GAO Warns Space Station May Be A Bust

From Discovery News:

The Government Accountability Office has some somber words for U.S. taxpayers: After 25 years of work and billions of dollars, we may not get our money’s worth out of the International Space Station.

There are several reasons for the situation, the GAO said in a new report, including the fact that there currently is no money to keep the station operational past 2015. NASA and its international partners in the program -- Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan -- are just beginning to ramp up research after a 12-year construction effort ends next year.

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Super Strength Robot Suit

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Europe's Goce Satellite Probes Earth's Gravity

A first glimpse at the data coming down from Europe's Goce satellite

From The BBC:

Europe's Goce satellite is returning remarkable new data on the way the pull of gravity varies across the Earth.

Scientists say its first maps clearly show details not seen in previous space and ground measurements.

Goce was launched by the European Space Agency (Esa) in March from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in north-west Russia.

Its information is expected to bring new insights into how the oceans move, and to frame a universal system to measure height anywhere on the planet.

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How The Brain Encodes Memories At A Cellular Level

This is a neuron. (Credit: Sourav Banerjee)

From The Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 25, 2009) — Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.

The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.

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Pain Pills Could Ease Hurt Feelings

From Live Science:

Getting the snub from friends can feel like a slap in the face. Now researchers say treating such social pain may be as easy as popping a pain pill. They warn, however, that more research is needed before anyone tries the approach.

The finding builds on research showing that psychological blows not only feel like they hurt us, they actually do. For instance, scientists have found a gene linked with both physical pain and a person's sensitivity to rejection. And some of the same brain regions are linked with both pain types.

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Alcohol Substitute That Avoids Drunkenness And Hangovers In Development

From The Telegraph:

An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness and hangovers is being developed by scientists.

The new substance could have the added bonus of being "switched off" instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of well being and relaxation.

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Unveiled: China's 245mph Train Service Is The World's Fastest... And It Was Completed In Just FOUR Years

Travellers board a high-speed train which heads to Guangzhou
in Wuhan, Hubei province, on Boxing Day

From The Daily Mail:

In the week that Britain's high speed rail link closed down because the wrong sort of snow interfered with the engine's electronics, China unveiled the world's fastest train service on one of the coldest days of the year.

Days after thousands of passengers were left stranded when Eurostar services were cancelled, China's new system connects the modern cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan at an average speed of 217mph - and it took just four years to build.

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Security In The Ether

Cloud crowd: Some 4,000 servers hum at IBM’s cloud computing center in San Jose, CA.
Credit: Jason Madara

From Technology Review:

Information technology's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud--and prove we can trust it.

In 2006, when Amazon introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it was a watershed event in the quest to transform computing into a ubiquitous utility, like electricity. Suddenly, anyone could scroll through an online menu, whip out a credit card, and hire as much computational horsepower as necessary, paying for it at a fixed rate: initially, 10 cents per hour to use Linux (and, starting in 2008, 12.5 cents per hour to use Windows). Those systems would run on "virtual machines" that could be created and configured in an instant, disappearing just as fast when no longer needed. As their needs grew, clients could simply put more quarters into the meters. Amazon would take care of hassles like maintaining the data center and network. The virtual machines would, of course, run inside real ones: the thousands of humming, blinking servers clustered in Amazon's data centers around the world. The cloud computing service was efficient, cheap, and equally accessible to individuals, companies, research labs, and government agencies.

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2010 Preview: Waiting For ET To Phone

On the lookout for intelligent signals from the stars (Image: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis)

From New Scientist:

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

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Sumatra-Andaman Disaster: 5 Years Later

A combination photo shows (top) a view of the damage near Baiturrahman mosque December 27, 2004, the day after a tsunami hit the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, and (bottom) an Acehnese man collecting grass for his goat in the same area, December 4, 2009. (Reuters)

From Discovery News:

It's been five years since an 800-mile-long (1,300 km) section of colliding plates in Earth's crust unzipped and unleashed a 9.3 megathrust earthquake from Sumatra to the Andaman Islands. The rupture moved a block of earth as long as California about 30 feet. At least 230,000 people perished from the quake and the tsunamis that followed. We're remembering the disaster, as well as looking at the many lessons and discoveries been gleaned from it -- lessons that should never be forgotten.

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Rise In Cyber Crime

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Is Running Bad For Your Knees? Maybe Not.

Image: Tim Tadder / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Perhaps because it seems intuitively true, the notion persists that running, especially when done long-term and over long distances, is bad for the joints. Indeed it would be hard to think otherwise when, with each foot strike, a runner's knee withstands a force equal to eight times his body weight — for a 150-lb. person, that's about 1,200 lbs. of impact, step after step.

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Troubleshooters That Block Cancer

From The BBC:

Scientists have shown how a family of "limpet-like" proteins play a crucial role in repairing the DNA damage which can lead to cancer.

They hope the finding could pave the way for a new type of drug which could help kill cancer cells, and promote production of healthy replacements.

The proteins seem to have a remarkable ability to zero in on damaged areas.

The breakthrough, uncovered independently by two teams, appears in the journal Nature.

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Kindle Is Most Gifted Amazon Item, Ever

Amazon's second-generation Kindle
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

From CNET News:

Amazon.com on Saturday released its annual post-Christmas statement on holiday sales, and made one thing clear: the Kindle was king, perhaps fueled by continued shifts in plans for shipments of Barnes & Noble's competing Nook e-reader.

"We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history," said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

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Calorie Restriction: Scientists Take Important Step Toward 'Fountain Of Youth'

Glucose molecular model. (Credit: iStockphoto/Martin McCarthy)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 26, 2009) — Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life say researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That's because they've shown exactly how restricted calorie diets -- specifically in the form of restricted glucose -- help human cells live longer.

This discovery, published online in The FASEB Journal, could help lead to drugs and treatments that slow human aging and prevent cancer.

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Behind The Scenes: The First Women In Antarctica

Terry Tickhill (light hat) and Eileen McSaveney (red headband) use a hand augur to drill Lake Vanda, Wright Valley, Antarctica during the 1969-1970 field season. Water collected during this effort was used to date the lake. The green tent in the background was of the same type as the field crew used for housing during their work in Wright Valley. Credit: Lois Jones

From Live Science:

In the spring of 1969, Terry Tickhill Terrell was 19 and an undergraduate chemistry major at Ohio State University, bored with her lab work and restless. She had never traveled more than 250 miles from the Barnesville, Ohio farm where she grew up.

One day, after reading an article in the school newspaper about a graduate student who had just returned from Antarctica, Terrell decided that that was where she wanted to go.

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Looking Back At The 100 Best Innovations Of 2009

From Popular Science:

If you're like me, the holiday break is all about consuming everyone's year-end recaps--and of course, looking ahead to the year to come. We're taking a short break here on PopSci.com, but we're not going to leave you hanging with nothing--here we've compiled both our year-end Best of What's New list and our look ahead to 2010 in science, all in one place for your holiday enjoyment.

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Trading Shares In Milliseconds

A monitor at Tradeworx’s offices keeps track of the net trading operations during the day. It generally ticks up. Credit: Steve Moors

From Technology Review:

Today's stock market has become a world of automated transactions executed at lightning speed. This high-frequency trading could make the financial system more efficient, but it could also turn small mistakes into catastrophes.

If Manoj Narang is about to bring down the markets, he's certainly relaxed about it. Narang, who wears a goatee and wire-frame glasses, is casually dressed in a brown shirt and dark gray sweatshirt. Sitting on a swivel chair with one leg tucked under the other, he seems positively composed, especially for a man who has just bought and sold 15 million shares with a total value of $600 million. For Narang, however, such volume represents just the start of a normal day. Though it's about noon on a Friday morning, he has barely begun.

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Ouch! We Really CAN Feel The Physical Pain Of Others

In a recent study, a third of subjects claimed to feel real pain in the same
part of the body as the victim they were watching

From The Daily Mail:

For most of us the expression 'feeling someone else's pain' is simply a way of saying we sympathise with their sadness or discomfort.

But there are some who don't just have an emotional reaction to another's agony - they feel genuine physical pain as well, researchers have found.

The finding could explain why some people are more sympathetic to other people's misery.

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New Advances In Airport Screening Technology Will Deter Future Terrorist Attacks

T-rays can offer a safer, more effective alternative to current airport screeners
that employ X-rays. Getty Images

New Airport Screeners Could Save Time, Energy -- Discovery News

Holiday travelers: Sick of waiting in long airport security lines? T-rays are here to help.

Using several new advances in T-rays, or terahertz radiation, airport scanners could soon determine if a vial of white powder in a suitcase is common sugar or illegal drugs.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Rice University, in Europe and elsewhere have independently undertaken research to make it dramatically easier and cheaper to produce, amplify and direct T-rays.

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