I know these have been out for a while, but, I couldn’t resist adding some space beauty to my blog, as I am, after all, an astrophysicist. The first is the truly spectacular picture taken by the Kaguya wide-angel HD camera, from Japan’s lunar rover. It is of Earthrise from the Moon. I chose this link because you can easily click on the image for a nice, larger one, and it has links to the really cool movie version. The second is a pretty neat picture of the Space Station taken from the shuttle. Both the Earth and the Space Station look so small and fragile, don’t they?

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It seems that some scientists in Belgium got it into their heads to build some robot cockroaches. Now, the bots don’t look like actual cockroaches, but they have light sensors in them to find dark resting places and IR sensors to track other cockroaches. The researchers set these robots, scented like actual roaches, in with a group to see how their real counterparts reacted to them. It seems that roach behavior has some very basic tenets, like, rest in dark places, with other roaches. So, they programmed this into their bots, and low and behold, they were accepted and socialized with like real roaches. The scientists even changed the programming a little, forcing the robots to seek out less dark areas to congregate, and that in turn influenced their real counterparts to follow them.

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This article is very interesting! I have never heard of the use of human hair mats for soaking up oil, but, apparently it has been in use in San Francisco to deal with motor oil spills and leaks. The hair mats soak up the oil, and then oyster mushrooms are placed on the mats, which then absorb the oil and process it, so that the mats can be used safely as compost.

• Human Hair and Mushrooms Clean Oil Spill

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Ok, believe it or not, I was on to this already. In fact, my father has been telling me about this for a very long time now. And, if you just think about basic biology a little, it makes efficient sense. Females, those with two X chromosomes, are born with all of the eggs they will ever have, and those numbers get reduced over a lifetime, until menopause hits and the show is over. Males, well, they’re like a chromosome tap, something that starts at puberty and keeps the production line of sex cells flowing until death. Since females have a limited opportunity to have offspring, they must be more choosy and careful with their breeding choices, whereas men clearly have the equipment to produce many, many more children. So, from the standpoint of evolution, it would make sense if females changed more conservatively over time with respect to selection pressures, and males would be able to change more quickly to immediate environmental pressures. Hence, females have two, big, fat X’s and men have one X and one tiny Y. Those X’s can act as backup for females, but for males, they have one and only one X, so that is all they get, plus their itty, bitty Y.

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The field of stem cell research is an amazingly fast-paced and competitive one. It seems that in the latest big discovery, two teams have figured out how to get human skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells. Wow. This route avoids the whole human egg/stem cell issue that has deprived many labs of federal funding. They caution, however, that by using a virus to ferry four genes into the cell, a technique referred to as ‘direct programming‘, there is a certain cancer risk for now, but there should be a way to avoid this in the future.

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