Neat News - Neat things do happen

Based on the principles on which a mobile phone accelerometer is built, a small device has been developed that can be used to measure tiny changes in gravity. It may, for instance, be used to monitor changes in volcanoes.

Paul Kerley has compiled a number of examples of architecture inspired by nanostructures. They include several possibilities for sleeping and sitting.

For more than 1000 years there lynxes were extinct in Britain. Now the cats that weigh up to 40kg are about to be re-introduced, following a breeding programme in Spain that has seen their numbers increase from 100 to 400 animals.

Type 1 Diabetes - a risk in particular for young people - is due to an auto-immune reaction, in which an ill-guided immune reaction kills the beta cells in the pancreas, which are responsible for the synthesis of insulin. There is now a trial in London of an immunotherapy treatment to halt the progression of this.

Individual countries increasingly protect the natural habitats in their sovereign sea shores. This is much more difficult for International Waters. There are now UN plan to increase the protection zones of Internal Waters from 2% to 10% by 2020.

A tiny frog protects its eggs by foam. Scientists mimic this to deliver healing drugs to burn wounds.

The Australian city of Port Augusta - like a number of other towns and cities - is moving to be 100% carbon neutral, mainly by exploiting solar powers.

The global investment in renewable energies has risen in 2015 compared to 2014, in particular, due an increase of 17% in the investment by China.

There is a new scheme in which by 2020 one million trees will be planted in British schools. 35000 trees should be planted by the end of the month.

Scientific American suggests 10 measures to stop climate change. They include: not using fossil fuels, better insulating buildings, moving closer to work, consume less, be efficient (e.g., in a car have the tyres properly inflated), become a vegatarian, stop cutting down trees, don't leave devices on stand-by, have only one child.

A fifth of the Australian Island Tasmania is covered by a huge forest, the Tasmanian Wilderness. The previous Australian government planned to allow logging. However, the Unesco published report in wich it asked to protect it from logging as a World Heritage site. The Australian and Tasmanian governments said they will abide by the Unesco recommendation.

The BBC article is one in a series on ordinary people that made a huge difference to their communities. Here, a woman not in office managed to make a huge difference to her village by getting electricity for the village and protecting the nearby forest with the help of other women.

In observations with the Hubble Telescope a group of stars has been detected which contains stars that are 250 times as massive as our sun. They are on the edge of our Milky Way.

I very bright meteor was seen over Britain on the early morning of 2016-03-17.

In the 17th-century, the physician William Harvey discovered that the blood is pumped in a loop around the body. Now scientists named a system after him that they built. It models the blood flow very accurately so that effects of, e.g., setting a stent can be predicted.

The number of bats in a cave can be counted by the noise they make.

Scientists explain that ribbons can be made curly by the blade of a scissor because they are bent around the blade which stretches the outermost side more than the side near the blade. They are stretched more and in consequence are more curly when the movement is slow.

2.3 Million Species have been ligned up in a single "Circle of Life" in the OpenTreeOfLife project. It is supposed to be extended to up to 8.7 million species.

Once a year during spring, Death Valley (between California and Nevada) sees some bloom. Occasionally there is sufficient rainfall that the desert is carpeted with flowers.

Planting trees can reduce the flooding risk and flood levels by up to 20%, since they delay the flow of water.

In the first match of Google's Go program AlphaGo against world champion Lee Se-dol, the program won. It turned out that it was much harder to build outstanding Go programs than according chess programs.

A new revolutionary treatment based on stem cells has been applied by research teams from Sun Yat-sen University and the University of California, San Diego, to treat cataracts, the most common cause for blindness. The approach looks very promising.

There was a total eclipse last night in Indonesia. A toal eclipse happens when the moon blocks out the light coming from the sun. Amazingly the disks of the sun and the moon have approximately the same size when observed from earth. People were taking beautiful pictures.

In Norfolk genetic tests showed that two seals born are twins. The two have been named R2-D2 and C-3PO.

The Hubble Space Telescope has registered light from a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away, a new record. This means that according to current knowledge the galaxy is seen just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

The four first places for environmental performance go to four Scandinavian countries (Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Denmark).

In 2014, doctors in the Polish city of "Wrocław transplanted cells from a man's nose into his spine in order to stimulate regrowth of nerve cells which were distroyed in a knife attack in 2010 and left the man paralyzed. He is making good progress in regaining sensation and motor control.

There is new research which may lead in the longer run to the development of a new treatment against cancer by directing T-cells of the human immune system to attack cancer cells in an individualized way.

In the European Commission project Copernicus, the new Sentinel 3 satellite launched in February has sent its first images of landscapes and the ocean. The satellite and the others in the Sentinel series observe climate and environment.

80km south of Glasgow, an architect and landscape designer has created an artist's impression of the idea of the multiverse at the Crawick Multiverse site.

Scottish Power wants to extend the Cruachan plant near Oban in Scotland by adding a new dam to the existing dam. This would add a capacity of 400MW and could be used to buffer renewable energy at times of low demand (e.g., night) for high demand (e.g., day and evening).