Who Should Be the First Band To Play in Space?

Spandau Ballet

From Popular Science:

This morning an odd story surfaced and began orbiting the Web: Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic signed '80s rock heartthrobs (now aging '80s rock heartthrobs) Spandau Ballet to be the first band to rock out in space. Citing a press release of dubious origin, several blogs and even the UK's Daily Mail reported the story, even naming possible songs the group would play during a five-minute weightless set.

But we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. The Internet has hoodwinked us once again.

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The Beckoning Silence: Why Half Of The World's Languages Are in Serious Danger Of Dying Out

Language hotspots are areas with extreme linguistic diversity, containing many highly endangered and underdocumented languages

From The Independent:

Of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to die out by the end of this century. Now, one man is trying to keep those voices alive by reigniting local pride in heritage and identity.

High up, perched among the remote hilltops of eastern Nepal, sits a shaman, resting on his haunches in long grass. He is dressed simply, in a dark waistcoat and traditional kurta tunic with a Nepalese cap sitting snugly on his head. To his left and right, two men hold recording devices several feet from his face, listening patiently to his precious words. His tongue elicits sounds alien to all but a few people in the world, unfamiliar even to those who inhabit his country. His eyes flicker with all the intensity of a man reciting for the first time to a western audience his tribe's version of the Book of Genesis, its myth of origins.

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How A Glass Or Two Of Champagne Really Does Lift The Heart

From The Guardian:

Fizz made with black grapes shares benefits of red wine for heart and blood circulation, scientists find.

Scientists are delivering some unexpected cheer this Christmas. They have found that a couple of glasses of champagne a day are good for your heart and blood circulation.

Nor, they believe, are the benefits limited to expensive fizz: cheaper alternatives such as cava and prosecco may offer similar effects.

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From Future Pundit:

10000 to 7600 year old woolly mammoth DNA was found frozen in Alaska tundra. So this begs the obvious question: Is the DNA good enough to sequence and use some day to bring back the woolly mammoth?

The work of U of A Earth and Atmospheric Sciences professor Duane Froese and his colleagues counters an important extinction theory, based on radiocarbon dating of bones and teeth. That analysis concluded that more than half of the large mammals in North America (the 'megafauna') disappeared about 13,000 years ago.

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I, Robot: Buy Your Own Android Double For Christmas

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro developed his own robot doppelganger in 2007

From The Daily Mail:

Stuck for gift ideas this Christmas? How about an android moulded in the exact likeness of your loved one? Well that is exactly what's on offer at a chain of department stores in Japan.

The mechanical doppelgangers will be on offer at Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson retailers for the princely sum of 20.1million yen or £139,000.

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Baby Black Holes Implicated In Universe's Mightiest Rays

Baby black holes occur when two types of dead star merge
(Image: Denver Museum of Nature & Science)

From New Scientist:

Baby black holes are puny compared with their humongous cousins at the centres of galaxies, but their birth may spew out the universe's mightiest particles.

Subatomic particles are routinely detected smashing into Earth's atmosphere at incredibly high energies, but the origin of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) remains a mystery. Some have argued that energy released by the collapse of a massive single star to form a black hole might produce the UHECRs, but the rate of such events is too low.

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Lost Giants: Did Mammoths Vanish Before, During And After Humans Arrived?

Image: PREHISTORIC MYSTERY: Mastodons feeding on black ash trees. The disappearance of such megafauna has perplexed scientists. COURTESY OF BARRY ROAL CARLSEN, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

From Scientific American:

Three studies seem to disagree as to when mammoths, saber-toothed cats and other North American megafauna disappeared.

Before humans arrived, the Americas were home to woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other behemoths, an array of megafauna more impressive than even Africa boasts today. Researchers have advanced several theories to explain what did them in and when the event occurred. A series of discoveries announced in the past four weeks, at first glance apparently contradictory, adds fresh details to the mystery of this mass extinction.

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Drinking Cups Of Tea And Coffee 'Can Prevent Diabetes'

From The BBC:

Tea and coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a large body of evidence shows.

And the protection may not be down to caffeine since decaf coffee has the greatest effect, say researchers in Archives of Internal Medicine.

They looked at 18 separate studies involving nearly 500,000 people.

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'Rock-Breathing' Bacteria Could Generate Electricity And Clean Up Oil Spills

A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of East Anglia)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 15, 2009) — A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity.

Recently published by the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers have demonstrated for the first time the mechanism by which some bacteria survive by 'breathing rocks'.

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Americans Are Info-Junkies

Despite having access to computers and other electronic distractions, Americans on average spend about 60 percent of their information consumption time watching TV or listening to radio. Credit: UCSD

From Live Science:

Americans are known for gorging on food, but we're also gluttons of another sort: A new study finds that the average American consumes more than 34 gigabytes of video, music and words a day—and that's only on our free time.

One byte of information is equivalent to one letter of text. One gigabyte is equal to roughly 8 minutes of high definition video. Thirty-four gigabytes of data would fit on about 7 DVD disks or 1.5 Blu-ray disks.

A mix of old and new media contribute to our daily information diet, the study finds, including TV, radio, books, the Internet, movies, text messages and video games.

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Bad Bottles Of Wine Can Be Used For Energy

Got a Bad Bottle? Not to worry, researchers can still salvage some
electricity from a vintage that's going bad. Jairo

From Popular Science:

A bad bottle can throw a wrench in your dinner party, but researchers in the U.S. and India say it could also lower your energy bills. Using the leftover vinegar and sugar in improperly fermented wine, those scientists are devising novel methods to turn wastewater from vineyards into electricity and hydrogen, cleaning the water in the process.

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Octopuses Use Coconut Shells To Make Portable Lairs

From The Telegraph:

Octopuses collect coconuts from the sea bed and use them as portable shelters, scientists have found in the latest example of animals using tools.

Researchers watched as the eight legged creatures, not much bigger than the coconuts themselves, collected shell halves, stacked them two together, and transported them awkwardly under their bodies over distances of up to 20 metres.

Then when they arrived at their destination the octopuses in Indonesia used the two halves like shields to construct a makeshift shelter.

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Real Loneliness Can Do Serious Damage

Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

From The Guardian:

Neuroscientist John Cacioppo says social pain is akin to physical pain. So what can be done to make it better?

'Tis the season to be lonely. Half a million pensioners will spend Christmas Day alone, while nearly three in five people over 55 will be wishing they could see more of their family. This isn't just a seasonal or British phenomenon. At any given time, around one in five Americans – 60 million people – feel so isolated that it makes them seriously unhappy.

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Boeing 787 Dreamliner Finally Takes To The Skies In First Test Flight - Two Years Later Than Originally Planned

Employees cheer as the Dreamliner takes off for the first time

From The Daily Mail:

Boeing Co made the first successful test flight of its 787 Dreamliner today, almost two and a half years after the new, fuel-efficient plane was supposed to fly.

The lightweight carbon and titanium plane, promising to save airlines million of dollars in fuel and maintenance costs, has been hampered by a shortage of bolts, faulty design and a two-month strike.

But today Boeing sent the plane on a four-hour flight from Paine Field in Everett, Washington, at 10am local time, to test it as it flew around the local area.

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Rise And Fall Of A Dinosaur Hunter

Nate Murphy doing what he did best - unearthing dinosaurs
(Image: James Woodcock/Billings Gazette)

From New Scientist:

ANYONE who met Nate Murphy would think he had lived and breathed dinosaurs all his life. He's the sort of man who stands out in a crowd: stocky, outgoing and invariably wearing a straw hat and shorts. He never claimed to be a dinosaur scientist, just a regular guy with a love for fossils and a knack for finding them.

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Will The U.S. Military Do Right By The Dugong?

From Scientific American:

Would a plan to build a 2.5-mile-long airfield in Okinawa, Japan, doom a rare manateelike species to extinction? That's the assertion of more than 400 environmental organizations (pdf), which recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to cancel the plans to expand Camp Schwab, a U.S. Marine Corps base on Okinawa island.

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Company Aims to Make Jet Fuel from Coal

An artist’s rendition of the proposed facility. Rentech

From The New York Times:

Some of the world’s largest airlines — including American, US Airways, Delta and Lufthansa — have signed a memorandum of understanding to buy 500,000 barrels per month of jet fuel made from coal and petroleum coke, a refinery waste product.

The development will be announced this morning by Rentech, the Los Angeles, Calif.-based company that plans to make the fuel at a plant in Mississippi.

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People Who Look Young For Their Age 'Live Longer'

Photo: Fresh-faced actor Leonardo Di Caprio might expect a long life.

From BBC News:

People blessed with youthful faces are more likely to live to a ripe old age than those who look more than their years, work shows.

Danish scientists say appearance alone can predict survival, after they studied 387 pairs of twins.

The researchers asked nurses, trainee teachers and peers to guess the age of the twins from mug shots.

Those rated younger-looking tended to outlive their older-looking sibling, the British Medical Journal reports.

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More Pores Could Ease Global Warming

By boosting the number of pores in leaves, scientists hope to one day absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos/AFP:

TOKYO: Japanese researchers last week said they had found a way to make plant leaves absorb more carbon dioxide - an innovation that may help ease global warming and boost food production.

The Kyoto University team found that soaking germinated seeds in a protein solution raised the number of pores, or stomas, on the leaves that inhale CO2 and release oxygen, said chief researcher Ikuko Hara-Nishimura.

"A larger number means there are more intake windows for carbon dioxide, contributing to lowering the density of the gas," she said.

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Black Carbon Deposits On Himalayan Ice Threaten Earth's 'Third Pole'

To better understand the role that black soot has on glaciers, researchers trekked high into the Himalayas to collect ice cores that contain a record of soot deposition that spans back to the 1950s. (Credit: Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 15, 2009) — Black soot deposited on Tibetan glaciers has contributed significantly to the retreat of the world's largest non-polar ice masses, according to new research by scientists from NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Soot absorbs incoming solar radiation and can speed glacial melting when deposited on snow in sufficient quantities.

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