Childhood Obesity Linked To Mutant Gene

A genetic mutation may be the real reason overweight children cannot shift the pounds
Photo: Alamy

From The Telegraph:

Childhood obesity could be caused by a genetic mutation, scientists at Cambridge University believe.

Findings show for the first time that the condition can be a genetic one, rather than the result of over feeding.

The study could have a major impact on the decision of social services to take obese children into care where they believe they are being abused.

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Computer Pop-Ups Waste Time Even After They Have Disappeared

Computer annoyance: Pop-ups waste more time than they take to close, a study has found

From The Daily Mail:

The annoyance of computer screen pop-ups lasts long after they have disappeared or been closed, research has found.

Although they might stay on the screen for just a few seconds, pop-ups make us lose more time trying to find our place and resume the task that was interrupted, a Cardiff University study concluded.

The research, led by Dr Helen Hodgetts and Professor Dylan Jones, examined the cost of on-screen interruptions in terms of the time taken to complete a simple seven-step computer task.

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Ancient Site Reveals Signs Of Mass Cannibalism

Photo: The site contains remains of 500 "intentionally mutilated" humans.

From The BBC:

Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports.

The authors say their findings provide rare evidence of cannibalism in Europe's early Neolithic period.

Up to 500 human remains unearthed near the village of Herxheim may have been cannibalised.

The "intentionally mutilated" remains included children and even unborn babies, the researchers say.

The German site was first excavated in 1996 and then explored again between 2005 and 2008.

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Should You Treat Your Children Like Dogs?

Lucy Atkins's children Isabella, Ted and Sam with Rocket

From The Guardian:

Can dog-whisperering techniques used to control canines also work with children?

On parenting blogs, websites and Twitter, the guilty admissions are all the same: the training techniques of Cesar Millan, AKA "The Dog Whisperer", work on kids too. Millan has published four books; his show runs on a perpetual reel on the National Geographic channel. "As I watched him work with an extremely aggressive pit bull," admits a woman called TheMentorMom on Minti.com, "I saw that some of his techniques and philosophies applied to teaching children."

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Google Launches Real-Time Search

From Wall Street Journal:

Search-engine giant Google Inc. on Monday disclosed partnerships with social Web-sites Facebook and MySpace, and unveiled new technology that enables it to incorporate most-current updates by users of those social networks into its results.

Google said its real-time search technology will feature a scrolling list of near-instantaneous updates from a wide range of other sources, including micro-blogging service Twitter, news sites and documents.

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Mammoth Extinction Altered Ecosystem

New evidence suggests that changes in the North American ecosystem didn't kill the mammoth - their demise may have brought the changes about. Credit: Wikimedia

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: The extinction of mammoths in North America at the end of the last ice age was not caused by a change in the ecosystem: it's what triggered the changes, a new study suggests.

The study also elucidates a possible cause for the demise of mammoths and mastodons 15,000 years ago, and researchers say that the expanded incidence of fire in the landscape - suspected of being caused by human arrival - only appeared after the extinction.

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Headed Toward Extinction: The Light Bulb

From CBS News:

I come not to praise the incandescent light bulb. I come to bury it.

The familiar incandescent Edison bulb debuted 130 years ago, on December 31, 1879. And the next day, its death spiral will begin. Australia has imposed regulations that will phase the bulb out in 2010 and the European Union will follow in 2012.

The U.S. meanwhile, will get rid of them through new efficiency regulations in stages. 100-watt incandescents will vanish in 2012, followed by 75-watts a year later and 60-watts a year after that.

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Superbright Supernova Is First Of Its Kind

In this schematic illustration of the material ejected from SN 2007bi, the radioactive nickel core (white) decays to cobalt, emitting gamma rays and positrons that excite surrounding layers (textured yellow) rich in heavy elements like iron. The outer layers (dark shadow) are lighter elements such as oxygen and carbon, where any helium must reside, which remain unilluminated and do not contribute to the visible spectrum. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 5, 2009) — An extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily long-lasting supernova named SN 2007bi, snagged in a search by a robotic telescope, turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that first populated the Universe. The superbright supernova occurred in a nearby dwarf galaxy, a kind of galaxy that's common but has been little studied until now, and the unusual supernova could be the first of many such events soon to be discovered.

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Skin Cream Secrets Revealed

Researchers examine skin cream on the nanoscale to better understand what makes it feel smooth
Credit: dreamstime

From Live Science:

If asked to describe how skin cream feels, you might use words like "smooth," "thick," or "greasy."

But for Ohio State University mechanical engineering professor Bharat Bhushan, these words aren't good enough. Using a special instrument, he has gleaned new understanding of how these creams interact with skin on the nanoscale, bringing a more quantitative measure to the smooth sensation.

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The Tech That Makes New Airplanes And Runways Safer

Enhanced and synthetic vision systems (inset) blend GPS information with a topographical database to create a moving digital map of unseen terrain and hazards. (Photograph by Sam Chui)

From Popular Mechanics:

In our Anatomy of a Plane Crash feature, PM investigates the causes behind Air France 447's disappearance. Here are some of the advances in technology for airports, cockpits and airframes—systems that work in tandem to make air flight safer.

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In 2010, The Civilian Space Industry Finally Takes Off

The Final Countdown: October 15, 2009: Virgin Galactic’s bullet-nosed rocket, SpaceShipTwo, sits in the hangar of Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, awaiting a paint job before its public debut in December. Click here to launch the gallery for a closer look at SpaceShipTwo under construction. John B. Carnett

From Popular Science:

Who needs the space shuttle? Take a tour inside the private space industry and its innovative, efficient plans to get astronauts into space when NASA retires its old ride.

For a traveler heading up the highway toward the Mojave Air and Space Port, in the desert 70 miles north of Los Angeles, the surroundings are ghostly. Silent 747s and DC-10 jumbo jets from defunct airlines, along with smaller 727s and DC-9s, some cut up or resting on pylons, are visible from miles away, looking frozen and forlorn. Parked along the road at the airport entrance is a 1962 Convair 990, which began its life as an American Airlines jet airliner. Now the wind whistles through its nacelles and birds nest in its wheel wells.

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Large Moon Of Uranus May Explain Odd Tilt

A massive moon that orbited Uranus in the past may explain the planet's extreme tilt (Image: NASA/ESA/M. Showalter/SETI Institute)

From New Scientist:

Please try to resist the childish jokes, but the fact is that the odd tilt of Uranus may be the result of a particularly large moon.

Uranus spins on an axis almost parallel with the plane of the solar system, rather than perpendicular to it – though why it does this nobody knows. One theory is that the tilt is the result of a collision with an Earth-sized object, but this "hasn't succeeded in explaining much of anything", says Ignacio Mosqueira of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Why, for example, are the orbits of Uranus's 27 known moons not also tilted?

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Earth Much More Sensitive To Global Warming Than Thought

Factory smoke. Photo: Martin Pope

From The Telegraph:

The Earth may be 50 per cent more sensitive to the warming effect of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas than has previously been thought, scientists claim.

A new study suggests bigger cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions may be needed to prevent drastic long term climate change.

The evidence was obtained by scientists looking back three million years to the Pliocene epoch, when global temperatures were 5.4F (3C) to 9F (5C) higher than they are today.

They found that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere at the time should not have produced such a warm world.

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Copenhagen Climate Change Summit To Produce As Much CO2 As An African Country

From The Daily Mail:

It is being hyped as the summit that will save the planet.

But according to critics, next week's climate change talks in Copenhagen are more likely to cost the earth.

Researchers have estimated that the bill for the 12-day jamboree will top £130million - and will generate as much greenhouse gas as an entire Africa country.

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Copenhagen Summit Urged To Take Climate Change Action

From The BBC:

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen has described the UN climate summit in Copenhagen as an "opportunity the world cannot afford to miss".

Opening the two-week conference in the Danish capital, he told delegates from 192 countries a "strong and ambitious climate change agreement" was needed.

About 100 leaders are to attend the meeting, which is intended to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The UN says an unprecedented number of countries have promised emissions cuts.

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Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

From Next Big Future:

In terms of the scale of the effort for colonizing North America, I think it is useful to compare the size of the naval fleets of the time and other historical benchmarks. We know how large the military is today and the share of the total economy that it has. It will be more useful to approximate how large the interplanetary space travel industry will need to be before an interstellar colonization expedition would be a reasonably sustainable activity.

This relates to the discussion of spaceships and whether interstellar spaceships will happen

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Gasoline From Vinegar

Photo: Composting biofuels: Inside this white building, piles of sorghum are broken down into acids. The tanks in the foreground are used for pretreatment and for delivering a mixed culture containing many different organisms that break down biomass. The acids they produce can be used to make gasoline and other chemicals. Credit: Terrabon

From Technology Review:

A process that converts acids from garbage into fuel gets a boost.

A company that has developed a process for converting organic waste and other biomass into gasoline--Terrabon, based in Houston--recently announced a partnership with Waste Management, the giant garbage-collection and -disposal company based in Houston. The partnership could help Terrabon bring its technology to market.

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Nanowires Key To Future Transistors, Electronics

Researchers are closer to using tiny devices called semiconducting nanowires to create a new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips. The researchers have grown the nanowires with sharply defined layers of silicon and germanium, offering better transistor performance. As depicted in this illustration, tiny particles of a gold-aluminum alloy were alternately heated and cooled inside a vacuum chamber, and then silicon and germanium gases were alternately introduced. As the gold-aluminum bead absorbed the gases, it became "supersaturated" with silicon and germanium, causing them to precipitate and form wires. (Credit: Purdue University, Birck Nanotechnology Center/Seyet LLC)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 3, 2009) — A new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips using tiny structures called semiconducting nanowires are closer to reality after a key discovery by researchers at IBM, Purdue University and the University of California at Los Angeles.

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Mind-Machine Breakthrough: People Type With Just Thoughts

Electrodes placed directly on the surface of peoples' brains allow them to type just by thinking of letters. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

By focusing on images of letters, people with electrodes in their brains can type with just their minds, scientists now reveal.

These findings make up one more step on the road to mind-machine interfaces that may one day help people communicate with just their thoughts. Researchers have recently employed brain scans to see numbers and maybe even pull videos from inside people's heads.

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To Deflect An Asteroid, Try A Lasso, Not ANuke

From Wired Science:

To save the world from the real threat of a major asteroid impact, one engineer has imagined a scheme similar to George Bailey’s wish to lasso the moon for his sweetheart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The plan is to attach a gigantic weight to an Earth-bound asteroid using an enormous cord. This crazy-sounding contraption would change the asteroid’s center of mass and subsequently its trajectory, averting a potentially catastrophic scenario.

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