Mysterious Microbe May Play Important Role In Ocean Ecology

These unidentified cyanobacteria were collected in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. (Credit: Photo by Rachel Foster)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2008) — An unusual microorganism discovered in the open ocean may force scientists to rethink their understanding of how carbon and nitrogen cycle through ocean ecosystems. A research team led by Jonathan Zehr, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterized the new microbe by analyzing its genetic material, even though researchers have not been able to grow it in the laboratory.

Zehr said the newly described organism seems to be an atypical member of the cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria formerly known as blue-green algae. Unlike all other known free-living cyanobacteria, this one lacks some of the genes needed to carry out photosynthesis, the process by which plants use light energy to make sugars out of carbon dioxide and water.

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Grandma Is Better Babysitter Than Mom

From Live Science:

Common wisdom might suggest that because of their age, grandmothers are inappropriate caretakers for infants and children.

Sure, they might have years and years of parenting experience from bringing up their own children (and they must be OK parents because their children obviously lived long enough to have children) but people over 50 simply can't run as fast or react as quickly as young parents. And they presumably tire more quickly and must want to take a load off even more often than the most exhausted parent.

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Space Shuttle Endeavour Blasts Into Night Sky

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted into the night sky Friday, bound for the international space station and the most extreme home makeover project ever attempted by astronauts.

The shuttle rose off its launch pad at 7:55 p.m. EST, right on time, in a brilliant flash of light visible for miles around.

"It's our turn to take home improvement to a new level after 10 years of international space station construction," commander Christopher Ferguson radioed before liftoff.

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The Consequence Of A Failed Electricity Policy

(Photo from Van Ness Feldman)

Get Ready For Rolling Brownouts And Huge Hikes
In Electricity Prices -- Q and O

Forbes warns us:

If you think runaway oil prices are upsetting, just wait for what's in store for electricity. Similar forces are in play. Demand is rising fast; supply is not. The cost to get coal and natural gas out of the ground is going up, and to that expense must be added the cost of the carbon permits that Congress and the presidential candidates are contemplating. Environmentalists are getting power plants scotched. China is sucking up energy. Leave such dynamics in play long enough, and price spikes in electricity follow. But that's just the beginning. We may be facing brownouts (voltage reductions) and even rolling blackouts.

Price shocks are already a part of the system says the article:

Price shocks are already occurring. In May, long before peak summer demand, the wholesale price of juice jumped twofold in Texas, to $4 per kilowatt-hour, 25 times the average retail rate in the country. Prices exceeded the allowed rate of $2 for seven days and threatened the viability of power resellers who contracted to deliver cheap rates to consumers. New Yorkers may suffer a summer of price discontent if regulators are right about peak wholesale prices jumping by up to 90%.

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A New Ice Age?

In Greenland, a caribou skeleton lies before the snout of a glacier. Can humans prevent the ice sheets from advancing? (Credit: Andrew C. Revkin/ The New York Times)

More On Whether A Big Chill Is Nigh
-- New York Times/Earth Dot

[UPDATE, 12:30 p.m.: Thomas Crowley responds to critiques below.] I was on the road yesterday and had no time to collate earth scientists’ reactions to the Nature paper positing that the world, after 450,000 years of climatic turmoil (the ice ages and warm spells) is poised to enter a quasi-permanent big chill (unless we avert it, after dealing with near-term warming, with a subsequent buildup of greenhouse gases).

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Mystery Solved: How Bleach Kills Germs

Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Associate Professor Ursula Jakob (L) and Jeannette Winter, Ph.D. in an undated photo courtesy of the University of Michigan. Bleach has been killing germs for more than 200 years but U.S. scientists have just figured out how the cleaner does its dirty work. (Handout/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Bleach has been killing germs for more than 200 years but U.S. scientists have just figured out how the cleaner does its dirty work.

It seems that hypochlorous acid, the active ingredient in bleach, attacks proteins in bacteria, causing them to clump up much like an egg that has been boiled, a team at the University of Michigan reported in the journal Cell on Thursday.

The discovery, which may better explain how humans fight off infections, came quite by accident.

"As so often happens in science, we did not set out to address this question," Ursula Jakob, who led the team, said in a statement.

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Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe Lands On Moon

Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe lands on the moon surface (Times Now)

From Times Of India:

BANGALORE: India marked its presence on Moon on Friday night to be only the fourth nation to scale this historic milestone after a Moon Impact Probe with the national tri-colour painted successfully landed on the lunar surface after being detached from unmanned spacecraft Chandrayaan-1

Joining the US, the erstwhile Soviet Union and the European Union, the 35-kg Moon Impact Probe (MIP) hit the moon exactly at 8.31 PM, about 25 minutes after the probe instrument descended from the satellite in what ISRO described as a "perfect operation".

Miniature Indian flags painted on four sides of the MIP signalled the country's symbolic entry into moon to coincide with the birth anniversary of the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, observed as Children's Day.

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140 Years Of UFO Sightings - Part I

From The Telegraph:

One of the earliest photographs of an unidentified flying object, this picture was taken somewhere in the United States during the 1920s.

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Which Came First? Eggs Before Chickens, Scientists Now Say

Frrm Live Science:

A rare fossilized dinosaur nest helps answer the conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg, two paleontologists say.

The small carnivorous dinosaur sat over her nest of eggs some 77 million years ago, along a sandy river beach. When water levels rose, Mom seems to have fled, leaving the unhatched offspring.

Researchers have now studied the fossil nest and at least five partial eggs. The nest is a mound of sand that extends about 1.6 feet (half a meter) across and weighs as much as a small person, or about 110 pounds (50 kg).

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Indonesia's New Tsunami Warning System

The December 2004 Indonesian earthquake caused a massive tsunami to wash over 10 countries in South Asia and East Africa. This pair of images from NASA's Terra satellite shows the Aceh province of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, on December 17, 2004, before the earthquake (top), and on December 29 (bottom), three days after. The earthquake also changed Earth's shape slightly. (Photo: NASA)

From Popsci:

Nearly four years after a series of disastrous tsunami waves struck coastlines bordering the Indian Ocean, a new Tsunami Early Warning System is up and running in Indonesia. Using a series of buoys linked to detectors that sit on the ocean floor, the new high-tech warning system will be able to detect an undersea earthquake and predict within minutes whether it will cause a tsunami.

Catastrophic tsunamis result from undersea earthquakes or landslides, and when earthquake-generated tsunamis occur off the coast of Indonesia, the waves can reach the coast in as little as twenty minutes -- leaving little to no warning time for residents in high-risk areas. The 2004 tsunami reached the province of Banda Aceh just a quarter of an hour after a magnitude-9.1 earthquake struck, resulting in 140,000 deaths in that region alone.

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Can a Bone-Marrow Transplant Halt HIV?

Bone-marrow cell
MedicalRF.com / Getty

From Time Magazine:

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a pathogen so wily and protean that researchers rarely talk about curing infected patients, focusing instead on treatment and prevention. But in an announcement that caused a flutter of excitement and a wave of prudent skepticism, Berlin-based hematologist Gero Huetter claimed on Thursday that he has cured an HIV infection in a 42-year-old man through a bone-marrow transplant.

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The Big Question: What Is Nanotechnology, And Do We Put The World At Risk By Adopting It?

From The Independent:

Why are we asking this question now?

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has just published a report on novel materials and has looked at the case of nanotechnology, which describes the science of the very small. Nanotechnology covers those man-made materials or objects that are about a thousand times smaller than the microtechnology we use routinely, such as the silicon chips of computers.

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Tech Puts JFK Conspiracy Theories to Rest

The Motorcade
President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, riding in a motorcade with Texas Governor John Connally and wife Nellie, shortly before Kennedy's assassination. Victor Hugo King/Getty Images

From Discovery:

Nov. 13, 2008 -- A team of experts assembled by the Discovery Channel has recreated the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Using modern blood spatter analysis, new artificial human body surrogates, and 3-D computer simulations, the team determined that the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was the most likely origin of the shot that killed the 35th president of the United States.

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How Studying DNA From Ancient Animals Helps Humans

From Christian Science Monitor:

While on the campaign trail this fall, Senator John McCain would laugh at government-funded research on the DNA of bears. What would he think of the research on DNA from extinct cave bears that now has elucidated the bear family tree? It’s the latest example of how scientists are using the increasingly sharp cutting-edge of DNA research to clarify the divergence of animal species, including humans.

New techniques to rapidly analyze DNA accelerate such studies. An increasing ability to garner useful data from tiny samples of DNA enable scientists to make the most of what little DNA they extract from such ancient remains as cave-bear bones.

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Unlicensed News Stories Rampant On Web

Unauthorized copies of Web news stories draw far more viewers than the official versions. Publishers are seeking ways to draw advertising revenue from the pirated versions. (iStockphoto)

From CBS:
Software Could Help Publishers Recover Thousands In Ad Revenue, Study Finds
(AP) Here's another reason for ailing newspaper and magazine publishers to wince: On average, the audience perusing unauthorized online copies of their articles is nearly 1.5 times larger than the readership on their own Web sites, according to a study released Thursday.

However, the problem, flagged by copyright cop Attributor Corp., could turn into a golden opportunity if media companies figure out a way to mine advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories posted on blogs and other sites.

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UN: Clouds Of Pollution Threaten Glaciers, Health

From Myway/AP:

BEIJING (AP) - A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns around the world and threatening health and food supplies, the U.N. reported Thursday.

The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds."

When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.

"All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of Kenya-based UNEP, which funded the report with backing from Italy, Sweden and the United States.

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Hubble Directly Observes A Planet Orbiting Another Star

This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut. (Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2008) — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis (the Southern Fish).

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA's Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS).

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Why Do We Panic?

From Scientific American:

A better understanding of the path from stress to anxiety to full-blown panic disorder offers soothing news for sufferers

“I was driving home after work,” David reported. “Things had been very stressful there lately. I was tense but looking forward to getting home and relaxing. And then, all of a sudden—boom! My heart started racing, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was sweating and shaking. My thoughts were racing, and I was afraid that I was going crazy or having a heart attack. I pulled over and called my wife to take me to the emergency room.”

David’s fears turned out to be unjustified. An emergency room doctor told David, a composite of several therapy patients seen by one of us (Arkowitz), that he was suffering from a panic attack.

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First Direct Images Of Planets Around Other Stars

Left: Infrared image of one planet orbiting HR 8799. Right: Isolated dots are planets; multicolored ball is residual light from HR 8799. Left: Infrared image of one planet orbiting HR 8799. Right: Isolated dots are planets; multicolored ball is residual light from HR 8799. National Research Council Canada

From FOX News/Space.com:

Astronomers have taken what they say are the first-ever direct images of planets outside of our solar system, including a visible-light snapshot of a single-planet system and an infrared picture of a multiple-planet system.

Earth-like worlds might also exist in the three-planet system, but if so they are too dim to photograph.

The other newfound planet orbits a star called Fomalhaut, which is visible without the aid of a telescope. It is the 18th brightest star in the sky.

The massive worlds, each much heftier than Jupiter (at least for the three-planet system), could change how astronomers define the term "planet," one planet-hunter said.

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Simulation Shows What Would Happen If Magnitude 7.8 Earthquake Hit California

(Click To Enlarge)
Still image from a movie showing a view of southern California with the seismic waves radiating outward from the fault as the rupture propagates towards the northwest along the San Andreas fault. (Credit: Image courtesy of USGS)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2008) — What would happen in California was hit by the Big One? New 3-D animations of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake scenario are now available to the public.

Fourteen animations can be downloaded from the site in high definition format. The 3-D animations show, from the perspective of a several different Southern California locations, how intensely the ground would shake and shift during a very strong 7.8 earthquake with an epicenter on the southern end of the San Andreas Fault.

The science-based earthquake scenario, developed by USGS scientists and partners, is used for both the Great Southern California ShakeOut drill on November 13 and the statewide Golden Guardian 2008 emergency response exercise from November 13 - 18.

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