In the quest for competitive success, U.S. swim team members have taken to mimicking the swimming techniques of sharks and dolphins.

A recent German study reveals that brief bouts of sleep, power naps, improve memory and mental performance.

Dr. Olaf Lahl at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, has shown that simply falling asleep does more than refresh the brain - it can improve recall and mental efficiency.

In fact, a six-minute nap can have the same effect as nighttime sleep on memory.

Dr. Lahl’s team asked students to memorize a list of vocabulary and tested their ability to recall the list after an hour of playing solitaire.

via Earth Times

Nearly all of today’s Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.

Read the full article here.

How cool is this! A new fabric that generates electricity.

U.S. scientists have developed a microfibre fabric that generates its own electricity, making enough current to recharge a cell phone or ensure that a small MP3 music player never runs out of power.

If made into a shirt, the fabric could harness power from its wearer’s simply walking around or even from a slight breeze, they reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The fibre-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from the physical movement,” Dr. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who led the study, said in a statement.

The nanogenerator takes advantage of the semiconductive properties of zinc oxide nanowires – tiny wires one-thousandth the width of a human hair – embedded into the fabric. The wires are formed into pairs of microscopic brush-like structures, shaped like a bottle brush.

via Globe and Mail

The Detroit News reports about how Sweden’s use of ethanol fuel may serve as a model for the U.S. shift away from pure crude oil-based fuels.

As the International Herald Tribune reports things are brewing in Israel to test not the electric car per see, but the mass consumption of the electric car.

The idea, said Shai Agassi, 39, the software entrepreneur behind the new company, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware - the car - and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.

“Because the price of gasoline fluctuates so much during the life of a car, it’s hard to predict the cost basis for driving,” Agassi said. “But electricity fluctuates less, and you can buy it in advance, so I can give you a guaranteed price per mile, cheaper than the price of gas today.”

According to this news report (no, it is not from a tabloid) six people have been killed this year by a brain-eating amoeba.

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases — three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.

Scary, scary stuff.

The Associated Press (via the Globe and Mail) reports that there was a deadly mishap explosion at the development grounds for the crafts that will be used by Virgin Galactic for its space tourism offering. The explosion happened in the Mojave Desert back in July. I do not know about you, but I only heard about this yesterday.

…three technicians died and three others were critically injured while performing a routine cold-flow test of nitrous oxide that did not involve a rocket firing. The company, which has done the test numerous times before without a problem, uses the chemical as an oxidizer in its spaceship’s hybrid rocket motor.
…
Virgin Galactic did privately contact its prized customers known as founders, who have paid the full $200,000 to be among the first to experience four minutes of weightlessness.

Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic’s astronaut liaison, reassured the founders in an e-mail that the accident’s impact on the first commercial spaceflights — expected in late 2009 or 2010 — will be “minimal” and that it was “business as usual.”

Space.com has a nice article on the two rovers that are still going strong on Mars.

Those peppy Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, continue to make tracks as they wheel about two diverse locales on Mars – far outstripping their original warranties of 90 days of lifetime and a target of roughly 2,000 feet (600 meters) of driving range when they landed on the planet in January 2004.

Both of the mechanized emissaries from Earth remain hard at work, said Steven Squyres, principal investigator for the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Project and astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Scientists in Norther Ireland are stumped after discovering that a female hammerhead shark has reproduced without mating. The offspring appears to have no paternal DNA.

via seed magazine

Before sacrificing the opportunities to work abroad or fly to far-off places, the traveler should know that there are ways to reduce, although not eliminate, the discomfort caused by quickly crossing many meridians and throwing off the body clock.

Many vital bodily functions are regulated by an internal clock called the circadian rhythm - from circa for about and diem for day. The “about” part comes from the fact that in the absence of light these daily rhythms, the body’s many clocks, operate on slightly more than a 24-hour cycle. They are adjusted to a 24-hour rhythm by environmental cues called zeitgebers (German for time-givers), primarily the 24-hour cycle of sunlight and darkness and the rhythmic secretion in the brain of the hormone melatonin, which is released at night during sleep.

Continue reading this article on jet lag and ways to minimize it from the International Herald Tribune.

Musician David Byrne of Roxy Music Talking Heads fame (I don’t know why I wrote Roxy Music in the first place, confusing Byrne with Bryan Ferry. Lesson learned, get coffee before blogging) and neuroscientist David Levitin got together thanks to Seed Magazine to have a chat. Click over this way to see what they talked about hint it has something to do with music.

From Chow.com:

Senior Editor Lessley Anderson and Multimedia Producer Meredith Arthur attended the second Taste3 conference in Napa, California, where they got fully briefed on subjects ranging from how microwaves can know you inside and out to what kind of music will make your rib-eye taste better. Each session, loosely themed with titles like “Power” and “Senses,” featured three to four speakers drawn from all corners of the food industry—some well-known and others more obscure—as well as multimedia performers.

Click here to find out what’s happening.

UPI reports that a recent study yielded the result that women who eat beef regularly during pregnancy are more likely to produce sons with low sperm counts. I am skeptical about the reality or impact of this as women have been eating beef and having sons for the longest time and those sons have been fathering other children.

From Science Daily:

In one of the most comprehensive and definitive studies of its kind to date, a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis have proven that organically grown kiwifruit contain more health-promoting factors than those grown under conventional conditions. The research is reported in the SCI’s magazine Chemistry & Industry. The debate over the relative health benefits of organic versus conventional food has raged for years, with UK environment secretary David Miliband declaring in January that buying organic is just a lifestyle choice.

The latest research on the effects of pop/soft drinks on teeth is that they erode enamel over time. On the flip side, root beer is the drink that has the least effect on our teeth.

It appears that the future of rice is looking better after today’s news:

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust announced the historic new agreement at a special dedication ceremony at IRRI’s Genetic Resources Center, which houses more than 100,000 samples of rice, the biggest and most important such collection in the world.

The funding agreement is expected to help conserve and manage forever the extraordinary diversity of arguably the world’s most important crop. Today, about three billion people depend on rice for their survival, with the thousands of varieties carefully stored at IRRI providing the last line of defense between them and possible famine, especially in times of war, natural disasters, and attacks from pests and diseases.

The agreement offers for the first time in the history of modern agricultural research stable and long-term support to an unrivaled collection of genetic diversity that is estimated to include at least 80,000 distinct rice varieties. The collection is considered the Institute’s “crown jewels” and is kept in a special earthquake-proof and fireproof facility that must be maintained at temperatures as low as –19 degrees Celsius.

via science daily

China is getting ready to send a man into space so he could walk in space, but first they have to make a space suit

China is on schedule to have a man walk in space for the first time next year after engineers finished the design of a home-grown suit for the mission, state press reported Monday…”The design of the space suits has been completed but they still need to be tested,” the chief consultant to Shenzhou VII mission, Qi Faren, said as he outlined the 2008 schedule, according to the Beijing Times.

Huang, a leading rocket engineer on the project, meanwhile told the Beijing Morning Post that two astronauts may have a chance to walk in space.

via Seed

AP reports that paleontologist Michael Ryan, at Cleveland’s Museum of Natural History, has identified a new plant eater dinosaur after digging up a fossil six years ago in Alberta. The new dinosaur is named Albertaceratops nesmoi, after the Canadian province and Cecil Nesmo, a rancher near Manyberries, Alberta, who has helped fossil hunters.

via yahoo news