“A team of scientists…have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,”…Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms….” Full Slice

Meet Mark Roth

“…I have learned how to reduce the oxygen consumption of many animals, including mammals. And there are instances where we have generated states of suspended animation – that is, where we do not see any movement as judged by high-resolution microscopy . . . and have shown that if you then place those animals into a refrigerated cold environment, they’re able to survive. But if they were animated like you and I are now, they would be dead….” Full Slice

Evidence for the shattering of another paradigm which sounds like something from The Firesign Theatre

“A team of…chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

“There’s been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices…Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis.”…it means that quantum mechanical probability laws can prevail over the classical laws of kinetics in this complex biological system, even at normal temperatures….” Full Slice

“A collaboration led by researchers…has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the…researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids….” Full Slice

A bit over the top title I suppose but important anyway. Mirror away !

“…neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors,..” Video Slice

An idea by William Calvin that he presents in this book might also be part of this.

“…Stressful conditions cause misfolded proteins to accumulate in the ER. Cells try to recover by slowing down translation and increasing production of their protein folding machinery. But if the stress continues, prolonged expression of a transcription factor called CHOP promotes cell death instead. The apoptotic machinery is triggered by calcium released from the ER, but how CHOP induces this step wasn’t known….” Full Slice

“…The mountains were discovered by a Soviet team during the International Geophysical Year in 1957-8. Their detection was a complete surprise because the rock bed in the middle of the Antarctic continent was assumed to be relatively flat….” Full Slice

Lots in this one and well worth follow up

“…The study was so comprehensive that the team could see signatures of an undiscovered system of DNA repair, reducing the mutations in highly active genes, suggesting the genome seeks to preserve these regions above many others.

However, as previous studies suggested, there was not one mutation that stood out as ‘the lung cancer gene’. One gene - CHD7 - was found to be mutated in several SCLC samples. This gene is part of an emerging pattern that cancers often contain mutations in genes that are generalists in regulating genetic activity alongside more specific changes….” Full Slice

“Some of the highest growing trees in the world are also the oldest—bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) from the Great Basin in the western United States (eastern California, Nevada and Utah). The oldest example is more than 4800 years old. Because of their longevity and growth at high elevations (where the growth of trees is generally known to be limited by temperature) bristlecone pines have been of particular interest to dendroclimatologists (paleoclimatologists who study tree rings to reconstruct past climate). Numerous ecological studies carried out at treeline sites all over the world show that temperature imposes a critical limitation on the ability of trees to produce new tissue; mean daily temperatures of 8-9°C are required, so recent warming will have particular benefits for those trees that have managed to eke out an existence for so long, living “on the edge”….” Full Slice

“…These findings foreshadow a new catalytic system available for applications both in academic laboratories and in industry, allowing stoichiometric reductions mediated by Fe or Na2S to be performed in a catalytic fashion and greatly reducing subsequent waste production. Moreover, the catalyst developed here could replace expensive precious metal catalysts, therefore offering the potential benefit of lowering cost and diminishing the environmental impact from heavy-metal pollutants….” Full Slice

“A team of researchers…has constructed for the first time a synthetic cellulosome in yeast which is much more ethanol-tolerant than the bacteria in which these structures are normally found.

The yeast cellulosome could enable efficient one-step consolidated bioprocessing by maximizing the catalytic efficiency of cellulosic hydrolysis with simultaneous fermentation. The process of using these engineered yeasts can potentially make the production of bioethanol from biomass more efficient and economical….” Full Slice

“The first all-sky maps developed by NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, the initial mission to examine the global interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, suggest that the galactic magnetic fields had a far greater impact on Earth’s history than previously conceived, and the future of our planet and others may depend, in part, on how the galactic magnetic fields change with time.

“The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region,”…” Full Slice

“…The researchers’ spectroscopic study suggests that graphene grows in the form of tiny islands built of concentric rings of carbon atoms. The islands are strongly bonded to the iridium surface at their perimeters, but are not bonded to the iridium at their centers, which causes them to bulge upward in the middle to form minuscule geodesic domes. By adjusting the conditions as the carbon is deposited on the iridium, the researchers could vary the size of the carbon domes from a few nanometers to hundreds of nanometers across….” Full Slice

“…”Cells cleverly separate the most active genes into their own special neighborhood, to make it easier for proteins and other regulators to reach them,”…at a finer scale, the genome adopts an unusual organization known in mathematics as a “fractal.” The specific architecture the scientists found, called a “fractal globule,” enables the cell to pack DNA incredibly tightly …”Nature’s devised a stunningly elegant solution to storing information — a super-dense, knot-free structure,”…” Full Slice

“…While the focus of the present work is in the microwave regime, in conventional optics, light reflections present a major roadblock to light-driven circuits reaching the same level of sophistication as widely used microelectronic circuits. A variety of practical applications, such as optical isolation and optical information storage, could potentially benefit from the novel and unparalleled one-way photonic behavior observed by the…team. Numerous applications that require strong interactions between light and matter could also gain from such an efficiency boost.” Full Slice