Science
Thursday, March 28, 2024

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Scientists at CERN now believe that they've seen the Higgs. Not with their own eyes, but with massive computer systems hitched up to the Large Hadron Collider, a circular tube 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) in circumference that accelerates raw protons and other particles in opposite directions around the ring 11,000 times per second. At the perfect moment, they slam into each other, producing a massive explosion thought to rival the Big Bang, except on a much smaller scale. Only a particle collider can produce that much energy—the amount needed to produce a viewable Higgs.

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British scientist Peter Higgs, and Francois Englert of Belgium have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson. In the 1960s they were among several physicists who proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic building blocks of the Universe have mass.

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Researchers at the University of Washington report they have decoded the entire genome of a fetus using only a blood sample from the mother and a saliva sample from the father.  The scientists said prenatal genome sequencing using the noninvasive method could one day be used to determine if a fetus has any of the thousands of genetic disorders that are caused by a single, often devastating, mutation on one gene.

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The researchers checked the accuracy of their genetic predictions using umbilical cord blood collected at birth.  The findings are quite revealing bringing to the forefront many ethical issues including the possibility of "selecting" the make-up of future generations. 

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Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia for which there is no cure and it worsens as it progresses, and eventually leads to death. It was first described by German psychiatrist and neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer in 1906 and was named after him. In 2006, there were 26.6 million sufferers worldwide. Alzheimer's is predicted to affect 1 in 85 people globally by 2050.

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In a clinical trial that could lead to treatments that prevent Alzheimer's disease, people who are genetically guaranteed to suffer from the disease years from now — but who do not yet have any symptoms — will for the first time be given a drug intended to stop them from developing it.  

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Leonardo Fibonacci was the greatest European mathematician of the Middle ages. He was born in Pisa in Italy circa 1170 and died some time after 1240. In addition to being famous for the Fibonacci sequence, he also published a book called Liber Abaci, or Book of Calculation in 1202 AD, where he describes the rules we all now learn in elementary school for adding numbers, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. He was one of the first people to introduce the Hindu-Arabic number system into Europe. This is based on ten digits with its decimal point and a symbol for zero.

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The Shell of the Chambered Nautilus is a Logarithmic Spiral

  While the aesthetics and symmetry of Fibonacci spiral patterns has often attracted scientists, a mathematical or physical explanation for their common occurrence in nature is yet to be discovered. Recently, scientists have successfully produced Fibonacci spiral patterns in the lab, and found that an elastically mismatched bi-layer structure may cause stress patterns that give rise to Fibonacci spirals. The discovery may explain the widespread existence of the pattern in plants.

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According to 2012 Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures, released today by the Alzheimer's Association, caring for people with Alzheimer's and other dementias will cost the United States an estimated $200 billion in 2012. This includes $140 billion paid by Medicare and Medicaid.

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"Alzheimer's is already a crisis and it's growing worse with every year," said Harry Johns, President and CEO of the Alzheimer's Association. "While lives affected and care costs soar, the cost of doing nothing is far greater than acting now.  All we have been able to help in the reversal of our brain's aging process is the use of nutrition supplements including Magnesium, as well as eating blueberries and other fruits and vegetables that energize our brain.  A new breakthrough from a team of reseraches from MIT have found that a new highly absorbable form of magnesium called Magnesium-L-Threonate concentrates more efficiently in the brain, rebuilds ruptured synapses, and restores the degraded neuronal connections.