En sen torsdag kveld midtsommers ble en 25,91 meter lang og 27 tonn tung rørhåndteringsenhet transportert langs RV42 fra Steis Mekaniske på Tonstad til Sense Drilfab i Nodeland.

Enheten er en av 3 som produseres i Sirdal og som skal fraktes den smale vegen til Nodeland ved Kristiansand, hvor den skal testes før den skal ut på en oljeinstallasjon i Nordsjøen.

SR bidrar med planlegging og prikkfri gjennomføring av denne veitransporten som ble bestilt av Cameron Sense i Kristiansand.

Våre befraktere planlegger gjennomføringen, søker nødvendige dispensasjoner og ivaretar formalitetene omkring oppdraget. Selve utførelsen er det vår dyktige sjåfør Jan Tore Sola som står for sammen med følgebilsjåfør Ove Salte.

Å kjøre med en over 30 meter lang ekvipasje på de smale vegene i Sirdal og Evje er en utfordring og stiller store krav til både mann og utstyr. Med spesialtralle med dobbelt uttrekk og en av våre mest rutinerte sjåfører gikk imidlertid oppdraget veldig bra.

Sirdølen omtalte også den laaaange transporten.

Vil du vite mer om hva vi kan innenfor spesialtransport - eller andre former for transport - kontakt vår salgsavdeling:

- Kjetil Njærheim - tlf 9166 5509 - e-post

- Konrad Jonassen - tlf 9166 5526 - e-post

SR Group AS er et vel etablert transport- og logistikkonsern med hovedkontor i Risavika, Tananger. SR Group AS har i snart 40 år levert transport- og logistikktjenester til næringslivet, spesielt rettet mot olje- og gassindustrien. SR Group AS består av selskapene Alta Logistics AS, Halling Frakt AS, GeSi Shipping AS, SR Transport AS, Total Transport AS og Waage Transport AS. SR Group har 180 ansatte og omsatte i 2012 for ca. nok. 500 mill.

Det første selskapet (Waage Transport i Kristiansund) ble etablert allerede i 1974. I 1983 ble SR Transport etablert i Stavanger. Disse 2 selskapene danner grunnstammen i det SR Group AS. SR Group AS ble etablert sommeren 2010 som morselskap for flere veletablerte selskap innenfor transport & logistikk. Konsernet fremstår i dag som meget veldrevet, og er totalleverandør for flere store aktører innenfor olje- og offshore bransjen.

Gjennom sine datterselskap og samarbeidspartnere dekkes hele landet, i tillegg til at vi også leverer i stort sett verden over.

Gjennom vårt nære og lange samarbeid med olje- og offshore kunder har vi sammen etablert et stort fokus på KHMS. SR Group har egen ansatt sikkerhetsrådgiver, og setter de samme strenge krav til opplæring og kvalifikasjoner både til egne ansatte og innleide. Selskapet er godkjent i Achilles og har OLF og ISPS godkjente terminaler.

Konsernet disponerer over 100 kjøretøyer i alle størrelser, kontraherer båter og fly og har over 25 personer utleid til kunder for å drive deres logistikk virksomhet. Med andre ord, - your partner in logistics!

SR Transport og SR Group var en av de første transportørene som fulgte etter skipsbransjen og innførte et variabelt drivstofftillegg. Første gang dette ble forelagt våre kunder var i 2005.

Vi har opp gjennom tidene foretatt endringer med ujevne mellomrom, hele tiden basert på at våre endringer skulle være basert på en endring i vår netto pumpepris på + / - 5%. Dette har så langt fungert veldig bra.

For å imøtekomme ønske fra våre kunder vil vi fra 1. september 2011 samkjøre vårt dieseltillegg medSSB's kostnadsindeks. Dette slik at våre endringer skal kunne spores direkte til det som er offentlig utarbeidede tall.

Vårt dieseltillegg justeres fra 14,9 % til 13,8 % med virkning fra 1. januar 2014. Tillegget samsvarer da med 120,9 i indeks (Kostnadsindeks for lastebiltransport - indeks nr 10 - Drivstoffelementet).

BAF for båtfrakt holdes uendret på 30,0 % i januar.

Ved gjennomføring av denne endringen vil våre justeringer ikke lenger være basert på +/- 5% - men på eksakte endringer. Det vil for begge parter - både våre kunder og oss bety et mer korrekt tillegg.

Det til enhver tid gjeldende dieseltillegg og BAF finner du her.

- Planlegging, styring og håndtering av logistikktjenester

- Lokaltransport

- Landsdekkende biltransport

- Utenlandstransport

- Spesialtransport

- Tanktransport

- Containertransport

- ADR-transport

- Terminaltjenester (mottakskontroll, tollregnskap, varetelling og registrering i innkjøpssystem, dokumentasjonsoppfølging, pakking og merking av kolli for forsendelse/lagerhold, pakking og sikring/plombering av lastebærer for forsendelse, emballasje/emballering, ADR merking og dokumentasjon)

- Sikkerhetsrådgiver

- Rådgiving

- Spedisjon (utstedelse av import- og eksportdokumenter, godkjent tollager, tollregnskap, kryssing og oppbevaring av dokumenter)

- Sjøfrakt

- Utleie av logistikkpersonell

- Supply Chain Management

- Varehotell/lager, både i Norge, Brasil og Singapore

Sporing av frakt

SR tilbyr våre kunder tilgang til sporing av sendinger og dokumenthåndtering på ulike nivåer.

Vi opplever at våre kunder har ulike behov og ønsker omkring løsninger og vi kan tilby ulike konsepter i forhold til behov, dog bygget ut fra våre standard løsninger.

Tilgang til standard løsninger er kostnadsfrie - ved tilpasninger kan en kostnad påløpe. Denne avtales i forkant av implementering.

For standard tilgang til avansert sporing innland - og dokumentsenter utland - kontakt ahk@sr-group.no

Oppgi kundenavn og kundenummer, e-postadresse og telefonnummer.

Her er linker til de ulike sporingløsningene:

Spor & spor Innland (Avansert) spor & spor Innland (Enkel) spor & spor - Dokumentsenter Utland

Even before the advent of the Internet and the unlimited amount of knowledge and information we have available in a matter of seconds, research has generally been misunderstood as a simple process of going to the library (Googling, for most of us today) and getting the data one needs to make a report or “thesis”. Unfortunately, this is nothing but a single step in the whole process of scientific research. Academics will call this data-gathering or collating observations.

The purpose of scientific research is to observe physical phenomena and to describe them in their operation or functions. The essential question is WHY. Why do things behave as they do? We can predict some things because it is how things are supposed to behave; but we want to know the causes of such phenomena.  Discovering the causes through our research, we can then explain these things and use the knowledge to our advantage in many practical ways. That is, we can then build ships that can carry as many people as we can or explain that the moon, like the apple, is falling into the Earth because it is subject to the force of gravitation. Why it never crashes into the Earth is another question which Newton, fortunately, had to settle for us.

Science research or what others would call the Scientific Method requires several steps to be considered one. Let us look at them with simple examples for the beginner:

1. Basic or general questions about a phenomenon

Sometimes, it all starts with a casual observation followed by a curious question. Why do apples fall? Why do boats float? It takes a child-like mind to be curious about ordinary but intriguing things.

2. Setting a Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a statement of supposition. For instance, we can say that the Earth is flat and proceed to prove it. A hypothesis is, in reality, a result of general questions we have about real-life problems or phenomena. Whereas the ancient people believed that the world was flat and had an edge where you could fall from, today, we simply assume (without even knowing the basic evidences) that it is an orb. On the other hand, showing a photograph of the Earth taken from outer space may be a shortcut method of disproving the hypothesis. But it is only an indirect or circumstantial evidence and is not, technically speaking, a viable scientific proof. One must follow the entire method to its completion.

3. Predicting outcomes

Based on our initial observations related to the questions we have posed for ourselves, we come up with possible outcomes. An orange, a ball or a rock will always fall no matter how far or how high you throw it. Why does a bird not fall? We can come up with other questions that may make the initial question irrelevant. Hence, we can either incorporate others observations or limit ourselves to the first simple question and deal with others separately.

The main key in predicting in research is basing our assumed outcomes on solid reason or logic. Unlike Aristotle who assumed that iron fell faster than an apple and that an apple fell faster than a feather, we now know and can predict that they all fall at the same speed due to gravity in a vacuum. Our awareness of wind resistance and friction allows us to predict more accurately than other people before.

4. Testing the hypothesis

We then set up a method of investigation or a series of experimentation to check whether the hypothesis works for all instances or conditions. Tossing an apple or a rock into the air ten times or a hundred times will not change the outcome. From that observation, we can somehow accept the fact that a certain law applies for the apple as for a rock. What that is is something we can hypothesize as well. For now, we know that it applies for all objects, including a bird that is shot dead in mid-flight.

5. Deriving conclusions or explaining the hypothesis

Having observed the hypothesis being tested and reinforced so many times and seeing how the outcome displays a certain pattern, we can then derive general conclusions of fact. Any object, no matter how heavy or big it is will always fall to the ground. We know this for a fact because we have seen it happen so many times and have proven it ourselves by the many times we have played basketball or baseball.

In its crudest form, we can say that the scientific method is nothing but highly-systematized common-sense knowledge derived at through a strict process. By ourselves, we also all went through several conscious steps of determining a fact or a truth within the physical realm we live in. Yes, we came up with the same conclusion on our own without having to know or apply this precise method; but other more stringent phenomena cannot be handled simply using simple observations. We need precise tools, instruments and other research results to prove more sophisticated problems.

For example, we might need to send a probe to outer space to prove what a comet is made of, how it behaves in outer space and how it came into existence. For that, you need vast range of technology to discover the facts you need: a rocket, computers, high-tech cameras, advanced communication facilities and other precise, delicate instruments to measure physical phenomena in outer space. At this very moment, a space probe named Rosetta is poised to land on a comet to perform such an unprecedented scientific research.

We can say this latest research rides upon hundreds and thousands of other research studies in the past, proving how knowledge ostensibly expands without limits. What Galileo and Newton learned several centuries ago have helped us discover other things we now take for granted. And yet, we all seem to be asking the same basic question: Where do all things come from? In that sense, scientific research essentially deals with who we are, what we are and where we came from.

All knowledge centers on what makes us humans. And the question will continue to challenge as well as baffle us.

Last March, a team using a telescope called Bicep2 at the South Pole claimed to have read the signatures of these two elusive phenomena in the twisting patterns of the cosmic microwave background radiation: the afterglow of the big bang. But this week, results from an international consortium using a space telescope called Planck show that Bicep2’s data is likely to have come not from the microwave background but from dust scattered through our own galaxy.

Some will regard this as a huge embarrassment, not only for the Bicep2 team but for science itself. Already some researchers have criticised the team for making a premature announcement to the press before their work had been properly peer reviewed.

But there’s no shame here. On the contrary, this episode is good for science. This sequence of excitement followed by deflation, debate and controversy is perfectly normal – it’s just that in the past it would have happened out of the public gaze. Only when the dust had settled would a sober and sanitised version of events have been reported, if indeed there was anything left to report.

That has been the standard model of science ever since the media first acknowledged it. A hundred years ago, headlines in the New York Times had all the gravitas of a papal edict: “Men of science convene” and so forth. They were authoritative, decorous and totally contrived.

That image started to unravel after James Watson published The Double Helix, his racy behind-the-scenes account of the pursuit of the structure of DNA. But even now, some scientists would prefer the mask to remain, insisting that results are announced only after they have passed peer review, ie been checked by experts and published in a reputable journal.

There are many reasons why this will no longer wash. Those days of deference to patrician authority are over, and probably for the better. We no longer take on trust what we are told by politicians, experts and authorities. There are hazards to such scepticism, but good motivations too. Few regret that the old spoonfeeding of facts to the ignorant masses has been replaced with attempts to engage and include the public.

But science itself has changed too. Information and communications technologies mean that not only is it all but impossible to keep hot findings under wraps, but few even try. In physics in particular, researchers put their papers on publicly accessible pre-print servers before formal publication so that they can be seen and discussed, while specialist bloggers give new claims an informal but often penetrating analysis. This enriches the scientific process and means that problems that peer reviewers for journals might not notice can be spotted and debated. Peer review is imperfect anyway – a valuable check but far from infallible, and notoriously conservative.

Because of these new models of dissemination, we were all able to enjoy the debate in 2011 about particles called neutrinos that were alleged to travel faster than light, in defiance of the theory of special relativity. Those findings were announced, disputed and finally rejected, all without any papers being formally published. The arguments were heated but never bitter, and the public got a glimpse of science at its most vibrant: astonishing claims mixed with careful deliberation, leading ultimately to a clear consensus. How much more informative it was than the tidy fictions that published papers often become.

Aren’t some premature announcements just perfidious attempts to grab priority, and thus fame and prizes? Probably. But it’s time we stopped awarding special status to people who, having more resources or leverage with editors, or just plain luck, are first past a post that everyone else is stampeding towards. Who cares? Rewards in science should be for sustained creative thinking, insight and experimental ingenuity, not for being in the right place at the right time. A bottle of bubbly will suffice for that. What, then, of gravitational waves? If, as it seems, Bicep2 never saw them bouncing from the repercussions of the big bang, then we’re back to looking for them the hard way, by trying to detect the incredibly tiny distortions they should introduce in spacetime as they ripple past. Now the Bicep2 and Planck teams are pooling their data to see if anything can be salvaged. Good on them. Debate, discussion, deliberation: science happening just as it should.

The brain, it turns out, has a GPS-like function that enables people to produce mental maps and navigate the world — a discovery for which three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday.

Husband-and-wife scientists Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser of Norway and New York-born researcher John O'Keefe were honored for breakthroughs in experiments on rats that could help pave the way for a better understanding of human diseases such as Alzheimer's.

"We can actually begin to investigate what goes wrong" in Alzheimer's, said O'Keefe, a dual British-American citizen. He said the findings might also help scientists design tests that can pick up the very earliest signs of the mind-robbing disease, whose victims lose their spatial memory and get easily lost.

It was in London in 1971 where O'Keefe discovered the first component of the brain's positioning system.

He found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rat moved to another place. He demonstrated that these "place cells" were building up a map, not just registering visual input.

Decades later, in 2005, the Mosers identified another type of nerve cell — the "grid cell" — that generates a coordinate system for precise "positioning and path-finding," the Nobel Assembly said.

"I made the initial discovery over 40 years ago. It was met then with a lot of skepticism," the 74-year-old O'Keefe said. "And then slowly over years, the evidence accumulated. And I think it's a sign of recognition not only for myself and the work I did, but for the way in which the field has bloomed."

John Kubie of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York said this GPS system in the brain is used in such everyday tasks as remembering where a car is parked or taking a new shortcut on the way home. Kubie also said learning about it may teach scientists more about how the brain learns and remembers, even apart from navigating.

Born in Harlem and raised in the South Bronx, O'Keefe received his doctoral degree in physiological psychology at McGill University in Canada before moving to England for postdoctoral work at the University College London.

"If you can survive the South Bronx, you can survive anything," he said.

Monday's award was the fourth time that a married couple has shared a Nobel Prize and the second time in the medicine category.

"This is crazy," an excited May-Britt Moser, 51, said by telephone from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, where she and her husband work.

"This is such a great honor for all of us and all the people who have worked with us and supported us," she said. "We are going to continue and hopefully do even more groundbreaking work in the future."

Edvard Moser, 52, said: "It is really a joint work. Not only are we two people, but we are complementary as well."

The Nobel Assembly said the laureates' discoveries marked a shift in scientists' understanding of how specialized cells work together to perform complex cognitive tasks. They have also opened new avenues for understanding cognitive functions such as memory, thinking and planning.

"Thanks to our grid and place cells, we don't have to walk around with a map to find our way each time we visit a city, because we have that map in our head," said Juleen Zierath, chair of the medicine prize committee.

Half the Nobel prize money of 8 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million) goes to O'Keefe and the other half to the Mosers. Each winner also receives a gold medal.

The Nobel Prizes will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

This year's Nobel announcements continue with the physics award on Tuesday, followed by chemistry, literature and peace later this week. The economics prize will be announced next Monday.

For more science news from The Koyal Group Info Mag, visit our facebook page and follow us on twitter @koyalgroup.

Visit almost any anti-GMO website and you will find alarming headlines about the alleged dangers of GMO foods. They kill pigs, cows and sheep on farms and in lab studies! Humans are next!

“Monsanto’s GMO Feed Creates Horrific Physical Ailments in Animals,” screams a typical article, in AlterNet, a popular anti-GMO site. It touts “new research” but as is typical of such articles and such sites, it neither quotes a study nor links to any independent research.

Although there have been more than 2,000 studies documenting that biotechnology does not pose an unusual threat to human health and genetically modified foods are as safe or safer than conventional or organic foods, questions remain in the minds of many consumers.

What does the research say?

Animal feeding studies are the basis for evaluating the safety of GMO crops. One-off studies of lab animals have occasionally shown some problems. Gilles-Eric Séralini, in his retracted GM corn study (later republished in a non-peer-reviewed anti-GMO journal), claimed rats fed genetically engineered corn developed grotesque cancerous tumors—the kind no farmer would miss among his animals if this cause-effect was genuinely in place.

Anti-GMO crusader Jeffrey Smith, on his personal website, the Institute for Responsible Technology, lists more than a dozen cases in which he claims animals fed GMOs exhibited abnormal conditions, including cancer and early death. He also references his own self-published book, and anecdotal evidence that pigs fed GM feed turned sterile or had false pregnancies and sheep that grazed on BT cotton plants often died.

“Nearly every independent animal feeding safety study on GM foods shows adverse or unexplained effects,” he writes. “But we were not supposed to know about these problems…the biotech industry works overtime to try to hide them.”

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine—an alternative medicine group that rejects GMOs and believes that vaccines are dangerous—claims, “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food,” including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system.

Is there any basis to these allegations? After all, globally, food-producing animals consume 70% to 90% of genetically engineered crop biomass, mostly corn and soybean. In the United States alone, animal agriculture produces over 9 billion food-producing animals annually, and more than 95% of these animals consume feed containing GE ingredients. The numbers are similar in large GMO producing countries with a large agricultural sector, such as Brazil and Argentina.

Estimates of the numbers of meals consumed by feed animals since the introduction of GM crops 18 years ago would number well into the trillions. By common sense alone, if GE feed were causing unusual problems among livestock, farmers would have noticed. Dead and sick animals would literally litter farms around the world. Yet there are no anecdotal reports of such mass health problems.

But we don’t need to depend on anecdotes to address these concerns. Writing in the Journal of Animal Science, in the most comprehensive study of GMOs and food ever conducted, University of California-Davis Department of Animal Science geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam and research assistant Amy E. Young reviewed 29 years of livestock productivity and health data from both before and after the introduction of genetically engineered animal feed. [NOTE: article is behind a paywall until October 1.]

The field data represented more than 100 billion animals covering a period before 1996 when animal feed was 100% non-GMO, and after its introduction when it jumped to 90% and more. The documentation included the records of animals examined pre and post mortem, as ill cattle cannot be approved for meat.

What did they find? That GM feed is safe and nutritionally equivalent to non-GMO feed. There was no indication of any unusual trends in the health of animals since 1996 when GMO crops were first harvested. Considering the size of the dataset, it can reasonably be said that the debate over the impact of GE feed on animal health is closed: there is zero extraordinary impact.

The Van Eenennaam study corresponds to other reviews of animal feeding data, some multi-generational and as long two years.

Several recent comprehensive reviews from various authors summarize the results of food-producing animal feeding studies with the current generation of GE crops (Deb et al., 2013; Flachowsky, 2013; Flachowsky et al., 2012; Tufarelli and Laudadio, 2013; Van Eenennaam, 2013). Studies have been conducted with a variety of food-producing animals including sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, quail, cattle, water buffalo, rabbits and fish fed different GE crop varieties. The results have consistently revealed that the performance and health of GE-fed animals were comparable with those fed near isogenic non-GE lines and commercial varieties.

Here is a comprehensive list of animal feeding studies. Many of these studies are independent. The list included systematic reviews, all of which conclude that GMO feed is safe.

As Dr. Steven Novella notes on his blog Neurologica:

[T]his data is observational, meaning the authors are looking at data collected out there in the world and not part of any controlled prospective experiment. Observational data is always subject to unanticipated confounding factors. However, robust observational data is still highly useful, and has the potential to detect any clear signals.

The findings also comport with long-term GMO feeding laboratory studies. The GENERA database, found at Biology Fortified online, lists more than three-dozen examples of multi-year studies. A recent review of 24 of these studies by Snell et. al found: “Results…do not suggest any health hazards and, in general, there were no statistically significant differences within parameters observed.” There have been a few outlier studies, such as the retracted GMO corn research. But if Séralini’s data were real and 80% of food was poison, animals and people would be dropping like flies.

The authors also found no evidence to suggest any health affect on humans who eat those animals. No study has revealed any differences in the nutritional profile of animal products derived from GE-fed animals. Because DNA and protein are normal components of the diet that are digested, there are no detectable or reliably quantifiable traces of GE components in milk, meat, and eggs following consumption of GE feed.

Have you ever imagined what the future would be like? Here is a hint as to what the latest discoveries will unfold within our lifetime. Unfortunately, we also found some unlikely stories about the past that try to make the advances of scientific development a kind of joke. Read on!

1. Last year, personalized embryonic stem cells became experimentally more viable with the successes made by the Oregon Health and Science University in cloning human embryos and collecting stem cells from them. Using those derived cells, they were able to produce cells into specialized cells usable for the skin or heart. This will allow doctors in the future to use such cells to generate entire organs or parts of them for transplant procedures.

Cut off your finger with a knife or lost an eye in an accident? A replacement can be generated, perhaps, in a matter of days or weeks, perhaps, using your own body as the source of original cells to produce cloned body parts since they claim that they may be able to generate such cells without using embryos. It is like real-life imitating fiction. Exciting but a bit scary and reminiscent of Frankenstein.

2. Was there water on Mars? Well, if NASA has it right, there might have been. Or wasn’t there? NASA’ Curiosity rover allegedly found a lake on the red planet which “could have supported” life more than three billion years ago. But the conclusion appears to be a big leap of faith, so to speak, for researchers to claim. Just because there is water does not mean there could have been life on Mars. Comets, perhaps hundreds or thousands of them. are basically made of ice and where they got that water somewhere in outer space would lead us to suppose that there is a lot of life out there. So far, we seem to be alone.

Besides, where is all that supposed lake water now? Could that lake have been formed by some other liquid or fluid, more volatile than water, such as methane, ammonia or some kind of mineral-based acid? Or could that lake have been merely a crater formed by an asteroid like many meteor-formed lakes we have on our planet?

In fact, the photo has all the evidences of a crater formed from a ballistic impact of a meteor rather than a lake that once held water. Notice the exact center where the tell-tale rebound of rock materials formed a small peak. Remember the popular slow-mo drop of water rebounding out? That is what happens with a meteor impact on solid ground. It forms a small peak on the center from the debris that are is thrown upward. A more exacting scientific inquiry and not speculations should be made before coming out with such “desperate” conclusions.

This piece of news is far from being a vindication of NASA. We need more proof of life — intelligent, if possible — to make us applaud. Even a college student will see through this unfounded claim.

3. A skull discovered in the Republic of Georgia apparently showed more ancient and more recent human characteristics. Evolutionists would feel confounded by this news as it would disrupt there belief that there was progression in the development of the Homo Sapiens species that we are. The conclusion the scientists reached, rather conveniently, was that more archaic humans apparently mated with the more advanced Homo Erectus or the first primitive erect humans before our “species” emerged.

Now this might be a rather surprising admission; but it is again a desperate and illogical hypothesis that throws cold water on the whole Theory of Evolution. It is basically saying that because some fossils show mixtures of pre-evolved and post-evolved characteristics then it could have only been the result of the reproduction of the two. But that is exactly like saying that a “zebronkey” – a mutant zebra that had features of a zebra and a donkey documented in Manila back in the 1970’s – was the product of the mating of a zebra and a donkey.

Again, it seems evolutionary scientific research has a lot of credibility check it has to undergo before we can accept its farfetched conclusions. Besides, a single toe bone does not a whole human being or so-called whole humanoid. With such sparse evidence, we wonder how scientists could confidently brag about their “latest discoveries”.

There are, to be sure, legitimate and amazing scientific discoveries out there; but these few we found online seem to be more like press release materials for fund-raising purposes rather than acceptable results of serious scientific inquiry.

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Koyal InfoMag features journals and other content across clinical, applied and physical sciences. Apart from hosting loads of up-to-date and informative feature articles complete with in-depth analysis and related facts, there is a rich archive where you can easily search for articles, photos, resource links and topics.

We host news of discoveries in various fields of science with the focus on space, medical treatments, fringe science, microbiology, chemistry and physics, while providing commercial and cultural contexts and deeper insight.

Koyal InfoMag includes category-specific news and updates to be of service to a vast range of guest interest, updated on a daily basis (while the Daily News Watch section is updated whenever a news break).

Koyal InfoMag prides itself in its wide coverage of scientific news, discoveries and resources that caters to researchers, scientists, students, scholars, healthcare practitioners and various institutions. The majority of our audience is in Asia, especially in South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and China.

U.S officials leading the fight against history's worst outbreak of Ebola have said they know the ways the virus is spread and how to stop it. They say that unless an air traveler from disease-ravaged West Africa has a fever of at least 101.5 degrees or other symptoms, co-passengers are not at risk.

"At this point there is zero risk of transmission on the flight," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said after a Liberian man who flew through airports in Brussels and Washington was diagnosed with the disease last week in Dallas.

Other public health officials have voiced similar assurances, saying Ebola is spread only through physical contact with a symptomatic individual or their bodily fluids. "Ebola is not transmitted by the air. It is not an airborne infection," said Dr. Edward Goodman of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where the Liberian patient remains in critical condition.

Yet some scientists who have long studied Ebola say such assurances are premature — and they are concerned about what is not known about the strain now on the loose. It is an Ebola outbreak like none seen before, jumping from the bush to urban areas, giving the virus more opportunities to evolve as it passes through multiple human hosts.

Dr. C.J. Peters, who battled a 1989 outbreak of the virus among research monkeys housed in Virginia and who later led the CDC's most far-reaching study of Ebola's transmissibility in humans, said he would not rule out the possibility that it spreads through the air in tight quarters.

"We just don't have the data to exclude it," said Peters, who continues to research viral diseases at the University of Texas in Galveston.

Dr. Philip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola research while heading the U.S. Army's Medical Research and Development Command, and who later led the government's massive stockpiling of smallpox vaccine after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also said much was still to be learned. "Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised, because there are too many unknowns here."

If Ebola were to mutate on its path from human to human, said Russell and other scientists, its virulence might wane — or it might spread in ways not observed during past outbreaks, which were stopped after transmission among just two to three people, before the virus had a greater chance to evolve. The present outbreak in West Africa has killed approximately 3,400 people, and there is no medical cure for Ebola.

"I see the reasons to dampen down public fears," Russell said. "But scientifically, we're in the middle of the first experiment of multiple, serial passages of Ebola virus in man.... God knows what this virus is going to look like. I don't."

Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the CDC in Atlanta, said health officials were basing their response to Ebola on what has been learned from battling the virus since its discovery in central Africa in 1976. The CDC remains confident, he said, that Ebola is transmitted principally by direct physical contact with an ill person or their bodily fluids.

Skinner also said the CDC is conducting ongoing lab analyses to assess whether the present strain of Ebola is mutating in ways that would require the government to change its policies on responding to it. The results so far have not provided cause for concern, he said.

The researchers reached in recent days for this article cited grounds to question U.S. officials' assumptions in three categories.

One issue is whether airport screenings of prospective travelers to the U.S. from West Africa can reliably detect those who might have Ebola. Frieden has said the CDC protocols used at West African airports can be relied on to prevent more infected passengers from coming to the U.S.

"One hundred percent of the individuals getting on planes are screened for fever before they get on the plane," Frieden said Sept. 30. "And if they have a fever, they are pulled out of the line, assessed for Ebola, and don't fly unless Ebola is ruled out."

• As this week's viral photo of 35,000 walruses crammed on an Alaskan shore reminds us, the climate crisis is still very much a thing. For those who missed it, a lack of Arctic ice evidently forced the poor creatures to huddle together on a narrow piece of land out of desperation -- normally, they're observed lying more spread out. (The same thing happened last year as well.) 

  The plight of the walruses is striking, but climate change is also having all kinds of other, less readily visible effects. It's been shown to produce heat waves around the world, contribute to global wildlife extinction and maybe even reduce gravity. 
  
  Below, we give you 21 numbers to help explain one of the most pressing global issues of our time. 
  
  0.01% 
  

  Percentage of working climate scientists who reject man-made global warming. According to research by the geologist James Lawrence Powell, among 9,136 scientists who published a combined 2,258 peer-reviewed climate articles between November 2012 and December 2013, just one person rejected the idea that humans are changing Earth's climate. Another review looked at 4,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate change and found that a full 97 percent identified humans as the cause. 
  
  90% 

  Percentage of 108 climate change denial books published between 1982 and 2010 that were not peer-reviewed. The books variously denied that climate change is happening, that humans are at fault, that climate change is having a negative effect on the environment, or any combination of the three. A strong link was also found between the books and conservative think tanks. Seventy-two percent of the books were published by an author or editor with a verifiable affiliation to some such group. 
  
  800,000 to 15,000,000 

  Number of years it's been since carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are now. Not only did humans not exist back then, but the oceans were 100 feet higher than they are today and the world's surface temperature was 11 degrees warmer than it is now. 
  
  1895 
  

  The year Svante Arrhenius presented a paper describing the impact of increased carbon dioxide on Earth's greenhouse effect. Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist and chemist, hypothesized that changes in concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could have a significant impact on the planet's surface temperatures. While Arrhenius was not the first to suggest humans might be capable of influencing the climate, his research shows that the basic science of global warming has been understood for more than a century. Yet somehow, there are still public figures in the U.S. debating whether it's real. 
  
  42% 

  The percentage by which atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen since the Industrial Revolution. Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, two other important greenhouse gases, have risen 153 percent and 21 percent from pre-Industrial levels, respectively. 
  
  2°C 

  The generally accepted maximum increase in average global temperature that humans can sustain without dangerous consequences. It was proposed as a policy target by the EU in 1996, and again in the Copenhagen Accord of 2009. After the planet warms by more than two degrees Celsius, or roughly 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, relative to pre-Industrial times -- as it is currently on track to do -- humans could face more of the negative consequences of climate change, such as more frequent food shortages, extreme weather and mass extinction of plant and animal species. 
  
  800,000,000,000 

  Estimated total number of metric tons of carbon that humans can pump into the atmosphere before average global temperatures rise more than two degrees Celsius. According to a 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 800 billion tons is Earth's "carbon budget," and we've already used up close to two-thirds of it. 
  
  19.6 
  The number of pounds of carbon dioxide produced by burning one gallon (6.3 pounds) of gasoline. One gallon of diesel fuel does even more damage, releases 22.38 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that gasoline- and diesel-fueled transportation added 1,522 million metric tons of carbon to the environment in 2013. 
  
  25% 

  The percentage increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 1959 and 2013. That's a rise from 316 parts per million to 397 ppm. Over the past two decades, the average annual increase rose from 1.9 ppm to 2.1 ppm. 
  
  400,000 
  

  Estimated number of annual deaths due to factors influenced by climate change. A 2012 report published by the European nonprofit DARA estimated the average number of fatalities due to "hunger and communicative diseases" related to extreme weather affected by climate change. These conditions appear to hit the children of developing countries particularly hard. A group of doctors recently estimated that up to 7 million people may face premature death as a result of indoor and outdoor air pollution linked to fossil fuel consumption. 
  
  $696,000,000,000 

  Loss in 2010 global GDP estimated to have been caused by climate change. By 2030, researchers estimate that 3.2 percent of annual global GDP will be lost due to climate change, through consequences such as negative effects on crop yields. In developing countries, the loss may be even greater -- up to 11 percent of a nation's GDP. 
  
  1.7 to 3.2 

  The average number of feet by which global sea levels are expected to rise by 2100. This estimate by the IPCC assumes that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to climb at present-day rates. Sea levels around the globe are not expected to rise evenly, and some regions, such as the Mid-Atlantic U.S., are believed to be particularly vulnerable. 
  
  4 

  Number of feet global sea levels could rise if the increasingly unstable West Antarctic ice sheet should collapse. The sheet is already thinning, and one study has called its eventual collapse "unstoppable." However, while the ice sheet's melt would cause already-rising global sea levels to climb even higher, researchers do not believe that will start any time soon -- in a worst-case scenario, rapid collapse might begin 200 to 1,000 years from now. 
  
  2041 

  Year when it will become too late to stop Miami from slipping below sea level, due to greenhouse gas emissions already built up in the atmosphere. This doesn't mean Miami will actually be underwater by 2041 -- but if emissions continue at their current rates, 2041 is the year there will be no way to reverse the sort of sea-level rise that would end up drowning most of the city. 
  
  11.5°F 
  

  High-level projection for average global temperature increase by 2100. A low-level projection puts the average global increase at 2 degrees Fahrenheit, but changes in temperature are expected to vary by location. 
  
  0.3°C to 0.5°C 

  Estimated decrease in regional temperature by 2100, if certain presently non-forested areas of Europe are converted to deciduous forest. Though it's unlikely to happen, a 2013 study illustrated the benefits of using vegetation as a weapon against climate change. 
  
  70-plus 

  Number of days in 2011 when the temperature in parts of the U.S. was at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Climate Assessment. Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and Southern California were particularly hard-hit with scorching hot weather that year, a trend that is expected to increase with climate change. 
  
  14.9 

  Average number of days each year when temperatures in New York City exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit. That's based on data collected between 1870 and 2013. The last year when New York City had only one day of 90-plus temperatures was 1902. 
  
  69 

  High-level estimate of how many days per year New York City will have temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit if emissions aren't curtailed. That's the projection for the year 2100. A low-level estimate puts that number at 18 days. Other cities could face a much hotter future. In Miami, by 2100, almost 200 days out of the year could be 90 degrees or above. 
  
  9 

  Number of the top 10 hottest years on record that have occurred in the 21st century. The other year was 1998, and 2010 was the hottest year of all since record-keeping began in 1880. 
  
  71% 

  The percentage increase in very heavy precipitation events recorded in the Northeastern U.S. between 1958 and 2012. Only Hawaii saw a decrease in precipitation (12 percent) during that time frame. The Midwest experienced a 16 to 37 percent rise in heavy precipitation, and the South saw a 27 percent increase. 
  
  More - The Koyal Group Info Mag

AN Irish-American scientist and a Norwegian husband-and-wife research team yesterday won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the brain's navigation system - the inner GPS that helps us find our way in the world - a revelation that one day could help those with Alzheimer's.

The research by John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser represents a "paradigm shift" in neuroscience that could help researchers understand the sometimes severe spatial memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease, the Nobel Assembly said.

"This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a positioning system, an 'inner GPS' in the brain, that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space," the assembly said.

O'Keefe (75), a professor at the University College London, discovered the first component of this system in 1971 when he found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. He demonstrated that these "place cells" were building up a map of the environment, not just registering visual input.

Thirty-four years later, in 2005, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, married neuroscientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, identified another type of nerve cell - the "grid cell" - that generates a coordinate system for precise positioning and path-finding, the assembly said.

It was the fourth time that a married couple has shared a Nobel Prize and the second time in the medicine category.

Meanwhile, it was also announced yesterday that Professor O'Keefe is to receive an honorary doctorate from UCC. Professor O'Keefe, whose father hailed from Newmarket, Co Cork, and who still has family in the area, will also be guest speaker at a major symposium organised by UCC's Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience in advance of the ceremony.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, here’s a quick rundown. Traveling far into space is a tricky endeavor. With existing technology, traveling to a planet like Mars takes about 180 days, for example. Keeping a crew of people alive (and entertained) in space for that long isn’t hard, but it does require a lot of food, water, energy, and other supplies. This makes manned long-distance space travel extremely expensive, since hauling more supplies requires huge amounts of storage space, and thousands of additional dollars just to get it all that stuff into orbit.

In theory, suspended animation would help solve this problem. If astronauts could be placed in a deep sleep during the journey, they would require far fewer resources along the way. Instead, they could just be put to sleep at the beginning and woken back up when they arrive at their destination.

Now, with a manned mission to Mars likely in its sights, NASA has begun to explore the viability of such an idea, and has recently funded a study by Atlanta-based aerospace engineering firm SpaceWorks Enterprises to help work out the kinks in the process.

Related: Cryostasis isn’t sci-fi: surgeons will soon use suspended animation to revive gunshot victims

The bulk of the study revolves around placing humans in torpor — a state in which metabolic and physiological activity is drastically slowed down. To do this, the company has developed a three-stage system. Step one involves sedating the person and using a neuromuscular blockade to prevent movement, whereas step two is to physically lower the person’s body temperature by about 10 degrees farenheit, thereby reducing cellular activity and metabolic rate by around 50 to 70 percent. This is achieved with the help of cooling pads and a nasally-inhaled coolant that lowers the subject’s temperature from the inside out. Then, once in torpor, the subject is hooked into an intravenous drip that supplies their body with all the nutrients needed to keep them alive.

Using these methods, SpaceWorks has reportedly managed to keep a person in stasis for a week — an impressive feat, but even so, there’s still much work to be done before the technology is ready for primetime. In addition to extending the length of the stasis period, the company has a handful of other hurdles to overcome. The potential onset of pneumonia, muscle atrophy, and bone loss have yet to be addressed; and the long term-effects of stasis on human organs is still largely unknown. SpaceWorks still has a long road ahead of it, but with a few more years of research, it’s not unreasonable to think that suspended animation, cryostasis, torpor –whatever you want to call it– might finally bring a manned mission to Mars within reach.

The Antarctic has been brimming with sea ice in 2014, hovering around record-high extent for most of the year. On September 20, it peaked at 7.78 million square miles, breaking the previous Antarctic sea ice extent record, which was set in 2013. But while it might seem that this record throws into question the validity of global warming, scientists say this just isn’t the case.

Up north, the sea ice loss in the Arctic is exactly what you would expect in a warming world. 2012 was a record-low year for Arctic sea ice in the satellite record, and 2014 was the sixth lowest.

But in the Antarctic, sea ice has been growing year over year. This is in contrast to the ice on Antarctic land, which appears to be shrinking faster than previously estimated. The dichotomy suggests that something much more complicated than “warming equals melting” is occurring, and scientists say that more research is needed to understand the observations.

One possible explanation for the growing sea ice extent is that weather patterns around the Antarctic may be pushing more cold, continental air over the ocean, spurring the formation of more sea ice.

Another possibility actually includes the melting of the ice over Antarctica itself – as the land ice melts, it could be flushing large amounts of fresh water, which freezes faster, into the ocean.

“There hasn’t been one explanation yet that I’d say has become a consensus, where people say, ‘We’ve nailed it, this is why it’s happening,’” said Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Our models are improving, but they’re far from perfect. One by one, scientists are figuring out that particular variables are more important than we thought years ago, and one by one those variables are getting incorporated into the models.”

When it comes to comparing the Arctic and the Antarctic, it’s probably best not to draw conclusions from their differences. “Some people have looked at the Antarctic increasing trend and use that to suggest that global warming isn’t happening, or that the increase in the Antarctic is offsetting the decrease in the Arctic and that’s simply not true,” says Walt Meier, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in a video on the record extent. “If you look at the magnitudes of the changes we’re seeing in the wintertime, the Arctic is decreasing about twice as fast as the Antarctic is increasing.”

This year’s record extent will likely prompt new research on the difference between the North and South poles, and for good reason, according to Meier. “They’re more sensitive to climate change, and therefore they’re the regions that we see the biggest effects of climate change so far,” says Meier. “They’re kind of the canary in a coal mine of global warming.”

For more science news from The Koyal Group Info Mag, visit our facebook page and follow us on twitter @koyalgroup.

- Scientists at the Mercator Research Group creates the new models

- It lets experts make artificial networks of nerve endings in the hippocampus - on a computer screen so they can explore how memories form

- The hippocampus is thought to be one of the oldest regions of the brain

- Scientists are monitoring the way neural signals spread throughout the network time-wise using their new tool

- In the furure they hope to show how animals memorise food and dangers

The way neurons are interconnected in the brain is complicated.

But now scientists have created a new type of computer model to make artificial networks of nerve cells found in the hippocampus region of the brain.

The hippocampus helps us form personal memories, and it is hoped the tool will shed more light on how these memories develop as they move through the region's different structures.

Scientists will also explore how the structure connects to the the brain, and which information arrives where and when, using models.

The model has been created by Dr Martin Pyka and his colleagues from the Mercator Research Group in Germany.

Dr Pyka developed a method that allows the brain's anatomic data and neurons to be reconstructed as a 3D model.

Once built, this 3D model can be manipulated on a computer.

They claim that their approach is unique because it enables automatic calculation of the neural interconnection based on their position inside the space.

Scientists can generate feasible network structures more easily than using other tools.

They are using the models to monitor the way neural signals spread throughout the network time-wise, according to the study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.

Dr Pyka has, so far, found evidence that the hippocampus' form and size could explain why neurons in those networks fire in certain frequencies.

In future, this method may help us understand how animals, for example, combine various information to form memories within the hippocampus, in order to memorise food sources or dangers and to remember them in certain situations.

The researchers have so far shown off a model of a rat’s hippocampus including its different layers such as the CA1 and CA3 regions, the subiculum and entorhinal cortex.

WASHINGTON -- At a research lab at Duke University Department of Pharmacology in 1979, a group of scientists sparked a major breakthrough in infant care from a failed experiment on rats.

At the time, Dr. Saul Schanberg, a neuroscientist and physician, was running tests on just-born rats to measure growth-related markers (enzymes and hormones) in their brains. Together with Dr. Cynthia Kuhn and lab technician Gary Evoniuk, he kept getting weird results. With the rat pups separated from their mothers in order to run the experiments, their growth markers kept registering at low levels.

The team varied the trials. They used an anesthetized mother rat to feed the pups during and after the experimentation, and tried keeping the pups and mother in the same cage but with a divider to see if a lack of pheromones was the problem.

“The experiment failed,” Kuhn recalled.

So the team approached it from another angle. Instead of stabilizing the rat pups so they could run tests, they tried to figure out what was wrong with the pups in the first place. From a friend, Kuhn had heard theories that massaging the pups could produce positive results. Evoniuk, meanwhile, had watched mother rats groom their pups by vigorously licking them. He proposed doing essentially the same thing, minus the tongue.

The team began using a wet brush to rub the rat pups at different pressure levels. Eventually, they found the right one, and on cue, the deprivation effect was reversed.

"I said, 'Let’s give it a shot,' and it worked the first time and the second time," recalled Evoniuk. "It was just the touch.”

Though they had no way of knowing it, Schanberg’s team had taken the first step in a process that would see the upending of conventional wisdom when it came to post-natal care. Three and a half decades later, the theories that his team stumbled upon by failure would save an estimated billions of dollars in medical costs and affect countless young parents’ lives.

On Thursday night, the team will be rewarded for its work. A coalition of business, university and scientific organizations will present the Golden Goose Award to them and other researchers with similar successful projects. It is a prize given for the purpose of shining a light on how research with odd-sounding origins (really, massaging rat pups?) can produce groundbreaking results. More broadly, it’s meant to showcase the importance of federally funded scientific research.

The work done by Schanberg’s team is inextricably tied to the support of taxpayers -- not just because the group operated from a grant of approximately $273,000 from the National Institutes of Health. As Kuhn and Evoniuk both argued, the breakthrough they were able to produce never could have happened with a private funding source. The demand for an immediate result or for profit wouldn’t have allowed them to pivot off the initial failure.

“It is not a straight path from point A to point B,” said Evoniuk. “There are all kinds of weird little detours. We were really following a detour from where this work started. The federal funding gave people like Saul the ability to follow their scientific instincts and try to find the answers to interesting questions that popped up.”

As Congress members head back to their districts before the midterm elections, fights over science funding appear to be low on the list of priorities. The two parties are in the midst of an informal truce, having put in place budget caps this past winter. And no one seems particularly eager to disrupt that truce, even if science advocates warn it needs upending.

While NIH's funding increased this year from last year, when sequestration forced an estimated $1.55 billion reduction, it still fell $714 million short of pre-sequestration levels. Adjusted for inflation, it was lower than every year but President George W. Bush's first year in office.

Surveying the climate, the American Academy for Arts & Science released a report this week showing that the United States "has slipped to tenth place" among economically advanced nations in overall research and development investment as a percentage of GDP. For science advocates, it was another sobering cause for alarm. Young researchers, they argue, are leaving the field or country. Projects that could yield tremendousbiomedical breakthroughs aren't getting off the ground.

Looming over the Golden Goose awards ceremony is this reality: Would an experiment testing rat-pup massages ever survive this political climate? Would it be admonished as waste by deficit hawks in Congress?

“Researchers massaging rats sounds strange, but oddball science saves lives,” said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who is participating in the awards ceremony. “In this instance, premature babies got a healthier start. If Congress abandons research funding, we could miss the next unexpected breakthrough.”

NIH funding was certainly critical to the successful research behind rat-pup massages. "Without the NIH none of this would have happened, zero," said Kuhn.

But serendipity also played a role. Not long after he made his discovery, Schanberg was at an NIH study section with Tiffany Field, a psychologist at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Field had also been doing research -- also funded by the NIH -- on massage therapies for prematurely born babies. But she was getting poor results.

"We were just sharing our data, basically," Field recalled of that conversation. "I was telling him we were having trouble getting any positive effects with the preemies. … He talked about how his lab technician had an eureka experiment when he saw his mother's tongue licking the babies."

The conclusion reached was that Field probably wasn't massaging the premature babies hard enough. Instead of applying "moderate pressure" (as Schanberg had been doing) she was applying more of a "soft stroking."

A study done on rats became a study on humans. Field changed up her experiment and began to see results right away. Instead of the discomfort felt from that tickle-like sensation, the moderate pressure had a tonic effect, stimulating receptors. Babies' heart rates slowed down; the preemies seemed more relaxed; they were able to absorb food and gain weight; there was more evidence of growth hormone; an increase in insulin; greater bone density; and greater movement of the GI tract. The magnitude of the finding was enormous.

"We published the data and we actually did a cost-benefit analysis at that point and determined we could save $4.8 billion per year by massaging all the preemies, because of all the significant cost savings for the hospital," Field recalled.

Her conclusion challenged the prevailing sentiment of the time that prematurely born babies should be left in incubators, fed intravenously, and not touched immediately after birth lest they become agitated and potentially harmed. But few people listened.

"The only person who paid attention to it was Hillary Clinton," she recalled, noting that Clinton, who was working on a health care reform initiative as First Lady, expressed interest in the research.

Since then, however, conceptions of post-natal care have changed. Subsequent studies have confirmed Field's findings, though others have questioned whether there is enough research or the proper methodology to draw sweeping conclusions. Nevertheless, whereas few people used massage therapies in the '80s and '90s, as of eight years ago 38 percent of natal care units were using those therapies, said Fields. The method is estimated to save $10,000 per infant -- roughly $4.7 billion a year.

Those involved in the research still marvel that the chain of events started with a failed experiment on rats and turned on a fortuitous meeting between two scientists.

"We didn’t set out to figure out how to improve nursing care," said Kuhn. "But we wound up saving a lot of money and helped babies grow better, their cognitive outcome was better, they got out of the [intensive care units] sooner. … There was no downside."

"One thing led to another," said Evoniuk. "We were just kind of following an interesting question not thinking we were going to change medical practice."

Schanberg won't be around to receive his Golden Goose award Thursday night. He died in 2009, and his granddaughter will accept on his behalf. But those who worked with him say that his research remains a testament to the good results that an inquisitive mind and a respectable funding stream can produce. It's a story that scientists may find uplifting.

But it doesn't necessarily have a happy ending.

In the aftermath of her work with Schanberg, Field continued studying natal care, starting the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami in 1992 with the help from the NIH and Johnson & Johnson. Her work has been widely cited in medical journals and newspaper articles. But the funding streams have run dry, and now she's faced with the prospect of dramatically narrowing the scope of her lifelong work.

"We are faced with having to close the institute because we don’t have any NIH grants," she said. "It used to be a third of us would get the grants. Now they are funding at something like the seventh percentile."

Chris Lintott first met Kevin Schawinski in the summer of 2007 at the astrophysics department of the University of Oxford. Lintott had just finished a PhD at the University College of London on star formation in galaxies. He was also something of a minor celebrity in the astronomy community: he was one of the presenters of the BBC's astronomy programme  The Sky at Night alongside Sir Patrick Moore, and had written a popular science book called Bang!: The Complete History of the Universe with Moore and Brian May, the Queen guitarist and astrophysicist. "I went to give a seminar talk as part of a job interview," Lintott recalls. "And this guy in a suit jumped up and started having a go at me because I hadn't checked my galaxy data properly. I thought it was some lecturer who I'd pissed off, but it turned out to be Kevin [Schawinski], who was a student at the time."

Most galaxies come in two shapes: elliptical or spiral. Elliptical galaxies can have a range of shapes, from perfectly spherical to a flattened rugby-ball shape. Spirals, like the Milky Way, have a central bulge of stars surrounded by a thin disk of stars shaped in a spiral pattern known as "arms". The shape of a galaxy is an imprint of its history and how it has interacted with other galaxies over billions of years of evolution. It is a mystery to astronomers why they have these shapes and how the two geometries related to one another. For a long time, astronomers assumed that spirals were young galaxies, with an abundance of stellar nurseries, where new stars were being formed. These regions typically emitted hot, blue radiation. Elliptical galaxies, on the other hand, were thought to be predominantly old, replete of dying stars, which are colder, and therefore have a red colour. Schawinski was working on a theory which contradicted this paradigm. To prove it, he needed to find elliptical galaxies with blue regions, where starformation was taking place.

At the time, astronomers relied on computer algorithms to filter datasets of images of galaxies. The biggest bank of such images came from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which contained more than two million astronomical objects, nearly a million of which were galaxies, and had been taken by an automated robotic telescope in New Mexico with a two-metre mirror. The problem was that computers can easily filter galaxies based on their colour, however it was impossible for an algorithm to pick up galaxies based on their shape. "It's really hard to teach a computer a pattern-recognition task like this," says Schawinski, currently a professor in astronomy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "It took computer scientists a decade to [teach a computer] to tell human faces apart, something every child can do the moment they open their eyes." The only way to prove this theory, Schawinski decided, was to look at each galaxy image, one by one.

Schawinski did it for a week, working 12 hours every day. He would go to his office in the morning, click through images of galaxies while listening to music, break for lunch, and continue until late in the evening. "When I attended Chris's seminar, I had just spent a week looking through fifty thousand galaxies," says Schawinski.

When Lintott moved to Oxford, he and Schawinski started debating the problem of how to classify datasets with millions of images. They weren't the only ones. "Kate Land, one of my colleagues, was intrigued about a recent paper which claimed most galaxies were rotating around a common axis," Lintott says. "Which is indeed puzzling because the expectation was that these axes would be totally random." Land needed more data, which required looking at the rotation of tens of thousands of galaxies. "Out of the blue she asked me if I thought that, if they put a laptop with galaxy images in the middle of a pub, would people classify them?" Lintott recalls.

At the time, Nasa had launched a project called Stardust@home, which had recruited about 20,000 online volunteers to identify tracks made by interstellar dust in samples from a comet. "We thought that if people are going to look at dust tracks, then surely they'll look at galaxies," says Lintott. Once it was decided they would go ahead with the project, they built a website within days. The homepage displayed the image of a galaxy from the dataset. For each image, the volunteers were asked if the galaxy was a spiral or elliptical. If a spiral, they were asked if they could discern the direction of its arms and the direction of its rotation. There were also options for stars, unknown objects and overlapping galaxies.

It's undoubtedly a resounding accomplishment for European Space Agency (ESA) which launched the Rosetta mission in March 2004. After blasting off from Kourou spaceport of French Guiana, Rosetta and Philae have logged at least 6 billion kms just to reach the comet.

For a time, the spacecraft had gone on standby for almost 3 years. Apparently, it had gone 500 million miles away from the sun that the solar panels can't absorb enough energy to recharge and keep things going. Fortunately, the Rosetta came out of its hibernation just this January and approached its target: comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The comet, discovered in 1969, orbits the sun at the speed of 135,000 km/h. Measuring 4-km wide, the comet's shape is similar to that of a rubber duck which initially left people doubting if a landing would be possible at all. (This is because if the Philae lander touched down on uneven surface, it could turn over the wrong side -- and has no way to right itself up.)

After its separation from its carrier, Philae started its precarious  seven-hour descent onto the comet.

For the controller team, those were 7 hours of nerve-wracking anticipation, especially as a problem arose just at a critical moment. There seemed to be an issue with its thruster which could result in a rough landing at best. Their failure to amend the fault almost resulted in the cancellation of the mission. Eventually, they decided to proceed in spite of it.

Inside the control center of ESA  in Darmstadt, Germany, tensions were high.

Finally, around 4pm (GMT), Philae's communications reached Earth: touchdown.

“We are there. We are sitting on the surface. Philae is talking to us. We are on the comet,” said Stephan Ulamec, Philae's lander manager at the control room.

The space mission has already registered a number of firsts;  including the first spacecraft to come into close orbit around a comet and of course the first to land a probe. And if things go well, it could also be the first spacecraft to travel with a comet as it circles the sun.

ESA's director general, Jean-Jacques Dordain announced, "We are the first to do this, and that will stay forever."

During another  interview with Koyal Info Mag, Dordain noted, "This is a big step for human civilization."

After putting the Philae lander on ground, the Rosetta spacecraft is expected to orbit around the comet and take more images as well as collect various data as it travels toward the sun.

The Rosetta mission will be completed in December 2015, though if there's enough fuel in the spacecraft it might be given a 6-month extension to do even more daring projects. Philae itself has enough juice to continue working until March before its electronics get fried by the sun's heat. However, it might still continue to cling to the comet for around 6 years before losing its grip.

This daring space mission aims to further study the molecular and physical composition of a comet, believed to be made from materials that existed even before the solar system's creation. Koyal Info Mag hopes more will be known of how the solar system formed and how comets are instrumental to the life-sustaining qualities of a planet like Earth.

On Monday, November 17, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 5544, the Low Dose Radiation Research Act, which called for the National Academies to “conduct a study assessing the current status and development of a long-term strategy for low dose radiation research.”

Coincidentally that was the same day that the National Academy of Sciences hosted a publicly accessible, all day meeting to determine if there had been enough new developments in radiation health effects research to justify the formation of a new BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) committee. If formed, that would be BEIR VIII, the latest in a series of committees performing a survey of available research on the health effects of atomic (now ionizing) radiation.

I had the pleasure of attending the meeting, which was held in the ornate NAS building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. There were about 20 presenters talking about various aspects of the scientific and political considerations associated with the decision to form BEIR VIII. Several of the presenters had performed experimental research under the currently moribund Department of Energy’s Low Dose radiation research program.

That intriguing program was using modern genetics techniques to learn a great deal about the dynamic nature of DNA in organisms and about the ways that living tissues isolate and repair recurring damage that comes as a result of metabolic processes, heat, chemicals and ionizing radiation. It was defunded gradually beginning in 2009 and completely by 2011, with the money making its way to solar and wind energy research as the Office of Science shifted its priorities under a flat top line budget.

The agenda allocated a considerable amount of time for public comments. There were a couple of members of the audience interested in the science falsifying the “no safe dose” model who took advantage of the opportunities to speak, but so did a number of professional antinuclear activists from Maryland, Ohio, New York and Tennessee.

Need Better Results This Time

An epic struggle with important health, safety, cost and energy abundance implications is shaping up with regard to the way that the officially sanctioned science and regulatory bodies treat the risks and benefits associated with using ionizing radiation at low doses and dose rates for medical uses, industrial uses and power production.

We must make sure that this battle for science, hearts and minds is not as asymmetrical as the one fought in the period between 1954-1964. One skirmish in the battle worth winning will be to encourage the passage of the Low Dose Radiation Research Act and the annual appropriations that will enable it to function long into the future.

Here is a brief version of that lengthy prior engagement, where there were huge winners and losers. Losers included truth, general prosperity, peace and the environment. Partial winners included people engaged in the global hydrocarbon economy in finance, exploration, extraction, refinement, transportation, tools, machines and retail distribution. There were also big financial winners in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, oncology, and agriculture.

Rockefeller Funded Survey

During a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, several of the trustees asked the President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) if his esteemed organization would be willing to review what was known about the biological effects of atomic radiation.

The board did not have to pick up the phone or send a letter to make that request. Detlev Bronk, who was the serving president of the NAS, was already at the table as a full member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees. The board agreed that, based on their interpretations of recent media coverage, the public was confused and not properly informed about the risks of radiation exposure and the potential benefits of the Atomic Age.

The tasking given to the NAS was to form a credible committee that would study the science and issue a report “in a form accessible to seriously concerned citizens.”1

Aside: For historical context, that Foundation board meeting took place within months after President Eisenhower made his “Atoms for Peace” speech in December 1953. That speech to the United Nations announced a shift in focus of the Atomic Age from weapons development to more productive applications like electrical power generation and ship propulsion.

At the time the request to the NAS was made, the Rockefeller Foundation had been funding radiation biology-related research for at least 30 years, including the Drosophila mutation experiments that Hermann Muller conducted during the 1920s at the University of Texas. Foundation board members and supported scientists had been following developments in atomic science since the earliest discoveries of radiation and the dense energy stored inside atomic nuclei.

In March 1948, the Tripartite Conferences on radiation protection, a group that included experienced radiation researchers and practitioners from the US, Canada and the UK, had determined that the permissible doses for humans should be reduced from 1 mGy/day (in SI units) to 0.5 mGy/day or 3 mGy/week.

That reduction was not made because of any noted negative health effects, but to provide an additional safety factor.

In between these two extremes there is a level of exposure, — in the neighborhood of 0.1 r/day — which all experience to date show to be safe, but the time of observation of large numbers of people exposed at this rate under controlled conditions, is too short to permit a categorical assertion to this effect.2

End Aside.

Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation

The first NAS Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation committee began its work in April 1955. There were six subcommittees, each of which authored a section of the committee’s report. The report was identified as a preliminary version that was to be followed with a more technically detailed report scheduled to appear within the next couple of years, if desired by responsible government agencies.

Unlike the documents supporting the permissible dose limits that came out of the Tripartite Commission mentioned in the aside above, the NAS BEAR 1 committee report, especially the section from the Genetics Committee, was professionally promoted and received extensive media coverage and public attention.

The NAS held a press conference announcing the release of the report and answering questions in Washington, DC on June 12. Among other media attention, that press conference resulted in no less than six related articles in the June 13, 1956 edition of the New York Times. Several additional articles were published during the following weeks. The selection of pieces included a lengthy article that started at the top of the right hand column of the paper and continued with another 20-25 column inches on page 17. Read full article here

According to a study from Brigham and Women's Hospital, people who read on a lit screen before sleeping tend to fall asleep later as opposed to those who read on a paperback.

The study which was printed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the newest contribution to an increasing number of studies pointing to backlit devices, like our mobile phones and tablets, as culprits of sleep problems.

Anne-Marie Chang, a neuroscientist who headed the project said, "It seems that use of these devices in the evening before bedtime really has this negative impact on our sleep and on your circadian rhythms."

The study was conducted in a lab with 12 people who were monitored for 2 weeks. Every evening, they were asked to read for 4 hours -- the first 5 days from an iPad and the next 5 days from a paperback. Once the subjects went to bed every 10pm, they were closely monitored for physiological changes.

It turned out that when the subjects read on screens, their circadian rhythms were disrupted and melatonin production was suppressed, leading to less deep sleep and feeling of tiredness the next day.

Chang advised that the proper recommendation should be to set aside electronic devices a couple of hours before sleeping and read printed book instead. Ebook devices that do not have backlit screens will also be better. According to The Koyal Group Info Mag researchers, any device that gives off blue wavelength of light is problematic as a person will tend to hold it closer to the eyes.

Professor Charles Czeisler, one of the lead researcher said, "The light emitted by most e-readers is shining directly into the eyes of the reader, whereas from a printed book or the original Kindle, the reader is only exposed to reflected light from the pages of the book. Sleep deficiency has been shown to increase the risk of cardio diseases, metabolic diseases and cancer. Thus, the melatonin suppression that we saw in this study among participants when they were reading from the light-emitting e-reader concerns us."

Meanwhile, other scientists are cautioning the public in drawing conclusions from the said study. This is because critical changes were observed in a controlled environment like a laboratory compared to the real-life setting.

Their experiment conducted in a lab does not effectively mimic the setup in real life where people are naturally exposed to sunlight. For instance, the low light in the lab might have affected them in a way that it made them sensitive to light from screens. As The Koyal Group Info Mag said, a person exposed in mere room light the whole day could be more sensitive to the light from an ebook reader than a person who had been exposed to sunlight outside the whole day.

However, they all agree that the blue light wavelength emitted by devices like laptops, tablets and mobile phones has negative effects and should be avoided at least before bedtime.

In a related research conducted by Mariana Figueiro of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2012, they found that subjects who use an e-reader device like a tablet before going to sleep at night had lower melatonin levels after using it for 2 hours. But they clarified that the lit screen is only one of the contributing factor.

Efforts to find Europe’s lost comet lander, Philae, have come up blank.

The most recent imaging search by the overflying Rosetta “mothership” can find no trace of the probe.

Philae touched down on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November, returning a swathe of data before going silent when its battery ran flat.

European Space Agency scientists say they are now waiting on Philae itself to reveal its position when it garners enough power to call home.

Researchers have a pretty good idea of where the robot should be, but pinpointing its exact location is tricky.

On touchdown, Philae bounced twice before coming to rest in a dark ditch.

This much is clear from the pictures it took of its surroundings. And this location, the mission team believes, is just off the top of the “head” of the duck-shaped comet.

The orbiting Rosetta satellite photographed this general location on 12, 13 and 14 December, with each image then scanned by eye for any bright pixels that might be Philae. But no positive detection has yet been made.

Rosetta has now moved further from 67P, raising its altitude from 20km to 30km, and there is no immediate plan to go back down (certainly, not to image Philae’s likely location).

Even if they cannot locate it, scientists are confident the little probe will eventually make its whereabouts known.

As 67P moves closer to the Sun, lighting conditions for the robot should improve, allowing its solar cells to recharge the battery system.

The latest assessment suggests communications could be re-established in the May/June timeframe, with Philae distributing enough electricity to its instruments to resume operations around September.

This would be at perihelion - the time when the comet is closest to the Sun (185 million km away) and at its most active.

Scientists continue to pore over the data Philae managed to send back before going into hibernation.

Some of the results - together with ongoing Rosetta observations - were reported at the recent American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Highlights include a clearer idea of the nature of the comet’s surface. Researchers say this appears to be covered in many places by a soft, dusty “soil” about 15-20cm in depth.

Underneath this is a very hard layer, which is thought to be mainly sintered ice.

The conference had the rare opportunity to see pictures from Rosetta’s Osiris camera system.

These high-resolution images are not normally shown publicly because the camera team has been given an exclusive period to study the data and make discoveries.

Among them was a shot looking into a pit on the surface, revealing an array of rounded features that the Osiris team has nicknamed “dinosaur eggs”.

These features have a preferred scale of about 2-3m and may be evidence of the original icy blocks that came together 4.5 billion years ago to build the comet.

The dino eggs have been seen at a number of locations, including in cliff walls.

Early interpretations of the general surface of the comet indicate that many structures are probably the result of collapse over internal voids.

Although a small body just 4km across, 67P’s gravity is still strong enough to shape depressions and arrange fallen boulders.

A good example of this is in “Hapi” valley - the giant gorge that forms the “neck” of the comet.

It contains a string of large blocks at its base, which one Osiris team-member argued very likely fell from the nearby vertical cliff dubbed “Hathor”.

All the surface features on 67P carry names that follow an ancient Egyptian theme.

Hapi was revered as a god of the Nile. Hathor was a deity associated with the sky.

With the help of highly sensitive particle detectors, some of the world’s most powerful lasers, and good-old-fashioned quantum mechanics, physicists from around the world made important discoveries this year.

From detecting elusive particles forged in the core of our sun to teleporting quantum data farther than ever before, these physicists’ scientific research has helped us better understand the universe in which we live as well as pave the way for a future of quantum computers, nuclear fusion, and more.

11. Multiple teams detected what could be our first hints of dark matter.

Although dark matter -- the mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe, but is seemingly undetectable to us here on Earth -- is still shrouded in mystery, two important discoveries in 2014 shed the first rays of light on this elusive material.

10. For the first time, physicists figured out the chemical composition of the mysterious and extremely rare phenomenon of 'ball lightning.'

Reports of ball lighting stretch back as far as the 16th century, but until the 1960s most scientists refused to believe it was real. But, it is real. Ball lighting is a floating sphere or disk of lightning up to 10 feet across that lasts only seconds.

9. An analogue of the theoretical radiation made by black holes was recreated in the lab.

Last October, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, announced that he had created an analogue for a bizarre type of radiation that can, in theory, escape black holes.

8. An international group of physicists compressed quantum data for the first time in history.

You might grumble when your Internet connection is slow, but it would be infinitely slower if today's classical computers could not compress the information we're constantly sending back and forth.

7. Physicists made powerful, stellar explosions called supernovas in the lab -- for science.

During a supernova, a star explodes, ejecting its guts across space and leaving only a ghostly halo of gas and dust, called a supernova remnant, behind. Astrophysicists have observed supernovae remnants of all shapes and sizes but have yet to understand why they are all so different.

6. Powerful lasers compressed a diamond to simulate the centres of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Jupiter and Saturn are the two largest planets in our solar system, and yet what is inside them is mostly a mystery -- we don't even know if their centres are liquid or solid.

5. Researchers transferred information in light four times farther than ever before -- an important step to quantum computers.

If we are ever to have a digital world run by quantum computers, then we must learn how to transport information in the form of what scientists call quantum data, or qubits, which is encoded inside of subatomic particles, such as ions or photons (light particles).

4. Physicists developed a new and better kind of fibre optics to transfer information.

Traditionally, when you're trying to transfer particles of light through a fibre optic cable, the last thing you want are for the particles to be moving all about in a disorderly manner. But there's an exception to this that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Clemson University discovered the first time this year.

3. A physics team discovered a new particle, 80 years after it was first predicted.

After nearly 80 years since it was first predicted, the Majorana fermion was finally observed. The physicists at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin announced their discovery last October in the journal Science.

2. The National Ignition Facility made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it used up -- a first .

Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction that generates up to four times more energy than nuclear fission -- the process that fuels today's nuclear power plants. One big issue standing in the way of harnessing this energy for electrical power is that it takes more energy to create the reaction than we've gotten out of it, until now.

1. We've figured out how the sun generates energy through nuclear fusion in its core.

Energy from the sun is essential for life on Earth. Yet we were not certain of how the sun's core works until just this year.

With the help of highly sensitive particle detectors, some of the world’s most powerful lasers, and good-old-fashioned quantum mechanics, physicists from around the world made important discoveries this year.

From detecting elusive particles forged in the core of our sun to teleporting quantum data farther than ever before, these physicists’ scientific research has helped us better understand the universe in which we live as well as pave the way for a future of quantum computers, nuclear fusion, and more.

11. Multiple teams detected what could be our first hints of dark matter.

Although dark matter -- the mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe, but is seemingly undetectable to us here on Earth -- is still shrouded in mystery, two important discoveries in 2014 shed the first rays of light on this elusive material.

10. For the first time, physicists figured out the chemical composition of the mysterious and extremely rare phenomenon of 'ball lightning.'

Reports of ball lighting stretch back as far as the 16th century, but until the 1960s most scientists refused to believe it was real. But, it is real. Ball lighting is a floating sphere or disk of lightning up to 10 feet across that lasts only seconds.

9. An analogue of the theoretical radiation made by black holes was recreated in the lab.

Last October, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, announced that he had created an analogue for a bizarre type of radiation that can, in theory, escape black holes.

8. An international group of physicists compressed quantum data for the first time in history.

You might grumble when your Internet connection is slow, but it would be infinitely slower if today's classical computers could not compress the information we're constantly sending back and forth.

7. Physicists made powerful, stellar explosions called supernovas in the lab -- for science.

During a supernova, a star explodes, ejecting its guts across space and leaving only a ghostly halo of gas and dust, called a supernova remnant, behind. Astrophysicists have observed supernovae remnants of all shapes and sizes but have yet to understand why they are all so different.

6. Powerful lasers compressed a diamond to simulate the centres of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Jupiter and Saturn are the two largest planets in our solar system, and yet what is inside them is mostly a mystery -- we don't even know if their centres are liquid or solid.

5. Researchers transferred information in light four times farther than ever before -- an important step to quantum computers.

If we are ever to have a digital world run by quantum computers, then we must learn how to transport information in the form of what scientists call quantum data, or qubits, which is encoded inside of subatomic particles, such as ions or photons (light particles).

4. Physicists developed a new and better kind of fibre optics to transfer information.

Traditionally, when you're trying to transfer particles of light through a fibre optic cable, the last thing you want are for the particles to be moving all about in a disorderly manner. But there's an exception to this that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Clemson University discovered the first time this year.

3. A physics team discovered a new particle, 80 years after it was first predicted.

After nearly 80 years since it was first predicted, the Majorana fermion was finally observed. The physicists at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin announced their discovery last October in the journal Science.

2. The National Ignition Facility made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it used up -- a first .

Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction that generates up to four times more energy than nuclear fission -- the process that fuels today's nuclear power plants. One big issue standing in the way of harnessing this energy for electrical power is that it takes more energy to create the reaction than we've gotten out of it, until now.

1. We've figured out how the sun generates energy through nuclear fusion in its core.

Energy from the sun is essential for life on Earth. Yet we were not certain of how the sun's core works until just this year.

With the help of highly sensitive particle detectors, some of the world’s most powerful lasers, and good-old-fashioned quantum mechanics, physicists from around the world made important discoveries this year.

From detecting elusive particles forged in the core of our sun to teleporting quantum data farther than ever before, these physicists’ scientific research has helped us better understand the universe in which we live as well as pave the way for a future of quantum computers, nuclear fusion, and more.

11. Multiple teams detected what could be our first hints of dark matter.

Although dark matter -- the mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe, but is seemingly undetectable to us here on Earth -- is still shrouded in mystery, two important discoveries in 2014 shed the first rays of light on this elusive material.

10. For the first time, physicists figured out the chemical composition of the mysterious and extremely rare phenomenon of 'ball lightning.'

Reports of ball lighting stretch back as far as the 16th century, but until the 1960s most scientists refused to believe it was real. But, it is real. Ball lighting is a floating sphere or disk of lightning up to 10 feet across that lasts only seconds.

9. An analogue of the theoretical radiation made by black holes was recreated in the lab.

Last October, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, announced that he had created an analogue for a bizarre type of radiation that can, in theory, escape black holes.

8. An international group of physicists compressed quantum data for the first time in history.

You might grumble when your Internet connection is slow, but it would be infinitely slower if today's classical computers could not compress the information we're constantly sending back and forth.

7. Physicists made powerful, stellar explosions called supernovas in the lab -- for science.

During a supernova, a star explodes, ejecting its guts across space and leaving only a ghostly halo of gas and dust, called a supernova remnant, behind. Astrophysicists have observed supernovae remnants of all shapes and sizes but have yet to understand why they are all so different.

6. Powerful lasers compressed a diamond to simulate the centres of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Jupiter and Saturn are the two largest planets in our solar system, and yet what is inside them is mostly a mystery -- we don't even know if their centres are liquid or solid.

5. Researchers transferred information in light four times farther than ever before -- an important step to quantum computers.

If we are ever to have a digital world run by quantum computers, then we must learn how to transport information in the form of what scientists call quantum data, or qubits, which is encoded inside of subatomic particles, such as ions or photons (light particles).

4. Physicists developed a new and better kind of fibre optics to transfer information.

Traditionally, when you're trying to transfer particles of light through a fibre optic cable, the last thing you want are for the particles to be moving all about in a disorderly manner. But there's an exception to this that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Clemson University discovered the first time this year.

3. A physics team discovered a new particle, 80 years after it was first predicted.

After nearly 80 years since it was first predicted, the Majorana fermion was finally observed. The physicists at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin announced their discovery last October in the journal Science.

2. The National Ignition Facility made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it used up -- a first .

Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction that generates up to four times more energy than nuclear fission -- the process that fuels today's nuclear power plants. One big issue standing in the way of harnessing this energy for electrical power is that it takes more energy to create the reaction than we've gotten out of it, until now.

1. We've figured out how the sun generates energy through nuclear fusion in its core.

Energy from the sun is essential for life on Earth. Yet we were not certain of how the sun's core works until just this year.

The theory about everything review: Film depicting the life of Professor Stephen Hawking

IT is going to be a battle of the boffins at the Oscars next year. Benedict Cumberbatch is a frontrunner for playing Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and Eddie Redmayne will be a powerful contender for his remarkable performance as Professor Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything.

Playing Hawking from PhD student through to global superstardom as the author of A Brief History Of Time Redmayne is outstanding, inhabiting Hawking’s stricken body and brilliant mind with complete conviction.

In the same way that The Imitation Game humanised an intimidatingly clever and remote figure so The Theory Of Everything reveals the man behind the icon: courageous, mischievous, funny but also difficult and selfish.

It may not be a warts-and-all portrait (the picture is too genteel for that) but it’s a touching, humorous and inspirational insight into a man who refused to accept conventional boundaries, both of the mind and body.

We’re reminded quite how extraordinary it is that he’s still alive (now 72) when a doctor informs him, while at Cambridge University, that he has only two years to live. Told that his body will shut down as Motor Neurone Disease destroys his muscle function, Stephen asks about his brain. The doctor (Adam Godley) explains that it will continue to function normally but adds: “No one will know what your thoughts are.” The great mind will have no way to communicate.

Most people would have thrown in the towel and perhaps Stephen would have done were it not for Jane Wilde (a wonderful Felicity Jones), the girlfriend who refused to give up on him or let him give up.

Petite and seemingly demure she’s determined and quietly tenacious and the film is as much about her as it is Hawking. The screenplay by Anthony McCarten is based on her memoir, Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, and it’s their relationship which resulted in three children but ended in divorce that forms the heart of the story along with the role played by family friend and Jane’s eventual second husband, bashful choirmaster Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox).

This potentially messy state of affairs is handled with great delicacy and is the source of the picture’s fascination, heart and charm. It’s some achievement: what might have seemed uncomfortable and intrusive is actually moving, tender and sweet.

The result is a very British love story between three people, all extraordinary in their own way, who are trying to find happiness and fulfilment in the most trying of circumstances. We don’t get wild explosions or tantrums or declarations of love but mostly silent, dignified struggle and unspoken desire.

Initially we witness the love affair between Hawking and Jane who meet at Cambridge and strike up an instant rapport at a party despite having little in common. She’s a student of medieval Spanish poetry and a firm believer in God, he’s a “cosmologist” which he describes as a “religion for intelligent atheists”.

Still, love conquers all against the backdrop of a firework display during a May Ball where they kiss. On paper it sounds very Hollywood and their courtship is seductively staged and performed but the pair are winningly British and their conversation is hardly the stuff of your average Hollywood romance. They natter about quantum physics, God and Einstein.

Hawking explains his ambition to discover an “equation that explains everything in the universe” as he begins to explore his fascination with “time”.

The scientific talk is cleverly handled with some imaginative visual cues like cream swirling in a coffee cup. We may not understand the details but the general gist is clear as Hawking makes some ground-breaking discoveries into the origins of the universe.

In any case it’s not the science that compels or intrigues; we know the man’s a genius. What we don’t know is the personal story behind the work and the rather strange and testing family life endured by his wife who for years was denied help by her husband. “We’re just a normal family,” he insists. Read Source

It may be 2015 already, but in 2014 we saw some truly amazing scientific discoveries. We landed a probe on a comet, discovered new particles that further our knowledge of the physics of the universe, and learned more about the properties of the wonder-material graphene, which could eventually transform everything from fuel cell technology to battery and computing power and more.

At Futurism.co, Alex Klokus created an infographic that highlights 48 of the most transformative scientific advancements and discoveries of last year. We've republished the graphic here with permission, but you can check out Futurism's interactive version to click through to a source for each story.

A team of physicists from India, Israel, Germany and US reportedly detected the Higgs boson, which is believed to be the thing responsible for every mass in the universe, for the first time in superconductors. What’s more, these newly-detected Higgs boson using superconductors is more stable and way cheaper to achieve. Scientists will now have an easier way to observe the Higgs boson even in ordinary laboratories.

The so-called ‘God particle’ was detected 3 years ago in Switzerland using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The USD 10 billion LHC is the world’s biggest single machine and the most powerful particle collider. It was primarily built for the purpose of finding the Higgs boson.

The lead researcher Professor Aviad Frydman of Bar-Ilan University said, “Just as the CERN experiments revealed the existence of the Higgs boson in a high-energy accelerator environment, we have now revealed a Higgs boson analogue in superconductors.

Proving the presence of Higgs boson is a difficult feat because it can’t directly be detected and it is short-lived. Plus, a particle accelerator needs huge amounts of energy.

The energy scale used, The Koyal Group Info Mag reported, was only a thousandth of an electron volt. This is a huge contrast to the giga electron volts needed in accelerators like LHC.

However, only a particular amount of energy is required in superconductors to awake the “Higgs mode” — too much and it will break the electron pairs that serve as the superconductor’s basic charge.

To solve this, Frydman and his team used ultra-thin and disordered “superconducting films of Indium Oxide and Niobium Nitrite near the superconductor-insulator critical point”. In theory, once that point is reached, the rapid decay of Higgs will not occur anymore; hence researchers can awake the Higgs mode with only low energies.

“The parallel phenomenon in superconductors occurs on a different energy scale entirely — just one-thousandth of a single electronvolt. What’s exciting is to see how, even in these highly disparate systems, the same fundamental physics is at work,” said Frydman.

A superconductor is a special type of metal which allows electrons to move from one atom to another without hindrance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. That’s why once it reached the so-called ‘critical temperature’ and becomes ‘superconductive’, it does not release sound, heat or any form of energy. Surprisingly, The Koyal Group Info Mag discovered that it was this property of a superconductor which inspired the concept of the Higgs boson five decades ago.

In legend, Yeti is a huge and furry human-resembling creature also referred to as the Abominable Snowman, but in science, Yeti is just a bear.

Now the question is: what kind of bear? A new study, published in the journal ZooKeys, concludes that hair sample "evidence" for Yeti actually comes from Himalayan brown bears.

The finding refutes an earlier study that the hair belonged to an unknown type of bear related to polar bears.

Top 10 Reasons Why Bigfoot's a Bust

At the center of the controversy are DNA analysis studies. Prior research, led by Bryan Sykes at the University of Oxford, determined that hairs formerly attributed to Yeti belonged to to a mysterious bear species that may not yet be known to science.

Sykes told Discovery News that his paper "refers to two Himalayan samples attributed to yetis and which turned out to be related to an ancient polar bear. This may be the source of the legend in the Himalayas."

The new study, however, calls this possibility into question. The research, in this case, was authored by Eliécer E. Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine at the University of Kansas.

Did They Really Find Bigfoot DNA?

Gutiérrez and Pine found that genetic variation in brown bears makes it impossible to assign, with certainty, the samples tested by Sykes and his co-authors to either brown bears or to polar bears.

Because of genetic overlap, the samples could have come from either species, but because brown bears occur in the Himalayas, Gutiérrez and Pine think there is no reason to believe that the samples in question came from anything other than ordinary Himalayan brown bears.

For the new study, Gutiérrez and Pine also examined how the gene sequences analyzed might show the ways in which six present-day species of bears — including the polar bear, the brown bear, and the extinct Eurasian cave bear — might be related.

Wolf Attacks More Myth than Reality

This opened up a new mystery, as DNA from an Asian black bear in Japan indicated that this bear was not closely related to the mainland members of that species. The researchers believe that this unexpected large evolutionary distance between the two geographic groups of the Asian black bear merits further study.

"In fact, a study looking at the genetic and morphological variability of Asian black bear populations throughout the geographic distribution of the species is yet to be conducted, and it would surely yield exciting results," Gutiérrez concluded.

As for Yeti, believers might point out that the studies only looked at hair samples, and not the footprints, photographs, recorded sounds and other "evidence" for the Abominable Snowman.

The crash of meteors on early Earth likely generated hydrogen cyanide, which could have kick-started the production of biomolecules needed to make the first cells.

The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for life to have gotten started, there must have been a genetic molecule—something like DNA or RNA—capable of passing along blueprints for making proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. But modern cells can’t copy DNA and RNA without the help of proteins themselves. To make matters more vexing, none of these molecules can do their jobs without fatty lipids, which provide the membranes that cells need to hold their contents inside. And in yet another chicken-and-egg complication, protein-based enzymes (encoded by genetic molecules) are needed to synthesize lipids.

Now, researchers say they may have solved these paradoxes. Chemists report today that a pair of simple compounds, which would have been abundant on early Earth, can give rise to a network of simple reactions that produce the three major classes of biomolecules—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—needed for the earliest form of life to get its start. Although the new work does not prove that this is how life started, it may eventually help explain one of the deepest mysteries in modern science.

“This is a very important paper,” says Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist and origin-of-life researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not affiliated with the current research. “It proposes for the first time a scenario by which almost all of the essential building blocks for life could be assembled in one geological setting.”

Scientists have long touted their own favorite scenarios for which set of biomolecules formed first. “RNA World” proponents, for example suggest RNA may have been the pioneer; not only is it able to carry genetic information, but it can also serve as a proteinlike chemical catalyst, speeding up certain reactions. Metabolism-first proponents, meanwhile, have argued that simple metal catalysts, as opposed to advanced protein-based enzymes, may have created a soup of organic building blocks that could have given rise to the other biomolecules.

The RNA World hypothesis got a big boost in 2009. Chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom reported that they had discovered that relatively simple precursor compounds called acetylene and formaldehyde could undergo a sequence of reactions to produce two of RNA’s four nucleotide building blocks, showing a plausible route to how RNA could have formed on its own—without the need for enzymes—in the primordial soup. Critics, though, pointed out that acetylene and formaldehyde are still somewhat complex molecules themselves. That begged the question of where they came from.

For their current study, Sutherland and his colleagues set out to work backward from those chemicals to see if they could find a route to RNA from even simpler starting materials. They succeeded. In the current issue of Nature Chemistry, Sutherland’s team reports that it created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and ultraviolet (UV) light. What is more, Sutherland says, the conditions that produce nucleic acid precursors also create the starting materials needed to make natural amino acids and lipids. That suggests a single set of reactions could have given rise to most of life’s building blocks simultaneously.

Sutherland’s team argues that early Earth was a favorable setting for those reactions. HCN is abundant in comets, which rained down steadily for nearly the first several hundred million years of Earth’s history. The impacts would also have produced enough energy to synthesize HCN from hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. Likewise, Sutherland says, H2S was thought to have been common on early Earth, as was the UV radiation that could drive the reactions and metal-containing minerals that could have catalyzed them.

That said, Sutherland cautions that the reactions that would have made each of the sets of building blocks are different enough from one another—requiring different metal catalysts, for example—that they likely would not have all occurred in the same location. Rather, he says, slight variations in chemistry and energy could have favored the creation of one set of building blocks over another, such as amino acids or lipids, in different places. “Rainwater would then wash these compounds into a common pool,” says Dave Deamer, an origin-of-life researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t affiliated with the research.

Could life have kindled in that common pool? That detail is almost certainly forever lost to history. But the idea and the “plausible chemistry” behind it is worth careful thought, Deamer says. Szostak agrees. “This general scenario raises many questions,” he says, “and I am sure that it will be debated for some time to come.”

The study was published in Nature by a team of scientists from UK and Germany led by Andre Geim of University of Manchester and G. Algara-Siller of University of Ulm. The accompanying review article was done by Alan Soper of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK.

"We didn't expect to find square ice ... We found there is something strange in terms of water going through [nanochannels]. It's going too fast. And you can't explain that by just imagining a very thin layer of liquid. Liquids do not behave in that way. The important thing to realize is that it is ice in the sense of a crystallized structure, it's not ice in the familiar sense in that it's something cold and from which you have to protect yourself," said Professor Irina Grigorieva, one of the researchers.

To study the molecular structure of water inside a transparent nanoscale capillary, the team used electron microscopy. This enabled them to view individual water molecules, especially because the nano-capillary was created from graphene which was one atom thick and would not impair the electron imaging. Graphene was also chosen because it has unusual properties like conducting electricity and extreme strength. It's a 2D form of carbon that once rolled up in cylinders will form a carbon nanotube, a material, which according to The Koyal Group Info Mag, is a subject of further study because of its unusual strength.

The scientists themselves were admittedly surprised at finding out that small square-shaped ice crystals formed at room temperature where the graphene capillaries are narrow (3 atomic layers of water at most). The water molecules formed into square lattices arranged in neat rows -- an arrangement that is uncharacteristic for the element that is known for forming consistent triangular structures inside regular ice. Thisdiscoverymay just be the first example of water behavior in nanostructure.

The Koyal Group Info Mag reports that scientists have been trying to understand for decades how water structure is affected when it is confined in narrow channels. It is only now that this becomes possible through computer simulations, but even with those, the results they get do not agree with each other.

The team is also trying to determine how common this square ice actually is by using computer simulations. And from what they've learned, if the water layer is thin enough, it could create a square ice regardless of the chemical properties of the nanopore's walls where it is confined. Since there is water practically everywhere -- in microscopic pores and monolayers on surfaces -- it is likely that square ice is actually very common in nature.

Aside from its more practical applications in water distillation, desalination and filtration, their finding also allows for a better understanding of how water behave at a molecular scale which is important in nanotechnology work.