Color Differences Within And Between Species Have Common Genetic Origin

Body hair difference is more pronounced between chimpanzees and humans than within our own species. Biologists have puzzled over the same genes cause both types of variation, not just with respect to people, chimps and body hair, but for all sorts of traits that differ within and between species. New research shows that, at least for body color in fruit flies, the two kinds of variation have a common genetic basis. (Credit: iStockphoto/Warwick Lister-Kaye)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 25, 2009) — Spend a little time people-watching at the beach and you're bound to notice differences in the amount, thickness and color of people's body hair. Then head to the zoo and compare people to chimps, our closest living relatives.

The body hair difference is even more pronounced between the two species than within our own species.

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Evidence Alexander The Great Wasn't First At Alexandria

Detail from the Alexander mosaic. From the House of the Faun, Pompeii, c. 80 B.C. Credit: National Archaeologic Museum, Naples, Italy

From Live Science:

Alexander the Great has long been credited with being the first to settle the area along Egypt's coast that became the great port city of Alexandria. But in recent years, evidence has been mounting that other groups of people were there first.

The latest clues that settlements existed in the area for several hundred years before Alexander the Great come from microscopic bits of pollen and charcoal in ancient sediment layers.

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Solar Snafu: The Contractor Finally Installs The Panels, But Goofs

From Scientific American:

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

The first message I got from my wife last week was happy news indeed: “Solar guys are working on our roof!” As readers of this blog know, we’d started the process of installing solar panels back in February, and we had no idea what were getting ourselves into. The red tape for the state and utility subsidies took through the end of May. Then we had to get our roof restored, which added a couple of months. In early July, I told myself, the wait was over. How wrong I was.

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Seven Questions That Keep Physicists Up At Night

From New Scientist:

It's not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night?"

The discussion was part of "Quantum to Cosmos", a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.

While most panelists professed to sleep very soundly, here are seven key conundrums that emerged during the session, which can be viewed here.

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Blood Test Offers More Accurate Picture of Health

From Technology Review:

A Seattle company is developing rapid tests for thousands of proteins.

With $30 million in recent financing, a Seattle-based company has launched operations to develop and market inexpensive tests for thousands of blood proteins, offering a comprehensive picture of the health of all the body's organs. The Seattle startup, called Integrated Diagnostics, is developing cheap diagnostics that work in minutes and could be used to detect diseases at early, more treatable stages. The company's technology has been in development for the past nine years in labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. The company hopes to provide tests for early diagnosis of neurological disorders and other diseases.

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Evan Williams On Twitter's Vision For The Future

'Search is a huge thing for us, I think about it a lot,' says Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive of Twitter Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Twitter's co-founder, Evan Williams, talks exclusively to the Daily Telegraph about the future of online search and his plans for improving the micro-blogging platform.

Imagine a world where you were given answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s the future of search according to the chief executive of Twitter, the site every tech company wants a piece of.

Evan Williams doesn’t often give interviews. He usually leaves that to Biz Stone, his colleague and Twitter’s co-founder. I found this out the hard way as I chased him down the stairs at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

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Russia Considers New Internet Filtering Technology

From The Net Effect/Foreign Policy:

According to this article published on a Russian news-site Inbox.ru, Russia has moved one inch closer to the China-style system of filtering the Web. Russia's Ministry of Communications has urged ISPs to start filtering "negative" Internet content in places that provide public access to the Internet (think cafes, libraries, etc). Such filters have already been planned to be installed in Russian schools.

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The Light Bulb That Lasts 25 Years: It's Environmentally Friendly And As Bright As The Old Ones... But It Will Cost You £30

Photo: Bright idea: The Pharox light bulb lasts 25 years or longer if used for four hours a day

From The Daily Mail:

It could be the breakthrough that finally has consumers warming to the energy-saving light bulb.

A version that brightens up instantly, costs just 88p a year to run and lasts up to 25 years has gone on sale in Britain for the first time.

The only catch is that the new LED bulb will cost £30.

Manufacturers claim the Pharox is the first low-energy bulb to give off the same light quality and brightness as a conventional 60-watt traditional bulb.

They say that, despite its initial cost, each bulb will pay for itself in just three years.

After that, each one used could shave around £9 a year off a typical household electricity bill.

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Wake-Up Call As Population Of Africa Tops 1bn

From The Scotsman:

ONE day this year, in all probability, the billionth African will have been born, a milestone that will benefit the poorest continent only if it can get its act together and unify its piecemeal markets.

Nobody knows when or where in its 53 countries the child arrived to push Africa's population into ten figures. The United Nations estimates that in mid-2008 there were 987 million people, and in mid-2009, 1,010m.

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The Perfect Cram Drug? Scientists Identify Single Enzyme To Fix The Memory Of A Tired Brain

It's Cool, I'll Just Write It On My Arm Including all known Lanthanides and Actinides? via Densemstuco

From Popular Science:

We've all been there, late at night and early in the morning, forcing any and every last morsel of knowledge into our weak and exhausted brains. But when the test flops down on our desk, we just stare blankly at the forbidding blue book page. All that knowledge, gone. Either it didn't stick, or it has hid in some inaccessible crevasse deep in the brain.

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Biologically Active 'Scaffold' May Help Humans Replace Lost Or Missing Bone

Composite drug-releasing fibers used as basic elements of scaffolding for tissue and bone regeneration. (Credit: AFTAU)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 24, 2009) — Mother Nature has provided the lizard with a unique ability to regrow body tissue that is damaged or torn ― if its tail is pulled off, it grows right back. She has not been quite so generous with human beings. But we might be able to come close, thanks to new research from Tel Aviv University.

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Bigger Creatures Have Bigger Blood Cells

Largest and smallest species of eyelid geckos appear here in proportion, though somewhat smaller than life size. Credit: Zuzana Starostová & Lukáš Kratochvíl

From Live Science:

When it comes to metabolism, size matters—cell size, that is, according to a recent study.

Small animals have faster metabolisms relative to their body size than do large animals. According to the so-called metabolic theory of ecology, that scaling is responsible for many patterns in nature—from the average lifespan of a single species to the population dynamics of an entire ecosystem. Although scientists generally agree on the theory's fundamentals, they disagree on the reasons for the scaling. One camp thinks metabolic rate is driven by cell size; another thinks it corresponds to the size and geometry of physiological supply networks, such as the circulatory system.

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Recycled Plastic Bridges Can Support Tanks

Heavy Artillery: U.S. Marines clean an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif. Bridges made from recycled plastic are not only about to support the weight of this tank, but also can provide a cost-effective alternative to steel and concrete construction. Lance Cpl. Kelsey J. Green/U.S. Marine Corps

From Discovery News:

The U.S. Army may soon be able to recycle today's trash to support tomorrow's soldiers. New bridges made from recycled detergent bottles and car bumpers are strong enough to hold up a 73-ton Abrams tank.

The recycled plastic bridge takes only a month to build, costs 25 percent less than an equivalent wooden bridge and requires no annual maintenance.

Rutgers University professor Tom Nosker began developing plastic bridges, lumber and railroads ties back in the 1980s.

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Spying On A Stolen Laptop

From CNET:

Imagine your laptop gets stolen. Wouldn't it be great to remotely spy on the machine and get it back?

Clair Fleener, chief executive of IT outsourcer InertLogic, got that chance after a laptop belonging to a customer was stolen.

Fleener was instrumental in the investigation that led to the recovery of the laptop, monitoring the activities of the laptop user for two weeks using remote software and sharing the information with law enforcement in Omaha, Neb.

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Sales Of Virtual Goods Boom In US

From The BBC:

Americans look set to spend $1bn (£600m) on virtual goods in 2009, claims a report.

The cash will be spent on add-ons for online games, digital gifts and other items that exist only as data.

Total spend on such items is expected to be up by 100% over 2008 and to double again by the end of 2010, said the analysts behind the report.

In related news, Facebook is updating its gift store so it offers a wider variety of virtual presents.

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Solar Power Cost Decline Steeper

From Future Pundit:

The cost of solar panels dropped almost in half in the last year in Germany.

In the last year — solar panel prices dropped to $2.10 a watt from about $4.10 in Germany — and only about half the global manufacturing capacity is being used, said Steve O'Rouke, an analyst with Deutsche Bank.

"We've seen an awful lot of angst and difficulty," O'Rouke said. "You have to expect some companies to go out of business."

Deutsche Bank is forecasting a structural over-supply in the market until at least 2011.

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Now Playing At A Museum Near You, The “Day After Tomorrow Map”

Click Image to Enlarge

From Watts Up With That?

Here’s the view of the future in a new science museum according to the Telegraph. No mention if NYC’s West Side Highway will be underwater or not. They call it the “Day after tomorrow map”.

The article by Louise Gray says:

The apocalyptic map was launched by Government ministers at the opening of a new exhibition at the Science Museum.

‘Prove it – everything you need to know to believe in climate change’ is aimed at educating the public about the dangers of uncontrollable global warming.

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"Albedo Yachts" And Marine Clouds: A Cure For Climate Change?

SHIP TRACKS: Could ships spraying sea mist to boost cloud reflectivity cure climate change? Already, ship tracks can be picked out in marine clouds, as pictured here, thanks to the interaction of ships' exhaust and water vapor in the atmosphere. Courtesy NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.

From Scientific American:

A deep dive into one of the least scary geoengineering schemes to control global warming.

Here's an idea to cool Earth: make marine clouds into better reflectors of sunlight. After all, clouds already reflect more of the sun's radiation back into space than the amount trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide. So why not make them even more effective?

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Flu-Like Illnesses Now Higher Than At Peak Of Seasonal Flu Season

From the L.A. Times:

Federal officials report 8,200 hospitalizations for infections from the H1N1 virus, and 411 deaths. But reports of 1 in 5 kids being infected are wrong, they add.

Influenza-like illnesses are now higher throughout the country than levels generally seen at the peak of the seasonal flu season, federal health officials said Friday. But they dismissed media reports from a day earlier that 1 in 5 children had contracted swine flu during the first weeks of October.

Pandemic H1N1 influenza activity continues to spread throughout the country, with 46 states reporting widespread activity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

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Ancient Secrets Of Super-Cement May Lead To A Shield Against Bunker Busters

Super-Concrete Let's see if they can break this Air Force Office of Scientific Research

From Popular Science:

Super-cements similar to those used to build the pyramids could harden bunkers against missiles.

Super-cements similar to the ancient concrete used to build the pyramids might defeat even the U.S. Air Force's largest non-nuclear bunker buster to date.

Wired's Danger Room has a rundown on how French researcher Joseph Davidovits uncovered the chemistry of geopolymers, or super-cements. Davidovits also put forth the theory that the Egyptian pyramids were built using a similar type of geopolymer limestone concrete -- an idea supported by X-ray and microscopic study samples.

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