It's not nice to keep animals trapped inside of jars, but what if they were virtual animals, instead? This is the thinking behind Jarpet, an interactive 3D projection system that recently won a Red Dot design award.

Using Jarpet, children can visualize and interact with 3D projected pets that seem to appear and move inside a jar. The device, which can plug into a computer via USB, can display an assortment of downloadable virtual animals. Kids can use the system to not just observe animals, but to learn about their behaviors, life cycles, and habits.

Users can also interact with the animals through the use of multi-sensory technology.

Jarpet was designed by Zhang Di, Zhao Tianji, Ma Yinghui and Cui Minghui.

H/t Yankodesign.

All images: Jarpet/Yankodesign.

The double helix DNA structure is about as iconic as its gets. But geneticists have long speculated about the potential for a quadruple helix to exist — a four-stranded DNA structure. And indeed, computer models and lab experiments have suggested that it's theoretically possible.

Now, researchers working at Cambridge University have proven that quadruplexes do in fact exist in nature and they can be found right inside the cells of our bodies. Trouble is, their presence has been correlated with an increase in cellular replication — a process that could be contributing to the spread of some cancers.

Rapid Cellular Division

Called the "G-quadruplex," it's a square-shaped structure that forms in regions of DNA that are rich in the building block, guanine (abbreviated as G, and is one of the four main nucleobases found in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA). It's held together by a special type of hydrogen bonding, one that forms a compact square matrix that can disrupt the DNA helix.

The researchers, a team that included Giulia Biffi, Shankar Balasubramanian and Julie Sharp, were able to isolate the quadruplexes within human cancer cells by using fluorescent biomarkers. The research was funded by Cancer Research UK.

Their discovery shows that a clear link can be established between the presence of concentrated amounts of quadruplexes and the process of DNA replication — a combo that's facilitating cell division and production. And indeed, the research showed that quadruplexes are more likely to occur in genes of cells that are rapidly dividing — including cancer cells. Moreover, they also tend to appear in the core of chromosomes and in telomeres (the caps on the tips of chromosomes that protect them from damage).

Potential Therapy

Consequently, the researchers are looking to further establish this potential link and create a cancer therapy in which synthetic molecules can be used to trap and contain these genetic trouble makers, thus preventing certain cells from replicating their DNA. The scientists are hoping that such a therapy could halt the runaway cell proliferation that's so characteristic of cancer. And indeed, when cancer cells divide rapidly, they often exhibit defects in their telomeres; subsequently, there may be a very intimate link between quadruplexes and tumorous growths.

To prove the existence of the quadruplexes, the researchers generated antibody proteins that could locate and bind to sections of the human genome that's rich in quadruplex-structured DNA. They used fluorescence to mark the antibodies, thus allowing them to visually see where the four-stranded DNA was doing its work within the genome — and at what stage of cell division.

Interestingly, the quadruplex DNA exists fairly consistently throughout the genome of human cells, but they increase dramatically during the ‘s-phase' of replication, the time when DNA replicates before the cell divides.

Tumors grow when cell proliferation spirals out of control — a process that's driven by genes called oncogenes that have mutated to increase DNA replication. As a result, the increased DNA replication rate in oncogenes leads to an increase in quadruplex structures. So, if the researchers can figure out a way to trap the quadruplex DNA with synthetic molecules, they could devise a novel way to treat cancer.

"This research further highlights the potential for exploiting these unusual DNA structures to beat cancer –- the next part of this pipeline is to figure out how to target them in tumour cells," said Sharp through a release.

Read the entire study at Nature.

Images: Cambridge University.

Back in September we told you about Kim Suozzi, the 23-year old neuroscience student who was in the midst of battling terminal brain cancer. Sadly, she passed away last week on January 17th — but not before a successful fundraising campaign managed to secure the funds required to grant Suozzi her dying wish: cryonic preservation.

Suozzi's effort to get cryonically preserved began when she asked the Reddit community for help. At the time, she was only expected to live for another three to six months, making her request for financial assistance all the more urgent.

"I want to be cryogenically preserved when I die from brain cancer but can't afford it," she wrote, "I am literally begging for financial help."

Needless to say, preservation and storage at a cryonics facility like Alcor Life Extension Foundation or Cryonics Institute is not cheap. A standard Alcor suspension costs $70,000.00, which includes high quality stand-by, neuropreservation, and storage — but only if the terminal member relocates to the Phoenix area (otherwise the additional stand-by and transport costs bring the total to $80,000.00).

A whole-body preservation at Alcor costs $200,000.00. Cryonics Institute charges $28,000.00 for a whole-body preservation, but this fee does not include stand-by and transportation costs.

Both companies use vitrification preservation chemicals that stops the formation of damaging ice crystals, but they also have different facilities and procedures.

Most members of Alcor and CI are able to meet these costs by taking out a second life insurance policy and naming the cryonics company of their choice as the beneficiary. Preservations are only conducted on patients who have already been pronounced clinically dead.

Soon after Suozzi's posting on Reddit, she set up her own fundraising campaign.

Quickly thereafter, a cryonics-friendly futurist group called Society for Venturism set up its own charitable fund. This group, a volunteer-run not-for-profit, is no stranger to this process; it has already successfully raised funds for two cryopreservations and is currently working on one urgent case.

Between the two fundraising efforts, enough money was raised for Suozzi to be cryonically preserved at Alcor — a procedure that was undertaken a few days ago. Alcor will be issuing a statement shortly.

"When funds are raised for a cryonics charity recipient they can choose to contract with the cryonics organization of their choice," Shannon Vyff told io9. "It is up to them to set up their contract; the Society for Venturism will then provide funds to the cryonics organization they have contracted with." Vyff is a board of Society for Venturism, and an Alcor and Cryonics Institute member.

"I have been happy to help the cryonics community, and at times it is hard raise funds for a charity recipient," she told us. "Kim's case was compelling to many people — not only did many cryonicists donate but non-cryonicists as well." After having worked on one charity case before and hearing about how two past cases went, Vyff was impressed with how quickly funds were raised for Suozzi. Within just months she had enough to fund a neurosuspension with Alcor.

Speaking through an official announcement, Suozzi's boyfriend had this to say:

Our hope is that technology will continue to progress to the point that Kim may have a real chance of living again in the future. Unfortunately, the development of the requisite technologies could be decades or centuries away. Since Kim is no longer with us to explore and innovate in the field of neuroscience, she is counting on all of us to push for the innovations she had hoped to see in her lifetime.

Until (or unless) the day comes that Kim can be brought back, remember her, celebrate her, and emulate her resilience, so we can create the future of her dreams.

Nobody is too young to make cryopreservation arrangements.

Prior to her death, Suozzi had been in touch with another Society for Venturism case, Aaron Winborn, a 45-year-old man struggling with ALS. Hoping to help, but frustrated by her failing health, she contacted him and apologized that she could not do more.

Those looking to help can do so here.

Top image courtesy Christopher Barnatt/ExplainingTheFuture.

Well, this is embarrassing: According to botanists, Canada's brand new polymer $20 bill has the wrong maple leaf on it. Instead of choosing a maple leaf derived from any one of 13 species native to the country, the Bank of Canada appears to have chosen a leaf from an invasive species, the Norway maple. But despite the claims from scientists, the Bank of Canada says it has a perfectly good explanation.

Indeed, this wouldn't be the first time the currency-bombing Norway maple has made its way into Canadian iconography. Though the tree came to North America in the late 18th century (it was imported by a Philadelphian merchant who sold it to Canadian gardeners as an exotic adornment), it has appeared in such places as the official logos of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, the Natural History Museums of Canada, and the FIFA under-20 World Cup of Soccer.

But as senior botanist Sean Blaney recently told the CBC, "It's a species that's invasive in Eastern Canada and is displacing some of our native species, and it's probably not an appropriate species to be putting on our native currency."

Typically, the leaf of the sugar maple is used, and is the one featured on the Canadian flag.

In its defense, the Bank of Canada says that it's a "stylized blend" of Canadian maple species — a kind of amalgamation of several maple species. But Blaney — and others — are not impressed with this explanation:

"It seems a bit like an after-the-fact explanation to me. The bottom line is that, the image on the bill looks exactly like a Norway maple, however it was derived," he said.

University of Ottawa Prof. Julian Starr, also a research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, specializes in plant identification and classification.

He has been consulted by the Royal Canadian Mint about the botanical accuracy of its coins, but he was not shown this maple leaf.

"This could not be confused with a native species of Canada," said Starr. "It basically looks like a Norway maple."

According to the CBC, there are 400 million bank notes already in circulation, including $20, $50 and $100 bills. There are plans to print another 1.2 billion more bank notes, including $5 and $10 bills.

Image: CBC.

ScienceNow is reporting that marine biologists working in the Azorean archipelago of the Northern Atlantic have discovered a group of sperm whales who appear to have taken in an adult bottlenose dolphin who has a rather serious spinal malformation. And it wasn't just a one-time encounter for the two species; the dolphin appears to be sticking around.

Other than the 'S' shape curvature to its body, the dolphin appears to be healthy. The researchers have virtually no way of knowing if the deformity has anything to do with the unprecedented inter-species co-mingling — though they suspect that it does.

Dolphins are a hierarchical species, so they may have shunned this particular member on account of its serious birth defect. In the words of one of the researchers, Alexander Wilson, "It might be that this individual didn't fit in, so to speak, with its original group." Or maybe it just couldn't keep up. For now, however, this will all have to remain speculative thinking.

Chelsea Wald explains more:

Among ocean-dwelling mammals, dolphins are perhaps the most gregarious. They've been spotted traveling, foraging, and playing with a wide variety of other animals, including many whales. On the other hand, as far as the authors of the forthcoming paper in Aquatic Mammals know, sperm whales had never been reported cozying up to another species. Specialized deep-water hunters who travel great distances, the whales are more timid than dolphins and harder for people to observe.

Indeed, behavioral ecologists Alexander Wilson and Jens Krause of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin did not expect to find a mixed-species group when they set out to observe sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) some 15 to 20 kilometers off the island of Pico in the Azores in 2011. But when they got there, they found not only a group that included several whale calves, but also an adult male bottlenose dolphin ( Tursiops truncatus). Over the next 8 days, they observed the dolphin six more times while it nuzzled and rubbed members of the group. The sperm whales seemed to at least tolerate it; at times, they reciprocated. "It really looked like they had accepted the dolphin for whatever reason," says Wilson, who was snorkeling nearby. "They were being very sociable."

As to why the sperm whales took in the dolphin, the researchers aren't sure about that, either. But they warn against reading to much into it, saying that what looks to us like "pity" or compassion may be in fact something else entirely.

More here, including slideshow with more photos.

Images: ScienceNOW/Alexander D. M. Wilson/Aquatic Mammals

In a country that's crazy about their cats, economist Gareth Morgan has his work cut out for him. Concerned about the threat that cats are placing on New Zealand's native bird population, he has launched a campaign to make the country free of felines. But given that New Zealanders own more cats per capita than most other parts of the world, it's very unlikely that Morgan's wish will be granted.

To make it happen, Morgan set up a website called Cats to Go that encourages people to make their current cat their last.

"That little ball of fluff you own is a natural born killer," he writes. "Every year cats in New Zealand destroy our native wildlife. The fact is that cats have to go if we really care about our environment."

Morgan is hoping that people will gradually phase out the cat population — and all in the name of saving New Zealand's native bird species.

He does not advocate for euthanasia (though the website states: "Not necessarily but that is an option"), and would rather that the cats be neutered. He also wants to see cats kept indoors and a mandatory registry created.

But the hisses of outrage have already begun. Most New Zealanders aren't taking kindly to Morgan's plan. As the Associated Press reports:

A 2011 survey by the New Zealand Companion Animal Council found that 48 percent of households in New Zealand owned at least one cat, a significantly higher rate than in other developed nations. The survey put the total cat population at 1.4 million.

In the U.S., 33 percent of households own at least one cat for a total of 86 million domestic cats, according to a 2012 survey by the American Pet Products Association.

As to the environmental impact of cats, scientists say Morgan has a point, and that cats have likely contributed to the extinction of at least half a dozen New Zealand bird species.

Sources: Cats to Go, AP, The Atavism, Stuff.co.nz.

Top image: Pete Pahham/Shutterstock; Image via Stuff.co.nz.

Australian freelance illustrator Richard Morden has put together a whimsical and surprisingly accurate map of Pangaea, the massive supercontinent that dominated the Earth over 200 million years ago. With the caption, "Our world long ago with lands joined together, when first appeared beasties of fur and of feather," the map features an assortment of animals that belonged to the era.

Illustration by Richard Morden; the poster is available for purchase here.

The Pangaean supercontinent, along with the interior Tethys Ocean, existed about 200 to 250 million years ago, what would have been the Triassic period. The landmass was created from the collision of the two major continents, Gondwana and Laurussia.

Geophysicist Jesper Dramsch explains further:

We're looking at a time after the Perm-Triassic extinction. It took another 30 million years for life to redevelop into it's beautiful diverse complexity and it was the start of an era. The dinosaurs inhabited Earth. They're not quite drawn to scale but that's artistic freedom. We can find Ichthyosaurus South-East of the lettering Tethys Ocean, which was a highly succesful marine predator. Down in "Antarctica" South of Pangaea you can find a shark-like lifeform. In case you didn't know, yes sharks are some animal that happens to be around a little longer.

On land we can find the first known flying reptile, the pterosaurs, just between Europe and North America. The other species on two or four legs resemble quite a few images I found of Proterosuchus, Cynognathus, Coelophysis and the famous Plateosaurus.

H/t via It's Okay to be Smart.

Earlier this month, a report funded by the Greenwall Foundation examined the legal and ethical implications of using biologically enhanced humans on the battlefield. Given the Pentagon's open acknowledgement that it's working to create super-soldiers, this is quickly becoming a pertinent issue. We wanted to learn more, so we contacted one of the study's authors. He told us that the use of cyber-soldiers could very well be interpreted as a violation of international law. Here's why.

To help us parse through the details of the report, we contacted Keith Abney of California Polytechnic State University. Abney, along with Patrick Lin and Maxwell Mehlman, are the authors of the report, called "Enhanced Warfighters: Risks, Ethics, and Policy." The group, which investigates ethical and legal issues as they pertain to the military's effort to enhance human warfighters, received funding from the Greenwall Foundation.

"Too often, our society falls prey to a ‘first generation' problem — we wait until something terrible has happened, and then hastily draw up some ill-conceived plan to fix things after the fact, often with noxious unintended consequences," Abney told io9. "As an educator, my primary role here is not to agitate for any particular political solution, but to help people think through the difficult ethical and policy issues this emerging technology will bring, preferably before something horrible happens."

Transhuman Soldiers

As Abney reminded us, this isn't some fantasy bourne of sci-fi paranoia. The Pentagon is full-steam-ahead on developing a host of human enhancement technologies, some of which have become public knowledge, and others that are undoubtedly classified.

For example, Abney told us that several research organizations are developing exoskeletons to increase human strength and endurance — including the ability to carry payloads of 200 pounds and to sustain a run at seven to 10 miles per hour (11 to 16 kph). These include Lockheed Martin's HULC, Raytheon's XOS, UC Berkeley's BLEEX, and other projects.

"There's also DARPA's Reconfigurable Structures program," he added, "the Z-Man is another bio-inspired project that is developing Geckskin, an adhesive fabric that can enable humans to climb walls like geckos, spiders, and other animals."

In addition, DARPA's Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) is a computer-assisted visual aid that instantly identifies threats that warfighters might only subconsciously see given that only a fraction of their visual data is consciously registered. Similarly, the Pentagon's advanced concepts wing is also working on telescoping contact lenses.

The Human Assisted Neural Devices program, also from DARPA, seeks to strengthen and restore memories. But as Abney pointed out, there's other research that aims to produce drugs and treatments that can erase memories; post-traumatic stress disorder is a serious problem that the Pentagon would dearly love to stamp out.

Not content to rely to amphetamines and other stimulants — what the military likes to call "go pills — DARPA's Peak Soldier Performance program seeks to boost human endurance, both physical and cognitive.

"And though it may seem even more speculative, the military has funded the study of Metabolic Flexibility and Suspended Animation — which could actually make hibernation possible," says Abney.

Not surprisingly, the United States is not alone. China and Scotland are working to enhance acoustic speech with cochlear implants, while Canada is seeking to develop hearing protection that filters out environmental noises while enhancing verbal signals. "The same system could also utilize a tactile cueing system for pilots to detect motion without visual or auditory cues," he added.

Given the intrinsic and extrinsic nature of these technologies and how they're to be applied, we asked Abney how his team was able to define ‘enhancement' at all. For example, didn't humans become ‘enhanced' soldiers when they first picked up sword and shield?

Abney agreed that it's a difficult question — and it proved to be one of the most challenging aspects of the debate. Ultimately, after much consideration, they settled on a single definition.

"In the end, we argued that the best definition of an enhancement is that it's ‘a medical or biological intervention to the body designed to improve performance, appearance, or capability besides what is necessary to achieve, sustain or restore health,'" he said.

Abney and his colleagues make the case that the risks such enhancements pose over and above what is required for normal health helps explain their need for special moral consideration.

The Right to Enhance?

Indeed, given these incredible advancements — what is tantamount to the cyborgization of human beings — we asked Abney if the military has the right to enhance its soldiers in this way.

"That brings up a bunch of complicated issues," he said. "The requirement of ‘informed consent' in civilian bioethics does not — and realistically, cannot — fully apply to military service."

That said, the Greenwall report examined three different models for understanding the best way of thinking about the military's responsibilities to individual warfighters as it pertains to human enhancement.

"There's the medical model — including informed consent — of civilian bioethics, with the physician's responsibility being to the patient first and foremost. There's the research model used in civilian clinical trials — in which the physician has a goal of acquiring new knowledge and not just helping the patient. And then there's the public health model used in emergencies — such as quarantine during a pandemic — when the goal of protecting the public may outweigh individual rights."

Of these three, said Abney, the public health model is the best template for the military to follow. But the Greenwall report made some recommendations for a ‘hybrid framework' that addressed several items that the military should respect in order to ethically enhance its warfighters — a list that included such things legitimate military purpose, military necessity, the warfighter's dignity, consent, transparency, and so on.

A Super-soldier is a Safe Soldier

When considering some of the enhancements under development, many of them could actually be considered a good thing — that they could actually reduce the physical and psychological burden placed on soldiers.

"For sure, enhancements, by definition, are a good thing — for some purposes — or else it makes no sense to term them ‘enhancements,'" Abney told io9. "A decreased capacity for pain helps if you need to keep fighting without being paralyzed by pain, but can harm one if, being insensate, one is unaware of a traumatic, perhaps lethal injury."

Without a doubt, noted Abney, the most significant questions involve the risks such enhancements impose, not merely on those undergoing the enhancement, but also on others who may be affected — like families and other civilians who come in contact with the enhanced warfighters, or enemy combatants and the public at large. To that end, the Greenwall report presented a rubric for assessing both the risks and the supposed benefits.

The Potential for War Crimes

Getting to the heart of the matter, we asked Abney if the Geneva Convention, either explicitly or implicitly, forbids the use of enhanced soldiers in combat.

"There are no explicit rules against enhanced warfighters, he responded, "in part because the Convention, like all documents, was written against the assumptions of its time, and no one foresaw — at least, in any detail — the issues that we are discussing. It is, however, arguable that Article 36, in its prohibition of inhumane new weapons, might be used to prohibit certain kinds of enhanced warfighters."

Abney said that certain kinds of military robots would clearly be prohibited under Article 36. He also noted that a continuum exists between certain kinds of human-machine cyborgization and an ultimate replacement of all the organics of a warfighter by machine parts — turning a human warfighter into a fighting robot.

As an example, Abney points to Oscar Pistorius, the Olympian athlete who runs on artificial legs.

"Presumably if he enlisted, Article 36 would not ban his service," he says. "But what if his artificial legs could also serve as a flamethrower, or a missile launcher? At what point could a warfighter himself turn into a prohibited weapon? Imagine a warfighter with enhancements designed to violate the basic tenets of the laws of war and International Humanitarian Law, perhaps with psycho-cognitive enhancements — like a hypothetical "berserker" drug — that enabled him to kill ruthlessly and relentlessly."

Abney makes the case that if the result is superfluous injury, caused without distinction between combatant and civilian, than he might be considered in himself a novel weapon, prohibited under Article 36.

Enhanced Humans as Biological Weapons

The Greenwall report also made note of the possibility that human enhancement could qualify as a biological weapon under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

And indeed, the first article of the BTWC states that:

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain: (1) microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes; (2) weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.

The key phrase, here, is "other biological agents." Typically, this passage is meant to apply to viruses or bacteria that's directed at adversaries, and not to the enhancement of one's personnel.

So, could a human be a ‘biological agent'?

"Well, presumably the BTWC requires the agent be biological in nature (e.g., a smallpox virus), as opposed to purely chemical (e.g., mustard gas) or physical (e.g., a kinetic bomb); and an agent is a substance or actor employed for some effect or purpose (e.g., LSD is a psychotropic agent)."

In a broader but consistent sense, said Abney, agents can be persons too — like a CIA ‘secret agent.'

"If so, then enhanced warfighters can be agents," he noted. "Even if we reject this understanding and stipulate that biological agents must be living but nonperson substances — an interpretation that is not explicit in the BTWC — we can still consider the enhancement technology itself as an agent, apart from the warfighter it enhances. So, a virus that enhances warfighters by removing inhibitions (like, say, the virus that causes toxoplasmosis) may be seen as a biological agent."

Abney noted that some biological agents that don't directly harm adversaries, such as anabolic steroids for increased strength — are still applicable as biological agents.

Moral Repugnance

Given the Greenwall report's somewhat startling suggestion that the use of human enhancement on the battlefield may in fact constitute a war crime, we asked Abney if it also violates our moral sensibilities — that, when used in this way, it is repugnant to the values of humanity.

"The idea of ‘inhumane weapons' sometimes evokes such sentiments, but objective violations of crucial human values — such as the principles of distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants, or avoiding unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury — do not rest on whatever particular emotions that accompany them. One commits a war crime when wantonly murdering civilians, whether one does so in horror, or numb acceptance, or with glee. So arguments that appeal merely to sentiments or sensibilities are unimpressive."

In closing, we asked Abney what frightens him the most about the potential for human enhancement on the battlefield.

"That the human warfighters who are so enhanced will gradually be regarded by the military as very special, expensive, valuable tools, and no longer as full persons with all the usual rights and duties accorded full human persons," he replied. "To join a military has always been to accept one's role in a larger cause, and with certain diminished freedoms as a result — but the intrinsic value of a warfighter has never before been routinely confused with the merely instrumental value of a tank or a missile or a rifle."

But at some point, he told us, a change in degree begins to be seen as a change in kind.

"If the physical abilities of warfighters become too great, it may take great restraint on the part of their commanders and even their peers to see them, not as a killing machine, but as a person — even if they are enhanced."

Top Image: Tom Clancy Ghost Recon; other images: Dvice, Tout Lecine, Offline.

French sculptor Gael Langevin's InMoov project combines two of our favorite things: 3D printing and robotics. Though he had no previous experience making robots, Langevin spent the last year figuring it all out, ultimately developing and coding a voice controlled android that can be constructed from parts generated by a 3D printer. And not only that, he has made the entire project freely available via open source so that any DIY'er can print their own.

Langevin started by building the android's right hand, and it quickly took off from there. He designed the bot in Blender and printed it on a 3D Touch in ABS. And remarkably, it's all designed such that it's fully animated and responds to voice control.

Using Myrobotlab and GroG, the robot can "see" and hold objects after the voice command has been issued.

Source: InMoov and 3ders.

Images via 3ders.

Check out this spectacular and incredibly vivid long exposure capture by fine art photographer Amery Carlson. It's a photograph of a lightning storm taken off the coast of Ventura, California (what is officially the city of San Buenaventura).

Aside from how intricate each strand of lightning appears to be, I love how both the exit and entry points of the lightning strikes can be seen — kinda like portals to another word. I also like how the clouds appear in the foreground, what gives the photo a sense of depth and perspective. And the various shades of blue are simply delicious.

Just looking at the photo, however, it's not clear if locusts began falling from the sky soon afterward.

Check out Carlson's Flickr site.

H/t Twisted Sifter.

Japan's new right-wing government hasn't wasted time in alienating tens of millions of its voters. According to finance minister Taro Aso, elderly people should "hurry up and die" so that pressure can be relieved on the state to pay for their skyrocketing medical bills.

Indeed, nearly a quarter of Japan's population is over 60, so the government is starting to feel the strain. But given the potential for more advanced life extension technologies and even longer lives, it's something that governments — and voters — are going to have get used to. Anything less would be utterly discriminatory.

Aso made the statement Monday during a meeting of a national council looking at changes to social security. He also referred to seniors who are unable to feed themselves as "tube people." The Guardian reports:

Cost aside, caring for the elderly is a major challenge for Japan's stretched social services. According to a report this week, the number of households receiving welfare, which include family members aged 65 or over, stood at more than 678,000, or about 40% of the total. The country is also tackling a rise in the number of people who die alone, most of whom are elderly. In 2010, 4.6 million elderly people lived alone, and the number who died at home soared 61% between 2003 and 2010, from 1,364 to 2,194, according to the bureau of social welfare and public health in Tokyo.

The government is planning to reduce welfare expenditure in its next budget, due to go into force this April, with details of the cuts expected within days.

Aso, who has a propensity for verbal blunders, later attempted to clarify his comments. He acknowledged his language had been "inappropriate" in a public forum and insisted he was talking only about his personal preference.

This "clarification" aside, the finance minister is evidently reacting to not just current fiscal realities, but to estimates predicting that over 40% of the Japanese population will be over 60 in the next 50 years.

Clearly, the aging population is placing a tremendous strain on the government, both in Japan and elsewhere. But that's no excuse for such agist and callous comments. The elderly population is being treated as second class citizens, and as a kind of regrettable reality that the state is forced to deal with.

Such sentiments are unacceptable and completely undemocratic. But what's even more troubling is the potential for this kind of discrimination to get even worse. We are at the dawn of the second wave of life extension, where human longevity is set to increase even more dramatically. Wishing that elderly people would just "hurry up and die" is not a vision for the future. It's a myopic perspective that will only exacerbate the resentment young people feel towards the older generations — generations who have the right to life and unhindered access to medical technologies.

Rather than bemoan the presence of an increasingly aged population, governments need to own up to what's happening. It's clearly going to be a monumental challenge, but simply hoping that people will quickly die so that they don't have to figure this all out is clearly not the way to go.

Top photo by Daniel Berehulak. Lower image: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images.

A recent paper published in Nature Geoscience has proposed the existence of an entirely new kind of volcanic eruption, which geologists are now calling a 'tangaroan' eruption. Rather than being either explosive or effusive, this newly documented type of eruption involves the slow release of magma that generates a kind of buoyant foam filled with tiny bubbles. Then, these globs of hardening molten lava rise to the ocean surface, where they become waterlogged and sink back down.

Floating chunks of volcanic rock are nothing new to scientists. When explosive underwater eruptions happen, gas bubbles called "vesicles" expand so quickly that they fragment the magma, causing it to cool and de-gas — thus creating a form of solidified pumice that's light enough to float on water.

And in fact, these rocks are sometimes found floating on the water in huge quantities. Just last year a mass of floating rocks were found off New Zealand — an expanse of molten rock that occupied a space the size of Belgium (about a 26,000 square kilometer stretch (10,039 square miles)).

But this previously undocumented form of volcanic eruption is a bit different.

According to the researchers, a team consisting of Ian Wright and Melissa Rotella of the National Oceanography Centre, recent analysis on volcanic remnants indicated a new kind of process. Specifically, they documented the shape and density of bubbles in pumices generated by the Macauley volcano, an underwater caldera volcano in the southwest Pacific Ocean. They found large differences in the number and shape of bubbles in conventionally sized pumice — an indication that something different was going on geologically.

They figured that the bubble densities could not have formed from an explosive or effusive event, as the eruption was neither vigorous or gentle enough to produce the pumice. Instead, there had to be a kind of Goldilocks eruption — something in between these two well known processes.

In turn, the researchers are suggesting that, instead of exploding in the neck of the volcano, the formation and expansion of bubbles in the magma creates a kind of buoyant foam — which are called 'blebs.' This material eventually rises to the seafloor, where it assumes the form of a "molten pumice balloon" and floats up to the sea surface. But as it rises, the vesicles within the molten interior continue to expand as the water pressure gradually diminishes.

And it's this process that explains the unique bubble structures and densities seen in the samples; as a result, the tangaroan eruption is being thought of as an intermediate kind of volcanic eruption.

Interestingly, the word ‘tangaroan' means ‘Maori God of the Sea.'

You can read the entire study here.

Images: Image: Rotella et al (2012), Nature Geoscience.

Though it sounds suspiciously like Kurt Vonnegut's ice-nine from Cat's Cradle, a materials chemist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands has concocted a polymer that could turn an entire swimming pool into jelly. All that would be required is ample amounts of the compound, some warmth, and 25 minutes of time. The substance, called polyisocyanide polymer, is the first synthetic polymer that can equal the strength and rigidity found in many biological compounds, including living cells.

As Mark Peplow reports in Nature News, Radboud hasn't actually tried this experiment, but he's pretty sure it would work. But more importantly, he's excited about the materials breakthrough and what it could mean to the biomedical field.

Indeed, 'mechanical responsiveness' is a characteristic essential to the integrity of all biological systems, from tissues right down to cells. A sufficiently durable and robust material — one that could be generated on demand with a handy compound — could pave the way for advancements in drug delivery and tissue engineering.

For example, a cold solution of the polymer could be poured onto a wound to protect the tissue by quickly forming a gel barrier (i.e. a hydrogel) after it warms to body temperature.

Peplow explains how polyisocyanide polymer works:

Rowan's polymer strands have a helical backbone with thousands of short peptides jutting out from the sides, each carrying long tails made of repeating carbon and oxygen chains. Nitrogen and hydrogen atoms in neighbouring peptides bond to each other to give the backbone rigidity, and the carbon and oxygen tails readily grab water molecules, making the polymer extremely soluble.

Once the polymer is dissolved, warming it causes the tails to squeeze water molecules away and form links with neighbouring polymer strands. Above a certain temperature, the solution transforms into a gel in seconds as the strands self-assemble into bundles roughly 10 nanometres wide. As with the biopolymers in a living cell, or the fibres in a rope, the bundling stiffens the whole structure. "The nanoscale mechanism is the same as at the macroscale," says Rowan.

Researchers already knew that bundling was important in strengthening biopolymers. But Rowan's team has measured the stiffness of individual strands and of the bundles, and has shown the relationship between the two. "Now that we understand the principles, we can start making gels at even lower concentrations," predicts Rowan.

The entire study can be found here.

It has been a long time coming, but it looks like the vast majority of medical research performed on chimps in the United States is about to come to an end. A report from an internal working group was approved yesterday by the National Institutes of Health — and pending a final review by NIH director Francis Collins, the committee's recommendations will see nearly all of the 451 chimps currently held in government research facilities retired from active duty and relocated to federal sanctuaries. But as the new rules make clear, government scientists are still not ready to go the distance and put a halt to all research done on chimps.

Should the report be put into action, what looks to be a certainty at this point, 16 research projects will face closure over the next few years. That said, three projects will be allowed to continue — projects that address immunology and infectious diseases. It's very likely that research in hepatitis C and other diseases will be allowed to progress; no other animals, say scientists, provide a useful model for this kind of research (needless to say, researchers will continue to infect the chimps with these sorts of strains).

In addition, five of 13 studies on comparative genomics and behavioral research will end, while the remaining 8 will be allowed to continue in some form. And importantly, the report did not recommend future breeding.

Aside from ethical considerations, the committee justified its report by citing an Institute of Medicine report showing that smaller mammals, like mice, have become more effective for biomedical work.

It's clear that the committee wants to play it safe; halting all research on chimps makes a lot of people nervous. Consequently, the report is recommending that 50 chimps be maintained in a colony should their services be required in future. Their thinking has likely something to do with the threat of a pandemic or other health crisis. They want to ensure that reliable test subjects can be called upon in a crisis situation.

The committee also established criteria for how these remaining research chimpanzees are to be treated and kept in captivity. Moving forward, chimps will live in groups that contain no less than seven members, along with a minimum 1,000 square feet of space to move and climb. They will also be given outdoor access in all weather conditions, and opportunities to forage for food and build nests.

Disturbingly, the Humane Society says no labs in the U.S. currently meet these requirements.

The committee's guidelines, which were two years in the making, also set some stringent rules for new proposed studies, including the need for independent committees to evaluate the efficacy and safety of future research — committees that will also involve members of the public.

As we reported last month, many of the retired chimps will be moved to Chimp Haven, a federal sanctuary in Louisiana.

Of the 451 chimps held by the NIH, 282 are available for research, and 169 are inactive. Once the report is approved, the fate of the remaining chimps will be determined.

All this said, the Humane Society claims that another 350 chimps are currently being studied by universities or private companies. Consequently, the Humane Society, along with other groups, is lobbying for legislation to limit chimp research across the board.

Sources: New York Times, The Chronicle, NPR.

Top image via HBO. Other images: Chimp Haven.

As if 3D printers weren't mind-blowing enough, iRobot (yes, the company responsible for the Roomba) has just filed a patent for a robot-assisted all-in-one fabricator that can print, mill, drill, and finish a final product — and all without human intervention. Called the "Robotic Fabricator," the system is a precursor to machines that will eventually be able to autonomously construct other machines from scratch — including itself.

Typically, 3D printing involves a considerable amount of human oversight. Machine handlers need to remove unwanted materials such as burrs on plastic and metal parts, reposition and remove printed objects, and get rid of powdery dust from the interiors of intricate structures.

But this machine, with its robotic arms and sensors, takes away the need for an operator by functioning as both a milling machine and a drill.

It features a flexible pair of grippers that exhibit an impressive six degrees of freedom. And the platform is equipped with a series of sensors that tells the computer where it's at in terms of the production, and when to utilize the additive technique of 3D printing or the subtractive (and conventional) technique of milling and drilling.

And to combine pieces, the machine can secure objects with glue, connectors, or fasteners.

Eventually, the autonomous fabricator will be used in various industries for producing and repairing products. iRobot says any number of materials can be used, including ABS, polycarbonate, silicone rubbers, urethane rubbers, plastics, and low-melting-temperature metals, as well as combinations of these.

Looking to the future, it'll be fabricators much like this one that'll be able to construct entire machines from scratch, and all without human intervention. It also brings to mind the RepRap Project (short for Replicating Rapid Prototyper), a conceptual 3D printer that can print most of its own components.

More information can be found here and here.

Image: Christian Delbert/Shutterstock.

How cool would it be to set aside a day to celebrate the birth of one of the most important and influential scientists to ever walk this good Earth? That's exactly what U.S. House Democrat Russ Holt is hoping to establish — and he's introduced a resolution to Congress that would see February 12, 2013 officially recognized as Darwin Day.

Speaking through an American Humanist Association press release, Holt noted:

Only very rarely in human history has someone uncovered a fundamentally new way of thinking about the world — an insight so revolutionary that it has made possible further creative and explanatory thinking. Without Charles Darwin, our modern understandings of biology, ecology, genetics, and medicine would be utterly impossible, and our comprehension of the world around us would be vastly poorer. By recognizing Darwin Day, we can honor the importance of scientific thinking in our lives, and we can celebrate one of our greatest thinkers.

By setting aside this day, says Holt, we'd be celebrating the "advancement of human knowledge and the achievements of reason and science."

But as Eric Dolan reports, the resolution has been referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — where it is almost certain to die.

The committee, says Dolan, is controlled by Republican lawmakers who are particularly hostile to the theory of evolution. One committee member, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), described evolution as "lies from the pit of hell."

Image: Mars Madsen.

It was around this time last year when two teams of scientists from the U.S. and the Netherlands submitted papers for publication in Science and Nature describing how the H5N1 virus could be converted into a human-contagious form. All that was required were a pair of crafty genetic manipulations — and voila — instant pandemic. This revelation — and the very nature of the work — rocked the scientific community, who quickly set up a voluntary ban on further research. But now, a year later, that moratorium has been lifted and research can once again continue.

And indeed, scientists and the general public had good reason to be worried. This virus is a total bitch — a flu that kills nearly half of those it infects. Should the virus accidentally escape the lab, or be co-opted into a weapon by bioterrorists, it would create an unprecedented human catastrophe.

Under normal circumstances, however, the virus in its "natural" form cannot jump from birds to humans. Yet, as the research clearly showed, it's only a few mutations away from figuring this out on its own — with or without human help. It may only be a matter of time before the flu reconfigures itself and enters into the human population.

This is precisely why scientists want to resume the research; they don't want to be caught with their pants down if and when a pandemic strikes. The ultimate goal, aside from learning more about the virus and how it can evolve into dangerous strains, is to develop possible countermeasures, including immunizations and treatments.

For the past year, scientists, regulators and security experts have been working on a host of safety protocols to make sure an accident won't happen. Satisfied with what they came up with, Nature published a letter signed by 40 scientists saying that the pause had been useful in that it allowed them the time to communicate the public health benefits of the research, and how to minimise the risks.

The Guardian tells us more:

"There is probably not a scientific issue in recent times that has not been so widely thrown out for public consultation as this one," said Wendy Barclay, an influenza virologist at Imperial College London and a signatory to the letter. "The information learned from the two publications that finally made it into Nature and Science last year has been processed by the influenza community and has been hugely informative, not only for understanding the risks from H5N1 but also for illuminating how other subtypes of flu might jump species and even for assessing the zoonotic risks from other pathogens.

"The lifting of the moratorium will undoubtedly lead to more scientific revelations that will have direct consequence for human and animal health."

Interestingly, if not perplexingly, the idea of restricting who could access the research findings or publish a redacted or cut-down version of the results was rejected at meeting of journal editors, scientists, and U.S. and Dutch government officials in February 2012.

Top image: H5N1; "Making Mutant Flu" image via Nature News.

We humans like to think that that we're the only ones who figured out how to navigate using the stars. But as biologists from South Africa and Sweden recently discovered, the crafty dung beetle does it, too. This poop-obsessed insect uses the star-filled streak of the Milky Way to orient itself along a straight line — making it the only animal ever observed to use our galaxy for navigation. Intrigued, we talked to one of the researchers to find out more.

We contacted Eric Warrant, an Australian biologist now working at the University of Lund in Sweden. An expert on dung beetles, he has done previous work documenting the extraordinary talents of this insect, including its ability to see in the dark and orient itself with stars and the moon. But now, Warrant, along with his colleagues, have demonstrated that the dung beetle can navigate by using the Milky Way as well.

In the new study, which was published online today in Current Biology, the researchers showed that the dung beetle uses the milky band to get around — and it's the only animal now known to do so (not even birds do this, who are known to use individual stars for navigation).

"It is indeed the Milky Way streak of light that is seen — and this streak is very noticeable in the Southern hemisphere," Warrant told io9. He suspects that the beetles are probably not even capable of discerning individual stars, but are capable of picking up diffused light.

"That said, it's very likely that the beetles can see the brightest stars in the sky — they have quite sensitive compound eyes — but exactly how many remains to be determined." He says his team plans on studying this further — a future project that would look deeper into the dung beetles' physiological characteristics.

"In contrast," he says, "the Milky Way is a bright band of light made up of countless millions of stars, and this they can see and orient with respect to."

In previous experiments, Warrant's colleague Marcus Byrne discovered that the beetles climb on top of their dung balls to perform an orientation "dance" during which they locate light sources to use for orientation. He proved that dung beetles were relying on the moon and polarized light by putting "caps" on their heads which blocked light from reaching their eyes.

In the new study, Warrant, along with Marie Dacke and colleagues, showed that dung beetles lose their ability to transport dung balls along straight paths in overcast conditions. In a planetarium setting, however, the beetles were able to stay on track equally well under a full starlit sky — and importantly — a simulated sky showing only the diffuse streak of the Milky Way.

And indeed, navigation is crucial for dung beetles — and it's all about the big ball of crap they're desperately trying to protect.

"Dung is a precious resource for food," Warrant told us, "and male beetles invest much energy and time in creating and rolling a ball that will be used by a female to lay her egg within." It's an investment, he says, that's not lost on other male beetles — many of whom sit in wait for another beetle to create the perfect ball for them to aggressively steal.

"Thus once their ball is made, a dung beetle must get away from the fiercely competitive dung pile as quickly and as efficiently as possible," says Warrant, "and the best way to do this is in a straight line, in any direction." Inadvertently rolling back into the dung pile would likely prove disastrous. "This is why straight-line navigation is so important to these animals," he says.

Given the importance of the Milky Way to the dung beetle, we asked Warrant if light pollution might be causing a problem.

"Not at this stage, but this could become a serious issue for some species in some parts of the world in the future," he responded.

Looking ahead, Warrant and his colleagues will try to determine which neural circuits are responsible for this ability, and they'll do so by electrophysiologically recording the visual cells in the central brain of dung beetles.

Images: University of Lund, astro.wisc, bloddo on Flickr.

Aside from its bark, humans can understand the intentions and feelings of their dogs through any number of different channels, whether it be the way they tilt their head, position their front legs, or, of course, frantically wag their tail. Most dog owners can pretty much read their canine companions like a book. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the practice of cosmetic tail docking (or tail bobbing) has a profound effect on a dog's ability to communicate with other dogs. As the use of a robotic dog has shown, the lack of a long tail can seriously stunt your dog's social life.

Emily Anthes points this out in a recent PLOS article, where she says that not only is tail docking "a barbaric procedure in which several inches of a puppy's tail are amputated, often without anesthesia," it can also hamper its ability to convey its intentions to other dogs.

Anthes reviews a remarkable study conducted by two biologists at Canada's University of Victoria that was published a while back in the journal Behavior.

To see if there were any potential behavioral anomalies caused by tail length, the researchers used a robotic dog that featured either a long or short tail, and they exposed this artificial impostor to 492 dogs at an off-leash park. In addition to the variable tail length, the robotic dog was made to either wag its tail or keep it stationary. Thus, there were four different conditions to chronicle. The researchers then studied and documented the various ways the leash-free dogs interacted with the robot.

The first thing they noticed was that dogs who were smaller than the artificial version almost always approached it with caution. But as for dogs of equal or larger sizes, this is what they saw:

It was among the large dogs that the interesting behaviors emerged. These dogs were most likely to approach the robotic model when the robot had a long, moving tail. (They did so 91.4% of the time.) That makes sense, the researchers say. "Because the long tail was flexible, the simulated motion appeared to us to resemble that of a loose, wagging tail of a real dog," they write. This kind of loose wag is often an invitation to play–and a social signal that the wagging dog means no harm.

On the other hand, a dog that is holding its tail perfectly still isn't giving off such obvious "come hither" signals, and large dogs approached the robot with a long, still tail significantly less frequently — only 74.4% of the time.

But when the researchers swapped the long tail for the short one, these preferences disappeared. Large dogs approached a short-tailed robot with a wagging tail just as often as one with a motionless tail (85.2% and 82.2% of the time, respectively). These findings suggest that the dogs were less able to discriminate between a tail that's wagging playfully and one that's standing still and erect when the tail itself is short. "It appears that the signals communicated by differences in tail motion were most effectively conveyed when the tail was long," the scientists write.

The large dogs were also twice as likely to pause while approaching the short-tailed models, perhaps using that time to try to decipher whether they should continue moving closer. As the researchers put it in their paper, "As the efficacy of a visual signal is related to its visibility … it may be that larger dogs had a harder time interpreting the ‘intentions' of the model when the tail was short."

In other words, the dogs were completely confused about the robotic dog's intentions. Consequently, dogs who have their tails bobbed are in a similar predicament — a condition that's likely introducing significant stress and uncertainty to their social lives.

Image via sduffy (Flickr) via Caninest.

Check out these wild art displays designed by German street artist, Evol. He calls it his Building series, and he creates them by transforming everyday objects — like concrete blocks, power boxes, walls, and any other publicly accessible surface he can co-opt — into highly intricate miniaturized versions of apartment buildings.

Evol, who uses stencils to create the effect, is able to make such realistic looking surfaces by avoiding repetitious patterns, and by paying attention to the minutest of details — like stenciling in satellite dishes, graffiti, open windows, and wet and worn surfaces. And when photographed just right, they could easily be mistaken for the real thing.

You can visit Evol's Flickr page here.

H/t Modern Met.