Reading This Will Change Your Brain

Jeff Sherman / Taxi-Getty Images (Photo from Newsweek)

From Newsweek:

A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?

Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain's plasticity—it's ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.

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Mysterious Cyclones Seen At Both of Saturn's Poles

From National Geographic:

Saturn boasts cyclones at each of its poles that dramatically outpower Earth-roving hurricanes, new images reveal.

The Cassini spacecraft—a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency—recently peered below what had previously appeared to be isolated cumulus clouds at the planet's south pole.

"What looked like puffy clouds in lower resolution images are turning out to be deep convective structures seen through the atmospheric haze," Cassini imaging team member Tony Del Genio said in a press release.

"One of them has punched through to a higher altitude and created its own little vortex."

"Little" is relative—the eye of the storm is surrounded by an outer ring of clouds that measures 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) wide. That's about five times the size of the largest cyclones, or hurricanes, on Earth.

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Einstein's Relativity Survives Neutrino Test

From E! Science News:

Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists. The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below ground. As the Earth does its daily rotation, the neutrino beam rotates too.

"If there's a field out there that can cause violations of Lorentz invariance, we should be able to see its effects as the beam rotates in space," said Indiana University Bloomington astrophysicist Stuart Mufson, a project leader. "But we did not. Einsteinian relativity lives to see another day."

Mufson is quick to point out that the Physical Review Letters report does not disprove the existence of a Lorentz-violating field. Despite the sophistication and power of MINOS's detector, "It may be that the field's effects are so exceedingly small that you'd need extraordinary tools to detect it," Mufson said.

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Asia Trumping US On Science R&D

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From Christian Science Monitor:

Federal funding for research has been falling in real terms. Is the nation’s economic edge at stake?

Tallying this year’s Nobel Prizes so far, it’s been a respectable year for US-based scientists. Four shared the prestigious awards – three for chemistry and one as part of an international trio for physics.

As congratulations pour in, however, some science-policy specialists in the United States see troubling signs that federal support for research – measured by checks written rather than checks promised – may be weakening.

To those involved in federally funded research, their work represents a kind of intellectual infrastructure that, if allowed to erode, can begin to undermine the country’s economic competitiveness.

The immediate concern is the continuing resolution the president signed Sept. 30. Congress punted final passage of the federal budget to next March. Except for the Defense Department, other federal agencies responsible for performing or funding research must hold spending at or below fiscal year 2008 levels.

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Coolest Inventions Of 2008

From Popular Mechanics:

Popular Mechanics Picks Them; The complete list can be found HERE.

Genetic Reasons For Baldness

Hope for the hairless: Researchers in Europe isolated stem cells from the hair follicles of mice (shown here under a microscope) and transplanted them onto the backs of hairless animals, which then sprouted hair. Credit: Nature Genetics

Baldness Genes -- Technology Review

Finding the genetic causes could lead to new therapies for baldness.

It may be small comfort to anyone sporting a comb-over, but researchers have found a second genetic risk factor for baldness.

Two groups, working independently, found variants on chromosome 20 that are associated with male pattern baldness--the most common cause of hair loss in men, and the root of a multimillion-dollar industry devoted to protecting, nurturing, and transplanting hair.

A third report identifies a new kind of stem cell in the hair follicles of mice that, when transplanted onto the skin of hairless rodents, causes the animals to sprout tufts of hair.

These latest findings offer greater insight into the genetic underpinnings of male pattern baldness, and into the process that produces a glorious head of hair in the unafflicted. According to a research team led by Tim Spector of King's College London, figuring out the genetic variants linked to the disorder could lead to gene therapies for baldness. The discovery of a risk factor on chromosome 20 may point to "an intriguing new potential target" for gene therapy.

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Earliest Known Human TB Found In 9,000 Year-old Skeletons

The Skeletons submerged at the Alit-Yam site.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University College London)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) — The discovery of the earliest known cases of human tuberculosis (TB) in bones found submerged off the coast of Israel shows that the disease is 3000 years older than previously thought. Direct examination of this ancient DNA confirms the latest theory that bovine TB evolved later than human TB.

The new research, led by scientists from UCL (University College London) and Tel-Aviv University and published today in PLoS One, sheds light on how the TB bacterium has evolved over the millennia and increases our understanding of how it may change in the future.

The bones, thought to be of a mother and baby, were excavated from Alit-Yam, a 9000 year-old Pre-Pottery Neolithic village, which has been submerged off the coast of Haifa, Israel for thousands of years. Professor Israel Hershkovitz, from Tel-Aviv University's Department of Anatomy, noticed the characteristic bone lesions that are signs of TB in skeletons from the settlement, one of the earliest with evidence of domesticated cattle.

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New Evidence Provides An Alternative Route 'Out Of Africa' For Early Humans

A generalized map of the Sahara shows the location of the sample sites and the fossilized river courses. (Credit: Anne Osborne)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) — The widely held belief that the Nile valley was the most likely route out of sub-Saharan Africa for early modern humans 120,000 year ago is challenged in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team led by the University of Bristol shows that wetter conditions reached a lot further north than previously thought, providing a wet 'corridor' through Libya for early human migrations. The results also help explain inconsistencies between archaeological finds.

While it is widely accepted that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa 150-200 thousand years ago, their route of dispersal across the hyper-arid Sahara remains controversial. The Sahara covers most of North Africa and to cross it on foot would be a serious undertaking, even today with the most advanced equipment.

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Why Women Have Bad Teeth

Anthropologist John Lukacs shows a 250,000-year-old "Kabwe skull" from Africa. The sex is unknown, but this specimen has 15 teeth still intact or partially present. 12 of them have obvious damage from dental cavities. Credit: Jim Barlow/U. of Oregon

From Live Science:

Women had poor dental health compared to men back in the hunter-gatherer era, and it got worse as societies turned to farming.

Now an anthropologist is pointing to an overlooked explanation — hormonal and dietary changes related to higher pregnancy rates.

Anthropologists usually argue that women's poor dental health resulted from culture-driven factors, such as cooking duties and the ongoing nibbling that can go along with that. But that narrow focus may overlook biological factors connected to women bearing more and more children in agricultural societies.

Today, men are more likely than women to suffer from gum disease, possibly because men are more likely to ignore dental care, according to Delta Dental. Nonetheless, women do not tend to have better oral health than men, for hormonal reasons, according to the American Academy of Periodontology.

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NASA To Start Long Distance Repairs On Hubble

Hubble Space Telescope is seen with ground view in this picture taken from Space Shuttle in March 2002. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON - NASA engineers say they know how to fix the broken Hubble Space Telescope: They have to wake up computer parts that have been sleeping in space for more than 18 years.

On Wednesday, NASA will start a complicated remote-control fix of a major glitch that stopped the telescope from capturing and beaming down pictures. Hubble should be able to send stunning astronomy photos back to Earth by Friday, officials said.

The abrupt failure more than two weeks ago caused NASA to postpone its Hubble upgrade mission from October to sometime next February or so. The delay is costing NASA about $10 million a month, officials said in a Tuesday teleconference.

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Chimps 90 Percent Gone In A "Final Stronghold"

A young chimpanzee is shown in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï National Park in an undated photo. (Photo from National Geographic)

From The National Geographic:

West African chimpanzees have declined by 90 percent in the last 18 years in an African country that is one of the subspecies' "final strongholds," a new study stays.

Scientists counting the rare chimps in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) found only about 800 to 1,200 of the apes—down from about 8,000 to 12,000 in 1989-90. Before the new survey, the country had been thought to harbor about half of all West African chimps.

"We were not expecting such a drastic decrease," said lead author Geneviève Campbell, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The 1989-90 survey had itself represented a significant decline from 1960s estimates of about a hundred thousand West African Chimps in Côte d'Ivoire.

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Men Who Never Smoke Live Longer, Better Lives Than Heavy Smokers

From E! Science News:

Health-related quality of life appears to deteriorate as the number of cigarettes smoked per day increases, even in individuals who subsequently quit smoking, according to a report in the October 13 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Smoking has been shown to shorten men's lives between seven and 10 years, according to background information in the article. It also has been linked to factors that may reduce quality of life, including poor nutrition and lower socioeconomic status.

Arto Y. Strandberg, M.D., of the University of Helsinki, and colleagues followed 1,658 white men born between 1919 and 1934 who were healthy at their first assessment, conducted in 1974. Participants were mailed follow-up questionnaires in 2000 that assessed their current smoking status, health and quality of life. Deaths were tracked through Finnish national registers.

During the 26-year follow-up period, 372 (22.4 percent) of the men died. Those who had never smoked lived an average of 10 years longer than heavy smokers (more than 20 cigarettes per day). Non-smokers also had the best scores on all health-related quality of life measures, especially those associated with physical functioning. Physical health deteriorated at an increasing rate as the number of cigarettes smoked per day increased, with heavy smokers experiencing a decline equivalent to 10 years of aging.

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Archaeological Dig Uncovers Roman Mystery

Archeologist Roger Wilson pulls out the clay amphora from its 1,500 year hiding place. (Credit: Photo courtesy of Roger Wilson from Science Daily)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2008) — University of British Columbia archaeologists have dug up a mystery worthy of Indiana Jones, one that includes a tomb, skeletons and burial rites with both Christian and pagan elements.

This summer, Prof. Roger Wilson led excavations at Kaukana, an ancient Roman village located near Punta Secca, a small town in the south-eastern province of Ragusa in Sicily.

Combing through the sand-buried site, the 15-member team made a series of startling discoveries. Central to the mystery was finding a tomb inside a room in a house dating from the sixth century AD.

Wilson explains that tombs during this period are normally found only in cemeteries outside the built-up area of a town, or around the apse of a church. And since the building was substantial with mortared walls and internal plaster, this would have been likely a tomb for the wealthy.

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Home Lighting Could Be Wireless Network

An illustration shows an office where LED lighting provides both illumination and wireless communication. Credit: Boston University

From Live Science:

Lights may soon do more than just shine in dark places – they might wirelessly connect your computer, phone or car to the Internet.

Sounds strange, but consider this. Remote controls already use infrared light to communicate with TVs and DVD players. Turning ceiling and reading lamps into wireless access points could allow you to get your Internet fix almost anywhere.

"We can provide ubiquitous communication if we have network access wherever there's lighting," said Thomas Little, a computer engineer at Boston University.

These aren't just any lights, though. Little and other researchers hope to piggyback on the spread of light-emitting diode (LED) light bulbs, which are finding favor as low-energy, long-lasting alternatives to the more conventional incandescent or fluorescent light bulbs.

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Step Aside, Chicken Soup: Eight Cold Elixirs

From ABC News:

Spanning the Globe in Search of Alternative Home Remedies for the Common Cold
No matter where you live or what language you speak, the symptoms of a coldare understood the world over -- no translation required: Your throat feels sore; your nose runs; you might cough or sneeze; and your body aches.

It's time to crawl under the covers and get the extra rest you need.

But a cold virus will need some coaxing to hit the road. Colds rarely make a quick exit and usually take about a week to run their course.

That's where the time-honored tradition of folk medicine comes into play.

Faced with a cold and a lack of modern medicine, our ancestors turned to nature for its treatments. And throughout the world, parts of plants -- the roots, stems, leaves, fruits and flowers -- are used to ease a cold and its symptoms.

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For U.S. Astronauts, A Russian Second Home

The centrifuge at Star City is large enough for people to ride in and subjects them to high G-forces such as those experienced during spacecraft launches and re-entries. (Photo from the New York Times)

From The New York Times:

STAR CITY, Russia — Garrett Reisman was on his way to this formerly secret military base for several weeks of training, making his way through Kennedy Airport, when his cellphone rang. It was his boss, Steven W. Lindsey, the head of NASA’s astronaut office.

“Come back to Houston. They’ve canceled your training — they’re playing hardball,” Mr. Reisman recalled his boss saying. He was caught in a momentarily important dispute between NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

Ultimately, Mr. Reisman’s aborted trip was just a bump in the road on the way to space: he spent three months aboard the International Space Station earlier this year, performed a spacewalk and even traded jokes over a video link with Stephen Colbert.

Everyone who works with the Russian space program has similar stories to tell of implacable bureaucrats, byzantine rules and decisions that seem capricious at best. And many of those stories are played out here in Star City, where cosmonauts and, now, astronauts from all over the world train to fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to go to the $100 billion International Space Station.

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Google Satellite's Eye-Opening First Picture Promises Even Clearer Views Of Earth

Pin-sharp ... yet GeoEye-1's picture of Pennsylvania's Kutztown University
campus was taken from 423 miles above

From The Daily Mail:

Google's new satellite has beamed back its first picture, taken the moment the on-board camera was switched on.

The crystal-clear image promises to make the internet giant's photographic atlas, Google Earth, even more detailed.

The satellite went live for the first time two days ago following its launch last month from a U.S. air force base in California.

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Introducing the World’s Largest Solar Powered Winery

(Photo from Treehugger)

From Treehugger:

The largest solar installation of any winery in the world is set to be built for Constellation Wines’ Gonzalez winery in Monterrey County, CA by Pacific Power Management. Mitsubishi solar panels will cover 170,000 square feet on the winery warehouse roof, and will generate 1,700,000 kilowatt hours a year—enough to power over 50 percent of the winery’s energy needs.

Solar Powered Wine-Making, Solar Powered Living
What’s more, during the summer months when the winery isn’t operating at full capacity (it doesn’t process grapes in summer months), the electricity will be exported in order to power 25 percent of the energy needs of surrounding residential areas—1,695 homes in the city of Gonzalez.

This may very well be the most expansive effort to power a winery with alternative energy (though there are more than a few very green wineries already in operation, and it won't lay claim to the first carbon neutral winery).

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Haemorrhagic Virus Carried By Common African Mouse

From the New Scientist:

Three people have died and another is seriously ill with a previously unknown strain of a virus carried by a common African rodent. The virus requires close contact to spread, but experts warn that more like it could be circulating.

A 36-year-old woman on a small farm outside the Zambian capital Lusaka developed flu-like symptoms in early September. When they worsened she was taken by air ambulance to South Africa, where she died.

Alarms were raised after the ambulance paramedic and the nurse who attended her also died after developing similar symptoms two weeks later. The nurse who tended the paramedic is also in a serious condition.

On Sunday South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases announced that the victims were infected by an arenavirus, one of a family of viruses carried by rodents.

"They are very widespread," says Bob Swanepoel, former head of the NICD and one of the world's leading experts on haemorrhagic viruses. In Africa, arenaviruses are carried, with no symptoms, by the multimammate mouse, a common farm pest sold in Europe as a "pocket pet".

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Fusion Will Be Cracked "Within 30 Years"

(Click To Enlarge)
Temperatures inside the fusion reactor will reach 100 million degrees Celsius (ITER.ORG)

From Swissinfo:

Despite the complexity and high research and development costs, scientists are convinced they can unlock the massive power of nuclear fusion within a generation.

On Monday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Organisation (ITER) signed a cooperation agreement at the opening of an IAEA fusion energy conference, held in Geneva.

"ITER is one of the most important scientific projects in the world," said IAEA's director general, Yuri Sokolov.

ITER, or "the way" in Latin, is an experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, southern France, which has a practical goal: to establish whether fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be tamed to generate useful power on Earth.

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Break Out The Bubbly: White Wine May Be Good For You

From The New Scientist:

White wine lovers can feel a little less guilty about their habit. New research suggests that white varieties may offer similar heart benefits to red wines.

Rats that were fed white wine as part of their diet suffered less heart damage during cardiac arrest, compared to animals fed only water or grain alcohol. These benefits were similar to animals that ingested a red wine or its wonder ingredient found only in grape skin, resveratrol.

White wine, made from the pulp of the grape but not the skin, contains no resveratrol, which led many to pin the so-called "French paradox" – high fat intake but low rates of heart disease – on moderate consumption of red wines.

Not just reds, says Dipak Das, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington. "The flesh of the grape can do the same job as the skin."

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How We Evolve

From Seed Magazine:

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing. It was as though, having achieved its aim by the seventh day, evolution rested. "That was the stereotype that I learned," says population geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending. "We showed up 45,000 years ago and haven't changed since then."

The idea makes a rough-and-ready kind of sense. Natural selection derives its power to transform from the survival of some and the demise of others, and from differential reproductive success. But we nurse our sick back to health, and mating is no longer a privilege that males beat each other senseless to secure. As a result, even the less fit get to pass on their genes. Promiscuity and sperm competition have given way to spiritual love; the fittest and the unfit are treated as equals, and equally flourish. With the advent of culture and our fine sensibilities, the assumption was, natural selection went by the board.

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Extending The Life Of Fresh Cranberries

Cranberry harvest in New Jersey. (Credit: Photo by Keith Weller)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2008) — Cranberries are tart, tiny fruits packed with powerful antioxidants. The small, red berries offer a wide variety of health benefits. Not only are cranberries a healthy, low-calorie snack, but they can also play a significant role in preventing urinary tract infections, reducing the risk of gum disease and much more. In fact, studies show that the significant amounts of antioxidants in cranberries may help protect against heart disease, cancer, and other diseases.

The good news about cranberries is spreading, resulting in growing consumer demand for fresh cranberries and cranberry products. This demand has led to increased interest in finding ways to extend the shelf life of the popular fruit. Setting out to determine the optimum conditions for storing fresh cranberries, Charles F. Forney. a research scientist in Postharvest Physiology at the Atlantic Food and Horticulture Research Centre in Nova Scotia, Canada, conducted a study of fresh cranberries and their postharvest life. Forney's study was published in the April 2008 issue of HortScience.

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Promising New Material Could Improve Gas Mileage

Up to three-quarters of the potential energy you are paying at the gas pump for is wasted. A good deal of it goes right out the tailpipe instead of powering your car. (Credit: iStockphoto/Rich Legg)

From Space Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2008) — With gasoline at high prices, it's disheartening to know that up to three-quarters of the potential energy you are paying for is wasted. A good deal of it goes right out the tailpipe instead of powering your car.

Now a Northwestern University-led research team has identified a promising new material that could transform a technology that currently cools and heats car seats -- thermoelectrics -- into one that also efficiently converts waste heat into electricity to help power the car and improve gas mileage.

The researchers discovered that adding two metals, antimony and lead, to the well-known semiconductor lead-telluride, produces a thermoelectric material that is more efficient at high temperatures than existing materials. The results are published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

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Animals Have Personalities, Too

From Live Science:

We know our siblings and in-laws have personalities — sometimes to a fault. But science recently has revealed that such individual differences are widespread in the animal kingdom, even reaching to spiders, birds, mice, squid, rats and pigs.

Now a new mathematical model helps to explain how and why such animal temperaments develop over time.

The model explains a central question of both animal and human personality — why certain individuals are more rigid or flexible than others, and why some change their behavior in response to changes in their environment while others do not.

The answer, says Franz Weissing of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, comes down to costs and benefits. A group in which both rigid and flexible personality types co-exist makes for an optimal system, his model shows.

The field of animal-personality study is starting to gain some substance and credibility, said University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling, who does research in this field.

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A New Explosive

A high-energy-density nitrate ester (1) with unique properties was synthesized in good yield in a three-step process. Destructive stimuli studies and explosive performance calculations show that (1) has similar performance properties to those of well-characterized explosives.

From E! Science News:

Since the discovery of nitroglycerin in 1846, the nitrate ester group of compounds has been known for its explosive properties. A whole series of other nitrate esters have been subsequently put to use as explosives and fuels. A research team led by David E. Chavez at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) has now developed a novel tetranitrate ester. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the compound has a particularly interesting characteristic profile: it is solid at room temperature, is a highly powerful explosive, and can be melt-cast into the desired shape. Nitrate esters are organic nitric acid compounds that can contain enormous explosive force. However, their liquid physical state makes handling very difficult. By mixing in various other components, Alfred Nobel developed dynamite, a distinctly safer and easier to handle nitroglycerine-based explosive. The only solid nitrate ester used as an explosive before is nitropenta. Because of its high melting point of about 140 °C, nitropenta must be pressed into the desired form.

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New Spacecraft to Explore Interstellar Boundary -- Popsci

IBEX Mounted on Pegasus: Photo courtesy NASA

NASA's IBEX craft is heading out this month to map the edges of the solar system

The "termination shock" sounds like the stuff science fiction movies are made of. In reality, it marks the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. The invisible "shock" forms as our sun's solar winds begin to encounter the gases and magnetic fields of outer space, which slows the winds down abruptly.

On October 19, NASA will launch the first spacecraft designed to image and map the interactions that take place in this boundary zone. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, will be propelled from the Kwajalein Atoll into a high-altitude orbit that will eventually take it about 200,000 miles from Earth, where it will capture images of processes taking place in the termination shock and beyond.

"The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," said David J. McComas, principal investigator of the IBEX mission and senior executive director the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute.

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Sea Ice Extent Recovering Quickly

(Click To Enlarge)
(Photo from Watts Up With That)

From Watts With That:

As many readers know, the predictions for record low sea ice minimums in 2008 were not met, and 2008 ended up about 9% higher than in 2007 at the end of the season. See the report here.

Now in looking at AMSR-E satellite data, the red line on the graph below, one can see that the recovery is at a significantly faster rate than in recent years.

I’m not one to read much into this, as to do so would be to make the same mistake as was done earlier this year when the NSIDC melt trend led one researcher there to conclude that we’d see an “ice free north pole”.

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Babies Know Happy From Sad Songs

(Photo from Baby Pictures Photos)

From Live Science:

Babies as young as 5 months can distinguish an upbeat tune, such as "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, from a lineup of gloomy tunes.

Researchers displayed an emotionally-neutral face for the baby while sad music played. When the baby looked away from the face, the music stopped and a new sad song would start. When the happier "Ode to Joy" played, the babies stared at the face three to four seconds longer, suggesting they were interested in the shift.

By 9 months old, babies can do the opposite, picking out the sorrowful sound of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from a pack of happy pieces.

The finding is another example of how babies make sense of the world long before they can talk, said Brigham Young University psychology professor and study author Ross Flom.

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Blood Test Finds Coronary Disease

(Photo from NHLBI)

From The New Observer:

A simple blood test could soon replace expensive and invasive exams to detect coronary artery disease.

The test, announced Wednesday by doctors at Duke, is being developed after the discovery of genetic markers that show the presence and intensity of blockage in coronary artery disease, said a Duke cardiologist who co-authored research on the link.

Such a blood test could save millions of dollars annually by allowing some patients to avoid risky procedures in which catheters are inserted into patients' arteries.

"I think it is a big deal," Dr. William E. Kraus, a Duke cardiologist, said in an interview Wednesday. "What we want is a test that tells us the status of your disease today and if what you have is heart disease." Kraus' research was published in the medical journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics.

Current detection of the disease -- the leading cause of death in the United States and a top killer in North Carolina, with 23,610 deaths in 2006 -- can require expensive tests such as echocardiograms, stress tests and imaging techniques that use radiation.

"A blood-based test to diagnose coronary artery disease would be less invasive and risky and would prevent patients from [receiving] radiation exposure," Kraus said in a statement.

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In Puppy Play, It's Ladies First

She's the Boss: During puppy play, young males sometimes put themselves in a position where they can be taken advantage of by their female playmates. The early behavior could serve them well later in life, say researchers. (Photo: From Discovery)

From Discovery:

Oct. 9, 2008 -- It may not be such a dog-eat-dog world after all, at least among puppies. A new study has found that young male dogs playing with female pups will often let the females win, even if the males have a physical advantage.

Male dogs sometimes place themselves in potentially disadvantageous positions that could make them more vulnerable to attack, and researchers suspect the opportunity to play may be more important to them than winning.

Such self-handicapping has been documented before in red-necked wallabies, squirrel monkeys, hamadryas baboons and even humans, all of which frequently take on defensive positions when playing with youngsters, in particular.

The gentlemanly dog behavior is even accompanied with a bow.

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E-Science: Massive Experiments, Global Networks

Supercomputers: European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists work in the control center of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The massive amount of information collected by the collider will be shared across an international computer network.
(Fabrice Coffrini/AP/File). (Photo from Christian Science Monitor).

From Christian Science Monitor:

Worldwide computer grids mean even small-timers can contribute to ‘big science.’

Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina is not the first name that pops up in conversations about centers of polar science.

Tucked at the tip of a branch of Albemarle Sound, along the state’s northeast coast, the well-regarded, historically African-American university focuses largely on undergraduate education. But it’s also taking part in cutting-edge Arctic and Antarctic science as a key player in PolarGrid – a powerful, sophisticated computer network researchers use to analyze images of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and model their behavior.

It’s part of the burgeoning world of e-Science – a realm where the questions are big, cutting across once-disparate disciplines. And the answers often demand enormous amounts of number crunching through networks of interconnected computing centers at universities and laboratories around the world – a process known as grid computing.

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Hawking: If We Survive The Next 200 Years, We Should Be OK

Stephen Hawking, here delivering a lecture in May, spoke recently to CNN about his vision of the future. (Photo from CNN)

From CNN:

CAMBRIDGE, England (CNN) -- Professor Stephen Hawking, one of the world's great scientists, is looking to the stars to save the human race -- but pessimism is overriding his natural optimism.

Hawking, in an exclusive CNN interview, said that if humans can survive the next 200 years and learn to live in space, then our future will be bright.

"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," said Hawking, who is almost completely paralyzed by the illness ALS.

"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

Hawking is one of the few scientists known to a wide audience outside academia thanks to his best-selling books, a guest spot on "The Simpsons" and an ability to clearly explain the complexities of theoretical physics.

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Nobel Prize For Physics Announced

(Photo From The International Herald Tribune)

From left, Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Masukawa and Yoichiro Nambu. (Reuters)

2 Japanese, 1 American Share Physics Nobel -- CBS News

Prize Won For Subatomic Theories In Field Of Elementary Particle Physics

(AP) Two Japanese citizens and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries in the world of subatomic physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.

American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

In its citation, the academy said that this "year's Nobel laureates in physics have presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter."

Turning to Nambu, it said that his work in "Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface," the academy said in its citation. "Nambu's theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory."

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More News On The Nobel Prize For Physics

Three Physicists Share Nobel Prize -- New York Times
1 American and 2 Japanese share Nobel physics prize -- International Herald Tribune
Nobel physics prize goes to 2 Japanese, 1 American -- Myway/AP
2 Japanese, 1 American Share Nobel Physics Prize -- American Scientist
Nobel Prize in Physics winners voice joy -- Daily Yomiuri
3 Win Physics Nobel for Subatomic Particle Research -- Live Science
U.S. scientist, Japanese pair share Nobel physics prize -- Mercury News
Nobel Honors Glimpse Into Universe's Design -- NPR
Nobel Prize for Physics Honors Subatomic Breakthroughs -- National Geographic
Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa Win Physics Nobel -- Scientific American
Nobel Prize in physics shared for work that unifies forces of nature -- Science News
Shy Japanese Nobel laureate has no passport: wife -- AFP
Physics Nobel snubs key researcher -- New Scientists

Nobel Prize For Chemistry Announced

Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Roger Y. Tsien of UC San Diego will share the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry.(Photo from L.A. Times)

Three Chemists Win Nobel Prize -- New York Times

One Japanese and two American scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow green and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology to watch the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.

Osamu Shimomura, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. and Boston University Medical School, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, will share the $1.4 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short, was observed in 1962 in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America.

Dr. Shimomura was able to identify the protein and showed that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.

Dr. Chalfie showed how the protein could be used as a biological identifier tag by inserting the gene that produces the protein into the DNA of an organism.

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More News On The Nobel Prize For Chemistry

Chemistry Nobel Prize Awarded for Glowing Protein Work -- National Geographic
Scientists Go for the Glow in Fluorescent Proteins -- Wired News
Three U.S.-based scientists share Nobel chemistry prize -- L.A. Times
Japanese, American Scientists Win Nobel Chemistry Prize -- Voice Of America
Green jellyfish protein scientists win Nobel -- Reuters
Chemistry Nobel Glows Fluorescent Green -- Scientific American
A Nobel for Illuminating Biology -- Technology Review
How Green Was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry -- Scientific American
Cell Illuminators Win Chemistry Nobel -- Wired News
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Beauty of Fluorescent Protein -- Wall Street Journal
Nobel Prize in chemistry commends finding and use of green fluorescent protein -- Science News
Nobel prize for chemistry illuminates disease -- The Guardian
Chemistry Nobel Prize Awarded to Scientists Who Discovered and Developed GFP Fluorescent Protein -- GEN
Nobel won after 50 yrs, 100,000 jellyfish -- Daily Yomiuri
Nobel winners recall postwar struggles -- Japan Times
Nobel prize laureate finds winning news on internet -- AFP
Glowing Gene's Discoverer Left Out Of Nobel Prize -- NPR
Nobel Predictions: Score! -- Newsweek
US takes 2008 chemistry prize, Nobel league lead - October 08, 2008 -- Nature
Recent winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and their research, according to the Nobel Foundation -- AP

'Unbreakable' Encryption Unveiled

From The BBC:

Perfect secrecy has come a step close with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.

Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack, but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.

But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

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Asteroid Near-Miss Prompts Calls For Astronomy Funding

Scientists say the world has been 'lucky' no asteroids have crashed into the earth in recent years.
(Reuters: NASA)

From ABC News (Australia):

Astronomers have calling for more funding to watch southern skies, after an asteroid took sky-gazers by surprise and entered the earth's atmosphere over Africa yesterday.

Yesterday morning astronomers in Arizona reported seeing a tiny asteroid, which they described as a new but routine fast-moving object.

Before long, scientists at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Massachusetts had calculated the object was likely to pass within one Earth's radius of the centre of the planet.

That means it would have struck the surface of the Earth if had been big enough.

Gareth Williams, associate director of the MPC, spoke to AM shortly before the asteroid entered the earth's atmosphere.

"We estimate that it's about two metres across with a probable range of one to five metres. Something that small will not survive passage through the atmosphere intact," he predicted.

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Your DNA Will Reveal Your Surname

The Y chromosome confers maleness and is passed, like surnames, from father to son. Scientists believe that a link could exist between a man's surname and the type of Y chromosome he carries. (Credit: iStockphoto/Mark Evans). (Photo from Science Daily)

DNA Could Reveal Your Surname -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2008) — Scientists at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester – where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys -- are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone's surname from the DNA alone.

Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.

On Wednesday 8th October Dr King will present the key findings of her Ph.D. research in which she recruited over two and a half thousand men bearing over 500 different surnames to take part in the study. Carried out in Professor Mark Jobling's lab, Dr Turi King's research involved exploring this potential link between surname and Y chromosome type.

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Why Tokyo Gets Bad Earthquakes

The ruins of the Ginza after the 1923 Great Kanto (Tokyo) Earthquake and fire. (Photo from Geography Department Hewett School)

What Is Giving Tokyo A Headache? -- IOL

Paris - A massive slab of rock lurking beneath the Kanto Plain on the central Japanese island of Honshu is a major source of the earthquake threat that dogs Tokyo, scientists said on Sunday.

Around 100 kilometres wide and 25km thick, the chunk is jammed between tectonic plates that converge beneath the flat, densely-populated plain.

The giant fragment is a potent trigger for a hugely destructive kind of quake, for it wedges between two of the plates and prevents them from sliding smoothly over one other.

As a result, tensions build up until the stored energy is released catastrophically, rather than in smaller, safer movements, the experts say.

Tokyo is built atop the Eurasian plate, one of the two dozen or so tectonic plates that, like jostling pieces on a jigsaw puzzle, comprise earth's surface.

Around 100km to the northwest of the city, on the Kanto Plain, the local geology becomes complex, turning into a triple-layer subterranean sandwich.

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Death, A Cultural And Historical Look

Death Rituals Reveal Much About Ancient Life -- Live Science

Cultures around the world and through time have had wildly varying ways of dealing with the dead. And since death weighs so heavy on a culture and is ultimately so mysterious, records of these practices, or "deathways," are often more abundant than other ancient cultural accounts and provide illuminating windows into other cultures.

"Deathways illuminate religious meaning and the social life of cultures about which we may know little else," says Erik Seeman, Ph.D., associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo and author of the forthcoming "Death in the New World."

Cremation, grave cairns, funeral mounds, mummification, air burial, and belief in life after death are just some of the practices which, though sacred to one culture, often seem odd or even terrifying to another, Seeman says. The Greeks, for example, were fascinated with the historian Herodotus' description of the ancient Issedonians chopping up their dead into a mixed grill and devouring them in a communal barbeque, something entirely contrary to the Greeks' treatment of their own dead.

"Much of my research looks at how deathways marked cultural self-definition and the definition of 'other' in the New World," Seeman said.

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Stars Stop Forming When Big Galaxies Collide

(Photo from National Geographic)

From e! Science News:

Astronomers studying new images of a nearby galaxy cluster have found evidence that high-speed collisions between large elliptical galaxies may prevent new stars from forming, according to a paper to be published in a November 2008 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Led by Jeffrey Kenney, professor and chair of astronomy at Yale, the team saw a spectacular complex of warm gas filaments 400,000 light-years-long connecting the elliptical galaxy M86 and the spiral galaxy NGC 4438 in the Virgo galaxy cluster, providing striking evidence for a previously unsuspected high-speed collision between the galaxies. The view was constructed using the wide-field Mosaic imager on the National Science Foundation telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

"Our data show that this system represents the nearest recent collision between a large elliptical galaxy and a large spiral galaxy," said Kenney, who is lead author of the paper. "This discovery provides some of the clearest evidence yet for high-speed collisions between large galaxies, and it suggests a plausible alternative to black holes as an explanation of what turns off star formation in the biggest galaxies."

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(Photo from Wikimedia)

Ozone Hole Grows In 2008 -- CNN

(CNN) -- The ozone hole over Antarctica in 2008 is larger in both size and ozone loss than last year, but not as large as in 2006, the European Space Agency said Tuesday.

The hole is a thinning area in the ozone layer over Antarctica and the size of the hole varies every year depending on weather conditions.

This year, the size of the thinned area reached about 27 million square kilometers (10.4 million square miles), compared to 25 million square kilometers (9.65 million square miles) in 2007.

In 2006, the hole was a record 29 million square kilometers (11.2 million square miles), larger than North America, the ESA said.

The ESA announced its results based on information from German and Dutch researchers who analyzed satellite data.

Depletion of ozone is caused by extreme cold temperatures at high altitude and the presence of ozone-destroying gases, such as chlorine and bromine, in the atmosphere, the ESA said.

Those gases originate from man-made products like chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were phased out under a global agreement two decades ago but continue to linger in the atmosphere.

Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found at an altitude of about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles).

It acts as a sunlight filter, shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays that put humans at greater risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life, the agency said.

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How Much Oil is Actually Left On This Planet? Should We Care?

From Gas2.0:

According to Dr. Peter McCabe, a world-renowned scientist currently working at CSIRO in Australia, any realistic analysis of future energy sources can only conclude that, barring some complete and miraculous harmony between all the world’s economic superpowers, fossil fuels will dominate our energy mix for at least the next few decades — and we should just accept it.

To get a perspective on where Dr. McCabe is coming from, it struck me that he is a man who thinks in terms of quadrillions of BTUs and exajoules of energy. His views come from an analysis of global markets and global energy use. To him it probably seems that a grassroots coordinated global effort is beyond the reach of humanity.

Being a bit of a realistic skeptic myself, it seemed like it would be worth my while to temporarily suspend my deep held belief that not only is it possible for the U.S. and most of the rest of the world to kick its oil habit within a decade, but also a simple requirement for survival, and take Dr. McCabe at face value.

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Cosmic Eye Looks Back In Time To Picture A Galaxy Forming In The Early Universe

Back in time: A young, star-forming galaxy as it appeared two billion years after the Big Bang, as pictured by the Cosmic Eye. (Photo from Daily Mail)

From The Daily Mail Online:

Scientists have used a Cosmic Eye to 'look back in time' and glimpse a galaxy formation in the early Universe.

Using gravity from a galaxy in the foreground as an enormous zoom lens, researchers were able to see into the distant Universe.

The Cosmic Eye allowed scientists to observe a young star-forming galaxy, which lies about 11 billion light years from Earth, as it appeared just two billion years after the Big Bang.

Teams from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US and Durham and Cardiff Universities in the UK believe their findings show for the first time how the galaxy might evolve to become a spiral system like the Milky Way.

The Cosmic Eye is so called because the foreground galaxy, which is 2.2 billion light years from Earth, appears in the centre of an arc created by the distant galaxy - giving it the appearance of a human eye.

Its name also derives from its resemblance to the Eye of Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol representing the god of the sky and the ruler of the world of the living.

The distant galaxy was originally identified using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Scientists then used the 10 metre Keck telescope, in Hawaii, along with the magnifying effect of the gravitational field of the foreground galaxy to enlarge the distant galaxy by eight times.

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"Deadly Dozen" Diseases Could Stem From Global Warming

(Photo from National Geographic)

Tick populations will shift as a result of climate change, bringing Lyme disease to new regions and infecting more animals and people. An October 2008 study suggests that global warming will lead to new outbreaks of other dangerous diseases as well.

From National Geographic:

A spike in deadly infectious diseases in wildlife and people may be the "most immediate consequence" of global warming, according to a new report released today.

Dubbed the "deadly dozen," sicknesses such as Lyme disease, yellow fever, plague, and avian influenza, or bird flu, may skyrocket as global shifts in temperature and precipitation transform ecosystems.

Babesia, cholera, ebola, intestinal and external parasites, red tides, Rift Valley fever, sleeping sickness and tuberculosis round out the list. (Read descriptions.)

An "early warning system" based on an international wildlife-monitoring network may be the only effective defense, said William Karesh, a report co-author and vice president of Global Health Programs at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

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How Do Bloggers Make Money?

Blogging For Dollars -- Slate

Last week, the blog search engine Technorati released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report with the slightly menacing promise to "deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind." Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.

With this kind of cash sloshing around, one wonders: What does it take to live the dream—to write what I know, and then watch the money flow?

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Pictured: The Moment A Grey Heron Catches A Baby Rabbit By The Ears, Drowns It, Then Swallows The Thing Whole

(Photo from Daily Mail)

From The Daily Mail:

These amazing pictures show how cruel nature can sometimes be as a grey heron snacks on a rabbit.

Herons mainly eat fish but will also take birds and small mammals. This one was searching for a meal when it spotted the baby rabbit emerging from a hole.

Swooping down it grabbed its prey by the ears, took it to water and drowned it - then swallowed the rabbit whole.

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Spacecraft Reveals Stunning New Views of Mercury

The features this image from MESSENGER's Oct. 6, 2008 flyby shows never-before seen terrain. The region in the foreground near the right side of the imag is close to the border between darkness and daylight, so shadows are long and prominent. Two very long scarps are visible in this region, and the scarps appear to crosscut each other. The easternmost scarp also cuts through a crater, showing that it formed after the impact that created the crater. Other neighboring impact craters, such as in the upper left of this image, appear to be filled with smooth plains material. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW. (Photo from Live Science)

From Live Science:

A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

NASA's MESSENGER probe captured never-before-seen views of the Mercury during its encounter on Monday. The spacecraft zipped past Mercury for the second time this year and used the planet's gravity to adjust its path as it continues en route to become the first probe to orbit the planet in March 2011.

One new image shows large patterns of ray-like lines extending southward across much of the planet surface from a young, newly-imaged crater. The previously-imaged Kuiper crater and others craters also have similar webs of lines radiating outward.

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One Bad Weld Shuts Down A Billion Dollar Science project

A welder begins works on the interconnections of magnets in the Large Hadron Collider
(Photo courtesy The Telegraph)

Large Hadron Collider Broke Down Because Of Bad Soldering On A Single Connection -- Daily Telegraph

The £4.4 billion Large Hadron Collider was put out of action for months because one electrical connection out of 10,000 was badly soldered, the experiment's chief scientist said.

"It is very probable that there was a connection that wasn't good," said Lyn Evans, project leader of the 17-mile LHC, buried deep under Swiss soil at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organisation.

The LHC, which aims to shed light on how the universe began by replicating conditions just after the Big Bang, has to operate at extremely cold temperatures.

It was switched on to great fanfare on Sep 10, but had to be turned back off nine days later because the cooling mechanism broke.

It takes weeks to rechill the machine to "superconducting" temperatures - allowing it to fire protons around a 17 mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to light speed and break into even tinier particles

Mr Evans said he did not think a single fault in 10,000 connections was bad, but "it cost dearly".

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My Comment: Only one? I worked as a welder a number of years ago. To be right 9,999 out of 10,000 .... Hmmmmm .... I am very skeptical.

Smart Slime, Ovulating Strippers Among 2008 Ig Nobels

Opera singers perform at Thursday's Ig Nobel Prize awards, given for laughable (but scientifically sound) research. This year's event honored scientists who had studied strippers and slime, among other topics. (Photograph by Josh Reynolds/AP -- National Geographic)

From The National Geographic:

Some fake drugs are better than others, armadillos are assaulting our history, and slime mold is smarter than we think—these and other offbeat scientific triumphs were honored Thursday night at the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

The prizes celebrate "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

More than 1,200 people attended a raucous affair at Harvard University, dubbed the "18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony" in honor of this year's theme—redundancy.

William Lipscomb, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1976, dispensed prizes to the ten honorees. He himself was the prize in the Win a Date With a Nobel Laureate contest.

The gala is thrown every year by the science/humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).

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