Don’t worry, it’ll happen again in a couple of seconds. Should you be worried? Probably not, it’s been happening your whole life, at least according to a new study by a few theoretical physicists.

A dark matter particle smacks into an average person’s body about once a minute, and careens off oxygen and hydrogen nuclei in your cells, according to theoretical physicists. Dark matter is streaming through you as you read this, most of it unimpeded.

If you’d like to read up on this mysterious (nefariously named) substance the is estimated to comprise 83% of all matter in the universe, check out Wikipedia. I know I had to.

[Popular Science]

A new study debunks the long held myth that urine is sterile. The results, which appear in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology was conducted at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. If found evidence of bacteria in the bladders of healthy women.

“Doctors have been trained to believe that urine is germ-free,” said Linda Brubaker, MD, MS, dean, SSOM. “However, these findings challenge this notion, so this research may have positive implications for how we treat patients with urinary tract conditions in the future.”

The myth has long been a contributing factor to the survival strategy of drinking one’s own liquid waste. The idea being that 95% of urine is water and sterile so to combat loss of water in the body it would help to recycle the excrement.

Somebody please inform Bear Grylls.

[Science Daily]

It’s go time.

The man who directed the most successful film in movie history twice is about to embark on his greatest adventure yet. James Cameron will begin his descent into the Pacific Ocean, weather permitting, sometime this weekend.

His mission is to make it to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the lowest known point in the ocean. His submarine, a revolutionary vertical design, will attempt to sink to the bottom as fast as possible so he can spend six hours investigating. He will be the first ever human to see the depths with his own eyes, the only previous crew (aboard the Trieste in 1960) to make it that deep hit the bottom to hard and caused a silt storm bringing visibility down to zero.

Cameron will also bring along 3D cameras to make a documentary of his voyage.

Godspeed James.

[Nat Geo]

Nokia has applied for a patent which amounts to tattoo which would accommodate customizable buzzing for your phone.

Here is how it would work:

The patent application describes “a material attachable to skin, the material capable of detecting a magnetic field and transferring a perceivable stimulus to the skin, wherein the perceivable stimulus relates to the magnetic field.” The material would react to magnetic signals emitted by a nearby electronic device, such as a smartphone. It would offer some sort of micro vibration, and could be set to certain vibrating patterns. The idea is to provide you with a more direct way to notice when you’re receiving some sort of incoming device alert, whether it be a phone call, email, or text message.

Congratulations I Didn’t Feel The Vibration Through My Pants Excuse Practitioners and welcome to Screwsville.

In reality though, this is something that could be used for far more than smart phones. Imagine how many “alerts” we get everyday. Our phone, our car, our appliances and anything else you can think of. What if we had a way to prioritize some to directly interact with our body.

It’s a pretty cool idea at least.

[Information Week] via @Lockridge_Lisa

Much was made over the last few months about the apparent discovery of faster than light neutrinos at the CERN laboratories. The neutrinos appeared to travel at 60 seconds faster than the speed of light. Of course, this would stand in contrast to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Now, those results seem to be attributed to an error in the process.

This will certainly be seen as a reason to celebrate for those professional frowners who did nothing but rain “we should wait and see…” negativity on the parade of interest in this particular scientific breakthrough.

Those people, are terrible.

Allow me to qualify, this is not about respecting the scientific process. Of course, we shouldn’t rush off and proclaim the preliminary research on neutrinos scientific fact, damaging a fundamental physics concept in the process. But it is it wrong to hope that it could change everything? Isn’t hope and enthusiasm for a better understanding of our natural world tempered with rigorous and constant verification the backbone of why science is awesome?

So the neutrino test turns out to be flawed. Fine. It was going to wind up here no matter which road we travelled. I am happy that a large population of folks who only kind of care about science got to take a route that included a possibility of Earth shattering realizations about time, space and our relation to it.

It’s a revolution best served with pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun.

The first test-tube grown hamburger will be produced this fall. Although still in the laboratory phase as of now, the experiment will eventually produces thousands of small tissues recreated from a cow’s stem cells. This proof of concept could be a very powerful one, reshaping agriculture as we know it.

Could meat grown in a lab and not from a slaughtered animal be considered vegan?

Only time and possibly some Bar-B-Q sauce will tell…

[Fox News]

In this remarkable video, we see two Texas heart surgeons who replace a dying man’s failing heart with a turbine. This does a few remarkable things.

1) Saves the dude’s life
2) Removes his pulse, since the turbine creates a continuous flow of blood
3) Changes the conventional definition of physiological death

Very emotional stuff. Things might have gotten a little dusty for me while watching it. The closer we get to liberating ourselves from the fragile limitations of our meat bag prisons the better.

[Design Taxi]

Researchers have long thought that hallucinogenic stimulated parts of your brain, which created insane visuals like that one time Gary down the street saw the poster melt in his hands and then was all like “Did you see that?” but you were too busy holding your iPhone in your hands and wondering if apps have souls.

New brain scan research suggests there might be a more profound explanation, key parts of your brain turn off while on magic mushrooms. Specifically, blood flow is restricted to the brain.

This could possibly be beneficial in opening up patients to learning new behaviors, which could help in treating Obsessive Compulsive personality disorders.

“Chemically switching off might have very profound beneficial effects,” says Nutt, who suspects that psilocybin could also be useful for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. “It may help people completely locked into a mindset that drives their lives.”

The study also found a positive reaction to the question, “look at my fingers, aren’t they weird?”

[Science News]

The laboratory that mutated a deadly bird flu into something humans can spread are now called for a 60 day suspension of research so they can open a dialogue with the scientific community. Since their announcement, much Sturm and Drang has been made about how the lab should disseminate the information they gained and if anyone should be in the business of creating a global super plague.

“We recognize that we and the rest of the scientific community need to clearly explain the benefits of this important research and the measures taken to minimize its possible risks,” write about 40 scientists.

“We propose to do so in an international forum in which the scientific community comes together to discuss and debate these issues,” they write in a letter released by the journals Science and Nature today, Jan. 20.

Translation: Everybody, be cool.

Those who worked on the project would surely like to emphacize how few steps it took them to mutate the virus into something that could affect humanity. Now that it’s been done, we can learn a lot about how to prevent the spread of the disease should it happen in the wild.

They would in equal measures like to de-emphasize the fact that they engineered an unnatural global plague.

[Live Science]

A new study proves that organizing activities where a group of people move in unison can create more concrete leader-follower relationships and be used as a tool for helpful cooperation or evil deeds.

In the experiment, participants were instructed to either walk in sync with an experimenter, out-of-step with them or simply alongside them at their own pace. They were then asked to gather as many bugs as possible in 30 seconds and put them into a device where they were told they’d die.

Those participants who walked in step with the same experimenter who later instructed them to kill the bugs put approximately 54 percent more bugs into the device than did those in the control condition. They also put 38 percent more bugs into the funnel than did participants in the coordinated but asynchronous condition and twice as many bugs into the funnel as did participants who walked in synchrony with a different experimenter than the one who instructed them to terminate the insects.

Synchronized action is used as a tool for many institutions including but not limited to: religious rituals, military exercises and Supermaning dat ho.

[Science Daily]

Listen kids. If you are reading this and you only know of Peter Parker and Spider-man because of the Sam Raimi films, let me break something to you.

Peter Parker didn’t start shooting webs out of his wrists as part of an overnight biological evolution after being bit by a radioactive arachnid. That’s just Hollywood fantasy. The real story is that the brainy Parker, having already woken up with super strength, agility and uncanny Spider Sense decided to augment his new natural gifts with his own scientific concoction. A sticky, strong, spider silk-esqe substance which he then shot out of home made mechanical dispensers triggered by a specific hand gesture.

The mechanical web shooters reinforces a key element of the Spider-man mythos. Peter Parker is a socially awkward kid because he’s a genius level science nerd. This matters! This is important! Yes! I am still furious about this 9 years after the first Spider-man movie came out!

Also, 50 years after the character was created scientists have finally caught up with Peter Parker and recreated spider silk by transferring key spider genes into silkworms which are far easier to farm the substance out of.

So they worked out a way to transfer the key spider genes responsible for the strong thread making into the silkworm.

The scientific breakthrough could open the door for large-scale production.

The silk could be used in many medical applications including artificial ligaments and tendons, as well as tough wound dressings.

It is also said to be strong enough that it could be used as a new material in manufacturing bulletproof vests.

Or shooting Mysterio in the face so you can make fun of his helmet.

[Sky]

The future is now. Amazing exoskeletons will be sold to consumers with spinal cord injuries for training, under doctor supervision for now, how to walk upright with the help of the device.

Your job is to balance your upper body, shifting your weight as you plant a walking stick on the right; your physical therapist will then use a remote control to signal the left leg to step forward. In a later model, the walking sticks will have motion sensors that communicate with the legs, allowing the user to take complete control.

Take a look at this bad boy in motion below.

[Kurzweil AI]