How The Brain Hard-Wires Us To Love Google, Twitter, And Texting. And Why That's Dangerous.

From Slate:

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

Read more ....

National Security Agency's Surveillance Data Could Fill Two States by 2015

Data, Delicious Data I see you Warner Bros.

From Popular Science:

Where will the NSA house its secret yottabytes?

We always knew that the National Security Agency collects a lot of surveillance data from satellites and by other means, but we never quite imagined it was this much: the NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. The NSA wants to store yottabytes of data, and one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.

Read more ....

Friday The 13th Superstitions Get Rare Workout In 2009

Traditionally an omen of ill fortune, a black cat crosses a Palermo, Italy, street in an undated photo. Unlike its feline fellow resident of the bad luck hall of fame, Friday the 13th doesn't have nine lives—it can't even exist more than three times a year, thanks to the eccentricities of the calendar. Photograph by William Albert Allard/NGS

From National Geographic:

Today, Friday the 13th superstitions are fraying nerves for the third time in 2009.

Luckily for paraskevidekatriaphobics—people who harbor Friday the 13th superstitions—three Friday the 13ths are the yearly maximum, at least as long as we continue to mark time with the Gregorian calendar, which Pope Gregory XIII ordered the Catholic Church to adopt in 1582.

Read more ....

Pursuit Of Pleasure Drives Human Decisions

Chemical in the brain plays a key role in choices

From The Telegraph:

The pursuit of pleasure drives the everyday decisions that direct people's lives, research suggests.

Scientists discovered that a reward chemical in the brain plays a key role in choices such as where to go on holiday.

They believe the ''pleasure principle'' may be at the heart of most human decision making.

Read more ....

There Is More Water On The Moon Than What We Thought

Lunar Impactor Finds Clear Evidence Of Water Ice On Moon -- Wired Science

There is water on the moon, NASA confirmed today, and lots of it.

In the first look at results from the LCROSS mission, which sent a probe crashing into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, NASA’s main investigator said their instruments clearly detected water, despite the underwhelming plume.

Within the field of view of their instruments, the team measured approximately 220 pounds or about 26 gallons of water. Next, the team will try to understand how the compounds they saw in the plume relate to what’s actually embedded in the lunar regolith at the bottom of the permanently shadowed crater.

Read more ....

More News On The Discovery Of Water On the Moon

NASA discovers 'significant' amount of water on moon -- Washington Post
NASA sees "significant quantities" of water on the moon -- Ars technica
Splash! NASA moon strikes found significant water -- AP
Water Found on Moon, Scientists Say -- New York Times
NASA Moon Crash Found 'Significant Amount' of Water -- FOX News
Water found on Moon after Nasa 'bombing' mission -- The Telegraph

Rosetta Probe Makes Final Earth Flyby As It Sling-Shots Towards Speeding Comet

From The Daily Mail:

This spectacular image of our home planet was captured by Europe's Rosetta probe as it made its third and final flyby of Earth.

The outline of Antarctica is visible under the clouds in the illuminated crescent. Pack ice in front of the coastline caused the very bright spots on the image.

The Earth image was taken by the-board camera OSIRIS yesterday, from a distance of 393,000 miles.

Read more ....

Pollination In The Pre-Flower-Power Era

The long, tubular proboscis (arrow, left image) sported by some species of scorpionflies suggests that the insects were pollinating ancient plants including conifers (right) millions of years before flowers evolved. Credit: Photo: Wenying Wu; Illustration: Mary Parrish/National Museum of Natural History

From Science News:

Scorpionflies may have aided plant reproduction long before blossoms evolved.

An obscure group of scorpionflies with specialized mouthparts may have pollinated ancient plants millions of years before flowers evolved, a new study suggests.

Fossils indicate that before flowers evolved about 130 million years ago, most plants with seeds were wind-pollinated. Yet the pollen grains of some plants that lived in the prefloral era were too big to be wind-dispersed, say Conrad Labandeira, a paleoentomologist at Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Also, he notes, pollen receptors were hidden deep within some of those plants and wouldn’t have been readily exposed to windborne pollen.

Read more ....

ESA Spacecraft May Help Unravel Cosmic Mystery

Cassini-Huygens swings by Earth and accelerates towards Saturn. (Credit: ESA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — When Europe's comet chaser Rosetta swings by Earth on Nov. 13 for a critical gravity assist, tracking data will be collected to precisely measure the satellite's change in orbital energy. The results could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades.

Since 1990, scientists and mission controllers at ESA and NASA have noticed that their spacecraft sometimes experience a strange variation in the amount of orbital energy they exchange with Earth during planetary swingbys. The unexplained variation is noticed as a tiny difference in speed gained or lost during the swingby when comparing that predicted by fundamental physics and that actually measured after the event.

Read more ....

Friday The 13th: Your Luck Is About To Change

From Live Science:

If Friday the 13th is unlucky, then 2009 has been an unusually unlucky year. But your luck is about to change. Today is the last of three Friday the 13ths you'll have to endure this year.

The other two were in February and March. Such a rare triple-threat occurs only once every 11 years.

The origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and the number 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.

Read more ....

Tiny Mutation Led To Human Speech

Human speech is thought to have emerged 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, some five million years after chimps and humans took divergent paths on the tree of evolution. Photo: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Two minute evolutionary changes in a gene that is otherwise identical in humans and chimps could explain why we have fully fledged power of speech while other primates do not.

The findings may also point to new drug targets for hard-to-treat diseases that disrupt speech, such as schizophrenia and autism, said a study detailed in the British journal Nature today.

Read more ....

Behind The CDC's Soaring H1N1 Death Totals

From Time Magazine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday updated estimates of the number of H1N1 infections and deaths in the U.S. According to the new figures, about 4,000 Americans, including 540 children, have died of H1N1 flu, and 2 million people have been infected since April, when the novel flu virus first surfaced. The new death toll, which encompasses data through Oct. 17, represents a tripling of CDC estimates issued just last week; the number of deaths in children quadruples last week's figures. But the increase does not mean that the disease has suddenly become more deadly or severe, according to health officials, who say they are not surprised by the higher numbers.

Read more ....

Undercurrent Of Doubt Over Electric Motors

A loophole in EU targets on cutting CO2 emissions means that the more electric cars are produced, the more SUVs manufacturers can sell. Reuters

From The Independent:

Greener power generation needed if electric vehicles are really to reduce emissions.

Electric cars , which emit no carbon dioxide from their tailpipe, are not the answer some people think they are to environmental transport problems, a new report claims today.

The idea that a wholesale switch to electric transport would automatically reduce CO2 emissions and dependence on oil is a myth, says the analysis prepared for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA).

Read more ....

His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’

Facebook has become more than a diversion for Rodney Bradford. Damiano Beltrami

From The New York Times:

Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

Read more ....

Mars Rover Battles For Its Life

Last chance to lift NASA's spirit (Image: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

NASA's twin Mars rovers have outlasted their planned three-month missions for so long that they seem indestructible. Nearly six years on, their presence on the Red Planet is taken for granted, as if they are immutable parts of the Martian landscape.

But we may soon have to confront a new reality. Spirit, which has always suffered more hardships than Opportunity, is facing its toughest challenge yet. When New Scientist went to press, the rover was set to begin a risky push to free itself from a sand trap it has been mired in for six months. Mission engineers say it may not survive the attempt. "She's in a very precarious situation, and we don't know for sure if we're going to get her out," says rover driver Scott Maxwell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Read more ....

Robo-Negotiator Talks Down Armed Lunatic

You Want My Hydraulic Fluid! Take My Hydraulic Fluid! Via OK.gov

From Popular Science:

Hostage situations are often described like explosive devices, as ticking time bombs waiting to go off. And just as bomb disposal units have robots to help with their job, now police negotiators have a bot of their own for defusing a different kind of explosive situation.

Read more ....

Warning Of Extra Heart Dangers From Mixing Cocaine And Alcohol

A man snorting cocaine. Photograph: Andy Drysdale/ADR

From The Guardian:

A third chemical – cocaethylene – builds up in the liver over a number of years among those who mix the two drugs. And this is now having major health consequences.

"I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher," a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

Read more ....

Great Pacific Garbage Patch Keeps Getting Bigger

In a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement. Photo: Mario Aguilera/New York Times

From Future Pundit:

We are letting far too much plastic end up in the oceans.

ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.

In 1804, a little over 200 years ago, the planet had a human population of 1 billion people. Back then the oceans seemed immense and beyond the capacity of humans to change. Yet by 1850 whale hunting peaked due to over harvesting and we've since drastically drawn down the stocks of other ocean-going creatures such as cod and salmon.

Read more ....

High-performance Plasmas May Make Reliable, Efficient Fusion Power A Reality

Artist's rendering of a tokamak plasma. The plasma is confined by the combination of strong magnetic field in the toroidal direction (around the hole in the "donut" as shown by the black arrow) generated by external coils (not shown) and the magnetic field from a large current flowing in the same toroidal direction. The plasma is held inside a sealed metal structure that is evacuated and lined with special material to keep the plasma pure and handle the heat exhaust. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)

From The Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 12, 2009) — In the quest to produce nuclear fusion energy, researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have recently confirmed long-standing theoretical predictions that performance, efficiency and reliability are simultaneously obtained in tokamaks, the leading magnetic confinement fusion device, operating at their performance limits. Experiments designed to test these predictions have successfully demonstrated the interaction of these conditions.

Read more ....

Origin of Household Dust Pinned Down

A new computer model that simulates how dust comes into and out of homes found that most indoor dust originates outside. The model may help communities figure out how to best clean up contaminated waste sites. Credit: Stockxpert.

From Live Science:

No matter how much you clean, dust always comes back, and you might have wondered how it all gets there. Now, researchers have created a new computer model to explain what happens.

Most dust originates outdoors and comes in through the air, rather than trampled in on people's shoes, at least in a group of homes in the Midwestern United States, they found.

Read more ....

U.S. Army Orders Bridges Made Of Recycled Plastic

An M1A1 70-ton tank crosses a bridge made from Axion's thermoplastic composite at Camp Mackall in North Carolina. (Credit: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army/Dawn Elizabeth Pandoliano)

From CNET News:

Axion International Holdings has won a $957,000 contract to provide the U.S. Army with two bridges made from a thermoplastic composite and recycled plastic, the company announced Wednesday evening.

The two bridges, which are replacing old wooden ones, will be constructed at Fort Eustis in Virginia from a proprietary Recycled Structural Composite (RSC) developed by Axion in conjunction with scientists at Rutgers University.

Read more ....