Sleek Probe To Map Earth’s Gravity

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2008) — The European Space Agency is launching a new satellite to map variations in the Earth’s gravity field with unprecedented accuracy. The satellite will give UK scientists vital information about ocean circulation and sea level change needed to improve climate forecast models.

The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) is the first of three Earth Explorer core missions in ESA’s Earth Observation Envelope Programme. Data from GOCE will allow scientists to create a detailed model of the Earth's gravity field, or geoid.

“GOCE will yield details of the Earth's gravity field to an accuracy and resolution that is simply unobtainable by existing terrestrial and space techniques,” says Professor Philip Moore from Newcastle University, who specialises in gravity research.

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Why Female Spiders Eat Their Mates

From MSNBC:

Small males are easier to catch and are more likely to be prey

In many spider species, females eat the males after sex. Studies have suggested various complex evolutionary reasons involving costs and benefits to the species, sperm competition and esoteric sexual selection schemes.

Turns out the motivation for this creepy cannibalism is much simpler.

It's all about size. If males are small, they're easier to catch and therefore more likely to be prey, say Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio. Big females eat their puny mates simply because a) they're hungry and b) they can.

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Converting Fibre Into Fuel Without Using Enzymes

From Fibre To Fuel In A Flash -- Nature

Chemists convert cellulose to potential biofuel without enzymes.
A genuine revolution in biofuels is currently hindered by the difficulty of converting the most recalcitrant parts of plants, primarily the cellulose of their fibres, into useful fuel. Two chemists in California now claim that it might be remarkably easy to do just that with little more than a strong acid to break down the cellulose.

Mark Mascal and Edward Nikitin of the University of California, Davis say their new process is the most efficient way yet described for converting cellulose into small, energy-rich organic molecules, using no more than basic textbook chemistry.

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1843 Stellar Eruption May Be New Type Of Star Explosion

An artist's conception of the fast blast wave from Eta Carinae's 1843 eruption, which today has caught up with a slow-moving shell ejected in a previous outburst about 1,000 years ago, producing a bright fireworks display that heats the older shell and makes it emit X-rays (orange). The well-known two-lobed "Homunculus" nebula, a slow-moving shell of gas and dust also produced in the 1843 eruption, is shown closer to the star, which is a hot blue supergiant. (Credit: Gemini Observatory artwork by Lynette Cook)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2008) — Eta Carinae, the galaxy's biggest, brightest and perhaps most studied star after the sun, has been keeping a secret: Its giant outbursts appear to be driven by an entirely new type of stellar explosion that is fainter than a typical supernova and does not destroy the star.

Reporting in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature, University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Nathan Smith proposes that Eta Carinae's historic 1843 outburst was, in fact, an explosion that produced a fast blast wave similar to, but less energetic than, a real supernova. This well-documented event in our own Milky Way Galaxy is probably related to a class of faint stellar explosions in other galaxies recognized in recent years by telescopes searching for extragalactic supernovae.

"There is a class of stellar explosions going off in other galaxies for which we still don't know the cause, but Eta Carinae is the prototype," said Smith, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow.

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Tracking Hurricane Ike

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Hurricane History: Texas A Top Target

The unnamed Category 4 hurricane that slammed into Galveston, Texas Sept. 8, 1900 remains the deadliest ever to hit the United States, having killed at least 8,000 people (estimates vary) and leveling virtually the entire town. Credit: NOAA

From Live Science:

Florida and Louisiana have had an unfair share of hurricane activity these past four years while Texas has generally taken less of a beating.

That could change this week as powerful Hurricane Ike takes aim at the Lone Star State.

In fact, Texas has been in the crosshairs many times before and is second only to Florida among U.S. states in the number of direct hits from hurricanes.

It seems ages ago now, but it was just seven weeks back that Dolly struck southern Texas, knocking down trees and power lines and causing extensive flooding of low-lying areas. Preliminary damage estimates were put at $1 billion or more. In some isolated areas, rainfall reached 16 inches. But Dolly was not a major hurricane. Its peak wind gusts were around 100 mph, and its eye made landfall, on July 23, in a largely uninhabited area.

The big storm that defines the hurricane threat to Texas was the disaster that struck Galveston more than a century ago.

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Minor Planet May Help Explain Comets

From The Globe And Mail:

WASHINGTON — A newly discovered "minor planet" with an elongated orbit around the Sun may help explain the origin of comets, researchers said Monday.

The object, known as 2006 SQ372, is starting the outward portion of a 22,500-year orbit that will take it 240 billion kilometres away from the Sun.

The icy lump of rock is just over three billion kilometres from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune, researchers told a symposium on Monday. They will publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

The orbit of 2006 SQ372 is an ellipse four times longer than it is wide, said University of Washington astronomer Andrew Becker, who led the research team. Sedna, a distant, Pluto-like dwarf planet discovered in 2003, is the only other object with a similar orbit, but not nearly as stretched out.

The new object is about 100 kilometres in diameter.

"It's basically a comet, but it never gets close enough to the Sun to develop a long, bright tail of evaporated gas and dust," Dr. Becker said in a statement.

University of Washington graduate student Nathan Kaib said it is unclear how the object formed.

"It could have formed, like Pluto," he said, "in the belt of icy debris beyond Neptune, then been kicked a large distance by a gravitational encounter with Neptune or Uranus."

More likely, he said, it came from the Oort Cloud, a distant reservoir of icy, asteroid-like bodies that orbit the Sun at distances of several trillion kilometres.

"One of our goals is to understand the origin of comets, which are among the most spectacular celestial events. But the deeper goal is to look back into the early history of our solar system and piece together what was happening when the planets formed," Mr. Kaib said.

The Possible Extinction Of North America's Freshwater Fish

Freshwater Fish In N. America In Peril, Study Says
-- Yahoo News/AP

WASHINGTON - About four out of 10 freshwater fish species in North America are in peril, according to a major study by U.S., Canadian and Mexican scientists.

And the number of subspecies of fish populations in trouble has nearly doubled since 1989, the new report says.

One biologist called it "silent extinctions" because few people notice the dramatic dwindling of certain populations deep in American lakes, rivers and streams. And while they are unaware, people are the chief cause of the problem by polluting and damming freshwater habitats, experts said.

In the first massive study of freshwater fish on the continent in 19 years, an international team of dozens of scientists looked not just at species, but at subspecies — physically distinct populations restricted to certain geographic areas. The decline is even more notable among these smaller groups.

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Large Hadron Collider To Reach Full Capacity By Yearend
-- RIA Novosti

GENEVA, September 10 (RIA Novosti) - Scientists are planning to run the world's largest particle collider at full capacity by the end of 2008, a Russian physicist told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.

During the first full tests conducted Wednesday, beams of sub-atomic particles were for the first time sent round the accelerator ring in opposite directions at almost the speed of light, but the powerful superconductor magnets in the collider operated at minimum capacity.

"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an extremely complex system," said Vladimir Karzhavin of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. "That is why its initial launch is a very complicated and sensitive process."

The physicist, who heads of a team of Russian scientists from the institute who participate in the LHC project, said collisions initially would be rare and involve low-energy protons, but over time the frequency and energy output would gradually increase.

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The Future Of NASA's Shuttle Program

Enter the Dragon -- The Economist

The war in Georgia is prompting a rethink of America’s route into space.

IN TWO years’ time America’s space shuttle is supposed to retire. It is a complicated bit of technology—expensive and unreliable. And every launch raises fears of another accident. Something cheaper, simpler and safer, known as project Constellation, is planned to replace it, but this will take time to build, and probably will not be operational before 2015. That means five years during which NASA, the country’s space agency, will have no means of its own to ferry its astronauts between the ground and the space station that it spent so much money helping to build.

Until a few weeks ago, the plan was to buy tickets on Soyuz, Russia’s system of manned space vehicles. That was what happened when the shuttle was grounded after the Columbia accident in 2003. America spent hundreds of millions of dollars for flights on Soyuz.

Buying rides on Russian rockets requires approval from Congress. At the best of times, Congress takes some convincing, but now that America and Russia have fallen out over Russia’s war with Georgia, the chances of a multimillion dollar shopping spree to Moscow look less likely than ever. And although political moods may change, time is running out if NASA is to put an order in for the missions it will need from the end of 2011, when its contract with the Russians expires. Each vehicle takes about three years to build, so America needs to decide soon whether it wants to buy from Russia.

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The God Particle Will Be Found

An engineer leans on a magnet in the 27km-long tunnel that will house the Large Hadron Collider (Image: Cern/Maximilien Brice).

Higgs: Particle Will Be Found -- News 24

London - The British scientist who gave his name to the so-called "God Particle" said he believes it will be found by the world's biggest atom-smasher, which was finally fired up on Wednesday.

"I think it's pretty likely," said Professor Peter Higgs a few hours after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched at the home of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) below the Franco-Swiss border.

"The way I put it is that if there isn't anything there, then it means I and a lot of other people no longer understand all the things we understand about these weak and electromagnetic interactions," added the 79-year-old.

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964 Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.

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Galactic Blast From Dying Star Detected

From MSNBC:

Last March our planet looked straight down the barrel when one of the universe's most deadly kinds of stellar artillery fired — and we lived to tell about it.

The March 19 cosmic cannon was a jet of powerful gamma rays that shot out matter at speeds just a hair shy of the universal speed limit — that of light.

The explosion, which occurred not far from the handle of the Big Dipper, was even more remarkable because it was accompanied by enough visible light to be seen briefly with unaided human eyes. That's despite the fact that the dying mega-star that created the blast was in another galaxy, a whopping 7.5 billion light-years away.

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Why We Drink Ourselves Under The Table

Scientists say alcohol is addictive because it erases the worst memories of being drunk

Why Drinkers Do It All Again – They Only
Recall The Good Bits -- The Independent

Some people drink to forget, but scientists have found that anyone who binge drinks is more likely to forget only the worst experiences of being drunk – which is why alcohol is such an addictive drug.

Alcohol has been found to affect memory in a selective manner. Drinking makes it easier to remember the good things about a party but harder to recall the bad things that happen after having too much.

Studies into the memories of people engaged in heavy drinking have shown that it is the inability to remember the worst excesses of a night out – while remembering the happy things that led up to them – is one of the main causes of repeated binge drinking.

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The Large Hadron Collider -- Complete News Coverage From Nature News

From Nature News:

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's most powerful particle accelerator. As the first proton beams zip around the LHC's massive 27-kilometre ring on 10 September 2008, it marks a new era of physics that could pin down the identity of the dark matter that shapes galaxies; find the Higgs boson, believed to confer mass on the other particles of the quantum bestiary; and recreate conditions that existed a split-second after the Big Bang. In this online Special, Nature asks how it works, what it will find, and why we should be excited.

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Melting Ice Caps Could Suck Carbon From Atmosphere

From New Scientists:

It's not often that disappearing Arctic ice is presented as good news for the planet. Yet new research suggests that as the northern polar cap melts, it could lift the lid off a new carbon sink capable of soaking up carbon dioxide.

The findings, from two separate research groups, raise the possibility – albeit a remote one – of weakening the greenhouse effect. The researchers say the process of carbon sequestration is already underway. Even so, the new carbon sink is unlikely to make a significant dent in the huge amounts of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by industrial activities.

Kevin Arrigo and colleagues at Stanford University studied satellite data collected between 1998 and 2007 to see how sea surface temperatures and the quantities of sea ice and phytoplankton had changed during that time.

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Music Therapy Improves Well-Being of Very Ill Patients

From Live Science:

(HealthDay News) -- Exposure to music therapy can dramatically improve the mental and physical condition of patients receiving palliative care, a new study suggests.

The research team says that this is the first large study to gauge -- and substantiate -- the potential of music therapy as a physical and psychological aid to patients coping with advanced illness.

"We've known for a while that music therapy can be used for a wide variety of things in a medical setting," said study author Lisa M. Gallagher, a music therapist with the Cleveland Music School Settlement and The Cleveland Clinic's Horvitz Center for Palliative Medicine. "But this particular study clearly shows that it helps improve mood while decreasing pain, anxiety, depression and even shortness of breath among seriously ill patients."

Gallagher was expected to present her findings Tuesday at the American Academy of Pain Management Meeting being held this week in Nashville, Tenn.

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Largest Particle Collider Conducts Successful Test -- Collection Of News Reports

Scientists cheer atom smasher success

From Myway/AP:

GENEVA (AP) - The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. (0836 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the US$3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite. Physicists around the world now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

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More News On The First Large particle Collider Test

Large Hadron Collider: subatomic particles complete first circuit -- The Telegraph
Scientists cheer as protons complete first circuit of Big Bang machine -- Times Online
World's mightiest atom-smasher starts operations -- AFP
Largest particle collider conducts successful test -- Yahoo News/AP
Working LHC produces first images -- New Scientist
Beam Me Up: Big Bang Protons Away -- Sky News
Slideshow: Cern’s Large Hadron Collider goes live -- Financial Times
30 stunning images of the Large Hadron Collider -- Dvice
LHC Win: Beaming smiles all round -- ZDNet
Scientists cheer atom smasher success -- CNN
CERN experiment simplified -- NDTV
Today is not Hadron Collider Day -- Register Today
Large Hadron Collider: Why You Really Won't Die Today -- Gizmodo
TIMELINE: Major events for CERN and particle physics -- Reuters

5 Things You Need To Know About The Large Hadron Collider

A a large dipole magnet is lowered into the tunnel to complete the basic installation of the more than 1700 magnets that make up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which measures 27 km in circumference. (Photograph by CERN/AFP/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

The largest particle accelerator in history will take another step on Wednesday toward living up to its own celebrity. In the ongoing autopsy of the subatomic functions of the universe, the Large Hadron Collider could be the best hope yet to transform theoretical reality, such as dark matter and extra dimensions, into observable fact. And we'll be on hand to watch the LHC turn on, so stay tuned.

But why, exactly, are people without advanced degrees in physics counting the minutes until the first proton beam travels the length of the LHC's 27-kilometer (about 17-mile) accelerator ring? Is it because the bad science of the machine's supposed doomsday potential traveled faster—and louder—than responsible dissections of quantum mechanics? Is it because the LHC, which sits underneath Switzerland and France, feels like a turning point in the loss of American scientific primacy? Or is it because, however complex the physics might be, there's simply never been a larger, more powerful proton-smashing mega-gadget like it?

The answer is probably the doomsday thing, but on the eve of the accelerator's first full beam (and despite the glut of existing coverage) there's still a lot to be learned from—and about—the LHC.

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Childbirth Was Already Difficult For Neanderthals

Neanderthals had a brain at birth of a similar size to that of modern-day babies. (Credit: Ch. Zollikofer, courtesy of University of Zurich)

From The Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 9, 2008) — Neanderthals had a brain at birth of a similar size to that of modern-day babies. However, after birth, their brain grew more quickly than it does for Homo sapiens and became larger too. Nevertheless, the individual lifespan ran just as slowly as it does for modern human beings.

These new insights into the history of human evolution are being presented in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by researchers from the University of Zurich.

Dr. Marcia Ponce de León and Prof. Christoph Zollikofer from the Anthropological Institute of the University of Zurich examined the birth and the brain development of a newborn Neanderthal baby from the Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Crimea. That Neanderthal child, which died shortly after it was born, was evidently buried with such care that it was able to be recovered in good condition from the cave sediments of the Ice Age after resting for approximately 40,000 years.

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Windfarms On The Coast

Offshore Wind Farms May Line U.S. Coast -- CNN

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Visitors to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, soon may be greeted by more than sand dunes, seagulls and beach umbrellas.

If offshore wind advocates have their way, scores of 140-foot blades will be spinning in the ocean breeze nearly a dozen miles away, barely visible to the sunbathers.

Offshore wind has taken a back seat to offshore drilling for oil and natural gas in the current energy debate. But those wind-driven turbines probably will be operating long before oil platforms appear off Atlantic Coast states.

Delaware hopes to be the first state to construct a wind farm off its coast. The project, scheduled to be completed in 2012, is one of several offshore wind proposals that have cleared significant hurdles in recent months.

Proponents say wind offers more long-term energy independence than offshore oil. Residents along the Eastern seaboard are embracing it as a stable-priced, environmentally friendly energy alternative.

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