Making life more resistant to stress

All plants need to photosynthesize to survive. But when you throw in environmental stressors like excess heat, cold, drought, salt, or herbicides, just photosynthesizing can be deadly. Even in the absence of any of these assaults, too much sun can be worse than too little. The fact that chlorophyll’s absorption spectrum makes things surprisingly green reflects the compromises inherent in being able to capture every photon possible when they are scarce, yet field only just enough when they are plentiful.A recent paper in Current Biology suggests that plants can be engineered against climate change, even drought. Researchers propose to do this by making the plants better at handling stress. Now I know what you might be thinking — ‘stress’, ‘climate change’ — it sounds like it’s time to call the plant acupuncturist. However, there is actually some fascinating new science hiding behind claims like this.

Delivering medicine directly to the brain via remotely heated nanoparticles

Researchers at the Université de Montréal, Canada were able to bypass the BBB by delivering iron-oxide magnetic nano particles to a precise region of a mouse brain, and then heating them up with a remote RF field. To prove all this, they injected a blue dye into the blood, and then looked to see if it showed up on the business side of the BBB. To give some measure of confidence that the heating was not damaging the brain, they analyzed sliced-and-diced samples of brain for the presence of a protein known as CD68. This molecule, while certainly not the only telltale indicator of inflammation, is manufactured and/or released after many kinds of injury.There’s a lot of great medicines out there that don’t work for the brain. That’s primarily because they aren’t membrane-soluble and therefore can’t penetrate the blood brain barrier (BBB) that surrounds its vasculature. For things like cancer or infection, the only way in is to tap into the spine for a one-shot charge, or put in a more permanent indwelling tube that in-and-of itself can lead to further infection. Furthermore, any drug delivered by these extraordinary means can only penetrate as deep as the cerebro-spinal fluid can percolate. Fortunately, there may now be better ways to do it.

Can birds navigate by magnetic field?

At a meeting of the American Physical Society this Wednesday in Texas, Peter Hore will be describing new experimental results that help explain how avian magnetoreception might actually work. Like many other organisms, birds have many special adaptions to help them navigate. In addition to the ability to detect things like polarized light, they have any number of ways they might use to sense magnetic fields. The idea that they use magnetic particles within the neurites coursing through their beaks, while conceivable, is no longer the best explanation for their abilities.It’s difficult to prove that a device said to be a quantum computer actually is one. While entanglement is a requirement for the quantum performance of machines like D-Wave, it is not a proof. But the remarkable abilities of birds to navigate using Earth’s minute magnetic field are now similarly believed to depend on a biological quantum compass — although proving it is another story.

Battery power alone used to track Android phones

Android (specifically a Nexus 4) was used to test this location tracking scheme, but it would work equally well on any mobile device that offered network access and battery stats. Tracking location based on battery activity is predicated on the assumption that the farther a device is from the a cell tower, the more power it uses to maintain a connection. The same is true when it’s inside a building or otherwise obscured by structures.The phone you carry around all day has a myriad of different sensors that measure everything from location to barometric pressure. Apps usually have to adhere to the permission control system built into platforms like iOS and Android to get that information, but a team of researchers at Stanford University has devised a way to collect location information without talking to the GPS hardware. All they need to figure out where you’ve been is access to the battery levels.

Stunning NASA video showcases the beauty of our sun

The probe contains a number of scientific instruments, including tools for measuring extreme ultraviolet radiation, a Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, built by Lockheed Martin, which provides “continuous full-disk observations of the solar chromosphere and corna” in seven extreme ultraviolet channels. The SDO generates a reported 1.5TB of data per day, and has a 130Mbit linkage with Earth.NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which launched in 2010, recently celebrated its five-year anniversary. To celebrate, NASA cut together a stunning time-lapsed video showcasing the amazing vistas the SDO probe has captured to date. The SDO probe was designed to measure the structure and creation of the sun’s magnetic field, as well as to investigate how changes within the sun impact the Earth.