Science!!!

adgy-san

adgy-san

PJ Harvey is God
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
37,492
So occasionally in my internets travels I come across articles about how SCIENCE found something cool or discovered that something cures something else that you would have never expected. I don't really have anywhere to share that ****, aside from Facebook, which I don't really care about, and thus this thread is born.

Please feel free to post links to any articles you come across that are crazy ****ing awesome, bat**** insane or whatever. This stuff fascinates me endlessly.

Here, I'll start.

Zebrafish may hold the answer to repairing damaged retinas and returning eyesight to people

****in' cool.
 
Saturn Storm Creates Largest and Hottest Vortex Ever Seen in Solar System | Wired Science | Wired.com

But since May 2011, researchers have been watching two warm spots in Saturn’s clouds using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and several Earth-based telescopes. Such spots appear periodically and were expected to cool down after a month. Instead, the hotspots merged and produced a colossal cyclone, briefly exceeding even Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot in size and brightness.
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Leeches are highly prized as a tool for healing skin grafts or restoring circulation, especially in reconstructive surgery. Now the US Food and Drug Administration has approved an application from French firm Ricarimpex SAS to market leeches for medicinal purposes.

BBC NEWS | Health | The humble leech's medical magic
 
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How do owls twist their heads all the way around without dying? At last we know.
 
I thought this was about bill nye :(

Will try and find articles though..
 
The Javan Rhino – And then there was one – Phenomena: Laelaps

How do we know when a species no longer exists in a given area? The process, as explained by Brian Switek, is grimly fascinating. Scientists used dogs to find piles of rhino poop between October of 2009 and April of 2010. They found 22 dung piles, but DNA analysis showed that 17 of those belonged to a single rhino. After that rhino was killed by poachers, the rhino footprints vanished and no new piles of scat appeared.
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Venom: The Bite That Heals - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

Ironically, the properties that make venom deadly are also what make it so valuable for medicine. Many venom toxins target the same molecules that need to be controlled to treat diseases. Venom works fast and is highly specific. Its active components—those peptides and proteins, working as toxins and enzymes—target particular molecules, fitting into them like keys into locks. Most medicines work the same way, fitting into and controlling molecular locks to thwart ill effects. It’s a challenge to find the toxin that hits only a certain target, but already top medicines for heart disease and diabetes have been derived from venom. New treatments for autoimmune diseases, cancer, and pain could be available within a decade.

“We aren’t talking just a few novel drugs but entire classes of drugs,” says National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer Zoltan Takacs, a toxinologist and herpetologist. So far, fewer than a thousand toxins have been scrutinized for medicinal value, and a dozen or so major drugs have made it to market. “There could be upwards of 20 million venom toxins out there waiting to be screened,” Takacs says. “It’s huge. Venom has opened up whole new avenues of pharmacology.”
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Great thread idea.

For the BookFace users out there, Like the page "I F***ing Love Science". She posts some pretty good bits daily.
 
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