Anthropology News, Science News

Australia has adopted a similar environmental approach to Britain offering free insulation to home owners and tenants giving them chance to make a difference to the environment. The Australian Government insulation grant provides Australian people with free loft & ceiling insulation.

In the United Kingdom the government previously offered loft insulation & Cavity wall insulation as part of our environmental initiative. The cavity wall insulation was introduced to houses that were built in the 1920’s, as they were made with the external walls having two layers with a tiny gap ‘cavity’ between them.

The benefits of having this installed in your home were to save energy, which in theory helped reduce the amount of carbon monoxide emissions from the home and in turn keeping the warmth within the home where it is needed most. Carbon monoxide being one of the biggest causes to climate change in the world.

While offering this to the older homes in the country they also provided the free loft insulation grant. This would further reduce the amount of carbon monoxide emissions and would help reduce home owner’s yearly bills. This is the idea that Australia have taken on board.

With the Australian government adopting this program and offering free insulation to the Australian residents, it will help reduce the amount of green house gases that escape our homes. The Australian government are offering a $1200 government insulation rebate for free loft & ceiling insulation to those that are eligible.

Companies like Bradford insulation offer Australians various types of insulation including rock wool, fibre glass batts, eco wool and even a hybrid fibreglass foil insulation.

In the United Kingdom they were insulating the homes to keep the heat in. In Australia the government are providing the insulation grant to achieve the opposite and keep homes cool in the summer and warmer in the winter. With this the residents are saving money on there yearly home gas & electric bills.

It is great to see that the Australian government has adopted the insulation grant as a result they are helping the economy by creating more jobs and reducing carbon monoxide emissions. But after this grant was announced the Australian government did mention an increase in energy bills of up to 40%. If only more countries would adopt this process we would be getting closer to making more of a difference.

Scientists have successfully grown a date palm from a 2000-year-old
seed dug up from the Judean desert. That makes the seed, whose age has
just been verified by radiocarbon dating, the oldest ever to germinate.

Once upon a time, the Dead Sea region was famous for its full-size,
succulent dates. The fruits were renowned for their sweetness and for
their use in treating respiratory problems and depression. Indeed,
Judean dates represented Israel’s biggest export business 2000 years
ago. But centuries of wars, invasions, and drought disrupted date
cultivation, and by the time of the Crusades 800 years ago, the
region’s vast date forests had disappeared.

In 1963, a team of archaeologists, excavating King Herod’s fortress in
Masada, near the Dead Sea, discovered ancient date seeds beneath the
rubble. They preserved the seeds in a room for more than 40 years, with
the intent of studying them further, and recently, a team of botanists,
agronomists, and biologists did just that. Led by Sarah Sallon, head of
the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, the
researchers decided to plant some of the date seeds as part of a
project to regrow medicinal plants lost from the area.

There have been many claims of "ancient" seeds germinating but usually
without well-accepted verification of the seeds’ ages. So Sallon’s team
turned to radiocarbon dating, which measures the age of objects based
on the decay rate of their carbon isotopes, to date two of the seeds to
about 2110 and 1995 years old.

The researchers were unable to plant those seeds, because the dating
process destroys the shell, but they did plant a third seed. That seed
germinated after 8 weeks, similar to modern dates. After allowing the
plant–nicknamed Methuselah after the oldest person in the Bible–to
grow for 15 months, the scientists dated shell fragments clinging to
rootlets from the seed and arrived at an age of about 1700 years. The
researchers suspect that the original seed was closer to 2000 years old
but that the carbon the plant incorporated as it grew skewed the
calculations.

Sallon and colleagues, who report their findings tomorrow in science,
are currently conducting genetic analysis on the young plants to see
whether they represent an extinct species. If so, Sallon says her team
will try to reintroduce the plant to Israel. That could allow
scientists to cross the ancient date with more modern varieties, in the
hopes of creating palms more resistant to infection and drought, for
example.

Palm expert William Baker of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in
Richmond, U.K., agrees that the resurrected palm could be useful for
conservation purposes. But he notes that only the female plant produces
seeds, so the ancient seeds will have more value if they develop into
female plants.

Source

Amid recent reports of dangerous levels of arsenic being found in
some baby rice products, scientists have found a protein in plants that
could help to reduce the toxic content of crops grown in environments
with high levels of this poisonous metal. Publishing in the open access
journal BMC Biology, a team of Scandinavian researchers has revealed a
set of plant proteins that channel arsenic in and out of cells.

Arsenic
is acutely toxic and a highly potent carcinogen, but is widespread in
the earth’s crust and easily taken up and accumulated in crops.
Contaminated water is the main source of arsenic poisoning, followed by
ingestion of arsenic-rich food, especially rice that has been irrigated
with arsenic-contaminated water. According to the WHO, arsenic has been
found approaching or above guideline limits in drinking water in
Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Chile, China, Hungary, India, Mexico,
Peru, Thailand, and the US.

Until now, scientists have been
unable to identify which proteins are responsible for letting arsenite,
the form of arsenic that damages cellular proteins, into plant cells.
Now Gerd Bienert and his colleagues from the University of Copehangen,
Denmark and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, are the first to show
that a family of transporters, called nodulin26-like intrinsic protein
(NIPs), can move arsenite across a plant cell membrane. NIPs are
related to aquaglyceroporins found in microbes and mammalian cells and
which have already been shown to function as arsenite channels in these
other organisms. Bienert’s team put the plant genes coding for
different NIP transporters into yeast cells in order to test the cells
for arsenic sensitivity. The researchers found that the growth of yeast
containing certain plant NIPs was suppressed when arsenite, one of the
predominant forms of arsenic found in soil, was added to the mix. They
showed that the arsenite was channelled by NIPs and accumulated inside
the yeast cells. Further investigations showed that only a subgroup of
NIPs had arsenite transport capabilities, and have now been identified
as metalloid channels in plants.

More
surprisingly, the researchers also found that when they added arsenate
some yeast, cells actually grew better and arsenite was released out of
the cells. "It appears that some NIPs don’t just transport arsenite in
one direction", says Bienert. "They are bidirectional and, given the
right conditions, can clear cells of toxic arsenite as well as
accumulate it. This striking exit of the accumulated arsenite in cells
could have an important role to play in the detoxification of plants,
especially coupled with possibility of engineering a transporter that
discriminates against arsenite uptake in the first place."

To all the returning visitors you will hopefully have noticed the redesign of the site, the old design was crap to be honest, it looked messy was hard to configure and generally annoyed me.

The new design however is a little brighter, softer on the eyes and (I think) looks better than the previous one. Now I should be able to get some nice articles and posts up. Please take note of the new links which are up:
EurekAlert  & Ted.com. These are sites which I have been fond of for a long time now and I hope you will let them grow on you as well.

I am also hoping to feature a different video from Ted.com each week which will be really cool. The amount of information that they have on the site is fantastic and the quality of the videos are great too!

I also now have a Co-Author who will rear his face in due time. I hope that you will receive his posts with an open mind as he is very passionate about astrophysics and everything in between!!!

Thanks and hope you enjoy the new stuff

Sam

To all of the people that have been visiting I apologise for the lack of fresh posts. Work has been very busy and too tired to research anything.

Please keep checking back I should have some new information up soon.

Done some fine adjustments with the format of the website. This is a template though unfortunately, mainly because i have been a little stressed with getting the html code to work on my server >.<. Soon i am hoping to have some logos *funky* and some nice images that i can use for links and stuff.
  Finding places to get links from will be next thing on the agenda, this will take bit of time. I’m hoping to get between 20 and 50 by the year is out. that should really start getting some traffic to the blog and make a solid post to digg and stumble.

My favorite site so far has got to be Chimps vs humans purly because i have been doing a little research into the evolution of moneys and such lately. For example the benoba’s are amazing. Check out TED.com and search for Susan ‘Savage’. She has done some amazing work with the benoba’s
Until next time…
Sam

I have finally found some time and enthusiasm to get some self written posts up onto my blog, Do a bit of link building for a community feel, and start getting some good traffic to my blog so people can read what i will write. Maybe.
I have acquired a nice microscope in the cheap from eBay which was pretty cool and come the new year i should have a few bacterial colonies growing as well. I do need to get a microscope camera setup done or simply get a digital one. Cost could be an issue but there are ways around that……

Also need to change a load of keywords make some new categories and redesign the layout cause i am not happy with it at all. If anyone reads this leave a comment with some suggestions.!!!

Check back soon for some nice posts. I reckon 2 or 3 a week will be the coming average soon.

Sam