U.S. Army Orders Bridges Made Of Recycled Plastic

An M1A1 70-ton tank crosses a bridge made from Axion's thermoplastic composite at Camp Mackall in North Carolina. (Credit: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army/Dawn Elizabeth Pandoliano)

From CNET News:

Axion International Holdings has won a $957,000 contract to provide the U.S. Army with two bridges made from a thermoplastic composite and recycled plastic, the company announced Wednesday evening.

The two bridges, which are replacing old wooden ones, will be constructed at Fort Eustis in Virginia from a proprietary Recycled Structural Composite (RSC) developed by Axion in conjunction with scientists at Rutgers University.

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Flu Spray vs. Shot: Is One Better?

From Discovery News:

My four-year-old got her swine flu vaccination yesterday. At the time, I was relieved when the school nurse pulled out a spray rather than a syringe.
Flu-spray-278x225

There were no tears -- or at least fewer than if she had gotten a shot.

But then I started to wonder -- is this really as good as the real thing ... that is, the needle?

Apparently I'm not alone. My neighborhood parent list serve has been peppered with posts from parents wondering the same thing.

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Lithium Clue For Planet-Hunters

Planets grow in the dusty discs that form around infant stars

From The BBC:

Astronomers may have found a way to identify those Sun-like stars most likely to harbour orbiting planets.

A survey of stars known to possess planets shows the vast majority to be severely depleted in lithium.

To date, scientists have detected just over 420 worlds circling other stars using a range of techniques.

Garik Israelian and colleagues tell the journal Nature that future planet hunts could be narrowed by going after stars with particular compositions.

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4 High-Tech Surprises From The USS New York

USS New York makes her way up the Hudson River.

From Popular Mechanics:

The USS New York, commissioned this month in its namesake city, is the Navy's newest warship. It's a Landing Platform Dock ship, which means it brings Marines to wherever they are needed. The 700 marines on the ship travel ready for combat, and that means landing hovercraft (called Landing Craft Air Cushions), attack helicopters, tanks, amphibious vehicles and V-22 Ospreys come along for the ride. The aircraft launch from the ship and are maintained in hangars on and below the flight deck. The New York has the most famous hull in the world—the Navy integrated 7.5 tons of steel from the fallen World Trade Center towers into the bow. But that is not the only interesting detail of this new vessel's design. Here are four high-tech surprises the USS New York has in store for enemies.

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In SUSY We Trust: What The LHC Is Really Looking For

From New Scientist:

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

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When the DoD's Fantasy Projects Get Real: DARPA Monitors Student Minds, SOCOM Wants Robo-Go-Fast Boats, And More

Robot At The Helm? courtesy of the Department of Defense

From Popular Science:

Three times a year, the Department of Defense (DoD) solicits help from the small business community to transform their high-tech research projects into actual, usable products. While the businesses use this opportunity to fight for some of that sweet, sweet government pork, for us, it's a chance to get a look at the next generation of advanced military gear. With the new solicitations out today, we're counting down the most intriguing projects that the DoD wants to get out of the lab and onto the battlefield.

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My Comment: Everyone comes out of the woodwork for these type of shows .... myself included.

October USA – Temperature 3rd Coldest On Record, Wettest Ever On Record

From Watts Up With That?

Temperature Highlights – October

* The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data.
* For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts. Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation’s nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.

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Psychic Spies In The Military

Psychic Spies: Any Truth in 'Men Who Stare at Goats?' -- ABC News

Movie, Book Claim Military Officers Dabbled in the Paranormal

Major Paul H. Smith calls it his "Men in Black" moment.

It was 1983 and he was working as a Middle East analyst at Fort Meade, Md., when a fellow intelligence officer approached him with a highly-classified, so-called "black project."

They couldn't tell him what it was. They just said that as an intelligent, accomplished, open-minded and creative person, he fit the profile.

Intrigued, Smith agreed to take the tests thrown at him. And when the results confirmed his competence for the top-secret task, he was invited to try his hand at a new mission: To uncover details about places and activities around the world without stepping off of a U.S. military base.

"We're basically asking you to become a psychic spy," Smith, now retired, said he was told.

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My Comment: The Americans may have extensively studied this field of interest .... it pales when compared to what the Russians were doing.

Receptor Controls Long Term Memory Formation

From Future Pundit:

A drug that turns off the nogo receptor 1 blocks long term memory formation in mice. Imagine a drug that did the same thing in humans. It would have all sorts of uses and abuses.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a mechanism that controls the brain's ability to create lasting memories. In experiments on genetically manipulated mice, they were able to switch on and off the animals' ability to form lasting memories by adding a substance to their drinking water. The findings, which are published in the scientific journal PNAS, are of potential significance to the future treatment of Alzheimer's and stroke.

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EPA Study Says Mercury-Tainted Fish Found In 49% Of U.S. Lakes And Reservoirs

From The Bloomberg:

Fish with potentially harmful levels of mercury were found in 49 percent of U.S. lakes and reservoirs studied, the Environmental Protection Agency said.

Lakes in almost half of the states had fish contaminated by toxic chemicals such as mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls or pesticides, the EPA said in a statement Tuesday on a study conducted from 2000 to 2003.

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Star Trek-like Replicator? Electron Beam Device Makes Metal Parts, One Layer At A Time

Electron beam freeform fabrication process. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 11, 2009) — A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: "If you can slice it, we can build it."

That's because layers mean everything to the environmentally-friendly construction process called Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3, and its operation sounds like something straight out of science fiction.

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One Key Found For Living To 100

From Live Science:

Scientists have zeroed in on one apparent key to long life: an inherited cellular repair mechanism that thwarts aging and perhaps helps prevent disease. Researches say the finding could lead to anti-aging drugs.

The study involves telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that have been likened to the plastic tips that prevent shoelaces from unraveling. Telomeres were already known to play a key role in aging, and their discovery led to this year's Nobel Prize in medicine.

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Universities Reject Kindle Over Inaccessibility For The Blind

Photo: Kindle DX. (Credit: Amazon)

From The CNET:

The National Federation of the Blind is applauding the decisions of Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement.

The universities cited the Kindle's inaccessibility to the blind as the problem.

The federation said Wednesday that while it appreciates the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, the "menus of the device are not accessible to the blind...making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon's Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX."

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Super-Sniffing Bees Combat Colony Pest

Government scientists have developed a population of honeybees that can root out the Varroa mite, a main culprit in a honeybee die-off. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

Government-developed honeybees are equipped with a keen sniffing ability to root out a deadly parasite.

In an effort to stem a massive bee die-off, government scientists have developed a population of honeybees that can root out a main culprit in the epidemic -- a parasite that feeds on pupae in nests and spreads viruses within hives.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists hope the population of Varroa mite-detecting honeybees could potentially improve the health of the overall honeybee population.

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Sniff Test To Preserve Old Books

From The BBC:

The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists.

Researchers report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that a new "sniff test" can measure degradation of old books and historical documents.

The test picks up and identifies the chemicals that the pages release as they degrade.

This could help libraries and museums preserve a range of precious books.

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Will Probe's Upcoming Fly-By Unlock Exotic Physics?

The Rosetta probe will fly by Earth on Friday (Illustration: ESA/C. Carreau)

From New Scientist:

What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it.

The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.

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The Milky Way As You've Never Seen It Before: The Colourful Centre Of Our Galaxy In All Its Glory

Unprecedented: A beautiful composite image of the Milky Way centre using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory

From The Daily Mail:

Colourful, swirling clouds of cosmic dust interspersed with glowing star clusters are revealed in this extraordinary image of the Milky Way.

The dazzling image combining reds, yellows, blues and purples, was created by layering stunningly detailed pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory on top of each other.

The Milky Way is at the centre of our own galaxy and this image shows its core. The image was created to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first demonstration of his telescope.

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Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name

From The Threat Level:

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.

Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter (.pdf) demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

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The Vatican Joins The Search For Alien Life

From The Telegraph:

The Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church: at least since Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for claiming that other worlds exist.

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As Alternative Energy Grows, NIMBY Turns Green

An offshore wind farm in north Wales, U.K. (Credit: Vestas)

From CNET:

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge yellow might cause less fuss than trying to install a wind farm off Cape Cod's historic coast.

But when you're trying to build where the wind is strongest or the sun is brightest, you never know what obstacles you may run into.

In Massachusetts, a proposed wind farm called Cape Wind was dealt a blow last Friday that will delay what would be the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. The Massachusetts Historical Commission agreed with local Indian tribes who claim that the location for the wind farm should be considered for listing in the National Historic Register because the Wampanoags' history and culture are "inextricably linked to Nantucket Sound," according to the opinion.

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