Human activities are a major source of sound under water and such sound could be negatively affecting marine mammals. Research into the effect of sound on the behavior of marine mammals is aimed at understanding how and why marine mammals respond to various sound stimuli. Researchers have found that killer whales and pilot whales change the calls they make when responding to sonar sound. They believe that with greater knowledge about the sounds these animals make, regulations can be created to mitigate the impacts of the sound created by humans on marine life.

Researchers are now asking for the public’s help in classifying the calls of killer whales and pilot whales into distinct categories. Through the Whale Song Project, you can help by matching similar sounding whale calls. The results obtained will help specialists to refine the categories of calls used and discover patterns in the calls. The project is part of the Zooniverse network of projects (see our earlier posts on Zoo Galaxy and Ancient Lives, other Zooniverse projects).
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In many fields—especially math, physics, and chemistry—variables, constants, and other symbols are frequently used, and sometimes it’s difficult to know what font to use: roman (regular text), italics, bold, or bold italics…

For example, for the mass of an electron, m_e = 9.109×10⁻³¹ kg, m is written in italics because it’s a physical quantity, e is written in roman type because it’s a descriptor, and kg is written in roman type because it’s an SI unit.

There are many rules to remember, so we wanted to share with you a useful reference sheet, Typefaces for Symbols in Scientific Manuscripts, from the U.S. National Institute of Standards.

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/typefaces.pdf

We hope this is helpful to you in preparing your next manuscript!

Through the Ancient Lives Project, researchers at Oxford University are asking for help in deciphering fragments of text recovered from the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, at around the turn of the 20th century. Approximately 50,000 fragments of papyri were saved from garbage tips at the site and the texts identified so far include the Gospel of St. Thomas and the writings of Plato. The sheer volume of fragments still to be transcribed has led researchers to ask for help from the public in deciphering the texts for subsequent translation by scholars. You don’t need to know Greek to participate!

You can help by matching the letters handwritten on fragments of papyri to examples of Greek letters provided for reference. Operated under the Zooniverse network of projects (see our earlier post on Galaxy Zoo, another Zooniverse project), you just need to login and begin transcribing your first fragment of text. You can save your work at any time and come back to it later.

If you think you’d like to participate in this latest citizen science project, you can take the tutorial first without needing to login and see just what you have to do: http://www.ancientlives.org/guides/tutorial

Attention is again firmly focused on regenerative medicine following the advance online publication of a paper entitled ‘Functional tooth regeneration using a bioengineered tooth unit as a mature organ replacement regenerative therapy’. The article, published in PLoS ONE on July 12, reports how a team of Japanese researchers successfully transplanted a stem-celled derived tooth unit into the alveolar bone of a mouse. The transplanted tooth unit (composed of a mature tooth, periodontal ligament, and alveolar bone) demonstrated important physiological tooth functions including mastication and responsiveness to noxious stimulation. As stated in the press release posted on the Tokyo University of Science website, this proof-of-concept brings the reality of bioengineered mature organ replacement one step closer.

Here at ThinkSCIENCE, we have the pleasure of editing and translating many papers destined for American Chemical Society (ACS) journals. So, we wondered which ACS journal has the highest impact factor. > > >

We recently came across the amazing photographic series entitled ‘Your Beautiful Eyes’ by Dr. Suren Manvelyan which shows the topography of the iris in extreme close up.

In this series, Dr. Manvelyan, who has a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Yerevan State University in Armenia and currently works as a physical sciences teacher and professional photographer, has managed to capture the intricate beauty of the human iris. His photographic technique remains a secret!

You can view of some of his photographs online at http://www.behance.net/paronsuren/Frame/428809.

A team of researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan have successfully derived an optic cup from mouse embryonic stems cells. Published online in Nature this month, the team’s article entitled ‘Self-organizing optic-cup morphogenesis in three-dimensional culture’ reports that the optic cup gave rise to tissue exhibiting the stratified structure characteristic of the retina in vivo. As stated on the CDB website, the potential applications of this important work include regenerative medicine treatment for retinal degenerative disorders such as retinitis pigmentosa.

Check out the movies accompanying the article on the Nature website, showing, for example, 3D live imaging of morphogenesis of the optic cup.

Researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Washington have developed foldit (http://www.fold.it), a distributed computing project that will help scientists develop better algorithms for predicting protein structures, as well as better protein design.

How does foldit work? Because humans are highly skilled at pattern recognition and 3D problem solving, we can solve problems that are difficult for computers. You play the video game and try to solve protein folding puzzles. You earn more points the better the protein is folded, and you compete against other users to get the highest score. So it’s a lot of fun!

You don’t need to be an expert in biochemistry; you just need to enjoy games and solving puzzles. Why don’t you download foldit and give it try!

We recently came across a brilliant design solution for neonatal incubators intended for use in developing countries. The team at Design that Matters sought to overcome the prohibitive costs of buying and maintaining conventional incubators, the lack of available spare parts to fix broken incubators, and inconsistent electricity supply among other problems. Based on extensive research of the problem, Design that Matters developed the NeoNurture incubator, an incubator made from car parts. As the team states on their website, they considered in their design process the “abundant local resource in developing countries: car parts and the knowledge of auto technicians” http://www.designthatmatters.org/portfolio/projects/incubator/.

Its components include headlights as a heating element, a dashboard fan for convective heat circulation, a motorcycle battery, and a door chime as an alarm. For a full description of this amazing design solution and other projects, visit the Design That Matters website: http://designthatmatters.org/portfolio/projects/.

If you have an interest in astronomy, why not help scientists to classify the hundreds of thousands of amazing images of galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope. More than 250,000 people already have helped the Galaxy Zoo team to classify galaxies according to shape, by determining the presence of features in an image, such as spiral arms and the prominence of a galaxy’s central bulge. According to the Galaxy Zoo team, humans are much better at classifying the images than a computer.

In the latest project, some of the images to be classified come from the Extended Groth Strip, which contains at least 50,000 galaxies.

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