At Last! First Real Evidence For A Rocky Exoplanet

From Wired Science:

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

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

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More News On The Discovery Of This Rocky Exoplanet

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

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

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

From The Daily Mail:

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

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

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

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Scary Music Is Scarier With Your Eyes Shut

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

From Science Daily:

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

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Direct Evidence Of Role Of Sleep In Memory Formation Is Uncovered

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

From Science Daily:

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

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

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British Skeleton Suggests Ancient Murder Mystery

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

From Live Science:

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

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

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

The skeleton has been removed for further investigation.

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Dreams Of A Lunar Observatory

From Technology Review:

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

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

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

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Ready Or Not, Time To Grapple With E-Memory

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

From CNET:

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

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

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Mobile App Sees Science Go Global

The interface collates information from many sources and presents statistics

From The BBC:

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

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

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

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House Panel Resists Changes in NASA Space Program

From New York Times:

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

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

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Gorilla King Titus Dies In Rwanda

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

From Yahoo News/AFP:

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

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

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

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Argentina Site Of World's Biggest Crater Field

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

From Cosmos/AFP:

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

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

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

From Scientific American:

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

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

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

From Popular Science:

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

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

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

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

From Science Daily:

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

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Electricity Harvested From Trees

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

From Live Science:

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

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

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Video / The Evolution of Swine Flu

Congress Faces NASA’s Shaky Future

From Wired Science:

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

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

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Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

Lukasz Laska

From Scientific American:

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

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

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

From Popular Science:

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

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

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Antarctica's Hidden Plumbing Revealed

From The New Scientist:

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

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

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