Super-Efficient BMW Concepts Are Simple and Clever

From Autopia/Wired:

BMW, the company that brought you Gina, that wild shape-shifting concept car made of cloth, went even further off the deep end with a pair of wacky concepts making their debut at the company museum in Munich.

The cars, dubbed “Simple” and “Clever” — acronyms that we’ll explain in a moment — are über-small, über-light three-wheelers that are supposed to show just how far down the efficiency road BMW can go. The Bavarians say Simple is “light in weight, low on energy” and Clever gives you “cooperative driving pleasure.”

We say, WTF?

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Volcanoes Wiped Out All Forests 250 Million Years Ago

Trees damaged by the effects of toxic acid rain in the highly polluted area known as the "Black Triangle" are seen in northern Czechoslovakia in 1991. A similar treeless landscape full of wood-eating fungi dominated Earth about 250 million years ago, when acid rain from a volcanic eruption killed off most life on Earth. Photograph by Tom Stoddart/Getty Images

From National Geographic:

Massive volcanic eruptions wiped out the world's forests about 250 million years ago, leaving the planet teeming with wood-eating fungi, according to a new study.

The finding confirms that even hardy trees didn't survive the Permian mass extinction, one of the most devastating losses of life Earth has ever known.

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The Green Case For Cities

From The Atlantic:

Nowhere has the greening message had a bigger impact than in the building industry. Green or sustainable architecture is all the rage—as well it should be, because buildings use a lot of energy. The construction and operation of residential and commercial buildings consume as much as 40 percent of the energy used in the United States today.

The calculation of a building’s total environmental impact must factor in everything from annual energy consumption to how and where building materials are manufactured and the handling of storm water. This requires some sort of rating system, and there are currently more than 40 of them in use around the world.

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NASA's Future of Space Exploration (In Pictures)

NASA's Space Shuttle has been the United States government's spacecraft for human spaceflight missions since the early 1980's, but the Space Shuttle program is scheduled to be retired in 2010. The space agency began eliminating manufacturing jobs in May 2009 with only nine Space Shuttle missions remaining. John Raoux/AP/FILE

Cool Science News Editor: These pictures are from the Christian Science Monitor. To see more, the link is here.

New Way to Tap Gas May Expand Global Supplies

Engineers and geologists are learning how to extract natural gas from layers of shale, a sediment. Matt Nager for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

OKLAHOMA CITY — A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.

Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.

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Major Step Forward In Cell Reprogramming, Researchers Report

Lee Rubin, director of translational medicine at HSCI and the other senior author on the research team, said that "our goals were to try to as discretely and specifically as possible guide the cells through the deprogramming process" from the adult state to the embryonic-like state. (Credit: Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2009) — A team of Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers has made a major advance toward producing induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, that are safe enough to use in treating diseases in patients.

“This demonstrates that we’re halfway home, and remarkably we got halfway home with just one chemical,” said Kevin Eggan, an HSCI principal faculty member who is the senior author of the paper being published online today by the journal Cell Stem Cell.

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Computers Faster Only For 75 More Years

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (ISNS) -- With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast -- except they can't. A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we'll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.

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Rand Study: It Ain’t The Big Macs That Make The Poor Fat

From Don Surber/Daily Mail:

The city of Los Angeles banned new or expansions to fast-food restaurants in low-income areas as the politicians blamed the food for obesity rather than the mouths.

The whole song and dance is that eating healthy is expensive. It is not. My mother made do raising 5 kids on barely above minimum wage pay.

A study by the Rand Corporation found that far from preying on the poor, fast-food outlets avoid those neighborhoods because of crime and well, the customers don’t have much money.

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Pandemic Payoff From 1918: A Weaker H1N1 Flu Today

Past vaccinations and previous infection by interrelated viruses may account for the mildness of the new H1N1 swine flu. Bettmann CORBIS

From Scientific American:

How the legacy of the vicious 1918 outbreak led to today's comparatively tame swine flu.

Although the swine flu outbreak of 2009 is still in full swing, this global influenza epidemic, the fourth in 100 years, is already teaching scientists valuable lessons about pandemics past, those that might have been and those that still might be. Evidence accumulated this summer indicates that the novel H1N1 swine flu virus was not entirely new to all human immune systems. Some researchers have even come to see the current outbreak as a flare-up in an ongoing pandemic era that started when the first H1N1 emerged in 1918.

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5 Technologies Missing From The Clean Energy Bill

From Popular Mechanics:

Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., unveiled the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act last week, a bill that aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. The massive bill—it was 821 pages long—covers a range of programs aimed at cutting U.S. emissions, including clean transportation, waste management, water protection and even the ecological effects of wildfires. A number of emerging technologies show great promise in addressing climate change. The following innovations weren't fleshed out in the new climate bill, but they deserve attention.

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Video: Raytheon's Free Roaming Combat Simulator Lets You Feel Getting Shot

From Popular Science:

A new combat simulator lets you toss real flash-bangs and feel the consequences of getting shot by virtual enemies

First-person-shooter video games have nothing on a new combat simulator by defense giant Raytheon. Fully rigged warfighters can roam freely in the real world and engage unseen virtual enemies through their VR goggles, tossing real flash-bang grenades and even shaking off the muscle-numbing effects of getting shot.

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Card Counters' Days Are Numbered

From New Scientist:

GAMBLERS who adopt a well-known probability strategy to beat the house at blackjack beware - UK researchers have developed an automated system that will detect card counters before they can cash in.

Card counting, a strategy made famous by the film Rain Man, involves remembering which cards have been played, and which might be likely to turn up. An abundance of low-value cards in the discard pile can tip the odds slightly in favour of the gambler, and a card counter bets big only then.

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How 'Superswarms' Of Krill Gather

From The BBC:

When krill come together, they form some of the largest gatherings of life on the plant.

Now scientists have discovered just how these small marine crustaceans do it.

Huge 'superswarms' containing trillions of krill are formed by juveniles not adults, and these swarms are even denser than experts supposed.

That suggests that all krill in the Southern Ocean are more vulnerable to overfishing then previously thought, the scientists warn.

Krill are small shrimp-like crustaceans that gather in huge numbers.

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Nasa's Greatest Missions, From Apollo To Voyager

Buzz Aldrin unpacks instruments from the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

Nasa’s ‘Moon bombing’ LCROSS mission has successfully crashed into the lunar surface. We look back at five of the space agency’s other most important missions.

Apollo
Without doubt the most important of all: the first time a human being has stood on the surface of another world.

In 1969, eight years after US President John F Kennedy announced that man would walk on the Moon and be returned safely to Earth, two men – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – did exactly that. Ten more would follow in the next six years.

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Can The E-Reader Really Replace The Good Old Book? We Put Them To The Test

Book of the future: A festival goer uses the Sony Reader

From The Daily Mail:

Is this the end of the novel as we know it? Thanks to the ebook - a new generation of mini-computers that allow you to download thousands of books at the click of a button - it seems the answer may be yes. Yesterday, Amazon announced their Kindle e-reader - a device that can download a book from the internet in 60 seconds - will be available in the UK later this month. So, can the e-reader really replace the good old book? LINSEY FRYATT, editor of gadget website Stuff.tv, puts them to the test...

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Household Robots Do Not Protect Users' Security And Privacy, Researchers Say

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 9, 2009) — People are increasingly using household robots for chores, communication, entertainment and companionship. But safety and privacy risks of information-gathering objects that move around our homes are not yet adequately addressed, according to a new University of Washington study.

It's not a question of evil robots, but of robots that can be misused.

"A lot of attention has been paid to robots becoming more intelligent and turning evil," said co-author Tadayoshi Kohno, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. "But there is a much greater and more near-term risk, and that's bad people who can use robots to do bad things."

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Even Modest Exercise Boosts Self-Image

From Live Science:

Want to feel good about your self? Just get off the couch and do a little exercise. You don't even have to get real serious, a new study finds.

Heather Hausenblas of the University of Florida reviewed 57 intervention studies on the topic of exercise and how it makes people feel, and she concludes that "the simple act of exercise and not fitness itself can convince you that you look better," according to a statement released today by the university.

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Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology: The Nobel Prize factory

Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology

From The Independent:

For the 14th time, the judges have honoured a member of the same lab.

Yesterday at tea time at Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology, something a little stronger than the usual brew was being glugged by the scientists gathered on the top floor overlooking Addenbrooke's Hospital.

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Barnes & Noble To Launch Android-Based Kindle Killer?

From Channel News:

Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN)'s Kindle might have a new e-reader enemy from a familiar source: Barnes & Noble.

Barnes & Noble is reportedly preparing to unveil an e-reader device to compete with Amazon's Kindle and the rapidly expanding field of e-readers. The book retailer is already a force in e-books thanks to its three-month-old eBookstore, but according to reports is prepping an e-reader of its own that will run on Google's Android operating system.

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Universe To End Sooner Than Previously Thought

Find The Entropy In This Super Massive Black Hole via Jevin Studios

From Popular Science:

While Robert Frost famously said that he prefers the world to end in fire, physicists have long predicted the universe will end with an icy sputter known as "heat death." Heat death occurs when the universe finally uses up all its energy, with all motion stopping and all the atoms in creation grinding to a halt. And, based on new calculations from a team of Australian physicists, it looks like heat death is far closer than previously thought.

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