Will drinking carbonated beverages weaken my bones?

Maybe—but only if you're drinking several gallons of seltzer a day. Here's the chemistry that has soda drinkers worried: As carbon dioxide hits the water in your blood, it turns into carbonic acid. Too much acid in the blood can lead to a condition called acidosis, which could intercept small amounts of calcium from food as it makes its way to your bones, or steal it from them directly. Your greater concern, though, says endocrinologist Robert Heaney of Creighton University, should be the vomiting, headaches and impaired organ function that result from extreme acidosis.

The acid content in a carbonated beverage is 5 to 10 percent of what the body's metabolism naturally produces, Heaney has found, which is far too little to interrupt the calcium absorption of bones. In general, he says, the carbonation in soda has no ill effect on bone-mineral content.

Other ingredients in soda might rob a small amount of calcium from bones. Caffeine causes the kidneys to pull sodium from the blood using proteins that accidentally scoop up calcium ions as well. The body reverses this effect within 24 hours, however. Another commonly cited culprit is phosphoric acid, an ingredient in colas. Studies have indicated that if the ratio of phosphorus to calcium in your body tips too far toward phosphorus, it can cause bone loss over time. So although a "Coke and a smile" once in a while won't a brittle bone make, Heaney urges drinking a tall glass of milk to keep your bones good and strong.


http://www.popsci.com/scitech/articl...eaken-my-bones

An evolutionary biologist at Penn State University has discovered a species of snake so small that it can fit comfortably on a quarter. The average adult of the species, a type of threadsnake named Leptotyphlops carlae, is less than four inches long. The discovery will be published in the August 4 issue of the journal Zootaxa.

Found in a remnant patch of forest on the Caribbean island of Barbados, Leptotyphlops is probably a rare species because most of its habitat has been cut down to make way for buildings and farms. Blair Hedges, who identified the tiny snake by its genetic signature and unique color pattern and scales, says that some older specimens of the species exist in museums but were misidentified by other scientists.

While larger snakes can lay as many as 100 eggs at a time, Leptotyphlops usually lays just a single, relatively huge egg. The snake that hatches from that egg is about half the size of an adult, while hatchlings of the largest snakes are only one-tenth the size of their parents. The reason for this disparity, Hedges says, is that tiny snakes must concentrate their efforts on producing offspring large enough to hunt and consume prey—in this case, the larvae of ants and termites. A snake much smaller than Leptotyphlops might not be able to produce viable offspring.

Size matters: Tiny snakes produce larger but fewer young. Hatchlings of the largest snakes are only one-tenth the length of an adult (left), while hatchlings of the smallest snakes are proportionately huge—half the length of an adult (right).

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/articl...smallest-snake

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P.R.

Making processors for mobile gadgets is mostly an afterthought. Hone a chip from a desktop PC, tweak it to suck less power and vent less heat, and stick it in a laptop. Not so with Intel’s Atom. It’s Intel’s smallest-ever microprocessor, a 24-square-millimeter chip crammed with 47 million data-carrying transistors, and it’s paving the way for the next era of affordable, power-saving gadgets.

The key to shrinking the chip is a new manufacturing process that prints each conductive wire inside the circuit at about 1/2,000 the width of a human hair, half the size found in conventional chips.

More circuits mean smarter features. The Atom’s sleep mode powers down parts of the chip when idling. And unlike other chips, Atom doesn’t run background programs if stalled on its primary task, which helps boost battery life.

Although some of its power-saving tricks slow performance, the chip still keeps pace with other mobile processors. It can turn out impressive 1.8 gigahertz of processing speed on less than a watt of power—serious savings compared with today’s 35-watt notebook chips. And because lower wattage means less heat, you can say goodbye to scorched laps. “It’s deeply satisfying to be able to place a finger on an Atom CPU and not receive a third-degree burn,” jokes Intel design-engineering manager Bryan Boatright.

Intel isn’t through shrinking chips. It aims to print even smaller transistors by next year, taking advantage of the space to further ramp up speed and battery life.



Ninety years ago the Spanish flu swept across the globe, killing between 50 and 100 million people in only a few months. Since then, the specter of another flu pandemic dealing death and woe around the world has periodically terrified the medical and popular communities. But scientists searching for ways to prevent a similar outbreak in the form of the H5N1 bird flu have found a cure for the deadliest flu in the most unlikely place: nonagenarian immune systems.

A new paper in the journal Nature confirms that a team of doctors has succeeded in isolating pandemic-flu killing antibodies from 90+ year old survivors of the Spanish flu outbreak. To test whether or not the antibodies still worked, the doctors injected the immune cells into mice, and then dosed the mice with preserved copies of the 1918 flu recovered from frozen victims of the Spanish flu that had been buried in Alaskan permafrost. Within those mice, the antibodies and the virus renewed a microscopic battle that had lain dormant for almost a century. The mice that received a high dose of the antibodies lived, while mice that received a low dose of antibody, or none at all, died as expected.

While the authors of the paper indicated that understanding the immune system’s ability to “remember” infections for so long could be useful in studying all manner of viral infection, it is unlikely that antibodies synthesized from survivors would be able to immediately help in a future bird flu pandemic. The 1918 Spanish flu and the modern Asian bird flu are different species, and the antibodies are probably not compatible. Rather, by understanding how the body produces and preserves flu antibodies over a lifetime doctors hope to be able to develop more effective vaccines specific to viruses like the bird flu. Currently, the common flu kills 30,000 Americans a year, so developing effective vaccines is important even without an outbreak of the more deadly pandemic strain of the disease.

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P.R.

Lost in drive-by country? Look for a cow. It will probably be pointing north—or south.

After analyzing satellite photos of 8,000 cows in 308 different locations, German scientists have found that the milk-makers usually confront the world in a north-south direction. This preference isn’t an indication of the cows sunning themselves, researchers say—it shows that they can sense the Earth’s magnetic field.

The scientists were careful to correct for the animal’s whims: they only studied photos of cows that were resting on flat ground, and avoided ones that were near drinking or feeding areas. Couldn’t the cows just be guarding themselves from harsh winds? Not so, says lead researcher Sabine Begall. There was no correlation between gusty weather and the cow’s stance; in fact, if wind was the issue, cows would align themselves in different positions around the world, and not in a north-south direction.

Despite this finding, scientists will need to conduct more research before they settle on the magnetic theory for good. Magnetoreception is a laborious field to be in: after years of work, scientists haven’t pinpointed a chemical sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field in birds, which are known for their magnetic personalities. They’ve come close in the lab, but haven’t found it in the bird’s bodies yet. Hopefully, they’ll have better luck with cows.

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P.R.

A special-ops soldier carries a slew of gadgets into battle. There's the GPS unit to pinpoint his squad's location, and a laptop for pulling up blueprints of terrorist compounds or infrared readings of buildings scoped out by robotic surveillance drones. With a radio and its five-pound battery, it's too much gear. But in a couple years, troops could lighten their load with a rugged, flexible, wrist-mounted display that's in development by the U.S. Army and HP Labs.

The solar-powered, bendable computer screen will allow for instant data and radio transmission, all in a half-pound unit, says David Morton, the program manager for flexible electronics at the Army Research Laboratory. The display's thin layer of transistors sends electric signals to an e-ink screen, which converts those signals into grayscale images, similar to the way the Amazon Kindle does. Unlike the Kindle, the two-by-three-inch display can bend to fit around the user's wrist because HP stamps the electronics and optical components onto pliable plastic. The process eliminates the need for the fragile glass backing used in the Kindle and other displays, says Carl Taussig, the director of information surfaces at HP. "You can strike these things with a mallet, and they just keep on working."

While the Army works on a color screen, troops will test the black-and-white device and provide feedback for the final version, which should be ready for military use by 2011.



The use of concrete dates back to ancient Rome, and the recipe hasn't changed much since then. Neither have some of concrete's drawbacks. In particular, the slow deformation known as "concrete creep" has afflicted structures from the Pantheon to the Pentagon. But MIT scientists believe they have solved the mystery of concrete creep, and thus opened the door to structures that will last tens of thousands of years.

The scientists, writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claim that molecular-scale disturbances in the cement extrapolate into large-scale warping in concrete over time. By using denser cement, those nano-deformations could be reduced, lowering the rate of deformation by two or three orders of magnitude.

Right now, silica fumes, a common cement additive long known to strengthen concrete, has been proven to increase the density of cement, and thus the longevity of concrete. However, silica fumes only increase the density of cement by 87 percent. In the paper, the researchers mathematically calculated that the creep could potentially be slowed by as much as two and a half times. At that reduced rate of deformation, concrete currently estimated to last 100 years could last up to 16,000 years. One obvious use for such a long-lasting material would be building structures for containment of nuclear waste; the half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years.

With rapid construction occurring all over China and India, and with America looking to renew an aging infrastructure, concrete is on everyone's mind. Applying this new discovery might give everyone a couple of millennia before they need to worry about concrete again.



In the future, signs will be instantly rewritable and walls will change color at the flip of a switch. A research team at the University of California at Riverside has created a new magnetically activated, instantly and reversibly color-changing material with potentially groundbreaking applications. The technology is based on that used by colorful birds, beetles, and butterflies: instead of static pigments, the material employs "structural color," which depends on the interference effects of light.

Although other methods for creating tunable structural color exist, their color-changing processes are slow and complicated, and involve internal adjustments. This new material is composed of microscopic polymer "magnetochromatic microspheres," or beads, whose structural stability allows for instant changes in color with "no change in the structure or intrinsic properties of the microspheres themselves," according to Yadong Yin, who led the study.

The beads' colors change in response to magnetic fields, which alter the relative orientation of the periodic arrays within them. This use of magnetic fields allows for "instant action, contactless control, and easy integration into electronic devices already in the market."

The color-changing beads can also be used to create environmentally friendly pigments for inks and paints. Yin, an assistant professor of chemistry, and his colleagues, plan to work next on the wide array of applications for which this material is so promising. "Rewritable energy-saving display units such as papers and posters are our main interests," says Yin in the announcement. "We will also try to develop a similar new material for chemical and biological sensors."

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P.R.

There were a lot of heroes on and after 9/11, and as the the Kennel Club reminds us, not all of them were bipedal. Now, one of those courageous canines has been brought back to life through cloning.

Trakr, a German shepherd who assisted with search and rescue in the rubble of Ground Zero, died in April. However, Trakr's DNA was saved, and BioArts International produced five clones of the dog. Yesterday, the clones were presented to James Symington, the Canadian police officer who led Trakr through the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

BioArts International selected Trakr after running a contest that would give free cloning to a dog it deemed as the world's most "cloneworthy." Normally, cloning a dog costs over $100,000. Also of interest, BioArts cloned Trakr with the help of Hwang Woo-Suk, the South Korean scientist who falsely claimed to have cloned a human.




For everyone looking to hop the next commercial flight to space, your departure gate has finally been announced. Almost two years after the first plans were announced, construction has finally begun on Spaceport America. The spaceport, which will serve as the launch and landing pad for Virgin Galactic flights, is the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and represents the first serious commitment of infrastructure to manned commercial spaceflight.

According to the the project website the festivities kick off today with a a panel of speakers, food and drink, and even a mariachi band. Tomorrow, the construction begins in earnest.

Currently, Virgin Galactic only has two space ships, so it will probably be sometime before the facility experiences O'Hare and LaGuardia level traffic. So now might be the best time to sign up for a flight, before Spaceport America starts experiencing the soul-crushing delays that keep John Grisham, Hudson News, and Brookstone in business.

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P.R.

Not inclined to wait for a suborbital ride on Virgin Galactic, Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan became the firt couple to be wed in microgravity this past weekend over the skies of south Florida.

They did it aboard G-Force One, a modified 727 similar to the Air Force's "Vomit Comet" which can provide periods of weightlessness lasting several minutes via a parabolic flight path. It's operated by Zero Gravity Corp., the first and so far only company cleared by the FAA to offer simulated-weightlessness flights to the general public.

The couple, of course, wanted to be married in space. But failing the availability of space tourism, they went with the next best thing. Richard Garriott, an actual space tourist who has flown to the ISS, officiated the ceremony for the lucky couple and their wedding party of ten. I'm jealous.

For more on their zero-g nuptials, the couple has created a website: Zerogravitywedding.com.





Solar power is an exciting source of renewable energy, but has so far mostly been used to power little things like homes, cars and small villages. But what if solar energy was used on a scale that would power the majority of Europe? The Desertec Foundation, a Jordanian and German company are hoping to secure financing for a radically ambitious project to harness solar energy in the world’s most barren, sun-drenched expanse, the Sahara Desert. Desertec claims that if only 0.3 percent of the expanse of the Sahara was covered with solar panels, it would power the entire European continent. If up to 1 percent of the desert were covered, it could power the entire world.

Desertec hopes to construct decentralized solar fields across different parts of Northern Africa within the next 10 to 15 years. They predict that these installations will generate about 100 gigawatts of power, which would be sent over high-voltage DC lines buried under the Mediterranean and power about 15 percent of Europe. Their plans get even more ambitious from there. The company hopes to also set up a series of desalinization plants in the area as a source of clean water and for irrigation in the region in hopes of reclaiming portions of the desert. They even have a long-range plan that adds wind farms to the mix.

These solar installations would constitute the world’s largest, 80 times larger than any currently planned solar arrays. However, getting it up and running is still a ways off, and will require an investment of up to €400 billion before it gets off the ground. The project could also face certain dangers, such as damaging sandstorms and political instability in the region. Yet despite the potential setbacks, many large European companies are backing the project. If realized, this could set the standard for the future of renewable energy.





HP is hoping there’re a lot of people out there with mass printing needs but without regular Internet access. Their new PhotoSmart Premium printer has a Wi-Fi-enabled touchscreen on the front that allows a user to print directly from the Internet. The idea is that the printer would be a quick way of printing out online directions, pictures, movie tickets, and so forth, without the need of a computer.

HP even plans on teaming up with Google, Fandango, Snapfish, and other websites to provide easy-access widgets for the printer. But at a price of $399 and with a screen rivaling an iPhone's in size, it’s unclear if this printer will capture the computer-less market from people who could probably afford a netbook and cheap printer for the same price.

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P.R.