Congress To Address U.S. Rare Earth Shortage

From Live Science:

Members of Congress introduced a new bill this week that would resurrect the U.S. rare earths supply-chain and create a national stockpile for military and tech industry uses.

Rare earth elements have become irreplaceable in clean tech such as hybrid and electric car motors, high-efficiency light bulbs, solar panels and wind turbines. They also play a key role in defense technologies such as cruise missiles, radar and sonar and precision-guided weapons.

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The Oldest Trees On The Planet

From Wired Science:

Trees are some of the longest-lived organisms on the planet. At least 50 trees have been around for more than a millenium, but there may be countless other ancient trees that haven’t been discovered yet.

Trees can live such a long time for several reasons. One secret to their longevity is their compartmentalized vascular system, which allows parts of the tree to die while other portions thrive. Many create defensive compounds to fight off deadly bacteria or parasites.

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Searching For Another Earth

Photo: Planet finder: The CoRot satellite is operated by the French Space Agency CNES, and its mission is to search for planets outside our solar system. Here it’s undergoing mechanical qualification tests prior to launch. Credit: Alcatel Alenia Space/JL Bazile

From The Technology:

A new discovery advances the hunt for Earthlike planets beyond our solar system.

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exoplanet--one outside our solar system--that has a more Earthlike orbit than any alien planet discovered so far using the same technique.

The planet, called CoRot-9b, was discovered by the French-operated satellite CoRot, which has been in orbit since 2006. The spacecraft detected CoRot-9b by measuring the dimming of its star's brightness as the planet passed in front of it, a technique called "transit observation." The small dip in brightness allows the planet's size to be calculated. By measuring the amount of time it takes the planet to complete its orbit, researchers can determine the planet's distance from its star.

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'Mobile Apps Will Outsell CDs By 2012'

Source: Chetan Sharma Consulting

From The Guardian:

Report for app store GetJar forecasts number of downloads will rise from 7bn in 2009 to almost 50bn in 2012.

Mobile app downloads are expected to increase from more than 7bn downloads in 2009 to almost 50bn in 2012, according to a report.

The independent study, carried out by Chetan Sharma Consulting for Getjar, the world's second biggest app store, forecasts that the global mobile application economy will be worth $17.5bn in 2012, more than CD sales, which it predicts will be $13.83bn.

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Bubbles In Guinness 'Go Down Not Up' Say Scientists

From The Telegraph:

Bubbles in Guinness really do go down instead of up, according to a study by scientists to mark St Patrick's Day.

As pubs stocked up with extra supplies of the black stuff in preparation for Ireland's national celebrations on Wednesday, scientists offered an explanation for why the famous Irish brew behaves so oddly.

Pour just about any other pint of beer, and the bubbles can be seen to obey the normal laws of physics. Filled with buoyant gas, they rise to the surface and form a frothy head.

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Found... The Honey Bees With Built-In Central Heating

Scientists have discovered 'heater' bees who keep the hive warm

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have long attributed the success of the honey bee to the division of labour within the hive.

But thermal imaging research for a TV series has identified a previously unknown skill performed by a specialist bee that is vital for a colony's survival.

'Heater bees' use their bodies to provide a 'central heating' system, it has emerged.

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Team's Quantum Object Is Biggest By Factor Of Billions

Image: The "quantum resonator" can be seen with the naked eye

From The BBC:

Researchers have created a "quantum state" in the largest object yet.

Such states, in which an object is effectively in two places at once, have until now only been accomplished with single particles, atoms and molecules.

In this experiment, published in the journal Nature, scientists produced a quantum state in an object billions of times larger than previous tests.

The team says the result could have significant implications in quantum computing.

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Periodic Bursts Of Solar Radiation Destroy The Martian Atmosphere

Come on, Cohaagen! You got what you want.
Give those people air! Total Recall, via The Warehouse

From Popular Science:

Unfortunately for anyone looking to terraform Mars, a new study shows that powerful waves of solar wind periodically strip the Red Planet of its atmosphere. Scientists had known for years that Mars has atmosphere troubles, but only by analyzing new data from he Mars Express spacecraft were they able to identify the special double solar waves as the specific cause.

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Feeling Animals' Pain

From New Scientist:

Jonathan Balcombe believes that we have allowed intelligence to become the measure with which we determine how well to treat animals when what we should be using is how they feel.

It is not a new idea - the philosopher Jeremy Bentham said in 1789 that how an animal ought to be treated should be dependent on its capacity to suffer. It is a question that has recently been overlooked by biologists, who are instead determined to prove that some species have cognitive capacities akin to our own.

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Flowering Plants May Be Considerably Older Than Previously Thought

A new analysis of the land plant family tree suggests that flowering plants may have lived much earlier than previously thought. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 17, 2010) — Flowering plants may be considerably older than previously thought, says a new analysis of the plant family tree.

Previous studies suggest that flowering plants, or angiosperms, first arose 140 to 190 million years ago. Now, a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes back the age of angiosperms to 215 million years ago, some 25 to 75 million years earlier than either the fossil record or previous molecular studies suggest.

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Why Do Some Clovers Have Four Leaves?

Four-leaf clovers are a rare variation on the usual three-leafed kind caused
by a genetic mutation. Credit: stock.xchng.

From Live Science:

The leaves of clover plants are said to hold the luck o' the Irish when they sport four leaves. This myth likely arose because four-leaf clovers are rare finds — the result of an equally rare genetic mutation in the clover plant.

There are about 300 species in the clover genus Trifolium, or trefoil, so named because the plants usually have three leaves, or technically, leaflets. The ones you typically find in North America are white clover (Trifolium repens).

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How Privacy Vanishes Online

Alessandro Acquisti mined Web data to successfully predict Social Security numbers. Ross Mantle for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

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Plumbing The Depths For Oil

From The Economist:

Inside story: A recent wave of advances is enabling oil companies to detect and recover offshore oil in ever more difficult places.

IN OCTOBER 1947 a group of engineers from Kerr-McGee, an American oil company, drilled the world’s first offshore oil well that was completely out of sight of land. Located 17km (10.5 miles) off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, the project involved a drilling deck no bigger than a tennis court. This platform was complemented by a number of refurbished navy barges left over from the second world war, which served as both storage facilities and sleeping quarters for the crew. A single derrick enabled drilling into the seabed, 4.6 metres (15 feet) below. Kerr-McGee’s offshore drilling gear is still used in the Gulf of Mexico. The reused barges, however, are long gone. Instead, far more elaborate equipment is now being used, and in much deeper water.

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China Stands Firm On Internet Security Amid Google Drama

From Xinhuanet:

BEIJING, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- China Thursday insisted its stand for an open Internet under proper regulating following Google's widely-concerned statement of a possible retreat from the country.

"The Internet is open in China, where the government always encourages its development and has created a favorable environment for its healthy development," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular press conference.

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Are Printed Photos Going Extinct?

From ABC News:

The Number of Photos Printed Worldwide Is Dropping by the Billions as Facebook Makes the Glossy Print Old-Fashioned.

The glossy print, it seems, is losing its sheen. According to estimates from IDC, 42 billion photos will be printed worldwide, both commercially and personally, in 2013. That’s a third less than the 63 billion printed in 2008. Meanwhile, about 124 billion photos are on pace to be shared through social networks that year. If it maintains its momentum, Facebook will likely be hosting the lion’s share of these images. The advent of the affordable digital camera circa 2001 was hard enough on the photography industry. People no longer had to buy film, since photos could be stored on memory cards or on a computer hard drive. Now Facebook is slowly but surely turning the nozzle of the industry’s only other real revenue stream: photo printing.

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New 'Temperate' Exoplanet Hints At Solar System Like Our Own

An artist's impression shows CoRoT-9b, the first temperate exoplanet to be measured in detail. Scientists say it is about the size of Jupiter and orbits its parent star at about the same distance that Mercury orbits the sun. AFP/ESO

From Christian Science Monitor:

Astronomers have for the first time made detailed measurements of an exoplanet in the temperate zone around its star. Their conclusion: It looks a lot like a planet in our solar system.

Astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-size planet that orbits its host star at a Mercury-like distance – a solar system that begins to look like a topsy-turvy, Alice in Wonderland version of our own.

The discovery has allowed scientists to glean for the first time a wide range of information about an extrasolar planet so relatively distant from its "sun."

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Google Working With Intel, Sony, Logitech On TV Technology

From The Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. has lined up some big partners--including Intel Corp. and Sony Corp.--in the Internet giant's recent quest to move its technology into the living room, people familiar with the situation say.

The joint effort, which is in its preliminary stages, includes software to help users navigate among Web-based offerings on TVs and serve as a platform for other developers to target in creating new programs, these people say. The technology could be included with future TVs, Blu-ray players or set-top boxes, they added.

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Solar Storms Create 'Killer Electrons'

A stream of charged particles from the Sun hits Earth's magnetosphere. Credit: NASA

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: 'Killer electrons' - electrons circling Earth that wreck satellites and can cause cancer in astronauts - are created when Solar storms create shockwaves in the Earth's protective magnetic bubble, scientists said.

The Earth's magnetic field abounds with charged, fast moving particles that orbit up to 64,000 km above the surface. When a severe solar storm - a stream of energetic particles emanating from the Sun - hits the Earth's magnetic field, it creates a shockwave that boosts the number of particles by up to ten times as much.

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The CIA Predictioneer: Using Games To See The Future

Three decades of getting it right (Image: Ethan Hill/Contour by Getty Images)

From New Scientist:

MY HOROSCOPE this week says that now is the perfect time to relocate, or at least de-clutter. I know it's nonsense, but I can't help wishing there was a genuine way to predict the future.

Perhaps there is. One self-styled "predictioneer" believes he has found the answer. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a professor of politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. In his new book, The Predictioneer (The Predictioneer's Game in the US), he describes a computer model based on game theory which he - and others - claim can predict the future with remarkable accuracy.

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Rewriting The Decline (CO2 and Temperature)

Above: Matthews 1976, National Geographic, Temperatures 1880-1976

From Watts Up With That?:

The great thing about old magazines is that once published, they can’t be adjusted. Jo Nova has a great summary of some recent work from occasional WUWT contributor Frank Lansner who runs the blog “Hide the Decline” and what he found in an old National Geographic, which bears repeating here. – Anthony

Jo Nova writes:

Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?

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How Plants Put Down Roots

One week old seed of the thale cress with embryo. (Credit: Martin Bayer / Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 16, 2010) — In the beginning is the fertilized egg cell. Following numerous cell divisions, it then develops into a complex organism with different organs and tissues. The largely unexplained process whereby the cells simply "know" the organs into which they should later develop is an astonishing phenomenon.

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Prehistoric Shark Attack Reconstructed

The skeleton of a dolphin, preserved for 4 million years, shows bite marks across its ribs from the shark attack that killed it. Credit: Giovanni Bianucci

From Live Science:

A shark attack that took place 4 million years ago has just been reconstructed from the extinct hunter's fossilized victim – a dolphin.

Scientists investigated a well-preserved 9-foot-long dolphin (2.7 meters) discovered in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. From the remains, the researchers not only finger-pointed the attacker but also how the thrashing went down, suggesting the shark took advantage of the dolphin's blind spot.

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How Facebook Overtook Google To Be The Top Spot On The Internet

From Fortune/CNN:

What the Hitwise numbers do — and don't — tell us about the coming showdown between the Internet's largest web properties.

Facebook has dethroned Google! Sort of! Well, ok, not really. For the week ending March 13, the social networking site got more traffic than its competitor in the United States, according to a blog post by industry tracker Hitwise. But be careful how you slice your numbers. While many pundits may use this data to validate predictions that Facebook will eventually beat Google (GOOG) at its own game, the social networking startup has yet to pull ahead in any real sense.

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A Supersonic Jump, From 23 Miles In The Air

From New York Times:

Ordinarily, Felix Baumgartner would not need a lot of practice in the science of falling.

He has jumped off two of the tallest buildings in the world, as well as the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro (a 95-foot leap for which he claimed a low-altitude record for parachuting). He has sky-dived across the English Channel. He once plunged into the black void of a 623-foot-deep cave, which he formerly considered the most difficult jump of his career.

But now Fearless Felix, as his fans call him, has something more difficult on the agenda: jumping from a helium balloon in the stratosphere at least 120,000 feet above Earth. Within about half a minute, he figures, he would be going 690 miles per hour and become the first skydiver to break the speed of sound. After a free fall lasting five and a half minutes, his parachute would open and land him about 23 miles below the balloon.

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Natural Gas: An Unconventional Glut

From The Economist:

Newly economic, widely distributed sources are shifting the balance of power in the world’s gas markets.

SOME time in 2014 natural gas will be condensed into liquid and loaded onto a tanker docked in Kitimat, on Canada’s Pacific coast, about 650km (400 miles) north-west of Vancouver. The ship will probably take its cargo to Asia. This proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, to be built by Apache Corporation, an American energy company, will not be North America’s first. Gas has been shipped from Alaska to Japan since 1969. But if it makes it past the planning stages, Kitimat LNG will be one of the continent’s most significant energy developments in decades.

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China's Internet Users Top 384 Million

From Xinhuanet:

BEIJING, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- China reported 384 million Internet users by the end of 2009, up 28.9 percent, or 86 million, from a year ago, said a report from the China Internet Network Information Center on Friday.

Internet users surfing through mobile phones increased by 120 million to top 233 million, about 60.8 percent of the total Internet population, thanks to expanding third-generation (3G) business, said the report.

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Overcoming Blindness: Other Senses Compensate in Just 10 Minutes

From ABC News:

New Study on 'Neuroplasticity' Shows How Quickly Brain Adapts When Sight, Hearing Cut Off.

Four bikers headed off down a street in Southern California, safely navigating through traffic and past parked cars, and turned onto a narrow bike path leading up a steep hillside. None of them veered off the dirt path, and all safely avoided boulders along the way, always conscious of their surroundings and any possible obstacles.

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FCC Broadband Plan Promises High-Speed Internet For 100 Million More Americans By 2015

A Series of Tubes At Terremark's Miami headquarters, undersea Internet cables emerge from the Atlantic and connect to the rest of the country John B. Carnett

From Popular Science:

Today the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its plan to expand broadband Internet access to 100 million more Americans within the next five years. The plan calls both for the expansion of wired networks in under-serviced areas, and for the dedication of more wireless spectrum for Internet use as opposed to television. Largely deficit-neutral, the plan has bipartisan support in the current Congress, in part because contentious issues of net neutrality and privacy were not tackled by the FCC's plan. As you remember, PopSci called for an improvement to the nation's broadband infrastructure last year

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Seven Alternatives To The Apple iPad

From Crunch Gear:

Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers.

Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it’s not like you’re dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?

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Methane May Be Building Under Antarctic Ice

From Wired News/Science News:

BALTIMORE — Microbes living under ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could be churning out large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane, a new study suggests.

sciencenewsIn recent years scientists have learned that liquid water lurks under much of Antarctica’s massive ice sheet, and so, they say, the potential microbial habitat in this watery world is huge. If the methane produced by the bacteria gets trapped beneath the ice and builds up over long periods of time — a possibility that is far from certain — it could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas.

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Golden Bullet For Cancer? Nanoparticles Provide Targeted Version Of Photothermal Therapy For Cancer

Infrared images made while tumors were irradiated with a laser show that in nanocage-injected mice (left), the surface of the tumor quickly became hot enough to kill cells. In buffer-injected mice (right), the temperature barely budged. This specificity is what makes photothermal therapy so attractive as a cancer therapy. (Credit: WUSTL)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 16, 2010) — In a lecture he delivered in 1906, the German physician Paul Ehrlich coined the term Zuberkugel, or "magic bullet," as shorthand for a highly targeted medical treatment.

Magic bullets, also called silver bullets, because of the folkloric belief that only silver bullets can kill supernatural creatures, remain the goal of drug development efforts today.

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Video Games May Hinder Learning For Boys

Video games could hinder academic performance for boys, a new study finds.
Credit: Dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Parents who buy their children a video game system might want to be careful that all the fun doesn't interfere with their learning. A new study suggests owning a game system could hinder academic development, at least for young boys.

The results show that boys given a PlayStation II are slower to progress in their reading and writing skills and have more learning problems reported by their teachers than those not given a system.

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Hurtling Star On A Path To Clip Solar System

Heading our way (Image: ESO)

From New Scientist:

A star is hurtling towards us. It will almost certainly clip the outskirts of the solar system and send comets towards Earth – though not for a while.

Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, Russia, modelled the paths of neighbouring stars using data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite and from ground-based measurements of the speeds of stars.

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Startups Focus On AI At South By Southwest

From Technology Review:

A new crop of startups aims to bring artificial intelligence to the masses.

South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive has a reputation as being the place for social Web startups to hit the headlines. Twitter found one of its first big audiences at the event in 2007, and attendees are among the most eager adoptees of new social Web tools.

To harness this cutting-edge mood, last year the event's organizers launched the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator, a competition showcasing 32 Web-focused startups. This year's competition starts today.

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Iceberg Forensics: Predicting The Planet's Future With Antarctic Ice

From Popular Mechanics:

In the last million years, the North American ice sheet has formed and completely melted about 10 times. Ice is melting once again—simultaneously, across the globe—and the science research vessel and drilling ship JOIDES Resolution has been seeking out clues to how ice sheets may respond to a warming climate. Onboard in Antarctica, Trevor Williams reports on the role that ice has played throughout geologic history and what a new iceberg in the Southern Ocean can tell us about the future for the planet.

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Rolling Martian Avalanche Greets The Spring

Martian Avalanche Keep those red rocks rolling NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

From Popular Science:

Springtime on Mars means the thaw of carbon dioxide ice in the northern hemisphere. And when the dry ice goes, the party's over for any trapped debris that then goes tumbling down Martian cliffs in spectacular images such as this.

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Metal Nano-Particles Suspend Human Cells In Magnetic Scaffolding For Easy Organ Manufacturing

Image: Cells Floating In a Magnetic Field: Nano3D Biosciences, via Technology Review

From Popular Science:

While scientists have become rather adept at transforming generic skin cells into specialized organ cells, crafting the organs themselves has proven far more difficult. Since the 3-D architecture of most organs is as important to their function as their cellular makeup, 2-D cell cultures are not very useful for building a replacement heart from scratch. To solve that problem, most organ makers create a scaffolding for the cells to grow on.

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Heat: A Visual Tour of What's Hot

From Cool Infographics:

Our friend, Jess Bachman from WallStats.com, created Heat: A Visual Tour of What’s Hot or Not in the Universe for Rasmussen College. This fun infographic lines up real-life examples across the entire scale of temperature.

I really like this one, its fun. Basically it a huge ordered list of temperatures. Sometimes it just helps to see everything all in one go, to add some perspective. Also there are cool factoids and such scattered about. To support my work please digg it and tweet it or otherwise spread the good word! Thanks y’all.

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Why Drugs Don't Help Diabetes Patients' Hearts

From Time Magazine:

Doctors at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta on Sunday got some surprising news on their first day of sessions. Researchers presented three studies revealing that some of the most widely prescribed medications to reduce the risk of heart disease in Type 2 diabetes patients appeared not to provide much benefit at all.

People with diabetes are twice as likely as nondiabetics to suffer a heart attack — most diabetes patients die of heart disease — and for years, physicians have used aggressive drug treatments to lower that risk. To that end, the goal has commonly been to lower blood sugar or control blood-sugar spikes after eating, lower triglycerides and reduce blood pressure in diabetes patients to levels closer to those of healthy, nondiabetic individuals. By using medication to treat these factors, which are linked to a higher risk of heart attack and stroke in other patients, doctors assumed they would also be reducing the risk in people with diabetes.

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SEC: Hacker Manipulated Stock Prices

From Threat Level/Wired:

U.S. regulators are moving to freeze the assets and trading accounts of a Russian accused of hacking into personal online portfolios and manipulating the price of dozens of stocks listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and New York Stock Exchange.

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Can You Alter Your Memory?

Image: Douglas Jones

From The Wall Street Journal:

Doctors Try New Therapy for Phobias; Taking the Sting Out Of Childhood Upsets.

Is it possible to permanently change your memories? A group of scientists thinks so. And their new techniques for altering memories are raising possibilities of one day treating people who suffer from phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety-related conditions.

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Super Supernova: White Dwarf Star System Exceeds Mass Limit

Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae, like the one visible in the lower left corner of this galaxy, to explore the past and future expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy. (Credit: High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 16, 2010) — An international team led by Yale University has, for the first time, measured the mass of a type of supernova thought to belong to a unique subclass and confirmed that it surpasses what was believed to be an upper mass limit. Their findings, which appear online and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, could affect the way cosmologists measure the expansion of the universe.

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7 Ways To Raise Your Risk Of Stroke

From Live Science:

Stroke is the number three killer in the United States, affecting almost 800,000 people each year, according to the National Stroke Association. These "brain attacks" occur when blood flow to the brain is interrupted (an ischemic stroke) or when a blood vessel in the brain leaks or bursts (a hemorrhagic stroke). For 144,000 people each year, the result is death. Hundreds of thousands of others are left with long-term disabilities.

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Sudan's Forgotten Pyramids

An archaelogical site 300 kms north of the Sudanese capital Khartoum. The pyramids form one of the most spectacular sights in Sudan with about fifty small ruinous pyramids – the tombs of the rulers of Kush from about 250 BC to 350 AD. The pyramids lie on the tops of two rocky ridges blanketed by sand dunes about three miles east of the Nile. Credit: AFP

From Cosmos/AFP:

Archaeologists say the pyramids, cemeteries and ancient palaces of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan hold mysteries to rival ancient Egypt.

There is not a tourist in sight as the Sun sets over sand-swept pyramids at Meroe, in northern Sudan.

"There is a magic beauty about these sites that is heightened by the privilege of being able to admire them alone, with the pyramids, the dunes and the sun," says Guillemette Andreu, head of antiquities at Paris' Louvre museum.

"It really sets them apart from the Egyptian pyramids, whose beauty is slightly overshadowed by the tourist crowds."

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Evidence For Life On Mars May Be Staring Us In The Face

Sulphur in silence (Image: NASA/SPL)

From New Scientist:

THE footprint of life on Mars may have been plain to see all along in the sulphurous minerals that litter the planet's surface. What's more, the next Mars lander should be able to detect the evidence.

No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built. But sulphur is everywhere on Mars - it is more abundant there than on Earth - and it could contain one of the signatures of life. On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides. The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34. Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars. Now the prospects for this technique look better than ever.

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Fingertip Bacteria: A Promising Forensic Tool

Credit: Technology Review

From Technology Review:

The genetic makeup of microbes on a person's skin could provide crime scene evidence.

It's not just our genomes that make us unique. The genomic profile of bacteria that rub off our fingertips and onto objects we touch--a computer keyboard, for instance--also provides a "fingerprint" that could be used for forensic purposes, according to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Noah Fierer, Rob Knight, and colleagues recovered bacteria from keyboards of three individuals and sequenced large numbers of bacterial genomes at once.

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Latest SpaceX Falcon 9 Engine Test A Success (With Video!)

From Popular Mechanics:

This weekend’s Falcon 9 engine test could pave the way for a test flight in early April.

This weekend, the launch company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) ignited all nine Merlin rocket engines in a static fire test that marks a milestone in private space industry. The 3.5-second test occurred at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. "The test validated the launchpad propellant and pneumatic systems, as well as the ground and flight-control software that controls pad and launch vehicle configurations," the company announced. The success was a relief after a setback last Tuesday when launch technicians aborted the test with just 2 seconds to ignition.

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Tested: A Reboot For The Immune System

Reset Immune System iStock

From Popular Science:

The ability to reprogram the immune system is one of the most sought-after goals in medicine. Now researchers are closer than ever to pulling it off in patients with Type 1 diabetes, one of whom happens to be our correspondent.

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NASA Aims For April 5 Space Shuttle Discovery Launch

The space shuttle Discovery sitting on launch pad 39-A on August 27, 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Karen Bleier, AFP/Getty Images

From USA Today:

NASA will run tests later this week to determine whether its safe to fly shuttle Discovery despite valve trouble that cropped up over the weekend during a critical propellant-loading operation at Kennedy Space Center.

The tests, if successful, could provide managers with the data required to prove Discovery could launch as scheduled on April 5 and still fly its International Space Station outfitting mission safely.

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Search On For Death Star That Throws Out Deadly Comets

This diagram shows a brown dwarf in relation to Earth, Jupiter, a low-mass star and the sun.
Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

Nasa scientists are searching for an invisible 'Death Star' that circles the Sun, which catapults potentially catastrophic comets at the Earth.

The star, also known as Nemesis, is five times the size of Jupiter and could be to blame for the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The bombardment of icy missiles is being blamed by some scientists for mass extinctions of life that they say happen every 26 million years.

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Replica Of Big Skull From 28,000 Years Ago Suggests Human Brains Have Started To Shrink

Old big head: A 3D image replica of the skull shows it was 20% larger than ours

From The Daily Mail:

Our brains are shrinking, according to scientists who have recreated a 28,000-year-old skull from remains found in France.

The French team, which claims to have produced one of the best replicas yet of an early modern human’s cranium, says it is up to 20 per cent bigger than ours.

No one is suggesting this means our ancestors were more intelligent as studies have found there is only a minor link between brain size and IQ.

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Scientists Identify Driving Forces In Human Cell Division

Metaphase in a human cervical carcinoma (HeLa) cell. Chromosomes (red), microtubules (green). (Credit: Jason Swedlow, University of Dundee)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 14, 2010) — If you can imagine identical twin sisters at rest, their breath drawing them subtly together and apart, who somehow latch onto ropes that pull them to opposite sides of the bed -- you can imagine what happens to a chromosome in the dividing cell.

Understanding the forces that drive chromosome segregation -- a crucial aspect of human development and some diseases, including cancer -- is the goal of an international group of researchers who collaborate each summer at the MBL.

Read more ....

What Does The Achilles Tendon Do?

The Achilles tendon, pictured here, connects the calf muscle to the heel bone. Credit: NIH

From Live Science:

The injury sustained to soccer star David Beckham's left foot has fans worried the athlete will miss the World Cup, but injuries to the Achilles tendon are no stranger to athletes and the less-conditioned "weekend warriors" alike.

The Achilles tendon is a band of fibrous tissue that connects the calf muscle to the heel bone, according to the Mayo Clinic. You use this tendon in practically every activity that involves moving your foot, from walking and running to jumping and standing on tip-toe. It's also the largest tendon in your body, and can withstand more than 1,000 pounds of force, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS).

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