Proposal of alternative mechanism responsible for the function of high-speed swimsuits.

“Since many top swimmers wearing Speedo LZR Racer swimsuits have broken world records, it is considered that the corset-like grip of suit supports the swimmers to maintain flexibility of movement and reducing water resistance. We propose an alternative mechanism to explain this phenomenon. The suits are so tight that the blood circulation of swimmers is suppressed.This effect accelerates the anaerobic glycolysis system but rather suppresses the aerobic mitochondrial respiration system. Because of the prompt production of ATP in the glycolysis system, the swimmers, especially in short distance competitions, obtain instantaneous force in white fibers of the skeletal muscles.”

Photo: flickr/marcopako ?

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It looks like Genomes Unzipped has their own Mortimer Adler, with an excellent posting, How to read a genome-wide association study. For those outside the biz I suspect that #4, replication, is going to be the easiest. In the early 2000s a biologist who’d been in the business for a while cautioned about reading too much into early association results which were sexy, as the same had occurred when linkage studies were all the vogue, but replication was not to be. Goes to show that history of science can be useful on a very pragmatic level. It can give you a sense of perspective on the evanescent impact of some techniques over the long run.

Long a standard in science fiction, wormholes are used to move the action across immense distances.  Distances that would take several generations to cross at light speed.  Several millennia, actually.  We see them as super-highways across the cosmos.  Want to get to Andromeda?  No problem, just jump into a wormhole and you’ll be there in hours.

Honestly?  That’s pretty close.  A wormhole, basically, is a hypothetical shortcut through spacetime.  If you think of “spacetime” in two dimensions, like a piece of paper, it’s easy to visualize.  Just fold your piece of paper over, and you can see how a wormhole can “bridge” two sections of spacetime to create a shortcut.  Look at this:

Spacetime in 2D - image by en:Benji641 all rights reserved

The 2D image helps you to get a fix on the concept, but it’s really more complex than that.  A wormhole is an unvisualizable structure existing in four or more dimensions.  It’s a tunnel between you and anywhere.  Imagine you want to go to Paris, France, for dinner.  Let’s say you live quite a distance from Paris… like on the other side of the Earth.  You could open a wormhole “bridge” between you and your favorite Paris restaurant and step right over to it.  This image shows that type of bridge between the Physics Building of Tubigen University in Germany and the sand dunes of Boulogne Sur Mer in North of France:

wormhole imagery - Philippe E. Hurbain all rights reserved

That’s fairly easy to imagine, right?  How about a wormhole not between two different locations in the universe, but a wormhole between two different universes?  Imagine two points of gravity (black holes) in two different universes attracting each other.  As they approach, the fabric of spacetime distorts, stretches, and then touches.  The points of contact, two white holes now, meet to form a tunnel.  Look at this:

Merging - image by University of Colorado

That sounds great, doesn’t it?  Well, it does until you get to reading more about it.  For one thing, wormholes are unstable.  Very unstable.  Also, think a moment about those two points of gravity meeting.  You enter at one point, and immediately become stuck in the center.  See, the other point, the “way out”, is drawing matter in towards the center, too.  You can’t turn around and go out the way you came in, because that’s a point of gravity drawing matter in towards the center.  Now you’re stuck in a Schwarzschild Bubble.  You cannot exit either way, because in both ways you’re moving against the force of a black hole.

Okay, how about a wormhole created by a black hole spitting matter out, as in a white hole?  If that possibility exists, you sill have the unpleasant reality of meeting the singularity before your component parts get spat out.  Notice I said “your component parts”, not “you”.  You can forget about “you” at this point.  I guess the labeling of the parts of the wormhole should provide clues to its nature; the mouth, the throat… doesn’t sound promising.

Cover art of "Portal" video game - Valve Corportation, Microsoft Studios - Game uses wormholes to traverse areas of play

Still… if only.  It would be great to pop into a wormhole and exit on the other side of the galaxy. I know there are more types of wormholes than I covered here, and some of them sound promising.  What’s your favorite?  Do you think a human could ever survive a trip down a wormhole?  Could we get back home?

There was a big step forward this week in the struggle to contain the spread of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Reporting on a three-year study in the journal Science, scientists at the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) say that a microbicidal gel reduced HIV infection rates in women who used it by 39 percent over the course of the study. It would be the first time such a gel has proven so effective.

The researchers gathered nearly 900 women for the study who were HIV-free but demographically at risk for infection. Half received the gel, half a similar-looking but inactive substance. Among those given the gel, a vaginally-administered substance that contained an antiretroviral medication called tenofovir, infection rate fell by half after a year, and were reduced by 39 percent over two and a half years.

“This is very encouraging,” said Dr. Michel Sidibe, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations AIDS-fighting agency. “It can be controlled by women, and put in 12 hours earlier, and that is empowering. They do not have to ask the man for permission to use it. And the cost of the gel is not high” [The New York Times].

Though subsequent trials will of course be needed, these first results are especially inspiring given the predicament of women in some of these nations.

Women fall victim to HIV/Aids in disproportionately large numbers – 60% of new infections in Africa are among women. Many in the poorest countries have little education and suffer from very low status, so are unable to negotiate safe sex, using a condom, with their partner [The Guardian].

Salim Abdool Karim, one of the study authors, said the product would cost women “just pennies,” which is crucial because the effectiveness goes up with the consistency of use.

“Boy, have we been doing the happy dance,” Dr Karim, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, said [BBC News].

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Image: iStockphoto

The blue pepper-pot beetle, St. John’s jellyfish, and the queen’s executioner beetle–these distinctly British-sounding organisms share a few things in common. For one, they all have brand new names, thanks to the ingenuity of the British public.

The trio received these new names from public entries in a competition organized by The Guardian, Natural England, and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Other similarities include (perhaps unsurprisingly) that they all live in the UK, and that they’re all threatened with extinction.

One usually pictures an organism’s discoverer naming her find, or the organism’s common name coming from obvious characteristics (like lighting bugs or fireflies, for example), but sometimes critters just slip through the cracks; these ten were previously known only by their official scientific classifications. That made it hard, the competition’s organizers suspected, for the public to care whether or not these rare creatures disappeared. The naming competition, thought up by Guardian columnist George Monbiot, was meant to make the threatened organisms more identifiable and relatable to the public.

Comparing the cuddly appeal of the sea piglet shrimp (pictured above) vs Arrhis phyllonyx, it seems they accomplished their goal. The competition had over 3,000 entries, from which the judges picked a winner and two runners-up for each of the species based on how well the name matched the organism’s looks, habitat, and behavior. The naming competition’s overall winner was the queen’s executioner beetle, a black hooded bug from Windsor.

No matter who won, Monbiot sees the competition as a whole as a success.

“Judging the competition was very hard, as in every case there were at least half a dozen names that deserved to win…. Not only were they practical and distinctive, many of them also captured the magic and mystery of England’s wildlife.”

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Image: Moskal, Wojciech /World Register of Marine Species