Loneliness Increases Your Blood Pressure

From The Telegraph:

Loneliness can increase blood pressure if you are over 50, according to a new university study.

Lack of connection with others not only makes us unhappy but it is also bad for the wellbeing of your body, research finds.

The psychologists found that there is a direct relation between loneliness and larger increases in blood pressure four years later—a link that is independent of age and other factors such as smoking and obesity.

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Arctic Winds And Not Global Warming 'Responsible For Much Of Record Loss Of Sea Ice'

Study: Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years.

From The Daily Mail:

Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years, new research reveals.

Ice blown out of the Arctic area by winds can explain the one-third drop of sea ice since 1979, scientists believe.

The study helps to explain the huge loss of ice in the region during the summers of 2007 and 2008, after which some commentators suggested the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free during the summertime within a decade.

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US Space Companies Present Soyuz-Busting Price Plans

From New Scientist:

Matching Russian rides to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires will be difficult without "extraordinary" US government help, a senior NASA insider said on Thursday. But the private space firm SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, says it is ready to step into the breach by undercutting the current $50 million-per-astronaut round-trip ticket for travelling to the ISS aboard the Russian Soyuz craft.

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Do Animals Commit Suicide? A Scientific Debate

From Time Magazine:

Forty years ago, Richard O'Barry watched Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, kill herself. Or so he says. She looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. The moment transformed the dolphin trainer into an animal-rights activist for life, and his role in The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary about the dolphin-meat business in a small town in Japan, has transformed him into a celebrity.

"The suicide was what turned me around," says O'Barry. "The [animal entertainment] industry doesn't want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don't take the next breath. It's suicide."

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Large Hadron Collider To Start Hunt For 'God Particle'

Engineers have been installing a new protection system for the LHC's magnets

From The BBC:

The organisation that operates the Large Hadron Collider has set a date for the start of its science programme.

On Tuesday 30 March, engineers at Cern will make their first attempt to collide beams at an energy of 3.5 trillion electronvolts (TeV) per beam.

The LHC reached this beam energy last week, breaking its own particle beam energy record.

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Norton Ranks Riskiest Cities For Cybercrime

(Credit: Symantec)

From CNET News:

You may want to start keeping a closer eye on where you click if you live in Seattle.

Among 50 U.S. cities studied for their vulnerability to cybercrime, Seattle came out on top as the riskiest place, followed by Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to the report "Norton's Top 10 Riskiest Online Cities," released Monday.

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How Dinosaurs Rose To Prominence

Central Atlantic Magmatic Province Massive lava flow (top brown layer) sits atop end-Triassic (white) and Triassic (red) layers at a site in Five Islands Provincial Park, Nova Scotia. (Credit: Jessica. H. Whiteside/Brown University)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 23, 2010) — A shade more than 200 million years ago, the Earth looked far different than it does today. Most land on the planet was consolidated into one continent called Pangea. There was no Atlantic Ocean, and the rulers of the animal world were crurotarsans -- creatures closely related to modern crocodiles.

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Portion Sizes in 'Last Supper' Paintings Grew Over Time

From Live Science:

Nutrition experts have analyzed the food depicted in some of the best-known paintings of the biblical Last Supper and found that the portion and plate sizes depicted in them increased substantially from older paintings to those painted more recently.

The findings suggest the trend of bigger plates and portions that has been noticed recently and linked to obesity may have been in the works for much longer, the researchers suggest.

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Queen Chooses Which Sperm Die

Researchers retrieve sperm from the abdomen of an ant. Credit: Boris Baer/UWA

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: The queen of a social insect colony has one sexual encounter during her life, which involves many males, then controls which sperm will die off, researchers said.

A social insect queen only experiences a single day of sexual activity in her lifetime yet she must obtain all the sperm necessary to create an entire colony within that time frame. This means that social insect females store a large amount of sperm in their storage organ.

"A honeybee queen mates with many more males than she has to, thereby collecting much more sperm than she actually needs," said Boris Bear, from the University of Western Australia in Crawley.

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Swiss Team Breaks Record for Around-the-World Flight, Despite Encountering Volcanic Eruption

The Sabreliner 65 and Her Swiss Crew Emmanuel Joffet - Sipa Press

From Popular Science:

First time the record has been set with refueling stops.

Piloting a plane older than two of the three crew on board, a Swiss team shattered Steve Fossett's around-the-world flight record by almost ten hours over the weekend, the first time the record has been set in this weight class with refueling stops. But the pilots didn't just have to negotiate the usual headwinds and bad weather -- their flight was nearly derailed by a volcanic eruption in Iceland that forced them to make an extra refueling stop and add an unexpected 12th leg to their journey.

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In The Middle Of A Chain Reaction (Hot Video)

From The Daily Mail:

A domino-effect music video for a cult U.S. band has proved an internet sensation after attracting eight million online views and counting.

The ingenious four-minute promo, for Los Angeles-based OK Go's song This Too Shall Pass, is currently the hottest thing on the web.

It begins with band member Tom Nordwind - wearing a red paint-splattered jump suit - rolling a child's red lorry into a row of dominoes.

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SpaceShipTwo Makes First (Captive) Flight

From Autopia:

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo made its first captive carry flight early this morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port. SpaceShipTwo, which was christened the VSS Enterprise at its unveiling in December, is being carried by WhiteKnightTwo on its first test flight.

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The Future Of News

WNU Editor: Kristen Purcell explains how the Internet has changed how we get news. (From ABC News)

Who Writes Wikipedia Articles?

Image: Although "all-round" editors helped contribute to high-quality articles, the study's findings don't negate the importance of fact-checkers, copy editors and other contributors. Wikimedia Foundation

From Discovery News:

Wikipedians who can perform a range of roles -- rather than possess a single expertise -- are key to quality articles.

It takes a village of contributors -- adding paragraphs here, inserting references there -- to craft a quality Wikipedia article, according to a new study that identifies the types of contributors who initiate and dominate the process to separate the Wikipedia wheat from chaff.

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Ivory Bids Fall On Poaching Fears

From The BBC:

The UN's wildlife trade organisations have turned down Tanzania's and Zambia's requests to sell ivory amid concern about elephant poaching.

The countries asked the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting to permit one-off sales from government stockpiles.

The ivory trade was banned in 1989, but three sales have since been granted to nations showing effective conservation.

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Supermassive Black Holes: Hinting at the Nature of Dark Matter?

Artist's schematic impression of the distortion of spacetime by a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy. The black hole will swallow dark matter at a rate which depends on its mass and on the amount of dark matter around it. (Credit: Felipe Esquivel Reed)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 22, 2010) — About 23 percent of the universe is made up of mysterious 'dark matter' -- invisible material only detected through its gravitational influence on its surroundings. Now two astronomers based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have found a hint of the way it behaves near black holes.

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Happiness Is ... Making More Money Than The Next Guy

From Live Science:

One key to happiness might be whether you make more than your peers, regardless of whether that income is six figures or just a mediocre take-home, a new study finds.

This concept of "doing better than the Joneses" is well established among children: A toy gets ditched as soon as a shinier toy in the hands of another child is spotted. But some researchers have often thought that when it comes to adults and money, things works differently, in that the more money one has, regardless of how it stacks up, the more resources can be acquired to generate happiness.

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Should I Be Worried About Electromagnetic Pulses Destroying My Electronics?

Sun Spots Solar storms, like this one captured by NASA’s STEREO satellite,
could knock out the power grid. NASA

From Popular Science:

It depends on the source of the pulse. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) large enough to cause you trouble come in two varieties: those produced by the sun, and those created by a nuclear bomb or another military-grade emitter device. With the sun-related variety, specifically coronal mass ejections (CMEs), your gear will probably be fine. But a really large CME could take down the power grid, says Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Power lines transmit electricity as an alternating current, but a pulse from a CME can introduce a direct current into the system, says Luke van der Zal, a technical executive at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. This can cause transformers to overheat and work sluggishly, or fail altogether.

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Mars As You've Never Seen It Before

Colossal: This ice formation is a portion of the wall terraces of the Mojave Crater on Mars. It has barely suffered any erosion so offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like

From The Daily Mail:

It looks like a filmmaker's apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.

But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.

Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet's Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.

The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater's wall terraces.

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How A Volcanic Eruption Can Become A National Security Threat

Iceland Volcano Could Have World Consequences -- MSNBC

1783 eruption changed weather patterns, sent poisoned air to British Isles

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Blasts of lava and ash shot out of a volcano in southern Iceland on Monday and small tremors rocked the ground, a surge in activity that raised fears of a larger explosion at the nearby Katla volcano.

Scientists say history has proven that when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts, Katla follows — the only question is how soon. And Katla, located under the massive Myrdalsjokull icecap, threatens disastrous flooding and explosive blasts when it blows.

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My Comment: It is an uncomfortable thought to realize that even with our huge military arsenals, sophisticated technology, and all the tools that a modern and sophisticated society can bring to any problem .... when it comes to mother nature and the power that it can unleash we are powerless to do anything.

As to the 1783 eruption, a long time ago I did a university paper on the impact that the American revolution had on Canada. What struck me from the literature and news reports that I was reading was the impact that the 1783 eruption had on everyday life. Spring only came to Montreal late May, and winter returned by October. Growing crops was difficult and sporadic, and sickness was prevalent throughout the cities. The American Revolution was a major event, but the aftereffects of the 1783 volcanic explosion were just as serious.

If a repeat of the 1783 eruption was to occur today .... with the population centers that we have today .... there is no question in my mind the impact would be catastrophic.