Biofuels More Harmful To Humans Than Petrol And Diesel, Warn Scientists

A jatropha nursery in the Ivory Coast. Photograph: Kambou Sia/AFP/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Corn-based bioethanol has higher burden on environment and human health, says US study

Some biofuels cause more health problems than petrol and diesel, according to scientists who have calculated the health costs associated with different types of fuel.

The study shows that corn-based bioethanol, which is produced extensively in the US, has a higher combined environmental and health burden than conventional fuels. However, there are high hopes for the next generation of biofuels, which can be made from organic waste or plants grown on marginal land that is not used to grow foods. They have less than half the combined health and environmental costs of standard gasoline and a third of current biofuels.

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Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet

From Wired News:

The smallest exoplanet ever seen is less than twice the size of Earth, and orbits a star similar to our sun. Astronomers recently spotted this world, the most Earth-like planet yet discovered, with the COROT satellite.

"For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth,” said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA COROT project scientist.

For all its similarity to our own globe, though, it is still a far cry away from a habitable Earth-twin. For one thing, it is so hot — between 1,830 and 2,730 degrees Fahrenheit — that scientists think it might be covered in lava. It orbits extremely close to its sun and whips around the star once every 20 hours.

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Google Ocean Will Let Users Explore Shipwrecks And Reefs In The Deep Blue Sea

Watch footage of Google Ocean here...



From Daily Mail:

They cover two thirds of the globe and contain 80 per cent of all life.

Yet the oceans are such as mystery that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the undersea world.

Now for the first time, aspiring Jacques Cousteaus will be able to explore every square mile of the sea from the comfort of their own homes.

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When Dreams Come True

Photo from Haikudesigns

From Science News:

People interpret dreams in ways that affect their waking lives, especially when those dreams support pre-existing beliefs

Dreams don’t just bubble up at night and then evaporate like morning dew once the sun rises. What you dream shapes what you think about your upcoming plans and your closest confidants, especially if nighttime reveries fit with what’s already convenient to believe, a new report finds.

In an effort to understand whether people take their dreams seriously, Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Michael Norton of Harvard University surveyed 149 college students attending universities in India, South Korea or the United States about theories of dream function.

People across cultures often assume that dreams contain hidden truths, much as Sigmund Freud posited more than a century ago, Morewedge and Norton report in the February Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In fact, many individuals consider dreams to provide more meaningful information regarding daily affairs than comparable waking thoughts do, the two psychologists conclude.

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Windows 7: Better Late Than Never

(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

From CBS News:

Larry Magid Says Windows 7 Is What Vista Should Have Been

(CBS) I don't know why it took so long, but Microsoft has finally fixed Vista. Only it isn't calling it Vista. Instead the company is working on what it's calling a new version of Windows -- Windows 7. The operating system isn't commercially available but is likely to be out by the end of the year.

I don't know how much Microsoft plans to charge for the upgrade once it's officially available, but they should give it away free to anyone who bought Vista or a PC with Vista preinstalled. Even though there are some new features, Windows 7 strikes me mostly as a bug fix. It speeds up Windows and fixes one of its most annoying "features" and makes one particularly useful change to the user interface. It seems to me that anyone who paid for Vista is entitled to this upgrade.

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Treasure Hunters Say They’ve Found a 1744 Shipwreck

A bronze cannon recovered from the wreck of the HMS Victory was hoisted onto the deck of the Odyssey Explorer. Photo courtesy of Odyssey Marine Exploration

From The New York Times:

Sea explorers probing the depths of the English Channel have discovered what they say is a legendary British warship that sank in a fierce storm in 1744, losing more than 900 men and possibly four tons of gold coins that could be worth $1 billion.

The team found the wreckage of the warship, the H.M.S. Victory, last year and confirmed its identity through a close examination of 41 bronze cannons visible on the sandy bottom, Gregory P. Stemm, head of the discovery team, said Monday at a news conference in London.

The team lifted two of the cannons from the seabed and gave them to the British Defense Ministry, he said. The team’s leaders are now negotiating with British authorities on the disposition of the artifacts and treasure before the divers attempt further recoveries.

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Nuclear Fusion Fission Hybrid Reactor To Destroy Waste

Photo from ABC News (Australia)

From Future Pundit:

The idea behind long term (tens or hundreds of thousands of years) nuclear waste storage facilities is that we can't solve the nuclear waste disposal problem quickly. But matter is so manipulable in the hands of sufficiently smart scientists and technologists that sometimes supposedly insolvable problems become solvable. UT Austin researchers think they know how to convert nuclear power plant waste into far safer elements with a hybrid reactor.

AUSTIN, Texas--Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.

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Biodiversity Hotspot Enabled Neanderthals To Survive Longer In South East Of Spain

Photo: Present day landscapes of Gibraltar (above) and reconstructed landscapes of Gibraltar from 30,000 years ago (below). (Credit: Museum of Gibraltar)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet.

The international team jointly led by Spanish researchers has reconstructed the landscape near Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, by means of paleobotanical data (plant fossil records) located in the geological deposits investigated between 1997 and 2004. The study, which is published in the Quaternary Science Reviews, also re-examines previous findings relating to the glacial refugia for trees during the ice age in the Iberian Peninsula.

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FDA Approves Test To Inject Embryonic Stem Cells Into Humans

Image from ProQuest

From Live Science:

The federal government has approved the first study by a company that will use human embryonic stem cells injected into a human.

The Geron corporation announce the approval today. The therapy used in the study is designed to treat spinal cord injuries by injecting stem cells — which are able to transform into the many different types of cells we need in our bodies — directly into the patients' spinal cords.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted clearance of the company's application for the clinical trial of GRNOPC1 in patients with acute spinal cord injury.

"This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics - one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration of organ and tissue function achieved by the injection of healthy replacement cells," said Geron's president and CEO. Dr. Thomas B. Okarma.

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Japan Warns Of Volcano Eruption Within 48 Hours

Japan' has warned the Mount Asama volcano could erupt within 48 hours Photo: Reuters

From The Telegraph:

Tens of thousands of people living near Japan's volatile Mount Asama have been told to brace themselves for a major volcanic eruption within 48 hours.

The volcano is one of Japan's most active and last erupted in September 2004 when molten rock and ash blanketed areas more than 125 miles from the crater.

Even by Japanese standards, Mount Asama is an active volcano, with frequent bouts of activity over recent years. The most famous eruption came in 1783 and caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people and widespread damage.

Japan's Meteorological Agency yesterday raised the alert level for the 8,420ft peak, warning of an imminent eruption and forbidding anyone to scale the mountain.

More than 45,000 nearby residents have been put on alert and told to be ready to leave their homes within two hours notice.

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Update: Volcano erupts near Tokyo raining ash down on city -- Seattle PI/AP

Rubik's Revenge: Cube Inventor Set To Launch 21st Century Version Of Iconic Puzzle

Rubik's 360 (Click On Image To Enlarge)

From The Daily Telegraph:

For a few years the Rubik's Cube had millions under its spell.

Umpteen hours were spent on the infuriating device, which became the fastest selling puzzle of all time.

Eventually of course, more and more discovered the secret of how to solve it and word spread that youngsters were cracking the Cube in as little as eight seconds.

To the inventor, Professor Erno Rubik, this was merely the challenge to create something even more difficult.

And he appears to have done just that with the Rubik's 360, which is due to be formally unveiled this week.

Using the same formula of an apparently simple task that is maddeningly hard to complete, it involves moving plastic balls through a set of transparent spheres.

Professor Rubik, 64, a reclusive Hungarian, said: 'The 360 is one of the most innovative and exciting puzzles we've developed since the Cube, adopting elements of myoriginal design, challenging the solver to use skill, dexterity and logic.'

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Can A Person Be Scared To Death?

Edvard Munch's famous painting: "The Scream"

From Scientific American:

A 79-year-old woman dies in North Carolina after a heart attack brought on by terror.

A Charlotte, N.C., man was charged with first-degree murder of a 79-year-old woman whom police said he scared to death. In an attempt to elude cops after a botched bank robbery, the Associated Press reports that 20-year-old Larry Whitfield broke into and hid out in the home of Mary Parnell. Police say he didn't touch Parnell but that she died after suffering a heart attack that was triggered by terror. Can the fugitive be held responsible for the woman's death? Prosecutors said that he can under the state's so-called felony murder rule, which allows someone to be charged with murder if he or she causes another person's death while committing or fleeing from a felony crime such as robbery—even if it's unintentional.

But, medically speaking, can someone actually be frightened to death? We asked Martin A. Samuels, chairman of the neurology department at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

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Extinct Ibex Is Resurrected By Cloning

Young Spanish ibex (Capra pyrenaica), Sierra de Gredos, Spain
Photo: Jose Luis GOMEZ de FRANCISCO/naturepl.com

From The Telegraph:

An extinct animal has been brought back to life for the first time after being cloned from frozen tissue.

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain.

Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen.

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

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My Comment: This is incredible. The implications of this development are profound. Extinct species will be able to be cloned and returned to life.

Too Much TV Linked To Future Fast-food Intake

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 1, 2009) — High-school kids who watch too much TV are likely to have bad eating habits five years in the future. A new study followed almost 2000 high- and middle-school children and found that TV viewing times predict a poor diet in the future.

Dr Daheia Barr-Anderson worked with a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota to investigate the relationship between television and diet. She said, "To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the association between television viewing and diet over the transition from adolescence into young adulthood. We've shown that TV viewing during adolescence predicts poorer dietary intake patterns five years later".

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CO2, Temperatures, and Ice AgesA

Click The Image To Enlarge
(Source: http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yrfig.htm)

From Watts Up With That:

It is generally accepted that CO2 is lagging temperature in Antarctic graphs. To dig further into this subject therefore might seem a waste of time. But the reality is, that these graphs are still widely used as an argument for the global warming hypothesis. But can the CO2-hypothesis be supported in any way using the data of Antarctic ice cores?

At first glance, the CO2 lagging temperature would mean that it’s the temperature that controls CO2 and not vice versa.

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Water Plays Surprising Role in Climate Change

The twisting road up Mauna Loa's lava fields rises above the clouds.
Credit: CIRES, University of Colorado at Boulder

From Live Science:

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

With its sea turtles and surf shops, the Big Island of Hawaii resembles a tropical, watery world. Yet for climate scientists, it's the ideal place to study low-humidity air and the processes that dehydrate the atmosphere.

From the sprawling dome of Mauna Loa — 11,000 feet above Hawaii's coconut-fringed beaches — climate scientists David Noone and Joe Galewsky can track water vapor that's traveled as far as the equator and the pole. They're the first to try to measure vapor's chemical signature in real-time in order to understand the processes controlling the global water cycle.

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The Tech That Makes The Super Bowl Super

From CNET:

At its core, football represents the polar opposite of technology: A bunch of large men run around a field, battling for position and the control of a small pigskin ball.

Of course, the production of an actual NFL game requires lots of technology--from the headsets coaches use to communicate, to the computers used to calculate statistics to the HD cameras that record the contest for the viewing audience.

When it comes to the Super Bowl, one of the biggest sporting events in the world, technology has always played a very central role, and this year is no exception.

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Science May Explain Our Love Of Sports

Super Bowl 42

From Kansas City:

A relatively recent discovery in science may explain our country’s obsession with watching sports — like the expected audience of 90 million or so for today’s Super Bowl.

They call them “mirror neurons,” and they fire in your brain much the same way whether you’re doing something or watching someone else do it. The discovery killed a lot of assumptions scientists had about brain activity.

It explains why you get hungry if you see someone eating a juicy steak, thirsty when you see a cold drink — or excited when you watch sports.

“In a way, your brain is behaving the same way as (the athletes you’re watching),” says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at UCLA and the author of Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. “Your brain is making the same signals as the athletes you see on the screen, even if you’re just on the sofa eating popcorn.”

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Scientists To Football Players: Give Us Your Brains

Brains! Brains!!: Gaetan Lee (CC Licensed)

From Popular Science:

Amidst a growing body of evidence tying severe health problems to multiple concussions, researchers are tapping NFL stars for a more hands-on corroboration

Whenever rich people gather, charities flock hoping to solicit donations of time and money. But Chris Nowinski is asking NFL players at the Super Bowl this weekend for something a bit more personal. He wants them to donate their brains to science. And he’s getting what he wants.

Nowinski is the founder of the Sports Legacy Institute (SLI), which along with the Boston University School of Medicine is conducting autopsies on former athletes to research the effect of concussive impacts. To date eight former NFL players have promised to donate their brains to science after their death. Nowinski is a former professional wrestler who understands firsthand the potential ramifications of head impacts.

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Do Huge NFL Players Help Teams Win?

From Live Science:

When the Arizona Cardinals meet the Pittsburgh Steelers in Sunday's Super Bowl, every starting offensive lineman will be a member of the 300-pound club.

This season, there were more than 600 players — about 20 percent of the league — in triple donuts. Even with 6-foot plus heights, their Body Mass Index (BMI) levels are all in the range of grade 2 obesity, one step below what's called morbid obesity.

This super-sizing of NFL players has accelerated in recent years, and some studies suggest health risks are growing. But studies are conflicting on this point.

And the big question on the minds of coaches and owners: Do heavier players mean more wins? No, one study found.

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