The Science Thief

Near-Perfect Symmetry Revealed in Red Cosmic Square

2007-04-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

If symmetry is a sign of splendor, then the newly discovered Red Square nebula is one of the most beautiful objects in the universe.

Seen in the infrared, the nebula resembles a giant, glowing red box in the sky, with a bright white inner core. A dying star called MWC 922 is located at the system’s center and spewing its innards from opposite poles into space. (A nebula is an interstellar cloud of gas, dust and plasma where stars can both emerge and die.)

“This spectacular event is the death of a star,” said study team member James Lloyd of Cornell University.

After MWC 922 ejects most of its material into space, it will contract into a dense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, shrouded by clouds of its own remains.

The Red Square nebula discovery is detailed in the April 13 issue of the journal Science.

Patenting Life

2007-02-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

by Michael Crichton
You, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, its only too real.
Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.
Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldnt somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitors test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you cant even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but its now private property.
This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome to issue patents on genes.
Humans share mostly the same genes. The same genes are found in other animals as well. Our genetic makeup represents the common heritage of all life on earth. You cant patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldnt be able to patent genes, either. Yet by now one-fifth of the genes in your body are privately owned.
The results have been disastrous. Ordinarily, we imagine patents promote innovation, but thats because most patents are granted for human inventions. Genes arent human inventions, they are features of the natural world. As a result these patents can be used to block innovation, and hurt patient care.

For example, Canavan disease is an inherited disorder that affects children starting at 3 months; they cannot crawl or walk, they suffer seizures and eventually become paralyzed and die by adolescence. Formerly there was no test to tell parents if they were at risk. Families enduring the heartbreak of caring for these children engaged a researcher to identify the gene and produce a test. Canavan families around the world donated tissue and money to help this cause.
When the gene was identified in 1993, the families got the commitment of a New York hospital to offer a free test to anyone who wanted it. But the researchers employer, Miami Childrens Hospital Research Institute, patented the gene and refused to allow any health care provider to offer the test without paying a royalty. The parents did not believe genes should be patented and so did not put their names on the patent. Consequently, they had no control over the outcome."

Evolution-centered science OK'd in Kan. - Science - MSNBC.com

2007-02-13T19:19:00.000-08:00

TOPEKA, Kan. - The Kansas state Board of Education on Tuesday repealed science guidelines questioning evolution that had made the state an object of ridicule.The new guidelines reflect mainstream scientific views of evolution and represent a political defeat for advocates of %u201Cintelligent design,%u201D who had helped write the standards that are being jettisoned.The intelligent design concept holds that life is so complex that it must have been created by a higher authority."

Stem-cell storage firm takes Branson into biotech sector

2007-01-25T20:12:00.000-08:00

Sir Richard Branson will launch his most controversial business to date as he moves into stem-cell storage and the biotech sector, The Times has learnt.
The Virgin-branded company will be launched next Thursday and is expected to offer parents the chance to put the umbilical blood of their newborn children into cold storage. Scientists believe that future advances in medical technology will use stem cells to cure diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer.
The move into stem-cell storage is part of a strategy that Sir Richard is developing to invest in technologies of the future. He has already launched Virgin Galactic, which will take tourists into space, and is investing all the profits of Virgin Atlantic, his airline, in the development of environmentally friendly biofuels.

Ebola Virus Killing Gorillas, Chimps in Congo

2006-12-10T08:22:00.000-08:00

A new study confirms that the ebola virus is causing a massive die-off of gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa. Scientists differ on whether there's anything humans can do to help their closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
In the Lossi Sanctuary in the Republic of Congo, researchers had been tracking groups of gorillas for several years. Four years ago, they started to find gorilla carcasses. And over the next four months 130 of the 143 apes disappeared...

Windows virus worms onto some Apple iPods

2006-10-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

CNET News.com: "update
Apple Computer warned on Tuesday that some of its latest iPods have shipped with a Windows virus.
The company said that a small number of video iPods made after Sept. 12 included the RavMonE virus. It said it has seen fewer than 25 reports of the problem, which it said does not affect other models of the media player, nor does it affect Macs.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company apologized on its Web site for the problem, but also used the opportunity to jab at Microsoft, its operating system rival.
'As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it,' Apple said on its site.
Apple Vice President Greg Joswiak told CNET News.com that the virus was discovered last week and said the company has been working around the clock since then to discover the root cause of the problem. Joswiak said it was traced to a particular Windows machine in the manufacturing lines of a contract manufacturer that builds the iPods for Apple. The company declined to name the maker.
'It's more important to say we now have processes in place to make sure this won't happen again,' Joswiak said. 'Very few units actually went through that particular station, fortunately.'
The company said that computers using a current antivirus software and with default settings should detect and remove RavMonE, as it is an identified virus. It is urging iPod users without such protection to install antivirus software."

Is String Theory Tying Science in Knots?

2006-10-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

String theory, a complex equation-based way of viewing the universe, has been in vogue among the world's top scientists for decades now. But in the last few months, a growing chorus of voices within the scientific community has begun to claim that not only is string theory likely inaccurate, its relentless promotion as the only viable theory of unification is hurting science as a whole...

Talking Points - On the Recentness of What We Know by Verlyn Klinkenborg

2006-08-10T19:13:00.000-07:00

New York Times: "The other night I took the dogs for a walk in the pasture. It was a cloudless evening with low humidity, a rare event in this damp, northeastern summer. I always look up at the stars when I’m outside in the dark, but all too often, even here in the country, they’re obscured by haze. Not that night. They shone with a brightness, a clarity I’d almost forgotten. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis, Lyra, the red light of Arcturus in the west, the diffuse band of the Milky Way arching overhead—their presence was overwhelming. And yet, somehow, when the stars look close to earth it’s easier to imagine how far away they really are. It was a warm July night, but I could almost feel the chill of space.
I’ve been watching the stars for nearly half a century now. Not much has changed up there. The sky is a memory in itself. I stared at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through a small telescope of my own when I was a boy in Iowa. I spent part of a summer watching meteors while I was helping my family build a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and part of a winter star-gazing from the top of a mesa on the Hopi Reservation, where somehow the smell of cedar mingled with the light of the moon. The only thing that has changed in all that time—apart from a few new satellites crossing the sky—is the state of my knowledge."

Cold, Hard Facts - New York Times

2006-07-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

Chicago
IN the debate on global warming, the data on the climate of Antarctica has been distorted, at different times, by both sides. As a polar researcher caught in the middle, I%u2019d like to set the record straight.In January 2002, a research paper about Antarctic temperatures, of which I was the lead author, appeared in the journal Nature. At the time, the Antarctic Peninsula was warming, and many people assumed that meant the climate on the entire continent was heating up, as the Arctic was. But the Antarctic Peninsula represents only about 15 percent of the continent%u2019s land mass, so it could not tell the whole story of Antarctic climate. Our paper made the continental picture more clear.My research colleagues and I found that from 1996 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report also analyzed temperatures for the mainland in such a way as to remove the influence of the peninsula warming and found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change.Newspaper and television reports focused on this part of the paper. And many news and opinion writers linked our study with another bit of polar research published that month, in Science, showing that part of Antarcticas ice sheet had been thickening and erroneously concluded that the earth was not warming at all. Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming, said a headline on an editorial in The San Diego Union-Tribune. One conservative commentator wrote, Its ironic that two studies suggesting that a new Ice Age may be under way may end the global warming debate.
In a rebuttal in The Providence Journal, in Rhode Island, the lead author of the Science paper and I explained that our studies offered no evidence that the earth was cooling. But the misinterpretation had already become legend, and in the four and half years since, it has only grown.

Our results have been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel “State of Fear” and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” Search my name on the Web, and you will find pages of links to everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents — all citing my 2002 study as reason to doubt that the earth is warming. One recent Web column even put words in my mouth. I have never said that “the unexpected colder climate in Antarctica may possibly be signaling a lessening of the current global warming cycle.” I have never thought such a thing either.

Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?

Also missing from the skeptics’ arguments is the debate over our conclusions. Another group of researchers who took a different approach found no clear cooling trend in Antarctica. We still stand by our results for the period we analyzed, but unbiased reporting would acknowledge differences of scientific opinion.

The disappointing thing is that we are even debating the direction of climate change on this globally important continent. And it may not end until we have more weather stations on Antarctica and longer-term data that demonstrate a clear trend.

In the meantime, I would like to remove my name from the list of scientists who dispute global warming. I know my coauthors would as well.

Peter Doran is an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Cause and defect

2006-07-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

SignOnSanDiego.com: "Notice something wrong? Are our clocks ticking backward? The known laws of physics say there's no reason why the past, present and future must occur in that order. Backward works, too.
By Scott LaFee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 22, 2006
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
The answer would seem to be yes, if only because time always moves forward, drawing not just “we few” but everyone and everything “onward to new era.”
But what if time is like the palindrome above? What if the so-called arrow of time flies both ways, forward and back? What then? What now? What next?
People have debated the nature of time since, well, people invented it. Time is, in many ways, a fabrication of our minds, a superficial construct that helps us explain the universe, plot our course through existence and show up when we're supposed to.
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once,” Albert Einstein once said.
And so it goes, one thing happens, then another – a phenomenon called cause-and-effect. “It's a notion so deeply ingrained that it's hard to think about things any other way,” said Daniel Sheehan, a professor of physics at the University of San Diego.
But Sheehan does, as do other physicists who are meeting this week at USD to discuss and debate the concept of “reverse causation,” a fantastical notion that suggests effects can precede causes, and the future can influence the past, assuming the past and future actually “exist” in the first place.."

No sex please, robot, just clean the floor - Sunday Times - Times Online

2006-06-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a "Ccode of ethics" for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.
Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now - before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.
"There are two levels of priority,"D said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. "We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots."
Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines."

Translated version of http://www.esupply.co.jp/syohin.asp?sku=EEM-GTMS-300BK

2006-06-07T19:59:00.000-07:00

With thumb button operation!
Even in narrow space OK!
It locks in the index finger, operates the button with the thumb, it is the mouse of mini- size.

As for tread, barely vertical 2.3cm× side 2.7cm and microminiature.

In [purezen], in travel, the screen of the personal computer must be operated in the narrow space, when, it is optimum, it is the economical space mouse.

After use, collecting the cable, it can fold to the compact, even in the travelling bag is not bulky.

Scientists ponder invisibility cloak

2006-05-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - Imagine an invisibility cloak that works just like the one Harry Potter inherited from his father.
Researchers in England and the United States think they know how to do that. They are laying out the blueprint and calling for help in developing the exotic materials needed to build a cloak.

The keys are special manmade materials, unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These materials are intended to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around an object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

Why is Rupert Murdoch Sitting Next to the President???

2006-05-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

Australian Prime Minister John Howard (L) toasts U.S. President George W. Bush (R) before an official dinner at the White House in Washington May 16, 2006. Also pictured at the table with Bush are media baron Rupert Murdoch (2nd L) and the wife of the prime minister, Janette Howard (2nd R). REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Pyow pyow pyow . . . hack hack hack hack! Let's get out of here (in monkey talk) - World - Times Online

2006-05-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

It seems that human beings are not the only ones who are able to string sentences together

MONKEYS are able to string together a simple “sentence”, according to research that offers the first evidence that animals might be capable of a key feature of language.
British scientists have discovered that the putty-nosed monkey in Nigeria pictured above sometimes communicates by combining sounds into a sequence that has a different meaning from any of its component calls, an ability that was thought to be uniquely human.

Although many animals communicate with one another using calls that have a particular meaning — usually a warning signifying the presence of a certain predator — none has been known to combine these alarm calls into sequences similar to those of human language.

Funding And Bureaucracy, Not Access To Journals, Are Chief Obstacles To Scientific Productivity

2006-05-13T14:31:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily: Funding And Bureaucracy, Not Access To Journals, Are Chief Obstacles To Scientific Productivity

The single most important issue obstructing the productivity of biomedical scientists today is the culture of research funding. This finding challenges the belief of some that the lack of "open access" to journal content is a major barrier to scientific productivity.A survey of 883 biomedical scientists -- in Europe and North America - commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium found that aside from lack of resources, a 'stop-go' funding culture prohibits scientists from initiating new ideas, choosing research projects that contrast with funders' priorities, and recruiting and retaining qualified staff.

$10M prize for hydrogen fuel technology

2006-05-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON -- Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs will be able to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel.

Legislation creating the "H-Prize," modeled after the privately funded Ansari X Prize that resulted last year in the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice, passed the House Wednesday on a 416-6 vote. A companion bill is to be introduced in the Senate this week.

"This is an opportunity for a triple play," said bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., citing benefits to national security from reduced dependence on foreign oil, cleaner air from burning pollution-free hydrogen and new jobs. "If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create."

Black hole mergers modelled in 3D

2006-04-29T23:42:00.001-07:00

BBC NEWS: "
Simulations on a supercomputer have allowed Nasa scientists to understand finally the pattern of gravitational waves produced by merging black holes.
The work should help the worldwide effort that is currently underway to make the first detection of these 'ripples' in the fabric of space-time.
Ultra-sensitive equipment set up in the US and Europe is expected to achieve the breakthrough observation very soon.
The new research will make it easier to recognise the correct signals.
'With these calculations, we are now able to know what will be the distinctive gravitational wave signature that comes out from just outside merging black holes,' commented Professor Peter Saulson, who is part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (Ligo) Scientific Collaboration."

Black hole mergers modelled in 3D

2006-04-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Telescope bid to spot alien beams

2006-04-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS : "A new optical telescope designed solely to detect light signals from alien civilisations has opened for work at an observatory in Harvard, US.
It will conduct a year-round survey, scanning all of the Milky Way galaxy visible in the Northern Hemisphere.
Seti is an exploratory science to scour the cosmos for signatures of technology built by alien beings.
Some experts believe alien societies are at least as likely to use light for communicating as radio transmissions.
The new telescope, which has a 1.8m (72-inch) primary mirror, is the first dedicated optical Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) telescope in the world.
It has been installed at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Oak Ridge Observatory.
'The opening of this telescope represents one of those rare moments in a field of scientific endeavour when a great leap forward is enabled,' said Bruce Betts, director of projects at the Planetary Society, which funded the telescope.
'Sending laser signals across the cosmos would be a very logical way for ET to reach out; but until now, we have been ill-equipped to receive any such signal.'"

Mistakes 'aid OCD understanding'

2006-04-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS': "Everyone is familiar with the sinking feeling you get after deleting a computer file by mistake or leaving the house without your keys.
But such events also cause their own unique reactions in the brain.
US scientists writing in the Journal of Neuroscience found one area becomes more active after 'costly' mistakes.
They say it may help explain obsessive compulsive disorder, where minor events appear to be enough to triger an over-reaction in the same area.
In the study, the brains of 12 healthy adults were examined using a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner while they were undertook 360 computer tests, such as spotting the odd one out or picking pairs of letters.
Succeeding at some carried a small financial reward, while failing at others incurred penalties. Others carried no reward or penalty.
People were told they had a $10 (�5.70) 'credit' to begin, and that they would receive real cash depending on their balance at the end.
The response to a mistake that cost them money was seen to be greater than the response to other mistakes and involved a part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC)."

Postcard from Mars

2006-04-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

The first color image of Mars from the high resolution imaging science experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals pocked craters, carved gullies and wind-formed dunes on Mars' southern hemisphere.
(AP photo from NASA/JPL)
Apr. 10, 2006

World's First Dedicated Optical SETI Telescope Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence To Begin

2006-04-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

Alien civilizations are thought by many to be at least as likely to use visible light signals for communicating as they are to use radio transmissions. Visible light can form tight beams, be incredibly intense, and its high frequencies allow it to carry enormous amounts of information. Using only Earth 2006 technology, a bright tightly focused light beam, such as a laser, can be ten thousand times as bright as its parent star for a brief instant. Such a beam could be easily observed from enormous distances.
"The opening of this telescope represents one of those rare moments in a field of scientific endeavor when a great leap forward is enabled," said Planetary Society Director of Projects Bruce Betts. "Sending laser signals across the cosmos would be a very logical way for E.T. to reach out, but until now, we have been ill equipped to receive any such signal."
The Planetary Society's Optical SETI telescope's custom processors will process the equivalent of all books in print every second. As the telescope scans strips of sky, it employs a custom-built "camera" containing an array of detectors that can detect a billionth-of-a-second flash of light. The telescope will scan the sky every night, weather permitting.

Pentagon to Test a Huge Conventional Bomb

2006-03-31T18:04:00.000-08:00

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada's desert in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive -- the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site -- as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets, officials said yesterday.The test, code-named 'Divine Strake,' will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.'This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing,' said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test.The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets -- such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles -- that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.Tegnelia said there is a range of technical hurdles to overcome. He suggested that big conventional bombs are unlikely to solve the overall problem of buried threats. 'It's a lot easier to dig your tunnel 50 feet deeper' than to develop weapons that can destroy it, he told a meeting of defense reporters.Such a bomb would be a conventional alternative to a nuclear weapon proposed by the Bush administration, which has run into opposition on Capitol Hill. The Pentagon for several years has sought funding for research into the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) -- also known as the 'bunker buster' -- after the administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review stated that no weapon in the U.S. arsenal could threaten a growing number of buried targets. Congress, however, has repeatedly refused to grant funding for a study on a nuclear bunker buster, instead directing money toward conventional alternatives.The June test will detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate-fuel oil emulsion -- creating a blast equivalent to 593 tons of TNT -- in a 36-foot-deep hole near a tunnel in the center of the Nevada Test Site, according to official reports. It aims to allow scientists to model the type of ground shock that will be created, and to weigh the effectiveness of such a weapon against its collateral impact."

Real Sound 1.0 rocks tunes from Texas Instruments graphing calcs - Engadget

2006-03-21T06:23:00.000-08:00

Real Sound 1.0 rocks tunes from Texas Instruments graphing calcs - Engadget: "Real Sound 1.0 rocks tunes from Texas Instruments graphing calcsPosted Mar 21st 2006 7:00AM by Evan BlassFiled under: Handhelds, Portable AudioWe're quite thankful to Texas Instruments
calculators for getting us through more than a few difficult tests (sometimes dishonestly, we must admit), so it's
great to see that a whole community of developers has sprung up to provide kids today with even more anti-academic uses
for their graphing calcs. Besides whiling away boring Calculus and Physics classes with grainy movies and
painstakingly-detailed recreations of such classics as Wolfenstein, Tetris and
Super Mario Brothers, disinterested students can now actually listen to music from their trusty TI's, thanks to James
Montelongo's Real Sound 1.0. Montelongo rather unfortunately chose an almost-unlistenable Green Day song to demo his
work in the linked video, put it definitely gives you a sense of the 32 kHz sound quality possible with the program.
America thanks you, James, for making No Child Left Behind just that much harder to achieve."

Sandia's Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

2006-03-12T21:11:00.001-08:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Sandia's Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin hotter than the interiors of stars. The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amountof energy as larger plants. The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures."

Enceladus!

2006-03-12T21:06:00.000-08:00

Captain's Log: March 9, 2006

Enceladus! Last November, special imaging sequences trained on Enceladus as it sat backlit by the sun revealed in striking detail the plume of material that we had flown through back in July as we buzzed the Enceladus surface. Many distinct narrow fountains of vapor and fine water ice particles, were clearly seen jetting from the south polar surface and reaching tens of miles into space. These jets supply material to an even larger diffuse plume that extends hundreds of miles above the south pole. A spectacular sight if there ever was one!"

New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found - Yahoo! News

2006-03-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found - Yahoo! News

Microsoft unveils much-hyped 'Origami' device - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

2006-03-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

HANOVER, Germany - After months of cryptic Web marketing and word-of-mouth hype over Microsoft Corp.'s Project Origami, the company finally showed off the product: an ultracompact computer running Windows XP with a touchscreen and wireless connectivity.It's everything a full computer or laptop is, minus the keyboard. It has a 7-inch touch-sensitive screen that responds to a stylus or the tap of a finger.Two models from different manufacturers are expected to hit stores shelves by spring, and Microsoft says they'll be about an inch thick and weigh less than 2 1/2 pounds %u2014 about the size of a large paperback book.
It will run on a full version of Windows XP, the same operating system used on larger tablet PCs, and newly developed software called Windows Touch Pack will handle touch-screen functions. Future editions will support Windows Vista, a version of Microsoft's flagship operating system that's due out in the second half of this year. (MSNBC.com is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)'It really opens up new possibilities for PC use,' Bill Mitchell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Platforms Division, said Wednesday. The device will be officially unveiled Thursday at CeBIT, the annual technology trade show in Hanover."

Map of future extinction

2006-03-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

Imperial College London scientists created a list of places where mammals are at risk of future extinction, even when they may be just fine now. All of the regions they highlight are mostly human-free these days but could suffer from human encroachment in times to come. From News@Nature:
The list, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, namechecks places that do not typically feature on lists of the world's most threatened habitats. Greenland, the Siberian tundra, the highlands of eastern India and the Patagonian coast are all places where mammals, from polar bears to musk oxen, face an uncertain future."

New Info On Indonesian Quake of 04'

2006-03-01T16:57:00.000-08:00

Study of 2004 Tsunami Disaster Forces Rethinking of Theory of Giant Earthquakes

PASADENA, Calif.--The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004, was one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory, mostly on account of the devastating tsunami that followed it. A group of geologists and geophysicists, including scientists at the California Institute of Technology, has delineated the full dimensions of the fault rupture that caused the earthquake.

Their findings, reported in the March 2 issue of the journal Nature, suggest that previous ideas about where giant earthquakes are likely to occur need to be revised. Regions of the earth previously thought to be immune to such events may actually be at high risk of experiencing them.

Like all giant earthquakes, the 2004 event occurred on a subduction megathrust-in this case, the Sunda megathrust, a giant earthquake fault, along which the Indian and Australian tectonic plates are diving beneath the margin of southeast Asia. The fault surface that ruptured cannot be seen directly because it lies several kilometers deep in the Earth's crust, largely beneath the sea.

Nevertheless, the rupture of the fault caused movements at the surface as long-accumulating elastic strain was suddenly released. The researchers measured these surface motions by three different techniques. In one, they measured the shift in position of GPS stations whose locations had been accurately determined prior to the earthquake.

In the second method, they studied giant coral heads on island reefs: the top surfaces of these corals normally lie right at the water surface, so the presence of corals with tops above or below the water level indicated that the Earth's crust rose or fell by that amount during the earthquake.

Finally, the researchers compared satellite images of island lagoons and reefs taken before and after the earthquake: changes in the color of the seawater or reefs indicated a change in the water's depth and hence a rise or fall of the crust at that location.

On the basis of these measurements the researchers found that the 2004 earthquake was caused by rupture of a 1,600-kilometer-long stretch of the megathrust-by far the longest of any recorded earthquake. The breadth of the contact surface that ruptured ranged up to 150 kilometers. Over this huge contact area, the surfaces of the two plates slid against each other by up to 18 meters.

Time out of mind

2006-02-23T14:37:00.000-08:00

BBC NEWS : "We can't touch time, or smell it. Yet it is utterly inescapable. But, research shows, time is - at least partly - something we control in our heads.
It's four in the morning, and schoolgirl Bethany McQuerry is starting her homework. Her dad, Clay, does the family's washing before going to the 24-hour supermarket. Meanwhile, Bethany's mum and brother, Janelle and Casey, sleep on.
But Bethany is no swot and Clay is no housework obsessive. They just wake up early every single day, whether they like it or not - it's as if they have permanent jet lag.
Bethany and Clay have to get things done early in the morning, because they also fall asleep in the early evening. The difference in timekeeping has divided the family, from North Carolina, US.
'There have been times when I wished we would function the same as other families,' says Janelle. 'It does make it hard when you're wanting to be together.'
Only recently did Clay discover there was a biological explanation for his and Bethany's unusual behaviour, known as ASPS, or Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome - a disorder of the body clock that shifts their day forward."

Wi-Fi to Go: The Hot Spot in a Box

2006-02-23T12:25:00.000-08:00

New York Times: "YOU know what would be so cool? A portable Wi-Fi hot spot. Whenever you wanted Internet access, you wouldn't have to hunt for a wireless coffee shop or pay $24 a night to your hotel.
Instead, you'd travel with a little box. Plug it into a power outlet %u2014 or even your car's cigarette lighter %u2014 and boom, you and everyone within 200 feet could get onto the Internet at high speed, without wires. Actually, such boxes exist. They come from companies like Kyocera, Junxion and Top Global, and they're every bit as awesome as they sound. (Unfortunately, the category is so new that it has no agreed-upon name. 'Portable hot spot' is descriptive but unwieldy. 'Cellular gateway' is a bit cryptic. Kyocera's term, 'mobile router,' may be as good as any.)Before you start thinking that you've died and gone to Internet heaven, however, you should know that these boxes don't work alone. Each requires the insertion of a PC laptop card provided by a cellular carrier like Verizon, Sprint or Cingular. The card provides the Internet connection, courtesy of those companies' 3G ('third generation') high-speed cellular data networks. The box just rebroadcasts that connection as a Wi-Fi signal so that all nearby computers %u2014 not just one privileged laptop %u2014 can go online."

Summers Resigns as Harvard President

2006-02-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

WaPo: "Lawrence Summers, the embattled president of Harvard University, resigned today after a tumultuous year during which he repeatedly clashed with the faculty at one of the nation's oldest and more prestigious schools.His resignation takes effect at the end of the academic year. Former president Derek Bok will serve as interim president of the university from July 1 until a new president is appointed, according to Harvard's Web site.
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers faces reporters as he departs a faculty meeting at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., in this March 15, 2005, file photo, taken after the school's Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a no-confidence vote against him. Harvard University announced Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006, on its website that Summers will resign as president at the end of the current academic year.
Summers's announcement comes after several weeks of inflamed rhetoric by his opponents on the faculty, incensed by the way he handled the dismissal of Arts and Sciences Dean William Kirby, and one week before a scheduled full faculty meeting on a vote of no confidence in his leadership."

CNN.com - UAE to get $265 million spaceport - Feb 20, 2006

2006-02-20T13:20:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A day after Space Adventures announced it was in a venture to develop rocket ships for suborbital flights, the company said Friday it plans to build a $265 million spaceport in the United Arab Emirates.The commercial spaceport would be based in Ras Al-Khaimah near the southern end of the Persian Gulf, and the UAE government has made an initial investment of $30 million, the Arlington, Virginia-based company said in a statement.The spaceport announcement comes on the heels of Space Adventures' new partnership with an investment firm founded by major sponsors of the Ansari X Prize to develop rocket ships for suborbital flights.The agreement between Space Adventures and the Texas-based venture capital firm Prodea would help finance suborbital vehicles being designed and built by the Russian aerospace firm Myasishchev Design Bureau.Space Adventures is best known for sending the first three space tourists to the orbiting international space station for a reported $20 million a person.Space Adventures' jump into the infant suborbital flight industry comes at a time when several companies already are designing spaceships to take paying passengers on short trips up into space and then back to Earth without circling the globe.Last December, British tycoon Richard Branson announced development of a $225 million spaceport in southern New Mexico, which will be the headquarters of Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism company.Virgin Galactic is contracting with Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites to develop a suborbital spaceship based on SpaceShipOne technology.Flying out of Mojave, California, SpaceShipOne made history on June 21, 2004, as the first privately financed manned rocket to reach space, then made two more flights later that year to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize."

California woman, 62, gives birth to 12th child - Women's Health - MSNBC.com

2006-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

REDDING, Calif. - A 62-year-old great-grandmother has become one of the oldest women in the world to successfully give birth.The healthy six-pound, nine-ounce baby boy is the 12th child born to Janise Wulf, who also has 20 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Her oldest child is 40.Family members said Friday%u2019s delivery went smoothly, despite health concerns involving Wulf, who has diabetes and has been blind since birth.Baby Adam is the second child born to Wulf and third husband, Scott. Their other son is 3-1/2. Scott Wulf, who is 48 years old, said he%u2019d always wanted children. He said their two sons, born through in-vitro fertilization, are beyond what he%u2019d hoped was possible.Wulf isn%u2019t the oldest woman to give birth. That record went to a Romanian woman who gave birth last year at the age of 66."

Shortlist drawn up of stars likely to have habitable planets

2006-02-19T20:01:00.000-08:00

Astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of the stars most likely to have habitable planets. They are the prime candidates for detecting signals with the first radio telescope designed specially to find extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere in the universe."

ScienceDaily: NASA's Spitzer Uncovers Hints Of Mega Solar Systems

2006-02-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has identified two huge "hypergiant" stars circled by monstrous disks of what might be planet-forming dust. The findings surprised astronomers because stars as big as these were thought to be inhospitable to planets.

This illustration compares the size of a gargantuan star and its surrounding dusty disk (top) to that of our solar system. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
"These extremely massive stars are tremendously hot and bright and have very strong winds, making the job of building planets difficult," said Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. "Our data suggest that the planet-forming process may be hardier than previously believed, occurring around even the most massive stars that nature produces."

NASA Telescope Spots Mega Solar Systems - Yahoo! News

2006-02-09T04:52:00.000-08:00

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers said Wednesday they have spotted evidence of two mega solar systems giant stars enveloped by what appear to be huge disks of planet-forming dust.

Cloudy disks around stars are believed to represent current or future planetary systems. Our sun is surrounded by the Kuiper Belt, a disk containing dust, comets and other bodies.
Astronomers said the latest findings were surprising because such massive stars are thought to be inhospitable to the formation of planets.
'Our data suggest that the planet-forming process may be hardier than previously believed, occurring around even the most massive stars,' Joel Kastner, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in a statement.
Results appear in the Feb. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The new stars were measured to be 30 to 70 times more massive than the sun. Because of the stars' size, scientists said the surrounding debris disks are larger versions of the Kuiper Belt and probably contain about 10 times more mass.
The new stars were found using

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope during a survey of 60 bright stars. Kastner said the new discoveries stuck out from the rest because an analysis indicated the presence of flat disks.
Last year, another team of scientists discovered what they believe was a mini solar system. The team found a dust cloud around a brown dwarf, or failed star."

It May Look Authentic; Here's How to Tell It Isn't

2006-01-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

New York Times: "Among the many temptations of the digital age, photo-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for science, and scientific journals are beginning to respond.
Some journal editors are considering adopting a test, in use at The Journal of Cell Biology, that could have caught the concocted images of the human embryonic stem cells made by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. At The Journal of Cell Biology, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of photos. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more illustrations that were manipulated in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Rossner of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. 'In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud,' he said.The two editors recognized the likelihood that images were being improperly manipulated when the journal required all illustrations to be submitted in digital form. While reformatting illustrations submitted in the wrong format, Dr. Rossner realized that some authors had yielded to the temptation of Photoshop's image-changing tools to misrepresent the original data."

NASA's Top 10 Photos

2006-01-23T16:25:00.000-08:00

Mars Over Moon Of all the images in our gallery, this one got the highest rating.

After 3 Billion Miles, Craft Returns Sunday Bearing Cosmic Dust Older Than the Sun - New York Times

2006-01-10T04:50:00.000-08:00

New York Times: "In a blaze across the night sky, it should be a spectacular homecoming at the end of a very, very long journey.
After covering 2.88 billion miles over seven years, the Stardust spacecraft is nearing home with its minute but precious cargo: samples of what are believed to be the oldest materials in the solar system.Tucked away in what looks like a giant fly swatter of a collector is dust swooped up from a close encounter with the comet Wild 2 and an accumulation of particles picked up in three circuits of the Sun.'This has been a fantastic opportunity to collect the most primitive material in the solar system,' said Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, the principal investigator for the mission. 'We fully expect some of the comet particles to be older than the Sun.' Comets, icy bodies that normally inhabit a region near Pluto's orbit, are made of material many scientists believe is virtually unchanged since the Sun and the planets formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Studying comets not only provides clues to how the solar system was created but could also help explain how certain materials and conditions combined to form life, researchers said. 'Comets are a library of our history,' said Thomas Duxbury, project manager at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which is supervising the mission.After its launching in 1999, the Stardust circled the Sun and flew by Earth for a gravity boost to rendezvous with Wild 2 (pronounced vilt 2) near Jupiter. On Jan. 2, 2004, the Stardust came within 149 miles of the comet, deploying shields to protect itself from cometary dust while extending a 160-square-inch collector filled with a material called aerogel. This low-density silicon material, composed of 99.8 percent air, gently slowed and trapped particles without significantly altering or damaging them. Stardust also spent 195 days collecting interstellar particles that flow through the solar system.The challenge now is to bring them home safely. If all goes as planned, a capsule bearing the space dust will dive into the atmosphere early Sunday morning and gently parachute the samples to the Utah desert."

After 3 Billion Miles, Craft Returns Sunday Bearing Cosmic Dust Older Than the Sun - New York Times

2006-01-10T04:49:00.000-08:00

Fuel Cell

2005-12-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

Engadget: "Jadoo's NABII fuel cells for 'prosumers'Posted Dec 30th 2005 5:00AM by Paul MillerFiled under: PeripheralsNext time you're prosumering around
with a digicam or aspiring to near professionalism with your laptop, Jadoo wants you to be rocking a fuel cell or two. The new NABII line that they're debuting at
CES makes fuel cells usable to the common prosumateer, and offers up 'virtually infinite shelf-lfe,'
hot-swapability, and rapid 'recharging.' The fuel cells mount on traditional battery mounts and receive their
fuel through refillable N-Stor mini cartridges which you can pop into their FillPoint hydrogen refilling station for
some more of that good stuff on the double. No word yet on price or just how much power we can get out of these things,
but we're guessing by 'prosumer' they mean people who
are willing to put up with a bit more crap and part with a bit more cash than the rest of us."

The Top Physics Stories for 2005

2005-12-24T15:36:00.000-08:00

Physics News Update 757: "At the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, the four large detector groups
agreed, for the first time, on a consensus interpretation of several
year's worth of high-energy ion collisions: the fireball made in
these collisions -- a sort of stand-in for the primordial universe
only a few microseconds after the big bang -- was not a gas of weakly
interacting quarks and gluons as earlier expected, but something
more like a liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons
(PNU 728).
Other top physics stories
for 2005 include, in general chronological order of their appearance
throughout the year, the following:
the arrival of the Cassini
spacecraft at Saturn and the successful landing of the Huygens probe
on the moon Titan (PNU 716);
the development of lasing in silicon (Nature 17 February);"

Quantum Computer Chip

2005-12-16T16:48:00.000-08:00

First Mass Producible Quantum Computer Chip

December 15th, 2005 by Thomas Herold Print Email

Researchers at the University of Michigan have produced what is believed to be the first scalable quantum computer chip, which could mean big gains in the worldwide race to develop a quantum computer.

Magnetic north pole drifting fast

2005-12-12T10:39:00.000-08:00

BBC NEWS: "The Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America so fast that it could end up in Siberia within 50 years, scientists have said.
The shift could mean that Alaska will lose its northern lights, or auroras, which might then be more visible in areas of Siberia and Europe.
The magnetic poles are different from geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of Earth's rotation.
Magnetic poles are known to migrate and, occasionally, swap places.
'This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada,' Joseph Stoner, a palaeomagnetist at Oregon State University, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco."

Women With Breast Cancer Face Increased Risk Of Developing A Second Cancer

2005-12-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

A new large-scale study on women with breast cancer found a 25 percent increase in the risk of developing a new non-breast cancer compared to women without cancer. The study, published online December 8, 2005 in the International Journal of Cancer, the official journal of the International Union Against Cancer (UICC), is available via Wiley InterScience (http:/%u200B/%u200Bwww.interscience.wiley.com/%u200Bjournal/%u200Bijc).

Scientists: Fissure Could Become New Ocean

2005-12-10T11:49:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! News: "ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Ethiopian, American and European researchers have observed a fissure in a desert in the remote northeast that could be the 'birth of a new ocean basin,' scientists said Friday.
Researchers from Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. have been observing the 37-mile long fissure since it split open in September in the Afar desert and estimate it will take a million years to fully form into an ocean, said Dereje Ayalew, who leads the team of 18 scientists studying the phenomenon.
The fissure, now 13 feet wide, formed in just three weeks after a Sept. 14 earthquake in a barren region called Boina, some 621 miles north east of the capital, Addis Ababa, said Dereje."

NASA in fight over lost UFO records

2005-12-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Space: "PITTSBURGH - Researchers and witnesses who believe a UFO landed in the woods of western Pennsylvania 40 years ago are marking another anniversary today: two years since a lawsuit was filed to get NASA to release records of what happened.A National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman says there's no cover-up: The 'UFO' was a Russian satellite but government records documenting it have been lost.Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter backed by the Sci Fi Channel, and a group connected to the cable TV channel sued NASA two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.Kean wants files on what happened Dec. 9, 1965, in the unincorporated hamlet of Kecksburg, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Witnesses described a fireball in the evening sky, and a metallic, acorn-shaped object about 12 to 15 feet high and 8 to 12 feet in diameter that landed gently in the woods, according to media accounts at the time."

Great Lakes near ecological breakdown: scientists - Yahoo! News

2005-12-08T17:55:00.000-08:00

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Stresses from polluted rivers to
invasive species threaten to trigger an ecological breakdown in
the Great Lakes, a group of scientists hoping to sway U.S.
environmental policy said on Thursday.
Seventy-five scientists who study the world's largest
collective body of fresh water released their report on the
myriad problems that need cleanup or restoration ahead of two
key policy announcements next week.
'This is just a critical period for the Great Lakes,' Andy
Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Great
Lakes office, said about next week's announcements.
A task force comprising federal agencies, Congress, local
government officials and regional Indian tribes is scheduled to
release its much-anticipated final plan for preserving the
Great Lakes requested by U.S.

The Hubris of the Humanities

2005-12-06T19:18:00.000-08:00

The Hubris of the Humanities - New York Times: "The best argument against 'intelligent design' has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for 'mediocre design.'
But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you. What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people.'The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had,' C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, 'The Two Cultures.'The counterargument is that we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it's Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity. There's something to that. If President Bush were about to attack Iraq all over again, he would be better off reading Sophocles - to appreciate the dangers of hubris - than studying the science of explosives. But don't pin too much faith on the civilizing influence of a liberal education: the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe. And similar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin and familiarity with the Bible - or, in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics. Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines."

Mars Express: We have H20

2005-12-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

MARSIS Uncovers Underground Ice

The upper image is a radargram from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), showing data from the subsurface of Mars in the layered deposits that surround the north pole. The lower image shows the position of the ground track on a topographic map of the area based on Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data. The images are 458 kilometers (285 miles) wide.

The MARSIS echo trace splits into two traces to the right of center, at the point where the ground track crosses from the smooth plains onto the elevated layered deposits on the right. The upper trace is the echo from the surface of the deposits, while the lower trace is interpreted to be the boundary between the lower surface of the deposits and the underlying material. The strength of the lower echo suggests that the intervening material is nearly pure water ice. The time delay between the two echoes reaches a maximum of 21 microseconds at the right of the image, corresponding to a thickness of 1.8 kilometer (1.1 mile) of ice. The total elevation difference shown in the topographic map is about 2 kilometers (1.2 mile) between the lowest surface (magenta) and the highest (orange).

MARSIS is an instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. NASA and the Italian Space Agency jointly funded the instrument. The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter is an instrument on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter.
Credit: ASI/NASA/ESA/Univ. of Rome/JPL/MOLA Science Team

Scientists Say Slower Atlantic Currents Could Mean a Colder Europe - New York Times

2005-12-01T15:23:00.000-08:00

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: December 1, 2005
Scientists say they have measured a significant slowing in the Atlantic currents that carry warm water toward Northern Europe. If the trend persists, they say, the weather there could cool considerably in coming decades.
Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping 'greenhouse' emissions. But several experts said it was premature to conclude that the new measurements, to be described today in the journal Nature, meant that such a change was already under way.The currents, branching off from the Gulf Stream, are part of an oceanic system that disperses tropical heat toward the poles and makes Northern Europe far warmer than its latitude would suggest.Warming, in theory, could stall the salty, sun-heated, north-flowing currents by causing fresh water to build up in high-latitude seas as ice melts and more precipitation falls.The scientists, from the National Oceanography Center in Britain, measured sea temperature, currents and other conditions across the Atlantic from the Bahamas to Africa last year and found a 30 percent drop in the flow of warming waters since a similar set of measurements were taken in 1957. The team, led by Harry L. Bryden, wrote that even though they had measurements from only 5 years out of the past 50, the pattern of change seen at various depths supported the idea that the shift was a significant trend and not random variability."

Mastodon, Mammoth Remains Turn Up in Ill.

2005-11-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

"A few months after the last of the elephants left Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo in May, amid complaints from activists that Illinois doesn't have a climate fit for such animals, remains of their ancient relatives were showing up around the state....
He said the recent spate of findings may be due to this summer's drought, which shrank the wetlands where mastodon remains are usually found. It also may reflect the spread of construction projects into Chicago's outer suburbs.
"But whatever the reason, there's no doubting that we have a rich record of large Pleistocene fauna here in Illinois," Saunders said, referring to the giant mammals of the last Ice Age. "There are about 80 localities of record here for American mastodons, and about 60 for mammoths. And I'd suspect that probably only one out of every 10 finds is reported. I'd love to know how many remains are being used as doorstops or are sitting in private curiosity cabinets.""

More machines than people on the Internet

2005-11-20T19:38:00.000-08:00

Rise of the robots
THE UNITED NATIONS is warning that machines are starting to take over from humans as the biggest users of the world wide wibbly web.
The UN's telecommunications agency International Telecommunication Union (ITU)has just penned a report called 'Internet of Things' in which it predicts the next stage in the technological revolution where humans, electronic devices, inanimate objects and databases are linked by a radically transformed Internet.
It says that already there are signs that we are heading into a new era where the robotic 'users' of the Internet will be counted in billions and where humans may become the minority as generators and receivers of traffic,' it added."

Prehistoric Lizard Called Historic Link

2005-11-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

DALLAS - Amateur fossil hunter Van Turner felt certain he had found something important during his search of earth turned up by bulldozers making way for a new subdivision in Dallas County.
Sixteen years later, scientists finally confirmed that Turner had discovered the first well preserved early mosasaur found in North America — a prehistoric lizard that lived 92 million years ago that evolved into what some call the "T. Rex of the ocean."

Harriet the tortoise turns 175

2005-11-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

ANBERRA (Reuters) - One of the world's oldest living animals, Harriet the tortoise, celebrated her 175th birthday on Tuesday -- with a pink hibiscus flower cake at her retirement home in northern Australia.

Australia Zoo, where Harriet has spent the past 17 years, says the Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise was collected by scientist Charles Darwin in 1835, although some historians have disputed this.

Vaccine against tooth decay successful in animal tests: researchers

2005-11-15T17:01:00.001-08:00

Portuguese scientists said they had developed an experimental vaccine against tooth decay which was successful in laboratory tests on rats and could pave the way for a version that works for humans.

"What we found is that the animals which were vaccinated with this protein developed much smaller lesions than the control group which had not been vaccinated," said Paula Ferreira, one of three Oporto University researchers who worked on the vaccine.

Former X Prize Rivals Announce Partnership

2005-11-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

Two former rocketeer rivals are teaming up to develop privately-built spacecraft, officials with both groups said Friday.
Canada's London, Ontario-based firm PlanetSpace and the Romanian aerospace company ARCA - both past competitors in the $10 million Ansari X Prize contest for suborbital spaceflight - are pooling their expertise or a joint space project.
While some details of the partnership remain under wraps, the collaboration will likely include the sharing of technology and other resources, PlanetSpace officials said.

Science to ride gravitational waves

2005-11-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

BBC NEWS: "Many expect it to be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of our age: 'There'll certainly be a Nobel Prize in it for somebody,' says Jim Hough.
The UK professor is standing on a farm road in Lower Saxony, Germany, with a crop of beet on one side and sprouts on the other.
But the real interest lies at his feet - with some shabby, corrugated metal sheeting. For a moment, it looks like an upturned pig trough until you realise it stretches for hundreds of metres.
The sheeting hides a trench and, within it, the vacuumed tube of an experiment Hough believes will finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena - gravitational waves.
The Glasgow University scientist has been chasing these 'ripples' in space-time for more than 30 years and feels certain he is now just a matter of months away from bagging his quarry."

'Innovative' Math, but Can You Count?

2005-11-10T22:56:00.000-08:00

New York Times: "LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician.
So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the 'constructivist' or 'inquiry' program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization. 'My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program,' Jim said recently. 'Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us with something to teach us.'Such experiences and emotions have burst into public discussion and no small amount of rancor in the last eight months in Penfield. This community of 35,000 has become one of the most obvious fronts in the nationwide math wars, which have flared from California to Pittsburgh to the former District 2 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, pitting progressives against traditionalists, with nothing less than America's educational and economic competitiveness at stake.In these places and others, groups of parents have condemned constructivist math for playing down such basic computational tools as borrowing, carrying, place value, algorithms, multiplication tables and long division, while often introducing calculators into the classroom as early as first or second grade. Such criticism has run headlong into the celebration of constructivism by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and such leading teacher-training institutions as the Bank Street College of Education."

Gay flies lose their nerve-Brain difference linked to same-sex courtship behaviours in insects.

2005-11-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

Researchers have finally pinned down a physical difference between male flies that are engineered to behave homosexually and those that are not: the tweaked variety is missing a small cluster of nerve cells in the brain.

Genetically altered flies that are designed to court members of their own sex, or no one at all, have made headlines in recent months (see 'Fruitflies tap in to their gay side '). But no one knew exactly what those genes were doing, or how the flies differed physically from heterosexual ones. Now Japanese researchers have pinpointed one difference in the brain.

Scientists caution that fly mating behaviour is very different from that of humans, as are our brains, so these results cannot be extrapolated to people. "No homologue of the fruitless gene is found in mammals and humans," points out Ken-Ichi Kimura of the Hokkaido University of Education in Iwamizawa, Japan.

But such work does help researchers to work out the complex genetic and environmental factors that help animals to choose their mates. "This finding will provide insight for understanding how a sexual behaviour is constructed in the circuitry of the brain through a function of single gene," adds Kimura.

Copernicus unearthed?

2005-11-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

Polish archaeologists think the skulls and bones they excavated last year in a Polish church are very probably the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy.

The excavating team sent the remains to forensic scientists in Warsaw without telling them who they suspected the skeleton belonged to. Last Thursday the Warsaw experts revealed their reconstruction of the person's face: a picture of an old man with a broken nose and a scar above the brow. These features match those seen in portraits of Copernicus from the 1500s.

To confirm their theory, archaeologists have mounted a search for the grave of Copernicus' maternal uncle, Lukas Watzenrode. Genetic comparison of the bones will reveal whether they belonged to uncle and nephew, the scientists hope.

The former Bishop of Ermland died in 1512 in the Polish city of Torun, Copernicus' birthplace, and is thought to be buried there or close by.

"I'm 97% sure that what we have found must be Copernicus," says Jerzy Gassowski, an archaeologist at the Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology in Pultusk, who led the excavation. But only a DNA test will ultimately settle the case, he admits.

The search for Copernicus began two years ago; the Bishop of Frombork, a small town on Poland's Baltic coast where Copernicus had served as a member of the clergy, commissioned Gassowski to search the town's large gothic cathedral for the astronomer's grave.

As Gassowski's team had no written documents about Copernicus's burial, they began the excavations with little hope. But last year they discovered a heavily damaged skull and skeleton parts beneath one of the cathedral's 16 altars.

Having the bones turned into a facial reconstruction was an important step in identifying the body. But the team admits that they didn't have much to compare the reconstruction to. When Copernicus died in 1543 at the age of 70 he was not a celebrity. So few paintings of him are available.

His famous book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), in which he first proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun, was published after his death. And astronomy was little more than a spare-time occupation for the clerical man whose name now stands as one of the most significant in the history of science.

Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science

2005-11-03T15:24:00.000-08:00

Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into 'fundamentalism' if it ignores scientific reason.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the 'mutual prejudice' between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States.
The Vatican project was inspired by
Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from 'tragic mutual incomprehension.' Galileo was condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.
'The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future,' Poupard said.
But he said science, too, should listen to religion.
'We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic bomb and the possibility of cloning human beings are fruit of a reason that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link,' he said.
'But we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism,' he said."

Hello Soymilk! Prions Suspected in Milk

2005-11-03T12:44:00.000-08:00

The inflamed mammary glands of sheep have been found to contain protein particles that cause scrapie, a sickness similar to mad cow disease. This suggests that the suspect proteins, called prions, may also be present in the milk of infected animals.

If prions exist in the milk of cows infected with both an inflammatory illness and mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), this raises concerns for human health. Consumption of prion-contaminated meat from cows with BSE is believed to cause the fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people; so might contaminated milk.

Adriano Aguzzi, the lead researcher on the study, has not detected prions in milk itself, because it is difficult to analyse for the abnormal proteins. But he says he expects to find them.

Two new moons found around Pluto

2005-11-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted two possible new moons around Pluto, the ninth planet in the Solar System.
If confirmed, it would bring Pluto's tally of satellites to three; Charon, the only known moon of Pluto, was discovered by astronomers in 1978.
Confirmation of two new moons would shed light on the evolution of the Kuiper Belt, the vast region containing icy objects beyond Neptune's orbit.
All the candidate moon seem to orbit Pluto in an anti-clockwise direction.

Art To Engage A Damaged Mind

2005-10-30T11:13:00.000-08:00

Can exposure to art slow the advance of Alzheimer's Disease, or at least make its effects more bearable? The answer seems to be yes, but no one really understands why. "Art therapy, both appreciating art and making it, has been used for decades as a nonmedical way to help a wide variety of people - abused children, prisoners and cancer and Alzheimer's patients. But much of this work has taken place in nursing homes and hospitals. Now museums like [New York's] Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are trying to bring it into their galleries, using their collections as powerful ways to engage minds damaged by dementia."

Ice Beneath Mars Is Asking, "Can You Hear Me Now?"

2005-10-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

In August 2003, as the twin Mars Exploration Rovers were barreling toward Mars in their flying saucers, scientists and engineers sent a radio signal disguised as the rovers "voice" to the Odyssey orbiter at Mars. The call to Odyssey was what Dr. John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover Science Manager, defines as a "can-you-hear-me-now?" test. Scientists and engineers wanted to ensure the UHF (ultra-high frequency) radio system on Odyssey, a primary communications relay between the rovers and Earth, would work. Odyssey responded with a resounding yes, and something else from Mars responded too..

Red Planet set for close approach

2005-10-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

Mars will not be this close until 2018
Mars is set for a close encounter with Earth, approaching to within 69.4 million km (43.1 million miles) of our planet in the early hours of Sunday.
With good conditions and a lack of cloud, amateur astronomers will be able to get an unusually good look at Mars.

The Red Planet will not swing this close to Earth for another 13 years.

Small telescopes will be able to see Mars as a brilliant ball; observers with more powerful instruments will be able to see features on the surface.

In August 2003, the Red Planet made an even closer approach to Earth, when it was at its nearest for about 60,000 years at a distance of 55.6 million km (34.6 million miles).

But Mars will be higher in the sky than it was in 2003, meaning that the planet's light will not be affected as much by the Earth's atmosphere. This will make for better viewing in the northern hemisphere.

A remote control that controls humans

2005-10-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

MSNBC.com: "ATSUGI, Japan - We wield remote controls to turn things on and off, make them advance, make them halt. Ground-bound pilots use remotes to fly drone airplanes, soldiers to maneuver battlefield robots.But manipulating humans?Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was. Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car.Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But more sinister applications also come to mind.I can envision it being added to militaries' arsenals of so-called 'non-lethal' weapons.A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration at an NTT research center. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head _ either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved.I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off."

New mathematics-based sculpture unveils fourth dimension

2005-10-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

Phys Org: "The stainless-steel work, a striking object of visual art, also is a mental portal to the fourth dimension, a teaching tool, a memorial to a graduate of the math department, and a reminder of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The sculpture itself measures about six feet in every direction and is mounted on a granite base about three feet high in order to bring its center approximately to eye level.
The sculpture, designed by Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, presents a three-dimensional 'shadow' of a four-dimensional solid object. Ocneanu's research involves mathematical models for quantum field theory based on symmetry."

The Man Who Would Murder Death

2005-10-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

" Growing old is not, in his view, an inevitable consequence of the human condition; rather, it is the result of accumulated damage at the cellular and molecular levels that medical advances will soon be able to prevent — or even reverse — allowing people to go on living pretty much indefinitely. "

---great article for those who wish not to die--

The World's Fastest Bike (Popular Science)

2005-10-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

Eat your heart out, Lance. This amateur-built recumbent may soon break its own record by hitting 82 mph
Dept.:You built what?!
Tech.: World’s fastest human-powered vehicle
Time: 200 hours
Cost: $15,000
In October 2005, a dozen or so bicyclists will haul butt down a flat two-lane state highway near Battle Mountain, Nevada, reaching speeds of more than 60 mph. That's no typo. It's par for the five-mile course at the sixth annual World Human Powered Speed Challenge.

The 10,000 Year Wonder Clock

2005-10-23T17:04:00.000-07:00

A clock being built in Southern California is being constructed to be accurate for 10,000 years. "Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis."

Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems

2005-10-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

New York Times: "The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.
The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers."

Does Anybody Care: Brazillian Amazon being cut down twice as fast

2005-10-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

'Selective logging could harm forest's ability to suck up greenhouse gases.'

Loggers are cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest at twice the rate of previous estimates, according to a new analysis of satellite images of the region. Earlier attempts to gauge the scale of deforestation were not sensitive enough to spot the occurrence of selective logging - the cutting down of individual trees without clearing the surrounding forest.

In a survey of Brazil's top five timber-producing states, selective logging accounts for the removal of up to 50 million cubic metres of wood per year, says the study, which spans the years 1999-2002. When the affected areas were added up, they found that some 19,800 square kilometres of forest were lost to selective logging in 1999, compared with around 16,100 square kilometres for clearance deforestation.
The overall effects of selective logging on the rainforest and its ability to store carbon are not yet clear, the researchers say. And they could change as the climate alters, they add.

In another study published this week in Science2, a team led by Daniel Bunker of Columbia University in New York evaluated the consequences of factors ranging from logging to climate change on Amazonian carbon storage. They note that climate change could result in less rain over this part of the world, increasing the number of drought-tolerant species, which store carbon more densely in their tissues.

That might be good news for carbon storage, and so might lessen the impact of selective logging. But there are other factors to consider too, says Bunker. "While there may be a handful of species that are best for storing carbon, these species are not likely to be able to maximize flood control, water quality, recovery from disturbance of any of the myriad other services that ecosystems provide," he says. "Any effort to manage a forest must consider all the services that we require from that ecosystem."

Genetic Google

2005-10-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

"Google is fast, you have to agree...it can somehow narrow down a search of billions of webpages and bring you a list of the "most relevant" within fractions of a second. Admittedly, sometimes that list can be long, but it's still quite astounding how it does it. Anyway, it occurred to me that maybe its indexing method and algorithm might be useful to those who search DNA databases.Chemists are slowly beginning to recognise how Google can be used to search for unique chemical structures using the INChI format, so maybe there is potential for DNA searching. Maybe DNA searching is already fast enough, but I somehow doubt it.">Science Blog from Sciencebase: "Google is fast, you have to agree...it can somehow narrow down a search of billions of webpages and bring you a list of the 'most relevant' within fractions of a second. Admittedly, sometimes that list can be long, but it's still quite astounding how it does it. Anyway, it occurred to me that maybe its indexing method and algorithm might be useful to those who search DNA databases.Chemists are slowly beginning to recognise how Google can be used to search for unique chemical structures using the INChI format, so maybe there is potential for DNA searching. Maybe DNA searching is already fast enough, but I somehow doubt it."

Biggest Wi-Fi Cloud is in Rural Oregon

2005-10-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

BREITBART.COM - Just The News: "Parked alongside his onion fields, Bob Hale can prop open a laptop and read his e-mail or, with just a keystroke, check the moisture of his crops. As the jack rabbits run by, he can watch CNN online, play a video game or turn his irrigation sprinklers on and off, all from the air conditioned comfort of his truck. While cities around the country are battling over plans to offer free or cheap Internet access, this lonely terrain is served by what is billed as the world's largest hotspot, a wireless cloud that stretches over 700 square miles of landscape so dry and desolate it could have been lifted from a cowboy tune. Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan areas by telephone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at discouraging such competition. In Philadelphia, for instance, plans to blanket the entire city with Wi- Fi fueled a battle in the Pennsylvania legislature with Verizon Communications Inc., leading to a law that limits the ability of every other municipality in the state to do the same. But here among the thistle, large providers such as local phone company Qwest Communications International Inc. see little profit potential. So wireless entrepreneur Fred Ziari drew no resistance for his proposed wireless network, enabling him to quickly build the $5 million cloud at his own expense."

Family meals, stories boost child confidence |

2005-10-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Family meals, stories boost child confidence | Science Blog:

"Research by two Emory University psychology professors shows that families who regularly share meals together have children who know more about their family history and tend to have higher self-esteem, interact better with their peers and show higher resilience in the face of adversity. In addition, families who openly discuss emotions associated with negative events, such as the death of a relative or a pet, have children with higher self-esteem and sense of control.

The findings come from the Family Narratives Project, directed by Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke, psychology professors at Emory and faculty fellows at the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL). The three-year study focused on 40 families from metro Atlanta who tape recorded dinnertime conversations, and answered questions that allowed researchers to measure how well the family functions. Each family had one pre-adolescent between the age of 9 and 12. More than 120 hours of recorded conversation was analyzed.

'We were particularly interested in the transition into adolescence, which is critical for identity and for self-concept,' says Fivush. 'Adolescence can also be a period of great stress for the family. So we wanted to know what skills and strengths the child is coming into that period with.'

Each family discussed a positive event and a negative event they shared together. Researchers analyzed routine interactions at the dinner table and the kinds of stories that emerge in conversations. They also asked the children 'Do You Know' questions developed by Duke to measure how much a child knows about his or her family history, such as how parents met and where grandparents grew up and went to school.

Two years later, when the children were ages 11-14, researchers visited families again. 'The power of the family stories and the family history is really remarkable,' Fivush says. 'There seems to be something that's particularly important about children knowing where they came from in a larger sense and having a sense of family history and a family place.'"

Machine Makes Dishes on Demand

2005-10-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

Wired News: "When Barbara Wheaton, culinary historian and honorary curator at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, told Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers that she longed for durable dishes that didn't need to be washed and could be thrown away after a meal, she was surprised when they took her seriously.
MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed.
Designed by MIT grad student Leonardo Bonanni, the DishMaker frees space in dish cabinets and reduces landfill trash. It also uses less energy to recycle dishes than factories use to make them. And, because the machine can produce up to 150 items, a dinner host would never be short of table settings when unexpected guests arrive: Cooks can select the number of place settings needed using a simple push-button control panel.
The prototype DishMaker is the size of a standard dishwasher, and uses the heating element of a toaster oven to shape the items. To recycle the dishes, it heats them to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit to soften the acrylic, then a press restores them to wafers for easy stacking."

Big stars are born near Milky Way's black hole

2005-10-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dozens of massive stars, destined
for a short but brilliant life, were born less than a
light-year away from the Milky Way's central black hole, one of
the most hostile environments in our galaxy, astronomers
reported on Thursday.
On Earth, this might be a bit like setting up a maternity
ward on the side of an active volcano. But researchers using
the Chandra X-ray Observatory and other instruments believe
there is a safe zone around black holes, a big dust ring where
stars can form.
Black holes, including the one at the center of our galaxy,
are monstrous matter-sucking drains in space, with
gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can
escape once it comes within the hole's grasp.
These young stars, however, are just far enough away to be
held in orbit around the hole much as planets are kept in orbit
around the sun, according to Sergei Nayakshin of the University
of Leicester, United Kingdom.
At less than a light-year's distance, the 50 or 100 massive
young stars are quite close to the black hole, but not close
enough to be drawn in, Nayakshin said in a telephone interview.
A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light
travels in a year. By comparison, Earth is about 26,000
light-years from the galactic center where the black hole lies."

GM crop 'ruins fields for 15 years'

2005-10-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

GM crops contaminate the countryside for up to 15 years after they have been harvested, startling new government research shows.
The findings cast a cloud over the prospects of growing the modified crops in Britain, suggesting that farmers who try them out for one season will find fields blighted for a decade and a half.

Rhythm Gene Discovered: The Scoop On When Worms Poop, Ovulate And Swallow

2005-10-09T19:04:00.000-07:00

We have found a gene that is important for the control of fundamental rhythms in nematode worms," says biology professor and physician Andres Villu Maricq, a member of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah. "The same gene products that control the fundamental processes of life in mammals also are found in the worm, so our study suggests this gene and related genes may have critical roles in controlling rhythmic behaviors in humans and other animals."

crashing satellite

2005-10-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

satelllite crashing
Originally uploaded by riley27.

The European Space Agency has confirmed that its ice mission Cryosat has been lost off the Russian coast.
The satellite fell into the Arctic Ocean minutes after lift-off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.
The £90m (135m euro) craft was designed to monitor how the Earth's ice masses are responding to climate change.
Scientists said the crash was a "tragedy" and it would be years before they could launch a similar mission, even if more funding were available.

'10th planet' has moon companion

2005-10-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS: "The astronomers who in July announced the discovery of a '10th planet' in our Solar System say the object has a moon.
The new development comes as a result of observations made with the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Michael Brown, from the California Institute of Technology, US, says the find will help his team make a better determination of the new planet's mass.
Currently, the planet has been dubbed Xena; the moon will be called Gabrielle until official names are agreed.

Both 'codenames' come from characters in a US TV series, Xena: Warrior Princess.
'Since the day we discovered Xena, the big question has been whether or not it has a moon,' Professor Brown said in a statement.
'Having a moon is just inherently cool - and it is something that most self-respecting planets have, so it is good to see that this one does, too.'"

Hurricane forecaster predicts busy October - LiveScience - MSNBC.com

2005-10-03T20:23:00.000-07:00

"A longtime guru of hurricane forecasting said today that October is likely to be another busy month. William Gray, a Colorado State University scientist who has been predicting seasonal hurricane activity for many years with remarkable accuracy, issue a statement today.'We project that October will continue the trend of above-average activity that we have witnessed in the preceding four months of the hurricane season,' Gray's team said."

Spider 'is 20 million years old'

2005-09-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS: "A scientist has described a spider that was trapped and preserved in amber 20 million years ago.
Palaeontologist Dr David Penney, of the University of Manchester, found the 4cm long by 2cm wide fossil during a visit to a museum in the Dominican Republic.
Since the discovery two years ago, he has used droplets of blood in the amber to reveal the age of the specimen.
It is thought to be the first time spider blood has been found in amber and scientists hope to extract its DNA."

iNntelajint deazine flaws

2005-09-29T22:43:00.000-07:00

Good article.

G Bara

Michael Crichton, Novelist, Becomes Senate Witness

2005-09-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

Michael Crichton, Novelist, Becomes Senate Witness - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - His last book, 'State of Fear,' was published more than nine months ago, but the reviews were still pouring in on Wednesday, even as Michael Crichton folded his 6-foot-9-inch frame into a seat to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
'More silly than scary,' the flier dropped off by the Natural Resources Defense Council said. 'Notable mainly for its nuttiness,' an analysis from the Brookings Institution said. 'Does not reflect scientific fact,' the Union of Concerned Scientists said. For all his previous works as a writer (13 novels, 4 nonfiction books, numerous screenplays) and his prominent career in Hollywood as a writer, producer or director of 13 films and as the creator of the popular television series 'ER,' little has yanked Mr. Crichton so deeply into political controversy as 'State of Fear,' an environmental thriller that casts doubt on the widely held notion that human activities contribute to global warming. It has become a hugely divisive policy issue in recent years, gaining a new urgency, perhaps, by the recent hurricanes that slammed into the Gulf Coast. Many prominent scientists, no friends of Mr. Crichton, to be sure, believe that man-made greenhouse gases are causing the earth to warm and are urging lawmakers to pass new regulations that govern carbon dioxide emissions. But after considerable study of his own, leading to 'State of Fear,' Mr. Crichton has concluded that the science is mixed at best, and that lawmakers should take that into consideration when they decide what they might do about it."

Researchers says Hobbit was human

2005-09-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

World's smallest mobile robot is built

2005-09-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

HANOVER, N.H., Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., have announced the creation of the world's smallest mobile, controllable robot.
The scientists say about 200 of the robots -- each nearly as wide as a strand of human hair -- could march in a line across the top of a piece of plain M&M candy.

A New Strategy to Fight Rapists

2005-09-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-rapetrap1sep01,0,4510917.story?coll=la-home-world

Human remains link to BSE crisis

2005-09-01T16:28:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS: "It proposes that some raw materials for fertiliser and feed imported from the Indian subcontinent in the 60s and 70s contained human bones and soft tissue.
If remains were infected with human prion diseases like CJD, they could have been the source for BSE.
The study by British researchers has been published in The Lancet.
But it has been greeted with scepticism by several experts on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).
The authors admit their evidence stops short of proving their case, but argue that their theory is plausible enough to warrant further investigation."

Day-After Pill Exposes FDA Rift

2005-09-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

Wired News: "The highly regarded women's health chief at the Food and Drug Administration resigned Wednesday in protest of her agency's refusal to allow over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception.
Assistant Commissioner Susan Wood charged that FDA's leader overruled his own scientists' determination that the morning-after pill could safely be sold without a prescription, and stunned his employees last week by instead postponing indefinitely a decision on whether to let that happen.
'There's fairly widespread concern about FDA's credibility' among agency veterans as a result, Wood told The Associated Press hours after submitting her resignation Wednesday.
'I have spent the last 15 years working to ensure that science informs good health-policy decisions,' Wood, director of FDA's Office of Women's Health, wrote in an e-mail about her departure to agency colleagues. 'I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended by the professional staff here, has been overruled.'
It was an unprecedented public show of discord for the FDA, and prompted lawmakers to call for congressional hearings into whether the nation's leading public health agency allowed politics to trump science in determining the fate of the morning-after pill called Plan B."

Fish meals 'stop sunburn'

2005-08-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

NEWS.com.au (30-08-2005): "EATING three portions of fish a week could offer significant protection from the sun, scientists have found.
Over time it could provide a natural defence similar to a weak sun cream.
Volunteers improved their resistance to harmful ultra-violet rays by a third after three months.
Fish oil is already known to provide a host of benefits including improved concentration in children and protection against heart disease and dementia.
The latest discovery suggests it could also help cut the soaring numbers of patients developing skin cancer.
As with its other benefits, it is the omega 3 fatty acids in oily fish such as salmon, mackerel and sardines that protect the skin against the DNA damage that causes the disease."

Storms Vary With Cycles, Experts Say - New York Times

2005-08-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.

From 1970 to 1994, the Atlantic was relatively quiet, with no more than three major hurricanes in any year and none at all in three of those years. Cooler water in the North Atlantic strengthened wind shear, which tends to tear storms apart before they turn into hurricanes.

In 1995, hurricane patterns reverted to the active mode of the 1950's and 60's. From 1995 to 2003, 32 major hurricanes, with sustained winds of 111 miles per hour or greater, stormed across the Atlantic. It was chance, Dr. Gray said, that only three of them struck the United States at full strength.

Historically, the rate has been 1 in 3.

Boost to CO2 mass extinction idea

2005-08-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS: "A computer simulation of the Earth's climate 250 million years ago suggests that global warming triggered the so-called 'great dying'.
A dramatic rise in carbon dioxide caused temperatures to soar to 10 to 30 degrees Celsius higher than today, say US researchers.
The warming had a profound impact on the oceans, cutting off oxygen to the lower depths and extinguishing most lifeforms, they write in the latest issue of Geology.
The research adds to the growing body of evidence that higher temperatures, rather than a giant space rock hitting the planet, led to the greatest mass extinction in history."

Earth's core runs ahead of crust

2005-08-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS: "US scientists claim to have confirmed that the Earth's core is spinning faster than its outer layers.
The team compared seismic waves being produced by pairs of earthquakes occurring at the same location on the planet, but at different times.
Waves from these nearly identical quakes passed through the Earth's core, they explain in Science magazine.
The results show that the inner core is rotating faster than the rest of the planet by about 0.009 seconds per year.
Earth has a solid inner core made of iron and nickel that is about 2,400km in diameter and a fluid outer core about 7,000km in diameter.
The inner core plays an important role in the dynamo that generates Earth's magnetic field. An electromagnetic torque from this dynamo is thought to drive the inner core to rotate relative to the mantle and crust.
Xiaodong Song, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Paul Richards, of Columbia University, argued that the inner core was spinning faster than the rest of the planet in 1996. But their findings were greeted with widespread scepticism."

Sunset Planets

2005-08-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Sunset Planets
Originally uploaded by riley27.

8.26.2005

Venus, Jupiter and the Moon are gathering for a beautiful sunset sky show.

August 26, 2005: Something nice is happening in the sunset sky. Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets, are converging, and they're going to be beautifully close together for the next two weeks.

Step outside tonight when the sun goes down and look west. If there are no trees or buildings in the way, you can't miss Jupiter and Venus. They look like airplanes, hovering near the horizon with their lights on full blast. (Venus is the brighter of the two.) You can see them even from brightly-lit cities.