Snowflakes, The Coolest Shapes On The Planet Are Even More Beautiful Close Up

From The Daily Mail:

If the recent snowfalls have left you dreaming of a white Christmas, your wish might be granted - because forecasters say we're in for more over the next week.

And although a crisp and pristine blanket of the stuff is a wonderful sight to wake up to, snow is even more beautiful in close-up.

As these photographs show, each snowflake is a miniature masterpiece of nature: six-sided, perfectly symmetrical - and unique.

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2010 Preview: Tooth-Mounted Hearing Aid For The Masses

Learning to hear again (Image: Barnaby Hall/Photonica/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

Beethoven is said to have overcome his deafness by attaching a rod to his piano and clenching it between his teeth, enabling the musical vibrations to travel through his jawbone to his inner ear. Next year, a similar but less unwieldy approach might restore hearing to people with a common form of deafness.

Single-sided deafness (SSD) affects around 9 million people in the US, and makes it difficult for them to pinpoint the exact source of sounds. This can make crossing roads extremely hazardous, and also makes it hard to hear conversations in noisy rooms.

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Data To Expose 'Ghost Mountains'

A simple illustration of the Gamburtsevs inferred from new gravity data

From The BBC:

Scientists who mapped one of the most enigmatic mountain ranges on Earth have given a first glimpse of their data.

An international team spent two months in 2008/9 surveying the Gamburtsevs in Antarctica - a series of peaks totally buried under the ice cap.

The group has told a major conference in the US that the hidden mountains are more jagged than previously thought.

They are also more linear in shape than the sparse data collected in the past had suggested.

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Why Does A Human Baby Need A Full Year Before Starting To Walk?

Why does a human baby need a full year before it can start walking, while a newborn foal gets up on its legs almost directly after birth? (Credit: iStockphoto/Beth Jeppson).

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 19, 2009) — Why does a human baby need a full year before it can start walking, while a newborn foal gets up on its legs almost directly after birth? Scientist have assumed that human motor development is unique because our brain is unusually complex and because it is particularly challenging to walk on two legs. But now a research group at Lund University in Sweden has shown that human babies in fact start walking at the same stage in brain development as most other walking mammals, from small rodents to elephants.

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Happiest States Revealed By New Research

The Happiest States

1. Louisiana
2. Hawaii
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Arizona
6. Mississippi
7. Montana
8. South Carolina
9. Alabama
10. Maine

From Live Science:

Ever wondered if you'd be happier in sunny Florida or snow-covered Minnesota? New research on state-level happiness could answer that question.

Florida and two other sunshine states made it to the Top 5, while Minnesota doesn't show up until number 26 on the list of happiest states. In addition to rating the smile factor of U.S. states, the research also proved for the first time that a person's self-reported happiness matches up with objective measures of well-being.

Essentially, if an individual says they're happy, they are.

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15 Cigarettes: All It Takes To Harm Genes

Scientists believe this new insight into the genetics of cancer will eventually lead to new drugs that target the specific changes to the gene that helps to trigger the disease. ALAMY

From The Independent:

Study reveals the genetic mutations suffered by smokers who go on to develop lung cancer.

One genetic mutation occurs on average for every 15 cigarettes that a typical lung-cancer patient smokes, according to a study that has identified for the first time all of the mutations acquired during the lifetime of a cancer patient.

Scientists have completed a full genetic analysis of the genomes of cancer patients, and hope the information will lead to a fundamental understanding of the causes of cancer – and possibly drugs and treatments – by identifying the mutations that turn a healthy cell into a cancerous tumour cell.

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Marijuana, Alcohol Addiction May Share Genes

From Yahoo News/Health Day:

FRIDAY, Dec. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The genes that make people susceptible to alcoholism also make them prone to becoming addicted to marijuana, a new study suggests.

Researchers interviewed almost 6,300 men and women aged 24 to 36, including almost 2,800 sets of twins who were part of the Australian Twin Registry, about their use of alcohol and marijuana over their lifetime.

Twins are valuable to researchers in determining the role of genetics in various diseases or conditions because identical twins share 100 percent of their genes, while fraternal twins share 50 percent of their genes, the same as other siblings.

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Data Deluge Will Reboot Our Brains

We are being bombarded with increasing amounts of information, although scientists say the brain itself is not under threat. (Pete Saloutos)

From Times Online:

The speed of modern life is 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words a day. That is the verbiage bombarding the average person in the 12 hours they are typically awake and “consuming” information, according to a new study.

Through emails, texting, internet surfing, reading and other media, our brains are being deluged with increasing quantities of information. Although we may not actively read 100,000 words a day, that is the approximate number reaching our eyes and ears. Add images, such as videos and computer games, and we are faced with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information each day — enough to overload the typical laptop inside a week.

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Living In Big Cities 'Makes You Miserable'

Piccadilly Circus, London, UK: Researchers found the popularity of big cities such as London, New York and Los Angeles undermined their attractions by increasing congestion, house prices and air pollution Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Living in big cities makes you miserable and people are actually more happy away from urban areas, claims research.

Researchers looking at happiness levels found that the popularity of big cities such as London, New York and Los Angeles undermined their attractions by increasing congestion, house prices and air pollution. Only the high wages and exciting jobs offset this lower quality of life.

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Google Books Project Found Guilty Of Violating Copyright By French Court

A number of French publishers spent three years fighting
Google's plan to scan and sell their books online

From The Daily Mail:

Google was found guilty by a French court today of violating copyright by digitising books and putting extracts online.

The search engine company initially started scanning books without permission for its controversial online library project. They were forced to strike deals in the U.S and the UK after hundreds of complaints.

In France, major publishers issued a legal challenge arguing the digital service would lead to publishers and authors losing out.

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Cooking Is What Made Us Human

From New Scientist:

What was the central mystery of human evolution that you were trying to solve?

I was sitting next to the fire in my living room and I started asking the question, when did our ancestors last live without fire? Out of this came a paradox: it seemed to me that no human with our body form could have lived without it.

Why can't a human exist on the same diet as a chimpanzee?

A chimpanzee's diet is like eating crab apples and rose hips. Just go into the woods and find some fruits, and see if you can come back with a full stomach. The answer is you can't. The big difficulty is that the nutrient density is not very high. This is problematic for humans because we have a very small gut, about 60 per cent of the volume it would be if we were one of the other great apes. We don't have enough intestine to keep low-quality food in our gut long enough to digest it.

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Guardian Headline – Low Targets, Goals Dropped: Copenhagen Ends In Failure

From Watts Up With That?

When the Guardian, that champion of everything “green” says it, you know it was a failure.

Excerpt:

The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

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Fake Blood-Clotting Products To Heal Wounded Soldiers

Photo: Immediate treatment can save lives.

From The BBC:

Scientists say they have made a synthetic blood-clotting agent that could help wounded troops and patients.

In the lab, the fake platelets cut bleeding in half compared with having no treatment.

They could offer doctors a limitless supply with a longer shelf life than fresh donor platelets, the journal Science Translational Medicine reports.

The Case Western Reserve University team in the US hopes the product could become available in coming years.

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My Comment: This is going to save many lives.

The Known Universe By AMNH (Video)

Hat Tip: Geek Press

Avatar's Moon Pandora Could Be Real, Planet-Hunters Say

This artist's conception shows a hypothetical gas giant planet with an Earth-like moon similar to the moon Pandora in the movie Avatar. New research shows that, if we find such an "exomoon" in the habitable zone of a nearby star, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study its atmosphere and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water. The key is to find a planet that transits its star, and then find a moon orbiting that planet more than one stellar radius away, so that the moon can be studied independently of the planet. Moreover, an alien moon orbiting the gas giant planet of a red dwarf star may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths. (Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 18, 2009) — In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable -- and inhabited -- alien moon called Pandora. Life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are a staple of science fiction. With NASA's Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact.

If we find them nearby, a new paper by Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to study their atmospheres and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.

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The Shortest Day: The Science Of The Winter Solstice

The winter solstice marks the shortest day of the year, when the sun is at its lowest point in the sky.
Credit: Stockxpert.

From Live Science:

You may think Mr. Frost's blustery entrance already occurred, but not officially. The winter solstice, and thus the official start of the chilly season on the astronomical calendar, begins Monday.

More exactly, the winter solstice begins at 12:47 p.m. EST (1747 UT) on Dec. 21.

Here's what's behind the timing:

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New Crew Poised To Launch To Space Station

From Yahoo News/Space.com:

A Russian cosmonaut doctor, a veteran Japanese astronaut and a rookie American spaceflyer are poised to blast off Sunday for the International Space Station.

The three spaceflyers are slated to launch Dec. 20 at 4:51 p.m. EDT (2151 GMT) on the Russian Soyuz TMA-17 spacecraft from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They will spend about two days catching up to the space station, where they plan to dock Tuesday.

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How High Will The Seas Go In A Warmer World?

Remi Benali / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Even as negotiators scramble to salvage an agreement at the foundering Copenhagen climate talks, a new study in this week's issue of Nature shows that the consequences of inaction on reducing emissions could be more severe than anyone thought.

By looking back about 125,000 years, to a time when global temperatures were as high as they are expected to be by 2100, a team of scientists from Princeton and Harvard universities has calculated that the oceans were probably at least 26 ft. higher than they are now, maybe as much as 31 ft. higher. That's significantly higher than the 13-ft.-to-19-ft. range scientists have been counting on, and it is, write Peter Huybers of Harvard and Peter Clark of Oregon State University in an accompanying commentary in Nature, "a disconcerting message."

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Sky Snake Flexible Blimps Are Bending The Rules On UAV Design

A segmented 76-foot airship during flight testing over Stuttgart, Germany.
(Sanswire-TAO Corp)

From Air And Space Smithsonian:

The blimp—that bloated, egg-shaped thing that blocks out the sun at major public events—remains one of aviation’s oddballs. Think Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the movie Ghostbusters. And it’s a high-maintenance oddball: lots of construction and operating costs relative to the few people it carries. No speed. Huge amounts of hangar space needed to shelter it when nasty weather arrives. How does this thing get work? Other than hoisting cameras above the Super Bowl for 10-second shots during TV commercial breaks, the blimp, or zeppelin as it’s never called anymore, has been a caricature of itself for decades.

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New Map Reveals Tsunami Risks In California

Photo: West Coast Risk: Some 350,000 California residents are at risk if a tsunami strikes there. istockphoto

From Scientific American:

The map, released close to the fifth anniversary of the 2004 Sumatran Tsunami, will be helpful in emergency response planning.

SAN FRANCISCO—Just days before the fifth anniversary of the 2004 Sumatran Tsunami, California officials on Thursday released a new map of the state's tsunami hazard, which details how an event could affect 350,000 people who live along the coast and cause tens of billions of dollars of damage.

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