November 16, 2011

Good Morning,

Lots of neat stuff going on this week, I had to throw in an extra article, as I try to do often. The third article, I thought, was particularly interesting; it outlines a new iPhone app that is said to help conservation efforts. Sensors take photos of animals and send them to users to answer questions about the species. Read all the details, again, in the third article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Device will do blood tests in space

PARIS - The European Space Agency says it has begun developing a new blood-testing device for astronauts on the International Space Station. Ailments from diabetes to heart disease should be diagnosable in moments from a single drop of astronaut blood, an ESA release said Friday. The device is a mini-disc embedded with a wide variety of miniaturized test procedures into which a small drop of blood is placed, then the device is inserted into a "point-of-care" device and spun to spread the blood sample across the surface. The device conducts multiple tests simultaneously with automated results delivered within a matter of minutes, researchers said. "Biochemical analysis aboard the space station is becoming a high priority for the human physiology experiments carried out there," said Nadine Fritz of ESA's Directorate of Human Spaceflight and Operations. "The retirement of the Space Shuttle has significantly reduced the amount of cargo we can download from the station, so it makes sense to do what analysis we can do in orbit."


Study: Humans became social in daylight

OXFORD, England - Humans became social rather that solitary creatures when they stopped being nocturnal and became active during the day, British researchers say. Oxford University researchers say primates were originally solitary creatures that lived alone and foraged by night but millions of years ago they began moving around in daylight, which put them at greater risk of predators so they quickly formed groups to reduce their chances of being attacked, The Daily Telegraph reported. The researchers studied groups of living primates as well as the evolutionary relationships of 217 other primate species to discover how social behavior developed. Unlike other primates, they said, humans are flexible enough to adapt to a range of social settings and a number of social groupings such as nuclear families, extended families and monogamous and polygamous relationships. "This flexibility in the human lineage has not evolved to anything like this level in other primates," study leader Suzanne Shultz said. "Our findings support previous studies that suggest that more brain power is needed for groups that have a more complicated social life." The study was published in the journal Nature.


iPhone users can help conservation efforts

LONDON - British researchers say a new iPhone app that lets users spot leopards, elephants and other animals in the wild will determine if populations are under threat. The free Instant WILD app, released by the Zoological Society of London, connects users to motion-sensitive cameras in animal habitats in Kenya, Sri Lanka and Mongolia, and will send images to the phones in real-time when a camera senses a nearby animal, NewScientist.com reported Monday. The app then asks users to identify which species it belongs to. Sifting through such animal images normally takes days, conservationists said, and they hope crowd-sourcing the activity will speed up the identification process. "By asking people to help us identify species through the app, we are turning wildlife conservation into the massive team effort that it needs to be," said Jonathan Baillie, ZSL conservation director. The free app can be downloaded from the Apple iTunes store, and a version of the app is also accessible online at EdgeofExistance.org.


Space tourist capsule in museum display

NEW YORK - A Soyuz space capsule that brought a private space tourist back from orbit is on display at a museum in New York, a space tourism company says. Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world's first private space explorers, said the Soyuz TMA-6 descent capsule that returned to Earth on Oct. 11, 2005, from the International Space Station with spaceflight participant Greg Olsen and the Expedition 11 crew on board is on exhibit at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. Electronics entrepreneur Olsen was the third private citizen to make a self-funded trip to the International Space Station with Space Adventures. "I hope that the exhibit at the Intrepid will not only spotlight the great engineering at the core of the Russian space program, but also inspire kids to pursue their own dreams and to never give up," Olsen said in a Space Adventures release Tuesday. The Soyuz TMA-6 descent capsule is on loan to the museum by Olsen.


Earliest North American primate studied

BALTIMORE - Fossils from the earliest North American true primate suggests our forerunners may have dwelled primarily in trees like modern-day lemurs, researchers say. Johns Hopkins researchers say they've identified the first ankle and toe bone fossils of Teilhardina, primates that first appeared just after the beginning of the Eocene Epoch about 55.5 million years ago. The ankle bone fossils were elongated like those of present-day prosimian primates, like lemurs, that do a lot of jumping, the researchers said, suggesting Teilhardina was capable of some leaping. The leaping capabilities make it likely Teilhardina was a tree-dweller too, anatomy Professor Ken Rose said in a Johns Hopkins release Tuesday. "Research on early primates gives us more evidence of our origins and our place in nature, with this particular study highlighting the oldest known member of our group from North America," Rose said.

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