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TEDMED – One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

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Research paper: Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain, DOI: 10.1126/science.1241224

Important points:

  • Brain has no lymphatic system to clean it
  • During sleep brain cells seem to shrink
  • Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) acts as a detoxing agent removing toxins built up while the brain is conscious.
  • CSF influx only happens during sleep. It is inhibited during wakefulness.

and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing [cerebrospinal fluid – CSF] fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out.

But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it’s only happening in the sleeping brain.

Visualized statistical history of the world (BBC Four & TED)

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Today I share two videos with you. The first is an episode of BBC Four’s “The Joy of Stats”. The other is a TED talk.
Both are presented by Hans Rosling.

In these videos Hans Rosling visually demonstrates statistical data on the world’s wealth, health, family size, & daily income among several others by continent and country. The demonstrations are amazing. Enjoy

Continue reading

Video of laser flash on Martian rock (NASA)

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The sparks that appear on the baseball-sized rock (starting at :17) result from the laser of the ChemCam instrument on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover hitting the rock.

ChemCam’s laser zapping of this particular rock was the first time the team used Curiosity’s arm-mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera to try and capture images of the spark generated by the laser hitting a rock on Mars. Their efforts were a success.

The video is compiled from single images from the MAHLI camera, taken during the 687th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (July 12, 2014).

Since Curiosity landed in Mars’ Gale Crater in August 2012, researchers have used ChemCam’s laser and spectrometers to examine more than 600 rock or soil targets. The laser itself has been fired more than 150,000 times. The process, called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, hits a target with pulses from the laser to generate sparks, whose spectra provide information about which chemical elements are in the target. Multiple laser shots are fired in sequence, each blasting away a thin layer of material so that the following shot examines a slightly deeper layer. In this case, “Nova” displayed an increasing concentration of aluminum as a series of laser shots from the rover penetrated through dust on the rock’s surface.

source: NASA Rover’s Images Show Laser Flash on Martian Rock

Three Supermoons in a row (Science@NASA)

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This month as well as the following two months will have three consecutive supermoons. The exact dates and (rise) times (Beirut time) of these supermoons are as follows:

  1. July 12 @ 1940
  2. August 10 @ 1906
  3. September 9 @ 1904
 But what are supermoons?

Supermoons are moons that happen to be at a point of their orbit whose distance is the shortest to Earth. That is they happen to be closest to Earth.
This particular (close) point of the orbit is called the “perigee” thus the scientific term for a supermoon is the “perigee moon“.

Some people have linked supermoons with natural disasters such as tsunami’s like the 2011 tsunami that occurred facing the coast of Japan which destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the 2004 tsunami that hit the Indian ocean since they occurred in a 1-2 week period within a supermoon.

Scientifically no evidence has been found in this regard. For a detailed explanation check the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory Outreach Program FAQ “Can the position of the moon or planets affect seismicity?” under “Common Myths and Misconceptions”.

Beware of the comming supermoons… whooo!

Fruit Flies fly to the International Space Station (Science@NASA)

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