This is really crazy

Steve McNair Found Dead in Nashville


Former NFL quarterback Steve McNair was found dead, having suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head, according to multiple published reports. McNair was 36.

The third overall pick in the 1995 draft out of Alcorn State, McNair played 13 seasons in the NFL -- 11 with the Houston Oilers/Tennessee Oilers/Tennessee Titans franchise and his final two in Baltimore.

He played in his final NFL game on Nov. 11, 2007, a 21-7 Ravens loss to the Bengals. McNair announced his official retirement in April of 2008.

NewsChannel 5 reports that police also found the body of a female victim, and believe the incident may have been a double homicide.

Human Centrifuge Preserves Muscle at Zero-G

Preventing muscle loss in space is simple: Just spend an hour a day in a giant human centrifuge that’s spinning at 30 rotations per minute. And don’t lose your lunch.
In the first human experiment looking at the effects of artificial gravity on muscle mass, researchers discovered that a force of 2.5 G applied to the feet for an hour a day halts the muscle wasting normally associated with weightlessness.
“We’ve all seen footage of astronauts on stationary bicycles or attached to a treadmill with bungee cords,” said physiologist Doug Paddon-Jones of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who co-authored the paper published this month in the Journal of Applied Physiology. “We tried the kind of obvious thing and said, ‘Let’s try to put the gravity back.’”
Scientists still don’t know why the “use it or lose it” adage holds true for muscles. But astronauts start losing muscle mass within days of entering a zero-gravity environment, and the longer they stay in space, the more their muscles shrink. Back on Earth, elderly hospital patients can lose more than a kilogram of muscle in just three days of lying in bed...

You should know by now that looks much better this way

Chinese Scientists Reprogram Cells to Create Mice

Two teams of Chinese researchers working separately have reprogrammed mature skin cells of mice to an embryonic-like state and used the resulting cells to create live mouse offspring.....

Green beetle's super-shiny secret




Under left circularly polarised light, the same beetle looks "super-green"


The stunning metallic green sheen of the "jewelled beetle" is produced by microscopic cells in its exoskeleton.

Researchers reporting in the journal Science have revealed that, with no green pigments, these structures make the beetle appear iridescent green.

These cells, they said, were almost identical to hi-tech liquid crystals.

The scientists found that the structures make the beetle appear very intensely green under light that is polarised in one direction.

Polarisation can be thought of as the orientation of light waves. And white light, or natural light, is essentially a mixture of randomly polarised light........

Could Earth Be Hit, Like Jupiter Just Was?

The recent bruising Jupiter received from a cosmic impact is a violent reminder that our solar system is a shooting gallery that sometimes blasts Earth.
Still, what are the odds of a cosmic impact threatening our planet?
So far 784 near-Earth objects (NEOs) more than a half-mile wide (1 km) have been found.


This image provided by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope taken with it's Wide Field Camera 3 on Thursday July 23, 2009 shows the sharpest visible-light picture taken of the impact feature (dark spot) and 'backsplash' of material from a small object that plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere and disintegrated. The only other time in history such a feature has been seen on Jupiter was in 1994 during the collision of fragments from comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. This is a natural color image of Jupiter as seen in visible light.