Thursday, September 17, 2009

Firefox Use Reaches Critical Mass; Skype Reigns In IM

From Infoworld:

It finally happened. After years of building momentum -- and more than a few false starts -- Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has finally reached critical mass. There are now more users running some variant of Firefox (50.6 percent) than not running it, according to the latest statistics from the exo.performance.network, which tracks the actual usage and configurations of thousands of PCs globally, providing a real-world snapshot.

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Apollo Moon Rocks Lost In Space? No, Lost On Earth

This photo from the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, Netherlands shows authentic Dutch moon rocks on display. The detection of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' Rijksmueum should serve as a wake-up call for more than 130 countries who received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later. Experts say the whereabouts are unknown of hundreds of tiny rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts and given by the Nixon administration to friendly nations. Photo from AP

From USA Today:

AMSTERDAM — Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?

The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later.

Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration. But according to experts and research by The Associated Press, the whereabouts of some of the small rocks are unknown.

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

The Science of Hunger: What 1 Billion People Feel


From Live Science:

Despite a record level of people suffering from hunger, food aid is at a 20-year low due to the poor global economy, United Nations officials said today. The result: More than 1 billion people across the world will face hunger this year.

"For the world's most vulnerable, the perfect storm is hitting with a vengeance," said U.N. World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director Josette Sheeran. So far this year, the agency has received less than half of the $6.7 billion it needs to feed 108 million people in 74 countries, Sheeran said.

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A 360-Degree Virtual Reality Chamber Brings Researchers Face To Face With Their Data

MULTI-DIMENSIONAL: Researchers interact with their data, which can be streamed live, using 3-D glasses, special wireless controllers, and sensors embedded in the bridge's railings. (Gesture control and voice recognition are in the works.) © JOANN KUCHERA-MORIN

From Scientific American:

Scientists can climb inside the University of California, Santa Barbara's three-story-high AlloSphere for a life-size interaction with their research.

Scientists often become immersed in their data, and sometimes even lost. The AlloSphere, a unique virtual reality environment at the University of California, Santa Barbara, makes this easier by turning large data sets into immersive experiences of sight and sound. Inside its three-story metal sphere researchers can interpret and interact with their data in new and intriguing ways, including watching electrons spin from inside an atom or "flying" through an MRI scan of a patient's brain as blood density levels play as music.

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Top 10 Most Dangerous Plants In The World

Giant Pitcher Plant: Nepenthes attenboroughii

From Popular Mechanics:

Over millions of years, plants have developed some crafty ways to fend off hungry animals. Deadly neurotoxins, thorns capable of puncturing car tires, and powerful digestive enzymes are just a few. Following the recent discovery of Nepenthes attenboroughii, a giant pitcher plant large enough to digest rodents, PM tracked down poison-plant aficionado Amy Stewart to discuss some of the world's deadliest plants. Stewart, who is the author of Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities, lives in Eureka, Calif., where she tends a garden that contains more than 30 different species of poisonous plants.

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Space Shuttle Unleashes Magnificent Plume Of Pee

Pee Over Hungary, By the Ruins of Essegvar: Last Wednesday, several skygazers scratched their heads when they saw this mysterious glow in the sky. Tamas Ladanyi

From Popular Science:

To anyone who's ever pondered what urine looks like in space -- c'mon, don't be shy -- we say: wonder no more, because photos of the phenomenon have finally hit the internet.

Last Wednesday, a number of North American skygazers were lucky to sight a mysterious flare in the night sky, that, as it now turns out, was a 150-pound cocktail of astronaut urine and waste water released from the shuttle Discovery.

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Scientists Find Lifesaver For India – Rice That Doesn't Have To Be Cooked

The new strain of rice offers hope for malnourished children in India. Reuters

From The Independent:

It sounds too good to be true. But if Indian scientists are correct, hundreds of millions of people across the subcontinent could benefit from a specially-developed strain of rice that "cooks" simply by being soaked in water.

Experts at the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Orissa who have developed the grain were inspired by so-called soft rice, or komal saul, that grows in the north-east Indian state of Assam. Traditional recipes call for such rice to be soaked overnight in water, then eaten with mustard oil and onions.

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Working In A Team Increases Human Pain Threshold

Cooperating as a group is thought to boost the rush of endorphins,
a feel-good chemical that also acts as a painkiller.


From The Guardian:


Team players can tolerate twice as much pain as those who work alone, according to research that throws fresh light on some of the most wince-inducing feats in sporting history.

Researchers at Oxford University found that members of its rowing team had a greater pain threshold after training together than when they performed the same exercises individually.

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Smiling Helps Women Feel Better About Their Appearance

A smile can be all it takes to make a woman feel better about her
appearance, research suggests Photo: GETTY


From The Telegraph:

A smile can be all it takes to make a woman feel good about her appearance, according to a new study.

Scientists found that women who are unhappy with the way they look feel significantly better about themselves after being greeted by a smiling face.

The boost in self esteem has led psychologists to think that for many, confidence in their appearance is all about social acceptance.

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At Last! First Real Evidence For A Rocky Exoplanet


From Wired Science:

There’s finally proof that Earth-like planets can exist outside our solar system: Scientists have managed to measure the mass of exoplanet COROT-7b, revealing that it’s the first exoplanet with a confirmed density similar to our own.

“This is a day we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said exoplanet researcher Sara Seager of the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first definitive rocky world beyond our solar system, and it’s opening a new gate for our research. We’re really, really excited about it.”

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More News On The Discovery Of This Rocky Exoplanet

First rocky planet found outside solar system -- CNN
Scientists say "super-Earth" has rocky surface -- Reuters
Found: Firm place to stand outside solar system -- AP
Distant world 'has rocky surface' -- BBC
Solid evidence for Earthlike world -- Scientific America
COROT-7b: Earth-like planet discovered outside Solar System -- The Telegraph
Earth-like planet Corot-7b found outside solar system -- Times Online
Rock Solid Evidence of a Rocky, Earth-like Exoplanet -- Discover Magazine

Life Was In The Oceans 200m Years Before Oxygen Made Air Fit To Breathe

Life first appeared in our oceans during the Archean eon when the moon was far closer to Earth. The air was too toxic for life on land

From The Daily Mail:

Life existed in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years while the Earth's air was not fit to breathe, research suggested today.

Plant-like bacteria evolved at least 200 million years before oxygen began to build up in the atmosphere, a study has shown.

During this period in its history, known as the Archaean, the Earth was covered by a poisonous smog of methane, ammonia and other toxic gases.

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Scary Music Is Scarier With Your Eyes Shut

The power of the imagination is well-known: it's no surprise that scary music is scarier with your eyes closed. (Credit: iStockphoto/Mirko Pernjakovic)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2009) — The power of the imagination is well-known: it's no surprise that scary music is scarier with your eyes closed. But now neuroscientist and psychiatrist Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University's Functional Brain Center says that this phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases.

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Direct Evidence Of Role Of Sleep In Memory Formation Is Uncovered

For the first time, researchers have pinpointed the mechanism that takes place during sleep that causes learning and memory formation to occur. (Credit: iStockphoto/Mads Abildgaard)

From Science Daily:


ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2009) — A Rutgers University, Newark and Collége de France, Paris research team has pinpointed for the first time the mechanism that takes place during sleep that causes learning and memory formation to occur.

It’s been known for more than a century that sleep somehow is important for learning and memory. Sigmund Freud further suspected that what we learned during the day was “rehearsed” by the brain during dreaming, allowing memories to form. And while much recent research has focused on the correlative links between the hippocampus and memory consolidation, what had not been identified was the specific processes that cause long-term memories to form.

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British Skeleton Suggests Ancient Murder Mystery

A skeleton from ancient Roman times, found in the buried town of Venta Icenorum in Norfolk, England is buried on its side. Romans laid bodies out properly, however, suggesting this man might have met a murderous end. Credit: University of Nottingham.

From Live Science:

A skeleton found at an ancient Roman site in Britain has researchers wondering if they've stumbled on a murder mystery.

Excavations at the buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St. Edmund in Norfolk, England, found what, for now, archaeologists are terming a "highly unusual" setup.

"This is an abnormal burial," said archaeologist Will Bowden of the University of Nottingham. "The body, which is probably male, was placed in a shallow pit on its side, as opposed to being laid out properly. This is not the care Romans normally accorded to their dead. It could be that the person was murdered or executed, although this is still a matter of speculation."

The skeleton has been removed for further investigation.

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Dreams Of A Lunar Observatory


From Technology Review:


If you could build an observatory on the Moon, what would you look for?

Imagine you could build an observatory on the Moon. What would you look for?

That was essentially the brief given to the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research, or LUNAR consortium, when NASA asked it to speculate about the unique astrophysics that could be done on the Moon.

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Ready Or Not, Time To Grapple With E-Memory

MyLifeBits can be used to catalog and search personal archives.
(Credit: Dutton Books)

From CNET:

Just because Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell are way out there on the nerd spectrum, don't ignore what they have to say in their new book, "Total Recall."

The Microsoft researchers obsessively record e-mails, photos, videos, phone calls, health records, financial transactions, Web site visits, and everything else they can in an attempt to electronically compensate for the fallibility of their own biological memories. Before you recoil at the prospect of letting your own life become this digitally augmented, though, consider that it will be whether you want it or not.

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....

Mobile App Sees Science Go Global

The interface collates information from many sources and presents statistics

From The BBC:

A mobile phone application will help professional and "citizen" scientists collect and analyse data from "in the field", anywhere in the world.

The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles - on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species - in a web-based database.

The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones.

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House Panel Resists Changes in NASA Space Program

From New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Members of a key House committee said Tuesday that they were reluctant to change NASA’s current plans for human spaceflight after the space shuttles are retired from service, beyond giving more money to the agency.

“I think that good public policy argues for setting the bar pretty high against making significant changes in direction at this point,” said Representative Bart Gordon, Democrat of Tennessee, who is chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology. “There would need to be a compelling reason to scrap what we’ve invested our time and money in over these past four years.”

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Gorilla King Titus Dies In Rwanda

This photo, provided by the Rwanda Development Board of Tourism and Conservation, shows the silverback gorilla, called Titus, in National Volcano Park in April 2009. Titus the Gorilla King, who became the world's most famous mountain gorilla after starring in Dian Fossey's "Gorillas in the Mist" and a BBC documentary, has died in Rwanda at the ripe old age of 35. (AFP/HO)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

KIGALI (AFP) – Titus the Gorilla King, who became the world's most famous mountain gorilla after starring in Dian Fossey's "Gorillas in the Mist" and a BBC documentary, has died in Rwanda at the ripe old age of 35.

The Rwandan and national parks office said the giant old silverback "succumbed to old age" on Monday after falling ill in the past week.

"He has been sick. He's been weakening. It's in the last week that he started going down," Rosette Rugamba, head of the tourism and national parks office told AFP.

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Argentina Site Of World's Biggest Crater Field

The Barringer Crater in Arizona, USA, is one of the largest
obvious craters known on Earth. Credit: Wikipedia


From Cosmos/AFP:

BUENOS AIRES: Argentina can lay claim to the world's largest crater field: a volcanic area in Patagonia known as the Devil's Slope, according to a new study.

Covering 400 square kilometres, the Bajada del Diablo field is peppered with at least 100 depressions left by the collisions of meteorites or comets from 130,000 to 780,000 years ago, the study found.

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Bacterial Casualties: U.S. Soldiers In Iraq Continue To Battle Drug-Resistant Bacteria

From Scientific American:

Despite great strides made to help soldiers in Iraq survive their wounds, medical personnel in the U.S. military still struggle to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. This was one the messages presented yesterday at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco.

Among the most common bacteria to turn up, usually in soldiers' wounds, are methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and strains of the virulent Klebsiella

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The Fastest (And Most Dangerous) Way To Light A Grill


From Popular Science:

Go from cold to cooking in 30 seconds with a big can of liquid oxygen.

About a year ago, when resident mad scientist Theo Gray pitched me a Gray Matter column on liquid oxygen, an extremely flammable form of the element, he first proposed showing how to use it to light a grill nearly instantaneously. The lawyers, however, suggested we go a more tame route, so instead we showed how you could make a few drops of the hooch yourself.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Widespread Occurrence Of Intersex Bass Found In U.S. Rivers

USGS researcher examining bass for abnormalities in the field. (Credit: Jo Ellen Hinck / U.S. Geological Survey)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2009) — Intersex in smallmouth and largemouth basses is widespread in numerous river basins throughout the United States is the major finding of the most comprehensive and large-scale evaluation of the condition, according to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research published online in Aquatic Toxicology.

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Electricity Harvested From Trees

This custom circuit is able to store up enough voltage from trees to be able to run a low-power sensor. Credit: University of Washington.

From Live Science:

Researchers have figured out a way to plug into the power generated by trees.

Scientists have known for some time that plants can conduct electricity. In fact, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants can pack up to 200 millivolts of electrical power. A millivolt is one-thousandth of a volt.

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Video / The Evolution of Swine Flu

Congress Faces NASA’s Shaky Future


From Wired Science:

Congress took its first crack at coming up with a plan for NASA in the wake of an independent report that could mean big changes at the agency — or not.

The Augustine committee, as it’s known because of its head, Norm Augustine, sent over a summary of its findings to the Office for Science and Technology Policy last week. It contained five options for human spaceflight — four of them entailing major changes for the Bush-era Constellation program. All of the plans would require upping NASA’s annual budget by $3 billion a year.

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Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

Lukasz Laska

From Scientific American:


A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people.

As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French.

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Google Explains Street View to Wary Japanese With--What Else?--Adorable Stop-Motion Animation



From Popular Science:

Google Japan's new video aims to alleviate privacy concerns among Japanese residents.

Fret no longer, citizens of Japan, about Google's camera vans exposing the awkward moments of your private lives to millions via Street View. Because here, see? All that's behind its scary secrets is an impossibly adorable anthropomorphic camera truck in a wonderland of children's toys. Dawww, its bobbing camera head just snapped a photo of your car! It's so cute!

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Antarctica's Hidden Plumbing Revealed


From The New Scientist:

THE first complete map of the lakes beneath Antarctica's ice sheets reveals the continent's secret water network is far more dynamic than we thought. This could be acting as a powerful lubricant beneath glaciers, contributing to sea level rise.

Unlike previous lake maps, which are confined to small regions, Ian Joughin at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues mapped 124 subglacial lakes across Antarctica using lasers on NASA's ICESat satellite (see map).

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Scale Of Gorilla Poaching Exposed

From The BBC:

An undercover investigation has found that up to two gorillas are killed and sold as bushmeat each week in Kouilou, a region of the Republic of Congo.

The apes' body parts are then taken downriver and passed on to traders who sell them in big-city markets.

Conducted by the conservation group Endangered Species International, the investigation helps expose the extent of gorilla poaching in the country.

It fears hundreds more gorillas may be taken each year outside the region.

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Information-Rich And Attention-Poor

From The Globe And Mail:

Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision.


Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.

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Thunderstorm On Saturn Is A Record-Buster

The moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet.

From AFP:

PARIS — A tempest that erupted on Saturn in January has become the Solar System's longest continuously observed lightning storm, astronomers reported on Tuesday.

The storm broke out in "Storm Alley," a region 35 degrees south of the ringed giant's equator, researchers told the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Thunderstorms there can be as big as 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) across.

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New Virus From Rats Can Kill 80 Per Cent Of Human Victims

From Sydney Morning Herald:

A PREVIOUSLY unknown virus that killed four of the five people it struck in an outbreak in South Africa last year has been identified as part of a family of viruses humans can catch from rats.

The virus, named Lujo, is an arenavirus that over nine days caused rash, fever, muscle pain, diarrhoea, severe bleeding, vomiting, organ failure and death, said Nivesh Sewlall, who treated the first patient at Johannesburg's Morningside MediClinic Hospital. He reported the findings at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco yesterday.

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Wine Tasting: Expectations Influence Sense Of Taste, Tests Show

Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:


ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown.

Many a wine grower trembles at the prospect of a visit from Robert Parker, one of the most famous wine critics in the world. His “Parker Points” have a similar impact to the Roman Emperor’s thumb, deciding the success of a winery instead of life and death. The extent to which product information like Parker’s ratings influence the consumer is revealed in a study by Michael Siegrist, Professor of Consumer Behavior at the Institute for Environmental Decisions, and his post-doc Marie-Eve Cousin from ETH Zurich, which was published in the journal Appetite.

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Do Brains Shrink As We Age?


From Live Science:

As we get older, our brains get smaller, or at least that's what many scientists believe. But a new study contradicts this assumption, concluding that when older brains are "healthy" there is little brain deterioration, and that only when people experience cognitive decline do their brains show significant signs of shrinking.

The results suggest that many previous studies may have overestimated how much our brains shrink as we age, possibly because they failed to exclude people who were starting to develop brain diseases, such as dementia, that would lead to brain decay, or atrophy.

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Google Book Search: Why It Matters


From Times Online:

European publishers and copyright holders gathered in Brussels on Monday to submit their opinions to a European Commission hearing on the American Google Book Search settlement.

In a nutshell, the situation is this: Google has embarked on a project to digitise hundreds of thousands of out-of-print and out-of-copyright books in the United States.

Some of these works are still technically in copyright, and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers took Google to court. A proposed settlement was reached last year, under which Google will essentially agree to pay royalties to anyone whose book they inadvertently put on line.

The settlement will be ratified in a Manhattan court on October 7 this year, by which time any European reservations will need to be registered.

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Splashdown! Cirque du Soleil Founder Prepares For First 'Poetic' Space Mission

Mr Laliberte in a rare serious mood at the Star City training centre

From The Daily Mail:

Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte made a splash at the space training centre in Star City outside Moscow. He was taking part in emergency landing practice for his trip to the International Space Station next month.

The owner of Cirque du Soleil, is spending £21million to become the world's seventh space tourist, after being slated to travel on a Russian Soyuz space craft at the end of September.

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China's Potent Wind Potential

Photo: Wind power: Wind power plants in Xinjiang, China. Credit: Chris Lim

From Technology Review:

Forecasters see no need for new coal and nuclear power plants.

China has doubled its installed wind power capacity every year for the past five, and is on pace this year to supplant the United States as the world's largest market for new installations. But researchers from Harvard University and Beijing's Tsinghua University suggest that the Chinese wind power industry has hardly begun to tap its potential. According to their meteorological and financial modeling, reported in the journal Science last week, there is enough strong wind in China to profitably satisfy all of the country's electricity demand until at least 2030.

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Space Robot 2.0: Smarter Than The Average Rover

Artist's conception of NASA's planned Mars rover, Curiosity. See other rovers in our gallery (Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

SOMETHING is moving. Two robots sitting motionless in the dust have spotted it. One, a six-wheeled rover, radios the other perched high on a rocky slope. Should they take a photo and beam it back to mission control? Time is short, they have a list of other tasks to complete, and the juice in their batteries is running low. The robots have seconds to decide. What should they do?

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Jupiter Turned Comet Into "Moon" For 12 Years

Jupiter (shown in a 2006 Hubble Space Telescope picture) captured a comet in 1949, and the "temporary moon" orbited the giant planet for 12 years before being cast aside, astronomers announced in September 2009.Image courtesy NASA via AP

From National Geographic:

Sixty years ago, Jupiter carried on a 12-year fling with an extra "moon" then casually cast it aside—and the gas giant will likely do it again within decades, scientists announced today.

In 1949 the massive planet's gravity pulled in comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu and held it in orbit until 1961, according to an international team led by Katsuhito Ohtsuka of the Tokyo Meteor Network.

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Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius Craft Finally Bags $1 Million Lunar Lander Challenge

Scorpius Shoots for the Moon: Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle completed a mock lunar landing on Earth -- next step, space Armadillo Aerospace

From Popular Science:

Armadillo Aerospace may claim a $1 million prize for completing a mock lunar landing, if no other competitors step up

A future trip to the moon could use a commercial vehicle, if Armadillo Aerospace has anything to say about it. The company's rocket-powered craft pulled off a mock lunar landing on Saturday to qualify for a $1 million purse from NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

Read more ....

Microsoft Testing 'Visual Search'

Microsoft unveiled a twist on the Internet search experience on Monday with a new feature

From AFP:

WASHINGTON — US software giant Microsoft unveiled a twist on the Internet search experience on Monday with a new feature which allows Web surfers to search using image galleries instead of text links.

Microsoft, which teamed up with Yahoo! in July in a bid to challenge Internet search giant Google, rolled out a beta, or test, version of the feature at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco.

Read more ....

Robots With A Mind Of Their Own

Monday, September 14, 2009

Flash Recovery Of Ammonoids After Most Massive Extinction Of All Time

Asteroceras, a Jurassic ammonite from England.
(Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)


From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — After the End-Permian extinction 252.6 million years ago, ammonoids diversified and recovered 10 to 30 times faster than previous estimates. The surprising discovery raises questions about paleontologists' understanding of the dynamics of evolution of species and the functioning of the biosphere after a mass extinction.

Read more ....

Key Found to Muscle Loss After Age 65


From Live Science:

It’s a sad fact that muscles shrink as adults age. But new studies are starting to unravel how this happens — and what to do about it.

Past research has shown that the bodies of older people build muscle from food less efficiently than young people. Now researchers at the University of Nottingham in England have also found that a mechanism that prevents muscle breakdown works less effectively in people over the age of 65, resulting in a “double whammy” effect.

Read more ....

How Does the Brain Use So Much Energy? Not in Electrical Signals

From Discover Magazine:

Experiments conducted on squid brains in the early days of neuroscience created misunderstandings about the workings of the human brain that have persisted for 70 years, according to a new study. While the squid experiments did shed light on how messages are transmitted between brain cells with electrochemical signals (and led to a Nobel Prize for the experimenters), researchers are just now realizing that the results gave scientists a confused idea about the efficiency of neurons.

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Navy Green: Military Investigates Biofuels to Power Its Ships and Planes

CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF?: The U.S. Navy has ordered more than 60,000 gallons of alternative fuels derived from weeds and algae--and hopes to power planes and ships with them in the near future. Courtesy of U.S. Navy

From Scientific American:

The U.S. Navy will begin testing biofuels from camelina and algae.

Ships powered by algae and planes flying on weeds: that's part of the future the U.S. Navy hopes to bring to fruition. This week, the seagoing branch of the military purchased 40,000 gallons of jet fuel derived from camelina—a weedy relative of canola—and 20,055 gallons of algae-derived diesellike fuel for ships.

Read more ....

Cache And Carry: A Review Of The Kindle


From Scientific American:

The best answer yet to what's black and white and read all over.

I’m not your classic “early adopter” when it comes to new electronic gizardry (a word I just made up that means a combination of gizmo and wizardry, with a secondary definition of bird digestion). I’m not even what one ersatz electronics guru referred to as an “early adapter,” although I do sometimes wonder if my purpose in life has been reduced to making sure my various devices are all plugged in correctly.

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China Starts Building New Space Launch Centre

Chinese astronauts at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in a remote desert area of northwest China's Gansu province. The country has begun construction of its fourth space launch centre as the nation gears up for future manned space flights aboard a new generation of carrier rockets, state media has reported. (AFP/Xinhua/File)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

BEIJING (AFP) – China on Monday began the construction of its fourth space launch centre as the nation gears up for future manned space flights aboard a new generation of carrier rockets, state media reported.

Work started on the Wenchang Space Satellite Launch Centre on southern Hainan island, which will become China's first coastal launching pad when completed in 2013, the Hainan Daily reported.

Chang Wanquan, member of the powerful Central Military Commission, and Chen Qiufa, head of the State Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, attended Monday's groundbreaking ceremony, the report said.

China's space programme is run by the nation's military.

Read more ....

More Efficient, And Cheaper, Solar Cells

Photo: Light trap: Incoming light reflects off grooves in a silver band and is redirected along a glass cover. This light, which is usually lost, can then be absorbed by the solar cell. The grooved band is one of three improvements that could significantly lower the cost of making solar power. Credit: Technology Review

From Technology Review:

New manufacturing techniques could cut solar power costs by 20 percent.

Improvements to conventional solar cell manufacturing that could significantly increase the efficiency of multicrystalline silicon cells and bring down the cost of solar power by about 20 percent have been announced by startup 1366 Technologies of Lexington, MA.

Such cost reduction would make solar power more competitive with conventional sources of electricity. In sunny environments, this could bring the cost of solar down to about 15 or 16 cents per kilowatt hour, says Craig Lund, 1366 Technologies's director of business development. That's cheaper than some conventional sources of electricity, especially those used during times of peak electricity demand.

Read more ....

Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama Of The Milky Way


From Wired Science:

You can see the entire Milky Way at once in this panorama painstakingly stitched together by French photographers.

A much larger, zoomable version available from the European Southern Observatory lets you visit any part of the galaxy.

Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.

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The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind


From Time Magazine:

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

"Henry!" he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix--a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry's collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.

"You got it?" Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he's standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room--neither dog nor human--can tell which cup hides the biscuit.

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Getting Ready For The Day That No One Wants

'Dirty Bomb' Breakthrough -- The Independent

British scientists have developed a revolutionary method of treating victims of radiation contamination. Trials of a new device, no bigger than a small suitcase, which can rapidly detect the extent of cellular damage caused by exposure to a nuclear "dirty bomb" or a radiation leak, will be announced this week. It could mean doctors being able to scan hundreds of potential victims at an incident within hours.

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My Comment: There are budgets in placed to develop technology (like this) because the "powers that be" have made the calculation that one day such a device will be used.

Astronomers Search For Habitable Moons

Scientists believe there are thousands of habitable moons orbiting planets in other solar systems Photo: Michael O'Connell

From The Telegraph:

Moons capable of supporting life like those portrayed in the popular Star Wars films could be scattered all over our galaxy, according to astronomers.

Scientists at University College London believe there are thousands of habitable moons orbiting planets in other solar systems trillions of miles from our own.

They have calculated that it should even be possible to spot these moons using a space telescope launched by Nasa earlier this year to hunt out other planets.

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