Science Found Wanting In U.S. Crime Labs

Robert Stinson, convicted of murder in 1984, was freed from a Wisconsin prison last month after tests found that bite-mark and DNA analysis did not match evidence from the crime scene. (Andy Manis/Associated Press)

From International Herald Tribune:

Forensic evidence that has helped convict thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded and standardized, according to accounts of a draft report by the nation's pre-eminent scientific research group.

The report by the National Academy of Sciences is to be released this month. People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting.

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Britannica 2.0 Shows Wikipedia How It's Done

From Times Online:

The 240-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica has taken a giant leap into the world of Web 2.0 with the launch of a new online version where users can contribute and edit content.

In a move that takes it head to head with Wikipedia, new features on the Britannica site will allow users to edit and contribute articles in return for the glory of having their name attached to the submission.

However, “voyeuristic” Wikipedia fans ought not to get too excited by the changes as all submissions will undergo a strict vetting process and may or may not make the cut, according to Britannica 's president, Jorge Cauz.

“We’re not trying to be a wiki - that’s the last thing we want to be,” Mr Cauz told The Times.

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East Asia Builds World's Largest Radio Telescope Network

Credit: Landscape photo of the Very Large Array antenna with the moon. Credit: NRAO

From China View:

SHANGHAI, Feb.1 (Xinhua) -- East Asian astronomers are building the world's largest radio telescope array to see the deep into the galaxy and black holes and more accurately determine the orbits of lunar probes such as China's Chang'e-1.

The array, called the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) consortium, consists of 19 radio telescopes from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) that cover an area with a diameter of 6,000 kilometers from northern Japan's Hokkaido to western China's Kunming and Urumqi.

The VLBI technology is widely used in radio astronomy. It combines the observations simultaneously made by several telescopes to expand the diameter and increase magnification.

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Google Sets up Online Broadband Testing Lab

Google Inc. and two nonprofit partners, on Wednesday, launched a Web site that lets consumers test their Internet connections to reveal possible interference and traffic management by service providers. (AP Photo)

From ABC News:

Google Inc. and two nonprofit partners Wednesday launched a Web site that lets consumers test their Internet connections to reveal possible interference and traffic management by service providers.

The site, Measurement Lab, addresses a need among academics who want to gather data on how Internet connections work in practice. While the workings of the core Internet "highways" are well known and standardized, it's difficult to find out what happens on the network of an Internet service provider, between the "highway" and the customer's home.

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US Wind Power Grew By 50% In 2008 As China's Doubled

Vail Resorts said Tuesday that it would buy credits for wind power like that generated by the turbines at the Gray County Wind Farm in Kansas. Orlin Wagner/Associated Press (New York Times)

From Ars Technica:

The Global Wind Energy Council, an industry group, has totaled the past year's growth in generating capacity, and found that wind had a very good year, with US wind power having its highest annual growth ever, and China doubling its installed capacity.

Many renewable energy technologies, most notably photovoltaic, are struggling to reach what's called "grid parity," where the cost of the power they generate matches that of fossil fuel generation. One technology that's largely there is wind, as maturing turbine technology and economies of scale have made the economics of wind power quite competitive. Those economics can clearly be seen in the latest figures on the growth of the wind industry, which cover 2008. Among the milestones: wind was the largest component of Europe's growth in electric generating capacity, the US became the world's top wind energy producer, and China doubled its installed capacity in just a year—for the fourth year running.

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Holographic Universe: Discovery Could Herald New Era In Fundamental Physics

View through one of the tubes of GEO600.
(Credit: Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/Leibniz Universität Hannover)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2009) — Cardiff University researchers, who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics, according to an American physicist.

Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic Universe – and that his ideas could explain mysterious noise in the detector data that has not been explained so far.

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Oldest Fossil Evidence for Animals Found

Hymeniacidon sp. Photograph: Jane Fromont, WA Museum

From Live Science:

The oldest fossilized evidence of animals has been unearthed in Oman and reveals that tiny sea sponges were abundant 635 million years ago, long before most of the planet's other major animal groups evolved, according to a new analysis.

This early life hardly looked like us, but some of the so-called demosponges can be sizable today. Demosponges still make up 90 percent of all sponges on Earth and 100 percent of Earth's largest sponges, including barrel sponges, which can be larger than an old-style phone booth.

The ancient demosponges — probably measuring across no more than the width of a fork tine — were pinned down via fossilized steroids, called steranes, which are characteristic of the cell membranes of the sponges, rather than via direct fossils of the sponges themselves.

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The Father Factor: How Dad's Age Increases Baby's Risk of Mental Illness

When a large study linked schizophrenia to paternal age, some researchers wondered if the root cause, rather than age, was that men who had waited had the makings of the disease themselves. Getty Images

From Scientific American:

Could becoming a father after age 40 raise the risks that your children will have a mental illness?

* It is widely recognized that a 40-year-old woman has an increased risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. What is not known is that a 40-year-old man has the same risk of fathering a child with schizophrenia—and even higher odds of his offspring having autism. The risk of bipolar disorder appears to rise as well.
* In the past couple of decades, the number of older fathers has increased. Birth rates for men older than 40 have jumped as much as 40 percent since 1980.
* The mechanisms behind the higher risks are still being investigated, although scientists have several hypotheses that could someday lead to better therapies or possibly even cures for these mental illnesses.

When my wife, Elizabeth, was pregnant, she had a routine ultrasound exam, and I was astonished by the images. The baby’s ears, his tiny lips, the lenses of his eyes and even the feathery, fluttering valves in his heart were as crisp and clear as the muscles and tendons in a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. Months before he was born, we were already squabbling about whom he looked like. Mostly, though, we were relieved; everything seemed to be fine.

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Intelligent Life Could Be Thriving On 40,000 Planets

This planet, located near the centre of the Milky Way about 20,000 light years from us, is just one of the 40,000 which could be harbouring intelligent life

From Daily Mail:

Science’s quest to discover life on Mars has so far failed to find even one little green man.

But not to worry. Aliens could be alive and well on almost 40,000 other planets.

Researchers have calculated that up to 37,964 worlds in our galaxy are hospitable enough to be home to creatures at least as intelligent as ourselves.

Astrophysicist Duncan Forgan created a computer programme that collated all the data on the 330 or so planets known to man and worked out what proportion would have conditions suitable for life.

The estimate, which took into account factors such as temperature and availability of water and minerals, was then extrapolated across the Milky Way.

Three scenarios of how life could develop were also taken into account.

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New Google Mars Reveals the Red Planet in 3-D

Mars's massive Victoria Crater is among the landmarks people can explore via high-resolution images in Google Mars 3-D, a new mode launched in February 2009 in the free mapping program Google Earth. Picture courtesy Google

From National Geographic:

Tucked into Monday's media splash for the launch of oceans in Google Earth was another, quieter announcement: A module for exploring Mars is now part of the popular 3-D mapping tool.

Users can soar through alien trenches, see through the eyes of robotic visitors, and toggle between natural color, "night vision," and rainbow-hued topographic views of the red planet.

Virtual Mars is based on pictures from the many orbiters and landers—past and present—that have been sent to study Martian landscapes.

Much of the imagery used in Google Mars 3-D is already publicly available and easy to access on sites across the Internet, noted project leader Noel Gorelick.

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Five Years of Facebook: A Retrospective

From PC World:

It doesn't seem like five years since Facebook appeared on the scene. I was slow to join the throng--my friends list numbers only 242 of the 110 million people who have joined the site since its inception.

Facebook is less juvenile in look-and-feel than MySpace, which it has overtaken in popularity. It is also a lot cleaner, again in look-and-feel but also in content. It also lacks the sexual content that plagues MySpace.

Facebook is more generalist in approach than some other social networking sites, such as Linked-In, which seem aimed at people looking for jobs and customers instead of communicating with people they already know. If you want to exploit your friends, Linked-In seems an excellent place to do it. And they'll exploit you in return.

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Solar Power's Next 5 Game-Changing Technologies

From The Futurist:

I have written beffore about the reduction in price of solar energy, and how each succcessive price decline would deliver a new generation of adoption. Now, we can examine some of the specfic technologies that are driving the race to affordability, and will enable solar energy to be one of the only candidate technologies to lead an economic recovery from the present downturn.

Popular Mechanics has a roundup of five new areas of innovation in harnessing energy from the Sun. All five promise to make solar energy competitive with the cheapest sources of fossil-fuel energy, and many of these five technologies could work in combination with each other. The five technologies are the following :

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Google Offers "Latitude" To Track People

Image from CBS

From CBS News:

New, Free Software Enables You To Keep Tabs On Others' Whereabouts, And Vice Versa, Using Cell Phones, Says Natali Del Conte

(CBS) Google is releasing free software Wednesday that enables people to keep track of each other using their cell phones.

CNET got a sneak peek at it, and CNET-TV Senior Editor and Early Show contributor Natali Del Conte explained how it works on the show Tuesday.

She says "Latitude" uses GPS systems and what's called cell tower triangulation to do the job. The software seeks the closest three cell towers and, with GPS, combines the data to show where someone is.

It is designed to work on any phone with Internet capabilities, except the iPhone.

"Latitude" is being marketed as a tool that could help parents keep tabs on their children's locations, but it can be used for anyone to find anyone else, assuming permission is given.

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'Longevity Gene' Common Among People Living To 100 Years Old And Beyond

Dr. Friederike Flachsbart (left) and Professor Almut Nebel of the Kiel Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology examining the genetic samples from 100-year-old subjects. (Credit: Copyright: CAU; picture by Sandra Ogriseck)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2009) — A variation in the gene FOXO3A has a positive effect on the life expectancy of humans, and is found much more often in people living to 100 and beyond – moreover, this appears to be true worldwide.

A research group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) has now confirmed this assumption by comparing DNA samples taken from 388 German centenarians with those from 731 younger people. The results of the study appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("PNAS").

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Timing of Seasons Is Changing

Image from Businessweek

From Live Science:

The Earth's seasons have shifted back in the calendar year, with the hottest and coldest days of the years now occurring almost two days earlier, a new study finds.

This shift could be the work of global warming, the researchers say.

To figure this out, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard studied temperature data from 1850 to 2007 compiled by the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom.

They found that temperatures over land in the 100-year period between 1850 and 1950 showed a simple, natural pattern of variability, with the hottest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere landing around July 21. But from the mid-1950s onward (the period when global average temperatures began to rise), the hottest day came 1.7 days earlier.

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Valve Concerns Delay February Space Shuttle Launch

Space shuttle Discovery atop the crawler transporter nears the end of it's 3.4 mile journey to pad 39A to prepare for the next launch at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009. Discovery is scheduled to launch on Feb. 12. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

From Yahoo News/Space.com:

NASA has delayed the planned Feb. 12 launch of the space shuttle Discovery by least a week to allow extra time to evaluate vital fuel valves on the spacecraft, agency officials said late Tuesday.

Discovery was slated to launch toward the International Space Station on Feb. 12 to deliver the last set of U.S.-built solar arrays to the orbiting laboratory. The mission is now scheduled to blast off no earlier than Feb. 19 at about 4:41 a.m. EST (0941 GMT), but an official launch target will be determined at a later date.

"By looking at it right now, we think it's about a week delay, but we're not going to put pressure on the team," said John Shannon, NASA's space shuttle program manager, in a briefing at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "We'll just let the information drive us."

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Astronomers Discover Link Between Supermassive Black Holes And Galaxy Formation

Two giant elliptical galaxies, NGC 4621 and NGC 4472, look similar from a distance, as seen on the right in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But zooming into these galaxies' cores with Hubble Space Telescope reveals their differences (left, black and white images). NGC 4621 shows a bright core, while NGC 4472 is much dimmer. The core of this galaxy is populated with fewer stars. Many stars have been slung out of the core when the galaxy collided and merged with another. Their two supermassive black holes orbited each other, and their great gravity sent stars careening out of the galaxy's core. (Credit: NASA/AURA/STScI and WikiSky/SDSS)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2009) — A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time.

"They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf Bender of Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Ludwig Maximilians University Observatory. The results are puiblished in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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U.S. Becomes Top Wind Producer, Solar Next

Vail Resorts said Tuesday that it would buy credits for wind power like that generated by the turbines at the Gray County Wind Farm in Kansas. Orlin Wagner/Associated Press

From Scientific American:

LONDON (Reuters) - The United States overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday.

Even before an expected "Obama bounce" from a new President who has vowed to boost clean energy, U.S. wind power capacity surged 50 percent last year to 25 gigwatts (GW) -- enough to power more than five million homes.

Political and business leaders worldwide have urged "green growth" spending on clean energy to fight both recession and climate change.

German wind power capacity reached nearly 24 GW, placing it second ahead of Spain and fourth-placed China, which doubled its installed wind power for the forth year running, said the Brussels-based Global Wind Energy Council.

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New .tel Domain Names Set To Create The World's Virtual Phone Book

From The Independent:

Millions of new internet addresses are put up for sale today, giving the public the chance to insert their entry into the world’s largest phone book.

The new “.tel” domain names go up for grabs this afternoon. Unlike other website addresses, however, they are not meant to act as catchy names for websites but rather to become people’s individual entries in a universal virtual directory.

Companies and individuals are being encouraged to list their phone numbers, websites, postal addresses, e-mail addresses and even their Facebook details in their .tel entry.

“.tel is your place on the internet, which will act like a switchboard.” said Kash Mahdavi, the chief executive of Telnic, the London-based company that runs the .tel registry. “You can say, ‘Here are my Facebook details, here is my mobile number, and people will always be able to find you’.”

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Dean Kamen Aims 'To Fix The World' With A 200-Year-Old Engine.

Dean Kamen wants to 'to fix the world' - using a 200-year-old engine Photo: BLAKE FITCH

Dean Kamen: Part Man, Part Machine -- The Telegraph

Some see Dean Kamen as a Willy Wonka character whose most famous invention - the Segway personal transporter - is still the butt of jokes. Others compare him to Henry Ford. His next project, after perfecting an electric car, is to 'to fix the world' - using a 200-year-old engine nobody else thinks can work. By Adam Higginbotham

Ten years ago, on the summit of a hill in the verdant New England countryside, at the highest point he could find between Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, Dean Kamen designed and built the sprawling, hexagonal house he called Westwind.

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