Category: Science

A year ago doctors in Italy took out a man’s cancer ridden liver, gave it high doses of radiation, and stuck it back in. This meant that none of his other organs were affected by the damaging radiation, but his liver tumors were successfully cured, and have not come back. They are hoping to start using the same procedure on more patients. Amazing technology.

Why do groups of women living in the same household have synchronous menstrual cycles? At last my question has been answered, and it is as I thought – to do with social groups and our evolutionary past. I speculated that it may be chemicals like pheremones that cause the synchronisation, but I did not know the exact evolutionary reasoning behind it.

Yes those scientists are at it again, cooking up things to help make our lives healthier and lazier – and so we can drink more wine. Since red wine has more polyphenols it is thought that its anti-oxidant properties help reduce ageing by getting rid of those nasty free radicals, good for red wine drinkers like myself. So what have they done? Traditionally white wine had less polyphenols but now they have found a way to grow them with three times as much.

Was Mars once like the Earth, or was it a hellish inferno like Venus? Well new theories are put forward often, and this is another.

SETI have decided to look again at their 100 most promising signals. I am a firm advocate of further investigation of space, and more space exploration – I hope SETI find something!

And in case you were wondering, we will be able to get to other planets by using solar sails. Duncan Steel writes in today’s Guardian that this much talked about, and very often written about technology will be utilised in the test probe Cosmos 1. Appropriate that it is named after Carl Sagan’s riveting book and television series. I hope it goes well.

Science Daily is carrying a story on the origins of life. It calls it revolutionary, but I would not think so after reading the report. The existence of life around hydrothermal vents has long been known, and do point towards the possibility that life originated without the help of the sun, and underwater – so I was not that surprised by this theory.

The European Space Agency are planning to use the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to image the remains of NASA equipment still on the moon. This might convince conspiracy theorists that man did indeed land on the moon. I can be somewhat of a conspiracy theorist myself, but I think this one is too far fetched – man did go to the moon!

Well the headline is my view – but I do think this story is worth looking at. I have read of the Mars Society, and I do believe they hold the director James Cameron as one of their major backers. Pity he made such a dismal movie about Mars. Robbins and Sinise at their worst. Anyway an interesting story nonetheless, see it here.

One of my favourite writers in the Guardian (betraying my leftist tendencies), George Monbiot writes another article on GM foods. I could not agree more with his sentiments. Have a read of it yourself and see what you think.