A Golden Sales Pitch

By Julie J. Rehmeyer

Can mathematics sell blue jeans? One company is hoping so.

The ProportionofBlu is a Los Angeles–based vendor of blue jeans designed to incorporate the celebrated golden ratio. The golden ratio is approximately 1.618:1, and it's defined as the ratio a : b such that a/b = (a + b) / a. Many have claimed that the golden ratio has divine, mystical, or highly aesthetic properties.

The company says that the ratio was used to design details such as the curve of the front pocket, the proportions of the rear pocket, and the ratio of the hip stitching to the inseam of the jeans. "This ratio is found throughout nature and has been recognized as a fundamental component of all things that man has found aesthetically pleasing," says a ProportionofBlu press release.

 

 

The ProportionofBlu company says that its blue jeans are designed using the golden ratio. M.J. Philippe

 

The blue jeans may be attractive, but the golden ratio probably doesn't have much to do with that. There is little evidence to suggest that the golden ratio has any special aesthetic appeal.

Those who believe that it does usually cite an experiment from the 1860s showing that when asked which rectangle is the "most pleasing," people most often choose the "golden rectangle" whose sides represent the golden ratio. More recent and rigorous versions of the experiment have debunked that finding. In a 1966 experiment by H.R. Schiffman of Rutgers University, for example, participants said that the most pleasing rectangles were those with a length to width ratio of about 1.9, on average, rather than 1.618. And the relationship between a pleasing rectangle and a pleasing pair of jeans is less than obvious anyway.

 

 

Test yourself: Which of these rectangles is the most pleasing? (See note at bottom of article to find out which is the golden rectangle.) J. Rehmeyer

 

The company press release goes on to say, "Recognizing the inherently pleasing nature of things 'in the ratio,' man has employed the Golden Ratio throughout time in some of the most remarkable and inspiring achievements. These include the Parthenon in Greece, the ancient Pyramids in Egypt, da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Stradivarius' Violins."

When a myth is repeated over and over, it can begin to sound like the truth.

Most of these examples are inaccurate. The actual ratio of the width to the height of the Greek temple called the Parthenon is about 2.25:1, not 1.618:1. The Great Pyramid of Khufu has proportions nowhere near that of the golden ratio, despite claims to the contrary that seem to be based on a wildly inaccurate 1859 translation of the Greek historian Herodotus. And a golden rectangle drawn over the Mona Lisa does not frame her face.

 

 

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with a golden rectangle added. Queen's University

 

One of the four examples is accurate, however. Original drawings show that Antonio Stradivari placed the eyes of the f-holes of his violins at positions determined by the golden ratio. However, experts don't believe that this placement contributes to the high quality of the instruments (See SN: 6/30/07, p. 414).

I, too, was fooled by the myths, and to my regret had a hand in further perpetuating them. In the recent MathTrek article, "The Mathematical Lives of Plants", I repeated the often-stated claims that the ancient Greeks believed that the golden ratio has divine and mystical properties and that Leonardo da Vinci believed that the human form displays the golden ratio. Neither assertion is proven, and I have since corrected the error.

The ancient Greeks studied the golden ratio extensively, but there is no evidence that they considered it to have divine or mystical properties. Euclid's book, The Elements of Geometry, describes the golden ratio (which he called "division in extreme and mean ratio") in great detail, but Euclid focused only on its mathematical properties. He was interested in it primarily because the golden ratio is essential for constructing a pentagon using a straightedge and compass. Euclid uses the pentagon to construct the dodecahedron and the icosahedron.

 

 

In a five-pointed star, the lines divide one another in the golden ratio. In this drawing, the red line has the golden ratio to the yellow line, and the blue line has the golden ratio to the green one. Euclid used this fact to construct a pentagon using straightedge and compass. J. Rehmeyer

 

The claims about Leonardo da Vinci seem to stem primarily from his work illustrating The Divine Proportion, a 1509 book by his friend Luca Pacioli which contains the earliest known claims that the golden ratio has divine properties. However, while the book extols the golden ratio and advocates a careful study of proportion in the arts, it recommends that buildings and paintings be planned using a system of simple, rational ratios, not the golden ratio.

 

 

Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man illustrates the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's theory that proportions of the human body follow simple, rational ratios, not the golden ratio.

 

Myths about the golden ratio seem to endure largely because the idea of a mathematical object with aesthetic powers is too alluring to resist. Whether it has the power to sell blue jeans has yet to be seen.

Develop your Minds power
Activate your brain, increase IQ & build more neural connections now!

Most people are shocked when they are told that increasing their IQ and cognitive abilities is possible. It was once thought that intelligence and mental capabilities were set in stone, unchanging since birth. But much of what we know about the mind has changed since then, particularly in the last 10 years. Research has found that there are many factors playing even larger roles in IQ, focus, memory and overall intelligence.  With iMusic, someone with ADD and trouble focusing, can experience huge leaps in IQ score, sometimes up to 30 or more points!  Even those with above average IQs have shown drastic improvements.

 Lab trials and university studies have shown over and over, that optimizing our brainwaves and training our minds to perform better for us, by just listening to the right iMusic selection, can have a huge impact on focus, memory and intelligence, whether we're highly intelligent or existing at low functional levels.  

Your Brain Doesn't Know How & It's Not Your Fault

A typical human brain is functioning on low capacity. Although the idea that a normal brain only uses 10% of its capacity is a myth, most people's brains are not functioning properly. For example, studies show that the brains of many people, when confronted with a problem, will actually switch gears and start working less! Instead of switching to logic and "work mode," the brain switches to patterns of frustration and emotion. Most people have simply not learned to "turn on" these higher cognitive abilities when the time is right. Most people are unfamiliar with the states of intense concentration and laser-like focus that come so easily to the great thinkers of our time.

To correct this problem, researchers endeavored to recreate the brainwave patterns of overachieving, successful individuals - the most intelligent 1% of the population. What they found is truly remarkable. By helping to optimize brainwave patterns, people can both temporarily increase cognitive abilities and train the brain to produce this activity on its own.

A research team, headed by Professor José Manuel Poyatos Capilla at the University of Granada, has developed a new method of wastewater purification, which has aroused the interest of many research institutes.

This new research could reduce the size of biological reactors by 40% to 60%. This new system involves separation of active mud from water by using membrane bioreactor process, eliminating the secondary decanting stage and shortens the water treatment process.

This system will reduce the coast associated with treating water, produce higher quality pure water, and reduce the size of land needed for the construction of plants. This system is capable of treating larger quantities of water in a much smaller purifier, which includes less space and work with advance purification component. Furthermore, the construction is less expensive making its installation cheaper.

Such a system has become a necessity in the developing world to solve the global water crisis erupting due to growing population and lack of space for treatment plants reported by many municipalities.

This research will be presented at two international congresses of the International Water Association and the system will soon be available for government and commercial use.

Cracking the Cube

By Julie J. Rehmeyer

Daniel Kunkle can solve a Rubik's Cube in 26 moves. Or at least his computer can.

Kunkle, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, has proved that 26 moves are enough to solve any Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled. That's one move below the previous record. In the process of cracking the cube, he developed algorithms that can be useful for problems as disparate as scheduling air flights and determining how proteins will fold.

Rubik's Cube has approximately 43 quintillion possible configurations. Even a supercomputer can't search through every possible configuration to find the quickest way to unscramble a given starting arrangement in a reasonable amount of time. So Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed some clever mathematical and computational strategies to make the puzzle more manageable.

 

 

To solve a Rubik's Cube, rotate the "facelets" so that each side of the cube is all one color. Courtesy of Matthew Fisher

 

Kunkle and Cooperman started by applying various mathematical tricks. If each side of the cube is one color, the puzzle is solved regardless of which color is on which side. By considering configurations to be equivalent if they differ only in having two colors interchanged, the computer scientists managed to reduce the number of truly distinct configurations to just over a quintillion.

Next, they looked at a simpler problem: they considered only configurations that could be solved by twisting facelets through half-turns only, with no quarter-turns. Only about 15,000 of the quintillion configurations can be solved in this way. A standard PC can find the shortest way to unscramble each of this relatively small number of configurations in less than a day, simply by searching through all possible moves. The team found that any puzzle in one of those special configurations could be solved in 13 moves or fewer.

Then they figured out how many steps are required to turn any random configuration into one of the 15,000 special configurations. To do this, they first classified the configurations into sets, each containing configurations that can be transformed among themselves using only half-turns. These sets were constructed in such a way that a series of moves that gets from one member of any set to one of the special configurations will also turn any other member of the set into a special configuration. They ended up with 1.4 trillion of these sets, so they now had only 1.4 trillion problems to solve—far fewer than the original 43 quintillion, but still a formidable number.

Now they put a supercomputer on the job and applied clever computational strategies to speed up the search. Because it takes computers a very long time to search for information stored on a hard drive, Kunkle and Cooperman developed ways to store the information in precisely the order the computer would later need it. That way, the computer could read the information off the drive without searching for it.

"These kinds of techniques can be applied to any combinatorial problem that you want to solve," Kunkle says. He points to checkers, chess, scheduling of air flights, and protein folding as examples. A somewhat similar set of computational techniques was recently used to find the best strategies for playing checkers (SN: 7/21/07, p. 36).

After 63 hours of calculation, the supercomputer found that it took no more than 16 steps to turn any random configuration into a special configuration that can be solved using only half-turns. And since those special puzzles can be solved in no more than 13 steps, this approach showed that 29 steps were enough to solve any Rubik's Cube.

But this answer wasn't good enough to set a new record. Last year, Silviu Radu of the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden showed that any Rubik's Cube can be solved in no more than 27 steps. Kunkle and Cooperman realized that to set a new record, they would need to eliminate three steps.

Their existing method had established that all but about 80 million sets of configurations could be solved in 26 steps or fewer. By searching through all possible moves starting from those relatively few configurations, they succeeded in finding a solution for each one that took 26 steps or fewer.

They presented their result July 29 at the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation in Waterloo, Ontario.

Kunkle and Cooperman now hope to knock the maximum number of steps down to 25. They think they can use their brute-force search method on all of the configurations that require 26 steps to find a quicker way to solve them.

Even if they manage this feat, however, it will probably leave room for improvement. Most researchers believe that just 20 steps are enough to solve any Rubik's Cube, but no one has proved it yet.

A Twist on the Möbius Band

By Julie J. Rehmeyer

A Möbius band is a two-dimensional surface with the puzzling property of having only one side. Despite this mind-bending characteristic, it's an easy object to make: just take a long strip of paper, give one end a half-twist, and tape the two ends together. Because of the half-twist, the front side of one end of the strip joins with the reverse side of the other end, so that the taped-together band has only one side.

When you do that, precisely what shape do you get? Until very recently, oddly enough, no one had come up with a complete answer. If the material is elastic, describing the shape is straightforward. Imagine holding a circular ring (with no thickness) and placing the midpoint of a stick at any point on it, perpendicular to the plane of the circle. Now move the stick around the circle—either direction will do—and at the same time rotate it smoothly lengthwise so that by the time it returns to its starting place, it has flipped through 180°. The shape it sweeps out in this maneuver is a Möbius band.

This Möbius band would have to be made from a stretchy material. The line through the middle of the strip forms a circle, and the lines at right angles to it turn smoothly. Wikipedia

 

By contrast, a flat, non-stretchy band, such as a strip of paper, can't quite assume this shape. Try it: The center line of a paper Möbius strip becomes a kind of hilly racetrack, closer to an oval or a triangle than a circle, and it swoops up and down. Furthermore, the paper doesn't twist smoothly throughout its whole length. Instead most of its 180-degree rotation occurs in a few short, separate sections. The wider the strip of paper, the less circular the Möbius band and the more abruptly the paper twists. Mathematicians have worked out approximate descriptions for paper (or other non-stretching) Möbius bands, but until recently, no one had a precise formula for the shape.

When made from a material that won't stretch, such as paper, a Möbius band forms a shape like the one shown here. The red areas are the most bent and the blue areas are least bent. Starostin and Van der Heijden /Nature Materials

"This is an old problem," says mechanical engineer Evgueni Starostin of University College London. "It's a very simple question, but it turns out that it requires a rather good theory" to solve it. Starostin and his colleague Gert Van der Heijden have now found the solution and have published their results online for an upcoming Nature Materials.

The shape of the Möbius band depends on how wide the paper is. As the paper grows wider, the shape becomes increasingly triangular. Starostin and Van der Heijden /Nature Materials

They solved the problem by imagining that the paper was like a band made of stiff, springy metal that was resistant to bending. The shape of the Möbius strip, they proved, was the one that required the least amount of energy to bend.

The researchers originally became interested in the problem while trying to understand the shapes that DNA takes as it twists. Like paper, DNA won't stretch. Like a metal strip, it is stiff and resists bending. The Möbius band served as a simplified model that allowed them to develop their technique for calculating possible DNA shapes.

I have come across Mundu IM, a browser-based web application for the iPhone. It has been developed by Geodesic Information Systems.

It enables users to chat with their IM contacts on multiple IM clients including Google Talk, MSN, AIM and Yahoo.

The unique feature of Mundu IM iPhone is that it allows simultaneous logins and brings a number of popular IM services for the users, where as other Mobile IM products support only one service.

With Mundu, you can also lead voice conferencing with your contacts across IM services in a single chat session and manage your online presence.

As of now, the IM application supports a number of Mobile devices based on Palm OS 5.2 and Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphones.

In the coming days, Mundu will have supports for Windows Mobile for Pocket PC and Symbian Series 60 devices based on Symbian 7.x, 8.x and 9.x. One more thing, the Mundu IM iPhone Edition is free.

In all honesty, segregation of David Jaffe and Scott Campbell from mainstream comrades (Sony Studios) has turned out to be fruitful to the PS2 as well as PS3 owners as both the gladiators have put heads together to synthesize three new games for Sony’s futuristic console PS3. Talking to GamePro, Jaffe informed that ‘Eat Sleep Play’, a new studio founded by Jaffe and Campbell, is currently working on three brand new PS3 exclusives.

Jaffe asserted that apart from Twisted Metal: Head-On for PS2, the new entity with 20 employees is engaged in first of three new titles that are pure PS3 exclusives. Out of three, the first is already in development. He didn’t specify any further detail, however, dropped some interesting hints –

I can’t disclose themes, but the new game is medium to hardcore in terms of game play and will focus heavily on multiplayer. I am more excited about this game than anything I have ever worked on. I cannot wait to unveil it.

In fact, we can’t wait for further revelation, either. Whether triplet of PS3 exclusives would come in the form of Blu-ray discs or downloadable content on the PlayStation Network, is tentative yet. The first out of three titles has been slated for early 2008 launch; only then, we will be able to track down complete details about new arrivals.

Doesn’t matter if the games come either as downloadable content or Blu-ray discs, eventually we are getting some vibrant exclusive stuff for our PS3s that we had been striving for so long.

Probably for you and me the notion may sound weird, but the city of Bremerton has promoted an idea of rainwater conservation by use of rain barrels. That sounds uncanny again, ok – rain barrel is a large container, which is set-up to collect and redistribute rainwater.

Rain barrel collects water form your gutters using downspouts and stores for use later, they are easy to make and easy on the environment too. Embedded with a screened louver vent, it is beneficial for plants and other external uses only coz you ain’t gonna consume it, absolutely not – also goes easy on your pocket, saving on your water bill.

Requirement to build one yourself:

• A Drill

• 6” hole saw

• 29/32” drill bit

• ¾” NPT pipe tap

• Hose adaptor

• Teflon tape and apply adhesive caulk

• Louvered screen

Here is how it goes:

• Take a barrel that can store up to 55 gallons of water, and clean it – use nothing that could harm your garden/lawn.

• Cut a hole perfect round hole of about 6” on the top of the barrel with a 6” hole saw or a keyhole saw.

• Drill two holes with a 29/32” drill bit, one around the top for the overflow while the other four to six inches from the bottom for the faucet, this will allow the debris to sink at the bottom of the barrel without clogging.

• Next twist a ¾” NPT pipe tap into the hole that you have drilled near the mouth, untwist it, and repeat the same in the other hole near the bottom.

• Twist threaded side of the hose adaptor into the overflow hole.

• Wrap the threaded side of the faucet tightly with a Teflon tape and apply all-purpose adhesive caulk on it.

• Twist this prepared end of the faucet into the bottom hole of the barrel.

• Cover the top 6” hole with a louvered screen. Slide hose into hose adaptor at the top, directing the water to overflow away from your house.

• Place cylindrical blocks under the downspout and cut your downspout about 4” above the top of the barrel, add an elbow so that water drains into the rain barrel.

Now, probably all is done and it is time for you to wait for the next shower before your plants and you can benefit from the rain barrel.

Who is to blame for our son's death?

The parents of Tim Whattler, who committed suicide aged 17, believe he was fatally let down by the system of care for autism sufferers. Cassandra Jardine reports Tim Whattler was a handsome, sporty 10-year-old when his life started to go badly wrong.   Tim Whattler: although he had friends, he would lash out at other children "He loved maths and science," says his father, Dean, an engineer. "He had a high IQ and learnt very quickly because he had a photographic memory. "But he also had a form of autism, so his behaviour annoyed his teachers. When they told him off, he didn't understand their facial expressions and just grinned. If they said, 'Can you get your maths book out?' he would do nothing because he knew that of course he could get his maths book out." Constantly in trouble, Tim was 10 when he became noticeably depressed. One morning, his parents found him curled up in the snow outside their home in Bromley, Kent. He had lain down by the dustbins, hoping never to wake up. That was the beginning of a seven-year battle for help that culminated in Tim's death in February last year. Dean and Elizabeth Whattler have file after file of correspondence relating to the care of their only child. Everything is intact, like Tim's bedroom, while they decide what to do, following an inquest in May which returned a puzzling verdict. "The coroner said Tim's death was preventable, yet he did not place any blame on the psychiatric unit where he died, just six hours after he was admitted," says his mother. "If his death could have been prevented, who exactly is to blame?" One answer might be the system of care for vulnerable young people to which he was entrusted, and in which the nurses and doctors didn't have all his notes, so were unaware that he had recently tried to kill himself. That system might also be blamed for his state of mind on the Friday he died. With suicide the second most common cause of death in the 15-to-24 age group, many families are affected by the game of "dodge the bill" played out between some health, education and social services departments. The bureaucracy can drive parents to act in ways that they know are not in their child's best interests, just to get some help. Tim, who was born in 1988, was a normal, happy child until he was three-and-a-half. "That summer we were on a beach in America," his father recalls. "But when Elizabeth handed Tim a sandwich, he flipped it on to the sand and looked at it."

The supply of filthy foods contaminated with pesticides and tainted with carcinogens, bacteria, and banned drugs which are unfit for human consumption has alarmed the Americans. A few weeks ago, news of the Chinese pet food scam aroused doubts and concerns about the quality of food products imported from China. Questions and concerns are creeping up. Could these items slowly become weapons of mass destruction? Could this be a Chinese way of unleashing terror against the Americans?

The Americans are really concerned as huge volume of food imports are being rejected by the FDA labelling them as poisonous and unfit for human consumption. A lot of the rejected shipments include poisonous fruits and highly contaminated meat posing risks of cancer in humans. The FDA has tightened food safety measures and is inspecting every food shipment imported from China. The United States has already recalled huge volumes of its Chinese import. Reports say the FDA rejected a huge volume of shipments, precisely 289, from China containing contaminated foods. The food items that were rejected as filthy, highly contaminated and poisonous include:

• Salted bean curd cubes in brine with chili and sesame oil
• Dried apple
• Dried peach
• Dried pear
• Dried round bean curd
• Dried mushroom
• Olives
• Frozen bay scallops
• Frozen Pacific cod
• Sardines
• Frozen seafood mix
• Fermented bean curd
• Frozen eel
• Ginseng
• Frozen red raspberry crumble
• Mushrooms

Toothpaste made in China was rejected by the FDA last month. The FDA found the toothpaste contaminated with a chemical used in antifreeze. Frozen catfish was found to be highly contaminated with banned antibiotics. And scallops and sardines were coated with putrefying bacteria.

The explosive growth of the Chinese economy in recent years, the volume of food market that China controls, and recent reports about rampant malpractices in certain Chinese industries has slowly become a threat. With China exercising almost a monopoly on the food import market, their supply of tainted food products have raised huge concerns in the United States. The supply of fake drugs, contaminated vegetable protein, poisoned food items, and cancerous meat has put the FDA on high alert.

Food Allergies Could Be a Thing of Past Soon!

A UN special meet on climate change harped on the developed world to carry more of the burden of tackling greenhouse emissions. Warning that if let loose to envelope the planet, these carbon emissions will choke the atmosphere poisoning the man-friendly environment, the UN also called for less-developed nations to contribute their bit in cooling the atmosphere.

Every one of us is familiar of the havoc that carbon emissions are wreaking in the atmosphere, raising mercury levels to an extent that calls for urgent attention. Relentless development, reckless industrialization, merciless destruction of flora is fuelling the atmosphere to an extent that would devour the entire planet one day. Human warming of the planet in the form of carbon emissions propelled by petrol eating vehicles, power plants, and industries is discharging innumerable pollutants into the atmosphere resulting in a rise in global temperatures.

The earth has already started showing dangerous signs of times to come. Melting glaciers, flooding, droughts, constant hurricanes, rising seas, dying creatures, and what not, all is the result of global climate change.

British economist Nicholas Stern acknowledges that carbon dioxide emissions need to be curtailed by at least 50 percent by 2050, if we want the earth to remain a green planet forever. Necessitating the need for cuts Stern asserts,

Because of reasons of past responsibility and better access to resources, the rich countries should take much bigger objectives than that 50 percent. They should be looking for around 75 percent cuts.

The better-placed richer nations must share most of the responsibility to financing cuts in emissions in poor undeveloped countries, which are fighting poverty and have no resources to their avail to contain emissions. Industrialized developed nations need to review their policy on climate change by allowing opportunities like carbon trading and offsetting to prosper.

Sunita Narain, director of India’s Center for Science and Environment, in her address snubbed the richer developed nations for the disproportionate sharing of the emissions. Asserting that the need of the day is an urgent attention on behalf of the developed world to share the ecological imbalance considerably, Narain retorts,

The rich world has to reduce emissions far more drastically than it has done so to date. The political leadership is very high on rhetoric but very low on real action when it comes to delivering the goods on climate change.

At a time, when most of the nations of the world are fighting a bizzare change in climate in the form of floods in one part and droughts in the other, risking everyone from humans to animals, a global consensus on reining global warming has to be reached.

The developed countries should start searching environment technology to support the environment rather than snubbing poor underdeveloped nations to cut their development for the sake of global climate. Is the developed world right in asking for such a huge demand from the poor nations, whose economy still needs wheels to sustain itself and run? If restraining their development process will hurt their economy, then how can rich countries ask for cuts from the poor nations? It is the bounden duty of the rich developed nations to lead from the front in a global effort to tackle global warming.

Here is a new procedure for the efficient transfer of specific DNA sequences into the genome of strawberry. Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) and the Department of Horticulture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech have developed it.

To introduce DNA into the woodland or alpine strawberry Fragaria vesca, the scientists have used Agrobacterium tumefaciens, nature’s genetic engineer. This method helps researchers establish the function of large numbers of strawberry genes. And it could, in the long term, be extremely useful in enhancing the nutritional value of these plants as well as the amount of health-enhancing antioxidants that they may contain.

This long-standing conundrum has been decoded using genetic evidence from more than 20 species of locusts. Thanks to the scientists from the Universities of Toronto, Arizona, Maryland, Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Capable of forming massive swarms that devastate crops, the desert locust is one of the world’s most economically important insects.

It all occurred somewhere between 30, 00,000 and 50, 00,000 years ago. A massive swarm of locusts took off from the west coast of Africa, making an unlikely voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to colonize the New World. An international team of researchers said this. DNA reveals that ancestors of the desert locust flew across the Atlantic and gave rise to a diverse group of New World species.

A Thai zoo has planned a “human-like way” to encourage its two pandas – living here for four years — to breed in captivity. It is next month; the officials will play “porn” videos for the six-year-old male panda — Chuang Chuang – who doesn’t know how to mate!

The pair has been living chastely together at the zoo since 2003 after their arriving from China in the northern city of Chiang Mai. According to panda project chief Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee, the couple would be separated in December, but stay close enough for occasional glimpses of each other.

Prasertsak, hoping Chuang Chuang would then use the techniques on Lin Hui, a five-year-old female said,

They don’t know how to mate so we need to show the male how, through videos… We’ll play the video at the most comfortable and intimate time for him, perhaps after dinner.

Once successful, these innovative and interesting methods might be used to make threatened or endangered species breed in future!

Proton radiation is more damaging to cells than previously assumed, scientists at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have found. It is specifically, the cells’ DNA that is vulnerable to proton radiation.

Protons are the most abundant type of particle in deep space. Thus, to properly protect astronauts traveling far from Earth, this research may help scientists design spacecraft and spacesuits.

Since protons are charged particles, it is important to know how protons affect cells before astronauts can safely travel far from Earth for long periods of time.

The computer constructed by Israeli scientists can perform 330 trillion operations per second and is powered by nothing else but the ubiquitous DNA. This makes it the world’s smallest biological computer system, recognized by the Guinness World Records and it processes information 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC.

Silicon microchips seems to be the thing of the past now with researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, crafting this phenomenal molecular computing machine powered by a single DNA molecule.

DNA computing is feasible with DNA as software and enzymes as hardware and the device, sans any mechanical device, is nothing but a clear water solution in a test tube. You’ll be surprised to know that a single drop of water can imbibe trillion bio-molecular devices.

A change in climate can speed up the course of evolution too, proving Darwin’s theory of ‘Survival of the fittest’. Several researches have been undertaken to find the indicators to climate change, and several have been discovered or proved too. But, penguins! Yes, it was a colony of penguins that has bred at the same site in Antarctica for thousands of years that gifted the scientists with this rare insight. Ancient fragments of DNA from the remains of penguins that have been buried at the site for up to 6,000 years are analyzed and they were compared to the DNA of living members of the same colony.

Though there were no notable changes to the appearance or behavior of the birds, the comparison has offered a snapshot of small-scale evolutionary changes to the genetic sequence of the penguins’ DNA. Scientists found that there had been significant changes to the DNA of the penguin colony. And the reason behind it? Obviously climate change that have probably occurred when huge icebergs break off from the Antarctic ice shelf. So, should we consider the recent similar incident at the Antarctica, another step towards such evolution, atleast for the polar animals?