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Scientists 3-D Print A Bionic Ear With Help From A High School Kid

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3-D Printed Bionic EarFrank Wojciechowski
Nanoparticle antennae are woven right into the organic tissue of the ear!

A team of scientists at Princeton University--along with one very savvy high school student--have managed to create a truly bionic ear. It's not just a replacement--it has sensors woven throughout the tissue that actually enhance its hearing abilities.

In recent months, it's been proven possible to run living cells through a 3-D printer and keep them viable, which has some pretty amazing possibilities for bionics. This team at Princeton took it a step further by being the first to actually weave sensors, in the form of silver nanoparticles, into the printing process. This isn't an ear with an antenna on it; it's a seamlessly integrated bionic ear.

This particular ear was made with a mix of hydrogel and calf stem cells combined with the silver nanoparticles, which act as an antenna. The stem cells will later develop into cartilage, the researchers say. It's not ready to be stuck onto a patient's head quite yet; at the moment, the ear can only pick up radio waves, though the researchers say the next step is to include pressure and acoustic sensors, just like an organic ear.

The big change here is that this bionic ear looks and feels like a natural ear. It's very difficult to combine electronics, which are "hard and dry," according to a co-author on the study, with natural body parts, which are largely made of water. 3-D printing is one way to combine the two seamlessly. It's a major step forward for bionics--and, interestingly, it couldn't have happened without the help of Ziwen Jiang, a local high school student, who helped with the CAD modeling of the ear.

Read more here.

    



Scientists Create Hybrid, Air-Transmissible Bird Flu Strains

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Pandemic FearsWikimedia Commons/cc licensed
Following a moratorium on "dangerous" flu research, new studies reshuffle the molecular mechanisms that allow bird flu to infect humans.

The most recent bird flu strain claimed another victim today, bringing the number of dead to 27, all in China. So far 127 people have fallen ill, and world health authorities say the new H7N9 flu is a global threat that should be taken seriously. The strain, which has been transmitted from chickens to humans, is so far unable to move from person to person. But scientists are figuring out how other strains could.

The journal Science is publishing two papers today that describe the mechanisms avian flu viruses could use to alter their structure and spread among mammals, including humans. One of the papers studied guinea pigs, which are not necessarily the best way to study the human response to flu-but studies on ferrets, which are a good proxy for people, were halted by a year-long moratorium. That hiatus recently ended, so more papers in this vein are likely to follow.

Some scientists are decrying the research as potentially dangerous-"appallingly irresponsible," in the words of Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the UK's Royal Society.

Fears of viruses escaping into the wild were the main motivation behind the voluntary moratorium scientists imposed last year, which halted research on making bird flu airborne. Virologists got back to work in January, saying the benefits outweigh the risks and promising safeguards that will protect lab workers and the public. This new research could very well re-ignite that debate.

But like other researchers before them, these authors argue their experiments, one of which deliberately mixes swine flu and bird flu, are crucial for understanding the way flu viruses spread.

Ying Zhang, Hualan Chen and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences combined genetic material from bird and human flu viruses, demonstrating how they might re-assort their genes and mix together. This could explain how bird flu viruses could naturally mix with human viruses-for instance, swapping their human airway proclivity and their propensity for spreading. The team mixed together the notorious 2009 "swine flu" H1N1 variant and a H5N1 variant that can spread among guinea pigs. They came up with 127 different virus combos, some of which were able to spread through the air.

The airborne viruses were not lethal. That's been the case each time scientists mutate bird flu viruses to become airborne and infect mammals. But critics say the research is still highly dangerous.

Another paper also in Science sheds more light on these processes. Wei Zhang and colleagues, also at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, studied the molecular means the flu virus would use to infect humans. Flu strains get their name-H5N1, H7N9-from their molecular components: H5N1 flu, for example, is a variant with type 5 hemagglutinin and type 1 neuraminidase, which are proteins. These proteins bind to a receptor in the airway of the host, and usually, these receptors and binding agents are species-specific.

For instance, humans have no immunity to flu viruses with a type 5 hemagglutinin, but this type of flu also doesn't bind to human air passages. Previous work has shown that it can mutate to become transmissible through the air among ferrets (although the ways in which researchers achieved this are not analogous to what would happen naturally). The mutations involved changes in a gene called HA, which binds the virus protein to the air passages. But scientists were not sure how these changes occurred.

Wei Zhang and colleagues set out to solve this question. It turned out to have a somewhat simple answer: The atoms in the human-adapted strain of H5N1 avian flu had a slightly different arrangement. In what may be a good sign, the mutated strain also was less likely to cause serious infection than its wild, un-mutated cousin. Something about the switch to a human-preferred protein shape seems to make the virus less effective.

This is also interesting for the H7N9 strain, according to the paper-it turns out that H7N9 has a particular amino acid substitution, called Q226L, that was necessary to make the avian flu into a human flu. The fact that H7N9 has it naturally, rather than induced through a mutation, could help explain why that particular strain has a higher infection rate in people right now.

It's also important to note that guinea pigs actually have some avian-like receptors in their respiratory tracts, which make them susceptible to bird flus in a way that humans are not. The next step would be to test these experiments using ferrets, which are a better model for how the flu works in people.

    


NASA Wants To Send Your Haiku To Mars

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Mount SharpNASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Submit your three-line ode to the red planet by July 1!

When NASA launches the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft in November, it wants to pack onboard a DVD containing three poetic messages to everyone's second-favorite planet. Any Earthling can submit a haiku about Mars by July 1-the DVD will include the name of each person who sends a poem, but only the three most popular haikus will eventually orbit the red planet.

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics is coordinating the Going to Mars Campaign. Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator, says the program is "a great opportunity to reach the next generation of explorers and excite them about science, technology, engineering and math." Starting July 15, an online public vote will open to select the three top haikus.

NASA's MAVEN mission will be the first mission devoted to studying the Martian upper atmosphere. The spacecraft will gather information that should help scientists figure out what happened to the atmosphere and water that once existed on Mars.

Submit your best haiku, or just your name, here. Or apply now for a one-way trip to Mars.

    


OpenWorm Is An Open-Source Virtual Worm, Accurate In Every Way

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Elegant Elegans The OpenWorm 3D Browser iPhone app lets you peek into C. elegans at the cellular level. MetaCell, LLC
An international programming project aims to create virtual nematode life.

Predictive models are essential in engineering fields, but less common in biology, though accurate simulations of living organisms could help us understand disease, drug efficacy and neuroscience.

OpenWorm, a new open-source project devoted to creating a complete virtual model of a worm, aims to bring simulation into the living world by creating a digital organism--C. elegans, a nematode commonly used as a model organism in biology research.

The goal is to make a digital worm that mimics its biological counterpart in essentially every way, from the molecular level to behavioral patterns. The project's creators explain their reasoning like this:

Because we believe brain research must accelerate, we are taking matters into our own hands. If we cannot build a computer model of a worm, the most studied organism in all of biology, we don't stand a chance to understand something as complex as the human brain. We must crawl before we can walk!

They're using a largely bottom-up approach, bringing together data from scientific observations of C. elegans from the past decade to simulate every aspect of the worm within a program, starting with the basics of its cell behavior. While C. elegans has been so widely studied, there's plenty of data out there on its neurons and muscular structure--that data just needs to be integrated to create a full model.

So far, the international team has created a demo of five connected muscle segments moving together through water, and a simulation of working neurons. They've also released an iPhone app that allows users to explore any of the 959 individual cells within a 3-D model of C. elegans.

[New World Notes]

    


Why Your Grocery Store Is Installing Military Cameras

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QueVision display in a Krogervia Kroger
Surprisingly, it's not about catching petty thieves.

The retail giant Kroger is using infrared cameras in 95 percent of its stores, and if all goes as planned, no one will even notice the cameras are there.

A system called QueVision, first established in 2010, puts cameras above store entrances and cash registers, runs that data through secret-sauce software, then displays the number of registers currently open and predicts how many will need to be open in 30 minutes.

Infrared cameras are better known for their military and law enforcement applications; they can find people at night hiding beneath camouflage or trying to conceal themselves in wilderness. Why use them for grocery stores?

Turns out, infrared cameras also work fine in regular light, and because they pick up on heat signatures, they're better than visual spectrum cameras at distinguishing people from their backgrounds. If the machine's purpose is to just count new warm bodies entering a store or others waiting in line, infrared is the exact right spectrum to use.

Ultimately, the technology serves a more mundane goal than its advanced origins imply. QueVision is about more efficiently using labor, allowing the store to better plan staffing needs and meet rushes without needing to hire more people or diminishing the quality of the shopping experience. It's a similar logic to self-checkout lines.

There's a couple cool things to learn from this. First, it's sometimes impossible to see how decades later a technology devised for one purpose will be used. Second, sometimes those new uses will be really, really boring.

Here is an absurd safari-themed training video about the importance of QueVision:

    


Watch Live As This Solar-Powered Plane Embarks On A Flight Across The U.S.

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Solar Impulse will attempt to fly across the United States using nothing but sunlight for fuel.

A solar-powered airplane is set to embark on a historic flight across the United States this morning. Weather permitting, Solar Impulse will leave the Bay Area at 6 a.m. PST, and arrive in New York about two months later, after stopovers in Phoenix, Dallas, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. With 12,000 solar cells built into the wings, the plane is designed to fly on sunlight alone. Check out the livefeed above, and read more about Solar Impulse here.

    


An iPhone Case For Cops That Can Scan Irises On The Fly

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AOptix Scannervia The Verge
Look to the iris.

Iris scanning as a form of biometric recognition doesn't get as much attention as retinal scanning or fingerprints, but it's got a lot of advantages. Irises don't change over time, like fingerprints can, there's no need for any actual physical contact to get a scan, and it's hard to fool an iris scanner with surgery or other medical alteration. Now, there's one even bigger advantage: you can carry an iris scanner around with you in one hand.

Russell Brandom over at the Verge has a nice look at AOptix, a company that has created what we can only think of as a "recognizer." It's an iPhone case that includes an iris scanner, a fingerprint scanner, and facial recognition ability--it's kind of a one-stop shop for figuring out who someone is.

Iris scanners work by essentially taking a picture of the iris, the colored part of the eye around the pupil. The specific patters are as unique as fingerprints. You take these pictures by shining a bright infrared light at the iris, and then matching the patterns with a database. The biggest problem? It can be fooled by, well, an actual photograph of an iris. But when taking a scan from 10 inches away, it'd be hard to slip in a photo in front of the scanner.

AOptix is pitching the case to police and other security forces, and as iris scans become more and more common, it's likely you'll see more and more of these scanners as well. AOptix says the scanner can work from up to 60 feet away, which has greatly interested such organizations as the Department of Homeland Security. That's something you can't do with fingerprints, for sure.

AOptix says this particular device is short-range, citing "a limited market" for a long-range sensor. But that's the potential of this tech, and now it's going to get into the hands of domestic law enforcement.

For more on the new world of iris scanners, head to the Verge.

    


Wing And A Scare

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The GatekeeperCourtesy Cedar Fair Entertainment
A record-breaking roller coaster that mimics the thrill of stunt flying.

In the competitive world of roller-coaster design, engineers often obsess about smashing records and pushing the limits of human endurance. But records mean little if the ride leaves thrill seekers feeling beat-up. For the engineers at the coaster-design firm Bolliger and Mabillard (B&M), it's not enough to simply go faster, taller, or twistier. "A good coaster should be smooth and comfortable," says B&M founder Walter Bolliger.

When the firm's newest coaster, the Gatekeeper, opens this month at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, it will claim plenty of records, including one for world's tallest upside-down drop-165 feet. It's also the longest and loopiest of the world's five "wing coasters." A B&M signature, wing coasters seat passengers on each side of the track in order to mimic the sensation of riding on the wing of a plane. The Gatekeeper whips riders along nearly a mile of stunt-pilot trickery, including a maneuver that knifes the wings through two concrete-and-steel towers. It's the thrill of stunt flying-minus the turbulence.

1) WING OVER DROP

Once strapped in, riders climb 165 feet and roll upside down as they plunge into the tallest upside-down dive of any coaster. The drop is so high, in fact, that it generates all the kinetic energy the car needs to travel along the coaster's 4,164 feet of track while completing six more upside-down moves (a.k.a. inversions).

2) THE IMMELMANN

Following the first drop, riders bottom out around four times the force of gravity (4Gs) and hit 67 mph before rocketing into the next maneuver: an Immelmann. Named after a pilot trick, the Immelman is a horseshoe-shaped path that ascends a half loop, rolls 180 degrees, and sends riders flying toward the next move. The short, tight vertical loop keeps forces aligned with riders' spines, so it's less jarring.

3) THE CAMELBACK

Momentum from the Immelmann carries riders to the crest of a 105-foot-tall parabolic arc, where they'll catch about two seconds of weightlessness. Airtime occurs when the upward force of the coaster balances out with the downward force of gravity.

4) THE CORKSCREW

A corkscrew is really just a loop stretched into three dimensions. Its center of rotation is slightly offset, so riders on the outermost part of the wing will experience more acceleration than riders closest to the center rail.

5) THE KEYHOLES

Just when the wings appear certain to slam into a pair of 62-ton concrete-and-steel towers, they rotate 90 degrees, slicing passengers through narrow slots. The clearance between the stretched limbs of the tallest rider (the height limit is 6'6'') and the sides of the towers is less than a foot. The track is mounted to each tower; without such supports, subtle track movements due to wind and temperature changes would have demanded a larger, less terrifying keyhole.

WINGS

Cantilevered steel arms support six-foot-long steel wings. Designers made the wing more rigid under the seats than in the rail so that the wings vibrate at a different frequency from the track. This avoids interactions that can cause structural problems.

HARNESSES

Most looping coasters rely on hard over-the-shoulder harnesses that can block views and box ears. The Gatekeeper has soft, flexible vests that secure the upper body without the need for hard foam padding. A rigid restraint bar holds riders in place at their waist.

SPECS

Top Speed: 67 mph
Inversions: 7
Biggest Drop: 165 feet
Length: 4,164 feet
Ride Time: 2 minutes, 40 seconds

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

    



The World's Largest Rubber Duck And Other Amazing Images From This Week

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Rubber DuckyFlorentijn Hofman via Design Taxi
Plus insects wearing hats made of water, Apple's new headquarters and more


Click here to enter the gallery

    


In A Quest For Immersive Gaming, A Device That Shocks You While You Play

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Haha. Now we are having fun! So much fun!

Here's a thing you don't hear often when making a purchase: this product is "medical compliant."

"Here are your skis! They are medical compliant." "This is the iPhone 5. It is medical compliant."

But that is apparently required to explain this idea for a gaming device that shocks your skin into convulsions. Not big ones, mind you: just minor, uncomfortable twitches that give you something to fight against while playing a game. In the video here, a reporter from IDG News Service went to Paris's Computer Human Interaction conference and tried out a flying game where your biggest enemy is apparently your biological reaction to being zapped in the arm. (Ha! Classic fun.)

The idea is to make the game using this system a more immersive experience. For years now, game controllers have used some kind of "rumble" system, where the controller vibrates when the player, say, tumbles down a hill or crashes a car into a wall. This is like that, only with the voltage kicked up.

In the future, when our robot overlords force us into mining the virtual salt mines, they will adapt this technology to keep us in line.

[IT World]

    


How Game Controllers Evolved [Infographic]

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From Tennis For Two to PlayStation 4.

Today's game controllers aren't totally original. There was a long, generational evolution that got them there, as this incredibly comprehensive infographic from Pop Chart Lab shows.

The Famicom controller begat the NES controller which begat the SNES controller which begat the Nintendo DS and eventually 3DS. But half the fun of this infographic isn't just tracing the family tree branches: there are some crazy obscure controllers that get included. Did you know, for example, about the Wu-Tang Clan-themed PlayStation 1 controller? Because that is definitely a thing that existed once (and that gets its own little dead-end branch here).

The infographic groups the controllers by type--"handhelds," "gamepad," "touch"--but it's also neat to look at the infographic as company history. Nintendo has been more experimental with its controllers than most (see the grouping to the left that includes the Power Glove controller down to the first Wii controller and beyond).

A surprise inclusion: The iPod Touch, which undoubtedly changed casual gaming but isn't what you might think of as a "controller." There's also the PlayStation 4 controller we only recently got a look at, and isn't quite on the market yet. Doesn't get much more comprehensive than 1958 to sometime in the near future.

You can purchase a print here.

[Pop Chart Lab via Co.Design]

    


Acer Announces Weird Folding Laptop With The Trackpad In The Wrong Place

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Acer Aspire R7 HingeAcer
An easel-inspired hinge turns this singularly weird laptop into a tablet or an all-in-one.

At an event this morning in New York City, Acer announced a slate of new gadgets, some boring (an iPad-Mini-sized Iconia tablet, a small convertible laptop) but one distinctly...odd. The Acer Aspire R7 isn't quite like any other laptop out there.

Windows 8's emphasis on touchscreen navigation has led to a lot of unusual laptop designs, which is exciting; there's Dell's vertically-flipping screen, Lenovo's excellent bend-all-the-way-around Yoga, and now Acer's easel-inspired design. The hinge is actually called "Ezel," which we assume is pronounced like "easel," and works sort of like the old iMac G4, moving up and down and forward and back. The hinge also allows the screen to lay down flat on the keyboard, so the computer looks more like a tablet.

Interestingly, the Aspire R7 has switched the positions of the keyboard (a nice-looking chiclet affair) and the trackpad, so the trackpad actually sits above, closer to the screen. The idea is that you use the trackpad less in a Windows 8 device, because so much of the operating system encourages you to touch the screen instead. Thanks to the hinge, you can bring the screen even closer to you, right over the trackpad, making the laptop look kind of like a jumbo iPad with a keyboard case.

The laptop has the standard specs; 15.6-inch 1080p display, Intel Core i5 processor, 6GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive with a 24GB SSD to load the OS faster, plus HDMI, SD reader, and three USB ports. The laptop looks thin, but we're skeptical about the utility of using a 15.6-inch laptop as a tablet. Even the very thin and light Lenovo Yoga 13 proved kind of heavy and unwieldy to use in "tablet mode," but perhaps you could use it for tabletop demos or something.

No price yet, but it'll be out May 14th as a Best Buy exclusive.

    


These Robots Are In A Relationship (And They Fight All The Time)

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Robot arm commences passively-aggressively doing the dishes

Meet Vincent and Emily. They're a robotic couple created by artists Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler and Carolin Liebl as an examination of human relationships. The two machines are programmed to react to sound and movement, moving their robotic heads or making a whirring noise in response to their surroundings, or to each other.

From Schmid-Pfähler's description:

As humans are only able to communicate their thoughts and emotions verbally and through their actions, likewise the two robots depend for their communication on their sounds via loudspeakers and motions controlled by their motors. The two technical creatures capture sounds and movements via sensors and react on those signals with own expressions. Just like in each human relationship it comes to misunderstandings: If Vincent sends positive signals by up and down movements, it is possible that Emily interprets even those signals as negative. Disagreement is preprogrammed.

It's a "tense relationship," Schmid-Pfähler writes, and people who see it "will be searching for similarities to particular patterns of human behavior." It's true: these two do look a tiny bit human while they're buzzing around. You can almost imagine one saying: "Honey you forgot to do the dishes again--whirrrrrr."

[Vimeo via Creative Applications Network]

    


What Makes Ebola So Deadly?

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Ebola Virion An electron micrograph of an Ebola virion, with added color. CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons
Ebola viruses prevent the body from mounting an immune response against them, but a new study finds that mutating just one gene makes the virus unable to suppress the immune system.

A new study has found, at a molecular level, what makes the Ebola virus so deadly.

The virus uses a combination of genes to prevent the cells they infect from triggering the immune system, a team of biologists at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases found. People who die from Ebola generally don't seem to have had an immune response to the virus at the time of their deaths.

There are Ebola outbreaks every couple of years-sometimes more than once a year-in central and west Africa. Up to 90 percent of those who get sick from the Ebola virus die, according to the World Health Organization. Those who get sick may get fluids through an IV or other support, but there's no treatment or vaccine.

The U.S. team found how the Zaire variant of the Ebola virus prevents cells called dendric cells from making proteins that call other immune cells over to destroy them when they're infected. The researchers genetically engineered Ebola Zaire viruses so that they had mutations in four places in their genetic material that the researchers thought were important to the virus' ability to stop dendric cells from making proteins. The researchers made four different engineered Ebola Zaire viruses, each with mistakes in just one place in its genetic material.

The biologists found that each of those four mutated viruses couldn't mess up dendric cells, suggesting the virus needs some combination of those four genes to do its deadly work.

The researchers published their work last week in the Journal of Virology.

[University of Texas Medical Branch]

    


Duuude, Finally: Drones That Deliver Beer

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Beer DroneOppiKoppiTV
Nerds and frat boys: brothers in beer drops.

This August, drones will drop payloads all over South Africa's OppiKoppi music festival, and there's a good chance no one will mind. Probably because the payload is beer.

Customers thirsty for beer will order beer with their phones, then someone will attach a parachute to a beer, load that beer into an octorotor, and the octorotor will fly overhead, release the beer, and the beer parachutes to the person who ordered it (hopefully).

For test flights, the drone is remotely piloted, but the goal is to make the process far more autonomous, with drones flying themselves to coordinates on a GPS delivery grid.

This isn't the first attempt at delivering concessions via robot: the sadly-a-hoaxTaco Copter first captured the stomachs of a hungry and tech-savvy public, before the Burrito Bomber offered a hopefully more real future of stuffed tortilla delivery. There's still a chance for the OppiKoppi beer drone to win hearts and minds (and the ire of livers) by actually delivering on its promises.

In doing so, it offers a good idea of what commercial drones will look like in action. Come the FAA's new rules for unmanned aircraft in 2015, we might even see beer drones stateside.

Watch of video of the glorious beer-robot future below:

    



Me, Me, Me: People Who Overuse The First-Person Singular Are More Depressed

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"Me, Myself, and I" words linked to depressionDreamstime
A new study links first-person singular pronouns to relationship problems and higher rates of depression.

Researchers in Germany have found that people who frequently use first-person singular words like "I," "me," and "myself," are more likely to be depressed and have more interpersonal problems than people who often say "we" and "us."

In the study, 103 women and 15 men completed 60- to 90-minute psychotherapeutic interviews about their relationships, their past, and their self-perception. (99 of the subjects were patients at a psychotherapy clinic who had problems ranging from eating disorders to anxiety.) They also filled out questionnaires about depression and their interpersonal behavior.

Then, researchers led by Johannes Zimmerman of Germany's University of Kassel counted the number of first-person singular (I, me) and first-person plural (we, us) pronouns used in each interview. Subjects who said more first-personal singular words scored higher on measures of depression. They also were more likely to show problematic interpersonal behaviors such as attention seeking, inappropriate self-disclosure, and an inability to spend time alone.

By contrast, the participants who used more pronouns like "we" and "us" tended to have what the researches called a "cold" interpersonal style. But, they explained, the coldness functioned as a positive way to maintain appropriate relationship boundaries while still helping others with their needs.

"Using first-person singular pronouns highlights the self as a distinct entity," Zimmermann says, "whereas using first-person plural pronouns emphasizes its embeddedness into social relationships." According to the study authors, the use of more first-person singular pronouns may be part of a strategy to gain more friendly attention from others.

Zimmerman points out that there's no evidence that using more "I" and "me" words actually causes depression-instead, the speaking habit probably reflects how people see themselves and relate to others, he says.

The study appears in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Research in Personality.

    


Coming Soon: A Cure For Gray Hair?

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Hair Dye Ad Circa 1843 People have worried about gray hair for a long time. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34040
Researchers are studying a cream that restores pigmentation to people with a skin condition called vitiligo. Theoretically, there are hints it may work for people who are going gray from age, too.

Researchers are working on a true anti-graying cream that could make people produce their own youthful colors again. So far, it's worked in just a few people who have lost pigment in their hair and skin not from age, but from a condition called vitiligo. Because the cause of vitiligo pigment loss is the same as one possible cause of graying in old age, however, the prototype cream might be a step toward a real anti-graying cream. (But what would we do without those Just For Men commercials?)

The cream worked in just five people in a preliminary study, so it's likely a long way from becoming a commercial product. If it does turn out to work in more people, it could be a great thing for those who have vitiligo, most of whom live with the condition for the rest of their lives. As for other graying folks, it would be the first anti-graying product that actually addresses the root of the problem instead of just hiding gray hair, Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal, said in a press release. The FASEB Journal published a paper about the cream this week.

For the paper, a team of dermatology researchers from Germany and the U.K. looked at more than 2,000 people with vitiligo, which causes people to lose pigmentation in patches of their skin and hair. While vitiligo isn't painful, dangerous, or contagious, it can still be pretty distressing because it can change people's appearance so much, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. One to 2 million people in the U.S. have vitiligo, according to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

The European researchers found some of the changes in what proteins vitiligo patients make compared to people without vitiligo. They also found that a couple different chemicals accumulate in vitiligo-affected skin: peroxynitrite and hydrogen peroxide (Yep, the same stuff that's often used in bleach).

The researchers had five of their study volunteers apply a cream they developed to reduce the amount of hydrogen peroxide in the skin. The researchers found that the cream worked to repigment the volunteers' skin and eyelashes.

Could removing hydrogen peroxide from the skin and hair work for those who don't have vitiligo? In 2009, some of the same researchers published a study that suggests it may, because people going gray from age have elevated amounts of hydrogen peroxide in their hair follicles and hair shafts.

[Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology via EurekAlert]

    


New Dinosaur Species Found In China

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Aorun zhaoi SkullJames Clark

A new dinosaur found in China may be the oldest of its kind--and a crucial link between lizard-like dinosaurs and the feathered, late-period creatures that bore a closer resemblance to today's birds.

A team of international researchers led by James Clark, from the George Washington University, found a fossilized leg bone on the side of a stream in a remote part of Xinjiang province in the far northwestern corner of China. That's not much, but, amazingly, they found more of the small dinosaur's body--a partial skeleton, a nearly complete skull, and a mandible. It is a new species, a basal member of the Coelurosauria family tree. Coelurosaurs are late-period dinosaurs that resembled birds as much as the typical dinosaurs we think of; it's possible all of them were feathered.

The researchers gave the dinosaur a name: Aorun zhaoi, after the Dragon King in the Chinese epic tale Journey to the West. It is the oldest known coelurosaur--though it died a youngster.

This particular animal had many very small, sharp teeth, which are very useful clues as to what this dinosaur ate and how it behaved. The researchers suspect it preyed on lizards and primitive shrew-like mammals--though since this one is estimated to be less than a year old, we don't really know much about how the adult of the species lived, or even how big it might have been.

Read more here.

    


Replace Your Lights With These Genetically Engineered Glow-Plants

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Now on Kickstarter.

Light bulbs are so 19th century. Why not genetically engineer yourself a glowing plant instead?

A team of scientists on Kickstarter is asking for donations to make it happen. The group has set up a DIY lab, where they're selecting the genes of bioluminescent bacteria, which turn a radioactive green in the dark. After that, they want to use software called Genome Compiler to create DNA that a plant can "read." With funding, the group says, they'll synthesize the bacteria with glowing genes and insert them into plants, which will turn into the alien-like thing you see in the video here. We've seen a lamp that's made out of glowing bacteria, but putting the bacteria in a plant is something new.

The project's already destroyed its funding goal of $65,000: backers have so far pledged more than $200,000, and there are still 34 days left to go. At $400,000, they'll start offering glowing roses, for the loved one in your life who's into genetically engineered stuff.

[Kickstarter via designboom]

    


6 Of The Weirdest Things Science Has Recently Revealed About The Past

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Franken-muuuuuummy!Mike Parker Pearson, University of Sheffield
Ancient toothaches, smells, franken-mummies, and more!

Scientific studies do a pretty good job of answering questions about how the world works. But often, researchers are pursuing things we never thought of as worth pursuing. Here we salute those tireless journeymen that have looked into the depths of our history and found the answers to things we never knew we were wondering.

    


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