Stone Age Humans Crossed Sahara In The Rain

It used to be wetter (Image: Sergio Pitamitz/Getty)

From New Scientist:

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa.

The Sahara would have been a formidable barrier during the Stone Age, making it hard to understand how humans made it to Europe from eastern Africa, where the earliest remains of our hominin ancestors are found.

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Drunken Fruit Flies Help Scientists Find Potential Drug Target For Alcoholism

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) breeding in a test tube.
(Credit: iStockphoto/Joe Pogliano)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 7, 2009) — A group of drunken fruit flies have helped researchers from North Carolina State and Boston universities identify entire networks of genes -- also present in humans -- that play a key role in alcohol drinking behavior.

This discovery, published in the October 2009 print issue of the journal Genetics, provides a crucial explanation of why some people seem to tolerate alcohol better than others, as well as a potential target for drugs aimed at preventing or eliminating alcoholism. In addition, this discovery sheds new light on many of the negative side effects of drinking, such as liver damage.

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Posting Pics Online? What Your Photos Say About You

Our non-verbal cues tell a lot about our personalities, particularly when the subject has a more natural pose (right) rather than a neutral one (left). Here, in this spontaneous photo, the subject shows a less energetic stance. Credit: Laura Naumann.

From Live Science:

Those photos you post on Facebook could paint an accurate picture of your personality, new research on first impressions suggests.

And perhaps as expected, the more candid a shot the more nuances of your personality show through.

"In an age dominated by social media where personal photographs are ubiquitous, it becomes important to understand the ways personality is communicated via our appearance," said study researcher Laura Naumann of Sonoma State University. "The appearance one portrays in his or her photographs has important implications for their professional and social life."

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The Sea Change That's Challenging Biology's Central Dogma

Image: National Institute of General Medical Sciences

From Discover Magazine:

For decades, RNA was seen as a simple slave to DNA. Newer research shows it has an active and critical role in every disease from Alzheimer's to cancer.

One of the great revolutions in modern science rests on the elongated backside of a grotesque, mutant worm. Inexpensive and easy to manipulate in the lab, Caenorhabditis elegans develops from egg to adult in three days and produces a few hundred offspring three days after that. Virtually all of the worms are hermaphrodites, containing both male and female sex organs and capable of making sperm and eggs, so each creature can fertilize itself. And because the worm is transparent and the adult has only 959 cells, development of every stage from egg to adult can be observed under the microscope and documented with near perfect detail while the worm is alive, an achievement accomplished in the 1970s by Sidney Brenner, a University of Cambridge researcher and legend in the field.

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Spanish Military Tests Swarm Intelligence On Video Game Battlefield

Battlefield Swarm Say, from here the soldiers look like ants ... Strategic Simulations, Inc./University of Granada

From Popular Science:

The Spanish army is using ant colony algorithms to plot the best paths through future battlefields.

Moving through real-life battlefields inevitably proves trickier than playing a game of Minesweeper, but Spanish researchers and army officers have converted the video game Panzer General into a simulator that can test troop maneuver algorithms based on ant colony behavior.

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U.S. Congress Considers Geoengineering

From Technology Review:

Plans to purposefully re-engineer the world's climate got their first serious committee hearing yesterday.

The idea that we might be able to "geoengineer" the planet to purposefully change the climate has clearly moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Momentum has been building in recent years: an essay in an academic journal by a Nobel Prize winning scientist in 2006, articles in the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, a largely private gathering of researchers at Harvard.

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Cough Into Your Mobile Phone For Instant Diagnosis

But will it ask you to turn your head to one side as well? Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY

From The Telegraph:

Your mobile phone may soon be able to diagnose respiratory illnesses in seconds when you cough into it.

Software being developed by American and Australian scientists will hopefully allow patients simply to cough into their phone, and it will tell them whether they have cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases.

Whether a cough is dry or wet, or “productive” or “non-productive” (referring to the presence of mucus on the lungs), can give a doctor information about what is causing that cough, for example whether it is caused by a bacterial or a viral infection.

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Windows 7 Versus Apple: The Great Computer Software Battle

Battling for your business: Should you go for Apple software for your computer or wait for Google?

From The Daily Mail:

There's no escaping it: Windows Vista was a disaster. Launched in 2007, Microsoft's follow-up to the massively successful Windows XP software, which powers the vast majority of the world's computers, met with lukewarm reviews and terrible customer satisfaction ratings.

It was simply too demanding of the computers it ran on – and the people who used it. Which is why Microsoft is going to great lengths to prove its new operating system, Windows 7, isn't just better than Vista – it's also simpler.

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Nasa And Esa Sign Mars Agreement

The Red Planet experiences periodic global duststorms

From BBC:

The US and European space agencies have signed the "letter of intent" that ties together their Mars programmes.

The agreement, which was penned in Washington DC, gives the green light to scientists and engineers to begin the joint planning of Red Planet missions.

The union will start with a European-led orbiter in 2016, and continue with surface rovers in 2018, and then perhaps a network of landers in 2018.

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Extraterrestrial Rafting: Hunting Off-World Sea Life

Sniffing out life on Titan (Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/SPL)

From New Scientist:

IF LIFE is to be found beyond our home planet, then our closest encounters with it may come in the dark abyss of some extraterrestrial sea. For Earth is certainly not the only ocean-girdled world in our solar system. As many as five moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thought to hide seas beneath their icy crusts.

To find out more about these worlds and their hidden oceans, two ambitious voyages are now taking shape. About a decade from now, if all goes to plan, the first mission will send a pair of probes to explore Jupiter's satellites. They will concentrate on giant Ganymede and pale Europa, gauging the depths of the oceans that almost certainly lie within them.

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October 2009 3rd Coldest for US In 115 Years, What About The Upcoming Winter?

From Watts Up With That?:

NCDC has compiled the October temperatures and it ended up the 3rd coldest in 115 years. As we have shown it was cold over almost all the lower 48. Indeed only Florida came in above normal. There is no [NOAA/NCDC] press release out yet but it should be interesting.

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Super-fast Quantum Computer Gets Ever Closer: Quantum Particles Pinned Down

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 9, 2009) — Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Nanosciences at Delft University of Technology, have succeeded in getting hold of the environment of a quantum particle. This allows them to exercise greater control over a single electron, and brings the team of researchers, led by Vidi winner and FOM workgroup leader Lieven Vandersypen, a step closer still to the super-fast quantum computer.

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Human Origins: Our Crazy Family Tree

The first specimen of Paranthropus boisei, also called Nutcracker Man, was reported by Mary and Louis Leakey in 1959 from a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.

From Live Science:

As the only remaining primate built to stride the world on two legs, it would be easy to assume that our extinct relatives were much like us, if perhaps hairier with smaller brains.

But fossils reveal evolution could take our relatives in bizarre directions, involving skulls resembling nutcrackers and miniature bodies resembling the hobbits of Lord of The Rings.

"These fossils tell us that human evolution was a long process of experimentation, not the outcome of a long process of fine-tuning leading just to us," said paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

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Laser-Powered Robot Climbs To Victory In The Space-Elevator Contest

Image: Space Elevator Games. The LaserMotive vehicle gets weighed in.

From Discover Magazine:

A laser-powered robot took a climb up a cable in the Mohave Desert in Wednesday, and pushed ahead the sci-fi inspired notion of a space elevator capable of lifting astronauts, cargo, and even tourists up into orbit. The robot, built by LaserMotive of Seattle, whizzed up 2,953 feet (nearly 1 kilometer) in about four minutes, which qualifies the team for at least $900,000 of the $2 million in prizes offered in the NASA-backed Space Elevator Games.

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Will Drilling Into A Volcano Trigger An Eruption That Destroys Naples?

Debate Erupts in Geology Circles Geologist will drill seven boreholes in the caldera at Campi Flegrie in around Naples, Italy, in an attempt to better predict volcanic disasters like the one that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79. Critics say the drilling could trigger that very volcanic disaster. Wiki Commons

From Popular Science:

Scientific research has helped humankind avoid or mitigate many of nature’s best attempts to send us to a violent end, but what do researchers do when the pursuit of research could trigger the very disaster from which science is trying to protect us? That’s the question facing geologists in Naples, Italy that will begin sinking seven four-kilometer bore holes into the Campi Flegrei caldera, the site of a “supercolossal” volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago.

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Searching For Real-Time Search

From Technology Review:

Google's CEO says it's still an unsolved problem.

News breaks faster on Twitter than just about anywhere else, and Google wants in on that speed. The search giant's recent deal to include Twitter updates in its search results is a key part of the company's strategy for improving its core product. In a visit to Cambridge, MA, last week, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said that the biggest changes coming to its algorithms have to do with efforts, like the Twitter deal, to integrate real-time search.

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Children Playing Multiple Sports Suffer Fewer Injuries

Multiple sports good for you Photo: BARRY BLAND/BARCROFT MEDIA

From The Telegraph:

Playing more than one sport should protect you from injury, claim scientists.

Researchers have found that it is a good idea to break up your normal training routine with a different sport as it avoids repetitive strain injuries and increases the strength of joints and muscles.

They believe that especially in similar speed sports such as basketball and football it can greatly reduce injuries.

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Tiny 'Sticking Plaster' Nanoparticles For Broken Nerves Could Provide Spinal Cord Treatment

A new 'sticking plaster' technique could repair damaged spinal cords, helping people to walk again

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists last night raised hopes that microscopic nanoparticles could be injected into the spines of paralysed people to help them walk again.

They have conducted experiments on rats which show that the tiny particles can act as a 'sticking plaster' to repair broken nerves.

When the microscopic spheres, known as micelles, were injected into the tails of paralysed rats, they regained the use of all their limbs.

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Early Life Stress 'Changes' Genes

Photo: Mice that are abandoned as pups have behavioural problems later on

From BBC News:

A study in mice has hinted at the impact that early life trauma and stress can have on genes, and how they can result in behavioural problems.

Scientists described the long-term effects of stress on baby mice in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Stressed mice produced hormones that "changed" their genes, affecting their behaviour throughout their lives.

This work could provide clues to how stress and trauma in early life can lead to later problems.

The study was led by Christopher Murgatroyd, a scientist from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany.

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Signature Of Antimatter Detected In Lightning

Antimatter lightningDuring two recent lightning storms, the Fermi telescope found evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on Earth.Axel Rouvin/Flickr

From Science News:

Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on Earth.

Washington — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

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