Cities Try Silly Antics To Grab Google's 'Golden Ticket'

From ABC News:

Forget decorum. City officials across the country are getting downright goofy for Google.

When the Mountain View Internet giant announced in February that it would choose at least one community in the U.S. to test an ultra high-speed broadband network, no one knew what kind of antics would ensue.

But over the past few weeks, hoping to lure Google and its experimental fiber optic network, everyone from mayors to ice cream makers have pulled out all the stops in what has become a heated nationwide competition.

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Heat-Toting Ocean Currents Chugging Along

From The New York Times:

Here’s a brief update on the great heat-toting oceanic currents that at one time were thought to be at risk from human-driven warming of the climate. There’s been no slowdown at all through much of the past decade and probably none since the early 1990s, according to new work using methods developed by Joshua Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

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Global Warming Making People More Aggressive?

A railroad worker in Australia takes a break from the heat. Photograph by William Albert Allard, National Geographic Stock

From National Geographic:

Global warming could make the world a more violent place, because higher temperatures increase human aggression and create volatile situations, a new study says.

The report combined government data about average yearly temperatures with statistics on the number of violent crimes committed between 1950 and 2008.

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TJX Hacker Gets 20 Years In Prison

From The threat Level:

BOSTON — Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for leading a gang of cyberthieves who stole more than 90 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX and other retailers.

The sentence for the largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted is the lengthiest ever imposed in the United States for hacking or identity-theft. Gonzalez was also fined $25,000. Restitution, which will likely be in the tens of millions, was not decided Thursday.

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'Super-Supernova' Challenges Astronomers

The first images of supernova SN2007if - the faint host galaxy could not be made out at the time the supernova was discovered. Credit: NBNL

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: A star that exceeded its known upper mass limit before turning supernova could change the way scientists measure the expansion of the universe and study dark energy, scientists said.

The researchers, led by experts from Yale University, measured the mass of a supernova thought to belong to a unique subclass, type Ia, and found that it significantly exceeded the upper limit, known as the Chandrasekhar limit - which is 1.4 times the mass of our Sun.

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Revealed: Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold

Freezing depends on impurities (Vilhjalmur Ingi Vilhjalmsson/Getty)

From New Scientist:

HOT water sometimes freezes faster than cold water - but why? This peculiar phenomenon has baffled scientists for generations, but now there is evidence that the effect may depend on random impurities in the water.

Fast-freezing of hot water is known as the Mpemba effect, after a Tanzanian schoolboy called Erasto Mpemba (see "How the Mpemba effect got its name"). Physicists have come up with several possible explanations, including faster evaporation reducing the volume of hot water, a layer of frost insulating the cooler water, and differing concentration of solutes. But the answer has been very hard to pin down because the effect is unreliable - cold water is just as likely to freeze faster.

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Blocking Gene Forces Cancer Cells To Age

Image: The finding may offer a new strategy for fighting cancer (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

Instead of killing off cancer cells with toxic drugs, scientists have discovered a molecular pathway that forces them to grow old and die.

Cancer cells spread and grow because they can divide indefinitely.

But a study in mice, published today in Nature, shows that blocking a cancer-causing gene called Skp2 forces cancer cells to go through an aging process known as senescence - the same process involved in ridding the body of cells damaged by sunlight.

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iPhone, Safari, IE 8, Firefox Hacked In CanSecWest Contest

Photo: Pedram Amini and Aaron Portnoy of TippingPoint look over Charlie Miller's shoulder as he conducts his Safari hack. (Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

From CNET:

VANCOUVER, B.C.--Researchers on Wednesday demonstrated that they could hack a non-jailbroken iPhone, Safari running on Snow Leopard and Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox on Windows 7 as part of the annual Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security show here.

Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, won $10,000 after hacking Safari on a MacBook Pro without having physical access to the machine. Miller won $5,000 last year by exploiting a hole in Safari, and in 2008 nabbed $10,000 hacking a MacBook Air, all on the same computer.

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Honeybees Dying: Scientists Wonder Why, And Worry About Food Supply

From ABC News:

A Third of Our Food Depends on Plants Pollinated by Bees; 'We're Really Cutting It Close'.

No matter where you live -- in a brick Philadelphia row house, the sprawling suburbs of Dallas or an apartment in Seattle -- you depend, more than most of us know, on lowly honeybees raised in California or Florida.

The bees have been dying in extraordinary numbers, and scientists are trying to figure out why.

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Ancient 'X-Woman' Discovered As Man's Early Ancestors Are Pictured Together For The First Time

From The Daily Mail:

A mysterious species of ancient human has been discovered in a cave in southern Siberia.

Nicknamed X-Woman, scientists say the human lived alongside our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.

The discovery, which could rewrite mankind's family tree, was made after analysis of DNA from a fossilised finger bone.

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The X-Woman’s Fingerbone

From Discover Magazine:

In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000-year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins–even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news.

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DARPA Bounces Smart Radar Off Buildings To Track Individual Urban Vehicles From The Sky

Tracking from Above It's difficult to use radar in urban environments because of all the structures that get in the way. But by bouncing highly sensitive radar off of buildings' facades, DARPA hopes to lock onto individual vehicles from UAVs and track them through urban streets even when buildings block line of sight. Zemlinki

From Popular Science:

Radar is great for tracking objects in the wide-open sky or even at sea, but when you try to take it to street level you run into some obstacles -- literally. Radar requires a good line of sight, and obstructions like buildings or terrain features can render radar useless. But now, using a handful of unmanned aircraft and technology that allows them to intelligently reflect radar off buildings, DARPA is developing a system that should be able to track individual vehicles even as they dart between skyscrapers and other structures.

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My Comment: You can run .... but you cannot hide.

Mind Over Matter? How Your Body Does Your Thinking

Let your body do the thinking (Image: Stephen Simpson/Image Bank)

From New Scientist:

"I THINK therefore I am," said Descartes. Perhaps he should have added: "I act, therefore I think."

Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences.

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UV Radiation, Not Vitamin D, Might Limit Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms

From Science News:

Sunshine effects on MS might be more complicated than previously thought, mouse study suggests.

Ultraviolet radiation from sunshine seems to thwart multiple sclerosis, but perhaps not the way most researchers had assumed, a new study in mice suggests.

If validated in further research, the finding could add a twist to a hypothesis that has gained credence in recent decades. The report appears online March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Are Hand Sanitizers Better Than Handwashing Against The Common Cold?

New research suggests that hand sanitizers containing ethanol are much more effective at removing rhinovirus from hands than washing with soap and water. (Credit: iStockphoto/Janine Lamontagne)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 24, 2010) — A new study suggests that hand sanitizers containing ethanol are much more effective at removing rhinovirus from hands than washing with soap and water. Sanitizers containing both ethanol and organic acids significantly reduced recovery of the virus from hands and rhinovirus infection up to 4 hours following application.

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Super Bug! World's Strongest Insect Revealed

Two males of dung beetle called Onthphagus taurus size up each other's horns.
Credit: Alex Wild.

From Live Science:

After months of grueling tests, a species of horned dung beetle takes the title for world's strongest insect.

The beetle, called Onthophagus taurus, was found to be able to pull a whopping 1,141 times its own body weight, which is the equivalent of a 150-pound (70 kilogram) person lifting six full double-decker buses. While the study researcher knows of a mite that can take on a hair more, that organism is an arachnid, not an insect.

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Search Engine Collects Historical Resources

From The BBC:

A search engine is being created to help historians find useful sources.

The Connected History project will link up currently separate databases of source materials.

Once complete, it will give academics or members of the public a single site that lets them search all the collections.

Once completed the search engine will index digitised books, newspapers, manuscripts, genealogical records, maps and images that date from 1500-1900.

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Inside A Global Cybercrime Ring

U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigators Sheryl Novick (L) and Martha Vera look at images (top half of monitors) as part of their investigation of the scareware company Innovative Marketing Ukraine (IMU) in the FTC internet lab in Washington March 22, 2010. Credit: REUTERS/Molly Riley

From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine's capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. They were creating some of the world's most pernicious, and profitable, computer viruses.

According to court documents, former employees and investigators, a receptionist greeted visitors at the door of the company, known as Innovative Marketing Ukraine. Communications cables lay jumbled on the floor and a small coffee maker sat on the desk of one worker.

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My Comment: A good chunk of my family (on my father's side) lives in the Ukraine. One of my cousin .... a software programmer, worked for a few months in such a company. Apparently the pay was great, and the people who he worked with were fun. I only learned about this later, because if I had learned about when he was working there, I would probably have gone down to his house and beat him over the head for being stupid enough to be affiliated with such criminals.

Because of my work in managing computer networks, I have had more than my share in tackling these vicious viruses. I have lost tons of information, and worse .... megaloads of my life in cleaning up the mess that such attacks always produced.

This Reuters article is a good one in outlining the problems and obstacles that need to be overcome to stop this type of cyber crime. This is a must read for all geeks, and for the individual user who has been a victim of this type of attack.

Climate Change Disaster Killed Off The 'Terrible Lizards' And Helped Dinosaurs To Rule The Earth

Changes: Dinosaurs came to rule the world as a direct result of a
mass extinction similar to the one that killed them off

From The Daily Mail:

Dinosaurs came to rule the world as a direct result of a mass extinction similar to the one that killed them off and allowed mammals to take over the planet, research has revealed.

History was repeating itself when a climate change disaster ended the 200million year reign of the 'terrible lizards', evidence suggests.

A massive asteroid impact is believed to have altered the world's climate and wiped out the dinosaurs, giving mammals the opportunity they had been waiting for to flourish.

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Astronomers Discover 2 Shortcuts For Locating Earth-Like Planets

A young star with planets forming, illustrated here, may retain chemical clues about the worlds that surround it. ESO/L. Calçada

From Discover Magazine:

Astronomers Discover 2 Shortcuts for Locating Earth-Like Planets.

Since the discovery of planets outside our solar system in the 1990s, astronomers have tallied more than 400 extrasolar worlds, many unlike anything known before. Two recent studies show that the formation of planets may leave detectable chemical signatures in their host stars, a finding that could help scientists zero in on planetary systems even more quickly and speed the search for worlds similar to Earth.

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