Abracadabrah<br><br><i> I create as I speak</i>: Let's Do The Time Warp Again

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century

With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade....

In other scientific, science fiction sounding news, US scientists have managed to grow bladders from human bladder cells and implant these successfully in patients from whom the original human cells were culled.

In a landmark study, U.S. researchers say they have implanted the first laboratory-engineered bladders into children and teenagers whose own organs were defective — and grown them from the patients' own cells.

Cultivating tissue from a person's cells eliminates the risk of rejection, say the researchers from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., who hope lab-produced tissue will one day relieve the shortage of donor organs available for transplant.

A partial fossil of a fish evolving into a land animal has been discovered, gifting scientists with more information about how that transition worked.

Some 375 million years ago, the creature looked like a cross between a fish and a crocodile. It swam in shallow, gently meandering streams in what was then a subtropical climate, researchers say. A meat-eater, it lived mostly in water.

Yet, its front fins had bones that correspond to a shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm and a primitive version of a wrist, Shubin said. From the shoulder to the wrist area, ''it basically looks like a scale-covered arm,'' he said.

''Here's a creature that has a fin that can do push-ups,'' he said. ''This is clearly an animal that is able to support itself on the ground,'' probably both in very shallow water and for brief excursions on dry land. On land, it apparently moved like a seal, he said.

It might have pulled itself onto stream banks, perhaps moving from one wet area to another, and even crawled across logs in swamps, said Daeschler.

The researchers have not yet dug up any remains from the hind end of the creature's body, so they don't know exactly what the hind fins and tail might have looked like.