The Warming Arctic; World's Fastest Camera Uses Powers for Good
Discovered: Yes, even the iciest place on the planet is warm, Zebra fish are just the best, a very inconvenient way to save a worm's life, and the fastest camera uses its powers for good.
Even the Arctic is getting warmer. Thinking about escaping this swelter for the cool shores of the arctic? Sorry, doesn't sound too appealing there, either, with the region stuck in a warming cycle of hell. "When it [sea ice] is heated, it reflects most of the incoming sunlight back into space. When the sea ice melts, more heat is absorbed by the water. The warmer water then heats the atmosphere above it," explains researcher Dr James Screen. It just keeps getting warmer and meltier and the metlier and warmer it gets the faster it warms and melts. [University of Melbourne]
Zebrafish are the best fish. Science has found that these magic fish have not just one but two medical uses. First up, zebra fish are helping researchers understand Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Doxorubicin-Induced Heart Failure, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, and Acute T-cell Lymphoblastic Leukemia and Lymphoma (T-ALL/T-LBL). So many diseases! But, that's not all. Another group of researchers has found a mechanism that might help fix broken spines. "Zebrafish don't have so much inflammation and the injury is not so severe as in mammals, so we can actually see the pro-regenerative effects that can happen," explains researcher Dr. Yona Goldshmit. "This is a nice example of how we can use the zebrafish model. When we learn from the zebrafish what to look at, we can find things that give us hope for finding therapeutic approaches for spinal cord injury in humans," she added. [Monash Univeristy, International Conference on Zebra Fish]
The most inefficient way to save a worm's life. Sending the Caenorhabditis elegans, a species of tiny worm, to space would lengthen its life. Here's maybe why: "Well, most of us know that muscle tends to shrink in space. These latest results suggest that this is almost certainly an adaptive response rather than a pathological one. Counter-intuitively, muscle in space may age better than on Earth. It may also be that spaceflight slows the process of aging," explains Dr. Nathaniel Szewczyk. Call us insensitive, but that seems like a lot of hullabaloo for a worm. [University of Nottingham]
The fastest camera on the planet uses its powers for good. Instead of taking pictures that could have been taken on Instagram, or whatever fast cameras do, this fastest camera catches rogue cancer cells. This camera is a superhero, really, if you think about it. Other cameras don't have the power to do it, so this powerful camera is the only one. "To catch these elusive cells, the camera must be able to capture and digitally process millions of images continuously at a very high frame rate," explains researcher Bahram Jalali. "Conventional CCD and CMOS cameras are not fast and sensitive enough. It takes time to read the data from the array of pixels, and they become less sensitive to light at high speed," he continues. Many rogue cancer cell terrorists are detected because of this camera hero. "This technology can significantly reduce errors and costs in medical diagnosis," added lead author Keisuke Goda. [UCLA]
