Zombie Squid Explained

A restaurant in Japan is serving up some very fresh sushi. The "dead" squid begins to squirm as soy sauce is poured over it, but why? Martin Berman speaks with a chemist to find out what's going on.

Weird Noises From Under The Earth

Invisibility Serum

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Left: Mouse embryo soaked in just saline solution. Right: Mouse embryo washed in Scale

Soaking the tissues in the chemical substance made them biologically transparent.

Maybe in the near future, doctors can say “I can see what’s going on inside your brain.” Literally.

A chemical known as Scale, which is in its experimental stage, turns brain tissue totally crystal clear. In other words, transparent. It’s like looking into a brain tissue with ”X-ray vision.”

Atsushi Miyawaki, scientist at Japan’s RIKEN Brain Science Institute said that their current experiments are “focused on the mouse brain” but the application could be limitless. They envision using Scale on other organs like muscles, heart, and kidneys and other biopsy samples from tissue taken from primates and humans.

Soaking the tissues in the chemical substance made them biologically transparent.

A neurologist at the UCLA School of Medicine, Dr. Paul Thompson, is a 20-year veteran in the field of brain imaging and he is extremely impressed at this discovery and its potential applications. He mentioned that photos of embryonic mice treated with Scale and transparent organs are absolutely amazing. “Seeing something like this truly had a wow factor,” he said.

The chemical solution, Scale, is made from just 2 simple compounds: urea-the dominant compound in urine-glycerol and Triton-X, a detergent.

One exciting application that experts are thinking about in the future is being able to see if medication is really getting to parts of the brain or other organs that are being treated. Also, one advantage of using this chemical is that it’s less expensive than CT scans or MRI.

Scale is currently too toxic for living creatures, so you won’t be worrying about the “invisible mouse” running around your house any time soon.

UFO Crashlands in the desert

Earth's gold and platinum arrived in a meteor shower that lasted 200MILLION years

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There's enough gold and platinum on Earth for a 4m-thick layer that covers the entire surface

All the world's gold and platinum ore came from outer space after a mammoth meteorite shower battered the Earth more than four billion years ago, scientists revealed today.

Researchers also discovered there is enough gold and platinum in the Earth's core to plate the surface of the globe with a layer of priceless bling four metres thick.

These huge gold deposits appeared during the Earth's formation when molten iron sank to its centre, dragging with it vast quantities of precious metals.

Rock on: Gold and platinum arrived on Earth from space, claim scientists

This left the Earth lacking gold and platinum until a cataclysmic meteor shower bombarded the earth 200 million years later.

A staggering 20 billion billion tonnes of meteorite matter, including gold and platinum, slammed into the earth during the 200million-year-long shower.

Geologists at the University of Bristol have discovered this mammoth meteorite shower replenished the earth's lost reserves of precious metals.

Rock samples found in Greenland - which were formed at the Earth's formation - contained a marginally higher ratio of the tungsten isotope 182W compared to more modern rock.

Therefore, modern rock must have come from a meteorite shower which proves today's gold and platinum deposits came from outer space.

Spaced out: Gold arrived on Earth during a monster meteor shower lasting 200 million years

Dr Matthias Willbold and Professor Tim Elliott, of the Bristol Isotope Group in the School of Earth Sciences, led the research.

Dr Willbold said: ‘Extracting tungsten from the rock samples and analysing its isotopic composition to the precision required was extremely demanding given the small amount of tungsten available in rocks.

‘In fact, we are the first laboratory world-wide that has successfully made such high-quality measurements.

‘Our work shows that most of the precious metals on which our economies and many key industrial processes are based have been added to our planet by lucky coincidence when the Earth was hit by about 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroidal material.’

The metals from these earth-shattering meteorites were stirred into the planet's mantle by gigantic convection processes.

These later emerged in newly formed continents, concentrated in the ore deposits which are mined today.

The research, published in Nature, was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.