Plastination artists perfect a sculpture. (Courtesy: Popular Science)

Body Worlds is a group that exhibits mortal remains in a traveling show of anatomical wonders. Body Worlds is managed by the Institute for Plastination, which was founded by German medical researcher Gunther von Hagens, who invented the plastination process 30 years ago in an effort to improve the study of human anatomy, reports popsci.com.
Plastination replaces bodily fluids with a clear polymer that hardens gradually so that anatomists can pose the bodies after they are preserved. The popularity of such exhibits, which rake in millions of dollars a year, has had other companies jumping on the bandwagon, although Body Worlds is the only group to get its bodies strictly through a donation process.
Its largest competitor, “Bodies: The Exhibition,“ receives plastinated cadavers from a facility in China. A spokesperson for that exhibit was unable to say how the facility acquires its cadavers. After someone dies, it’s a journey of about 15 months from funeral home to exhibition hallÑbeginning with the acquisition of the cadaver, to dissection, to plastination.
The waiting list is long Ñ 6,500 still-living people have donated themselves to the organization, and 300 bodies are in the works Ñ and the Institute can’t guarantee that your cadaver will end up in an exhibition. Happily for those with less-than-perfect forms, the minds behind Body Worlds want a variety of specimens. Part of the educational aim of the exhibit is to teach people how the body heals and how disease ravages internal organs. Bodies with healed broken limbs are included, as well as lung-cancer patients and obese people.

Dr. Ara Darzi of St. Mary’s Hospital in London is of the opinion that one day technology could allow even a monkey to do an operation.
According to cnn.com, the first medical robots are already being used in hospitals now - the da Vinci Surgical System was approved for use by the U.S. government in 2000, and more will follow.
As yet these systems are not autonomous, and they still require human input. When surgery is performed, small instruments and viewing equipment are inserted through tiny holes in the body minimizing the trauma and damage associated with open surgery. Conventional surgical tools are replaced with robotic instruments under direct control of the surgeon through “teleoperation.“
“These robots work on the ’master slave’ concept, with the surgeon as the master,“ says Dr. Ara Darzi. “The da Vinci system has three arms, and you can add a fourth, with 3D stereo imagery available during surgery. It also has a motion scaling concept, which can be scaled down to five-to-one, so you can be much more precise than a human hand could. The surgeon feels very similar sensations to if he or she was working with their hands.
The robots act as an extension of a practitioner’s skills, which allows them to perform better by helping improve control and precision. Already robots are being used to position endoscopes, and even perform gall bladder surgery. The hope is that soon they will be able to perform major operations such as heart surgery, perhaps using nanotech tools - microscopic robots - that would make the need to crack open a patient’s chest a thing of the past.

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory published in guardian.co.uk.
The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us was just the most recent of many.
The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs and big crunches - where every particle of matter collapses together.
“People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn’t any reason for that inference,“ said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, “What we are proposing is very radical. It’s saying there was time before the big bang.“
Under his theory, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it.
Turok and Steinhardt’s theory is an alternative to another explanation called the “anthropic principle“, which argues that the constant can have a range of values in different parts of the universe but that we happen to live in a region conducive to life.

Pristine dunes have been discovered on the surface of Titan. (Courtesy: Reuters)

Saturn’s moon Titan has huge regions covered with dunes, possibly made out of ice crystals, sand or some other unknown material, international space scientists reported on Thursday.
Images of Titan beamed back to Earth from the joint U.S.-European Cassini mission look very much like sand dunes in the Sahara desert, Namibia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, the researchers told the Reuters.
“It’s bizarre,“ said Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona, who worked on the study. These images from a moon of Saturn look just like radar images of Namibia or Arabia. Titan’s atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s, its gravity is lower, its sand is certainly different - everything is different except for the physical process that forms the dunes and resulting landscape.“
The Cassini craft was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004 after an interplanetary cruise that took it past Venus and Jupiter. The latest radar images show the dunes are up to 150 meters high and hundreds of kilometers long.
Dark patches on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 47 moons, were at first thought to be seas - but now they appear to be largely made up of these dunes.
Titan’s flat surface is very cold, with a temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius and scientists believe its thick atmosphere may occasionally rain methane.
The existence of pristine dunes, piled over other geological features, shows that wind recently blew fine grains of some material around. It could be sand, ice or something else, they added. But they called the presence of the dunes “comforting“, because at least the processes that lead to their formation can be studied on Earth.

Like an interplanetary spaceship carrying passengers, meteorites have long been suspected of ferrying relatively young ingredients of life to our planet, reports sciencedaily.com.
Using new techniques, scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism have discovered that meteorites can carry other, much older passengers as well-primitive, organic particles that originated billions of years ago either in interstellar space, or in the outer reaches of the solar system as it was beginning to coalesce from gas and dust.
The study shows that the parent bodies of meteorites - the large objects from the asteroid belt - contain primitive organic matter similar to that found in interplanetary dust particles that might come from comets. The finding provides clues about how organic matter was distributed and processed in the solar system during this long-gone era. The work is published in the May 5, 2006, issue of Science.
Atoms of different elements come in different forms, or isotopes, and the relative proportions of these depend on the environmental conditions in which their carriers formed, such as the heat encountered, chemical reactions with other elements, and so forth,“ explained lead author Henner Busemann. “In this study we looked at the relative amounts of different isotopes of hydrogen (H) and nitrogen (N) associated with tiny particles of insoluble organic matter to determine the processes that produced the most pristine type of meteorites known. The insoluble material is very hard to break down chemically and survives even very harsh acid treatments.“
The researchers used a microscopic imaging technique to analyze the isotopic composition of insoluble organic matter from six carbonaceous chondrite meteorites - the oldest type known.

Chemists at Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University, in kinship with Frost, have modified a key protein in a bacterium to move electrons along a pathway not normally traveled by. They got this to happen 70 percent of the time. According to nature.com, that yield makes all the difference.
For years, scientists studying photosynthesis have noted that electrons in photosynthetic bacteria always choose one of two identical pathways of electron transport in the reaction center (RC) protein, which is the factory for photosynthesis. The electrons always go to one pigment , sometimes called the “right“ side, shunning the left. The molecule-to-molecule movement of electrons stimulated by sunlight is called charge separation. It’s the basic modus operandi of photosynthesis, whereby plants and some bacteria use sunlight to produce chemical energy. The reaction center protein is like a forest with two roads. The chemists got the electrons to take the path not traveled.
Now researchers at Stanford University have created a mutant photosynthetic reaction center that passes electrons along “the road not taken.“ And they’ve done so like gangbusters.
The find advances the understanding of photosynthesis, which is the tool plants incorporated from bacteria to evolve on Earth. Many other kinds of proteins, critical for human and other life, transfer electrons, and the findings should help shed light on how they work, among other basic issues. It also advances multi-step electron transfer processes, which could have an impact in solar energy conversions.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines’ knack for peering at soft tissue deep within the body has made them one of the most popular imaging tools. But MRI isn’t perfect. It works by beaming radiofrequency pulses into a patient and tracking how this radiation affects the magnetic behavior of tissues. But those pulses must be carefully controlled to prevent them from overheating tissue and injuring patients. Now, a new study published in science.com could pave the way to a new form of radiofrequency-free MRI scans that would offer several advantages.
MRI owes its success to the magnetic behavior of the protons in hydrogen atoms within the body. Those protons have a magnetic moment, which makes them behave essentially like compass needles. To create an image, MRI machines place patients in a strong magnetic field, which causes the protons in the body to align their magnetic compasses with that field. Technicians then send in precisely tuned pulses of radiofrequency energy that knocks some of those compasses out of alignment. By tracking how the needles return to equilibrium, researchers can infer their distribution and thus the makeup of the tissue. But Norbert Muller of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and Alexej Jerschow of New York University in New York City wanted to see if they could do away with the need for radiofrequency pulses.
The chemists relied on the fact that even in a strong magnetic field the magnetic orientation of protons fluctuates. Muller and Jerschow tracked the magnetic behavior of elements for a few milliseconds and then repeated the process over and over. The multiple readings yielded a strong enough signal to reveal the magnetic signature of protons.
Next, to determine how those protons are distributed, Muller and Jerschow applied an external magnetic field that varied in strength across the sample. Because the degree of alignment of a proton’s magnetic moment is related to how strong the magnetic field is, that enabled them to locate those protons. The researchers report that by integrating some 30 scans of four water-filled glass capillaries, one of which was spiked with proton-rich deuterium, they could create a 2-dimentional image revealing the location of the spiked capillary.