Chinese Menus, Medicine Threatening Wildlife

Pictured is one of three lion cubs born in captivity at the zoo in Cali. November 6, 2008.
Reuters Jaime Saldarriaga (Colombia)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters) – Wild animals are climbing back onto Chinese plates after the deadly SARS virus made some diners wary, and booming demand for traditional medicine is also threatening some plants, environmentalists said on Wednesday.

Nearly half of urbanites had consumed wildlife in the past 12 months, either as food or medicine, with rich and well educated Chinese most likely to tuck into a wild snake or turtle, a survey of urbanites in six cities found.

They enjoyed eating wildlife because they saw it as "unpolluted," "special" and with extra nourishing and health powers, according to a study commissioned by Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

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NASA Begins Countdown For Space Shuttle Launch

Crew members of the space shuttle Endeavour on Mission STS-126 arrive to prepare for launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida November 11, 2008.
(Scott Audette/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- Countdown clocks at the Kennedy Space Center began ticking down on Tuesday toward Friday's launch of space shuttle Endeavour on a mission to outfit the International Space Station for an expanded live-aboard crew.

Liftoff is targeted for 7:55 p.m. EST (0055 Saturday GMT). At a news conference on Tuesday, managers said the shuttle was in good shape for launch.

"We haven't had a launch for a while so we're really excited to be back in the saddle," said NASA's Jeff Spaulding, a manager overseeing preparations for shuttle Endeavour's flight.

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Search Engine With Roots In Genomics Unlocks Deep Web

From Wired/Epicenter:

A research-focused search engine founded by Human Genome Project scientists is claiming to go where even Google doesn't tread: the deep web.

DeepDyve is designed to search the 99 percent (they say, citing a study from UC Berkeley) of hits not picked up by other search engines, which return pages based largely on interpretations of popularity and work only if a page is findable. Content hidden behind paywalls or that is not linked to enough sites to gain page rank remains obscure, but often contains the source material required for serious research.

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Quarter Of Atlantic Sharks And Rays Face Extinction

The spiny dogfish is highly prized for its meat. Photograph: Getty

From The Guardian:

New figures show 26% of all sharks, rays and related species in the north-east Atlantic are threatened with extinction

More than a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction from overfishing, conservationists warned today.

A "red list" report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that 26% of all sharks, rays and related species in the regional waters are threatened with extinction. Seven per cent are classed as critically endangered, while a fifth are regarded as "near-threatened".

The total number of at-risk species may well be higher because scientists lack of sufficient information to assess the populations of more than a quarter (27%) of them, the report adds. Many are slow-breeding fish that are especially vulnerable to fisheries.

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Darwin's Beagle To Sail Again

Vessel of knowledge: The original HMS Beagle on which Charles Darwin sailed. A replica is being built to research the effects of plankton on the world's oceans

From The Daily Mail:

It was the ship that carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands nearly 180 years ago, enabling him to make his breakthrough on the theory of evolution.

Now another HMS Beagle will depart on a new voyage of scientific discovery - this time with the help of sat-nav, engines and guidance from space.

The Beagle Trust plans to build a £5 million replica of the 19th-century vessel and use it to research the effects of plankton on the world's oceans.

It will be guided to algae blooms across the globe with the help of Nasa astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The charity has finalised its plans and is currently raising funds for its project, scheduled to begin construction within months.

'We are making a lot of progress, and I'm confident we will begin building next year, then set sail in 2010,' said project director Peter McGrath.

The original HMS Beagle took scientist and naturalist Darwin around the world between 1831 and 1836.

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Why Veins Could Replace Fingerprints And Retinas As Most Secure Form Of ID

Hitachi's finger vein authentication system represents a decade's worth of development and improvement and the technology has already been included in computers, ATMs and used for cardless payment authorization. Every finger has a vein configuration that is unique to it, much in the same way that every fingerprint is unique, and those veins are able to be read by near-Infrared light coupled with image sensors.

From Times Online:

Forget fingerprinting. Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers.

Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person's identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin.

Easydentic Group, a European leader in the biometric industry based in France, has announced that it will be using Hitachi's finger vein security in a range of door access systems for the UK and European markets.

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Will the Opening of the Northwest Passage Transform Global Shipping Anytime Soon?

Photo From The Washington Post

From National Geographic:

With the melting of Arctic Ocean ice, the fabled waterway between Europe and Asia has been open to shipping the past two summers--or has it?

It is said that the Inuit have many words for snow, but when it comes to the Northwest Passage only one type of frozen water matters: multiyear ice. It can slice through the hull of a ship like a knife through butter and it persists in the passage's waters despite unprecedented warming in the Arctic Ocean, thwarting shippers in search of a shortcut between Europe and Asia.

The fabled Northwest Passage has made headlines ever since it thawed last year for the first time. For three centuries the quest for an expedited route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans rivaled today's space race, with European superpowers vying for the prize. Hundreds of sailors and countless expeditions ventured into Canada's Arctic waters, including such naval luminaries as Sir Francis Drake, Captain James Cook and the ill-fated Henry Hudson, who left his name—and lost his life—on the Canadian bay that marks its entrance.

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Where Do Science Supermachines Go When They Die?

From The New Scientist:

LIKE a man hoping to find a second-hand sports car at a knockdown price, Lon Morgan used to regularly peruse the for-sale ads in Commerce Business Daily. Then one day in 1995, Morgan saw exactly what he had been looking for and submitted a bid. Three weeks later, Morgan and his company International Isotopes were the proud owners of parts from the world's biggest atom smasher for the princely sum of $4.5 million.

Morgan had bought part of the defunct Superconducting Super Collider, a behemoth of a machine designed to search for the much vaunted Higgs boson, aka the God particle, which is supposed to give all other particles their mass. When funding for the 87-kilometre-round SSC was slashed in 1993 a cool $2 billion had already been spent. Now the huge tunnels in Waxahachie, Texas, sat dark and empty. Since the parts for the accelerator had never actually been assembled into a working machine, they sat crated up in a warehouse, awaiting their new owner and their new destiny.

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Fast Food Made Up Mostly of Corn

If you are what you eat, most Americans are an ear of corn (above), a November 2008 study suggests. A chemical analysis of popular fast food menus reveals that some form of the grain appears in most items. Photograph by Joe Schershel/NGS

From The National Geographic:

If you are what you eat, most Americans are an ear of corn, new research suggests.

A chemical analysis of popular fast foods reveals that some form of the grain appears as a main ingredient in most items—especially beef.

The researchers examined the molecular makeup of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and french fries purchased from three fast food chains in six U.S. cities.

"Out of the hundreds of meals that we bought, there were only 12 servings of anything that did not go straight back to a corn source," said study lead author Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Corn's dominance in the nation's fast food is well known, "but the [chemical analysis] really bring it home in a way that hasn't been brought home before," said Craig Cox, Midwest vice president for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

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Now: The Rest Of The Genome

Thomas R. Gingeras of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a leader of Encode, an effort to determine the function of every piece of DNA in the human genome. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

From The International Herald Tribune:

Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word "gene." Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. "It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back," she said.

But Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. "It cannot work that way," Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

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If You Love Wind Power (And Solar Power), You’d Better At Least Like Transmission.

Sales bookings last year for Bob Chew and his company SolarWrights were $5.9 million, more than double the year before. He expects to hit $20 million this year.

From New York Times/Science :

If you love wind power (and solar power), you’d better at least like transmission. This was originally recited to me as kind of an energy-wonk joke. But it’s no laughing matter, as my colleague Matt Wald points out in an article today on new evidence that the country’s grid is already stretched to the limit and unlikely to be able to handle bigger, intermittent pulses of electricity from wind turbines and big solar-power arrays.

Here’s the lede:

WASHINGTON — Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, an industry report says. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. The corporation is the industry body authorized by the federal government to enforce reliability rules for the interlocking system of electrical power generation and transmission.

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An Atomic Solution To The Energy Crisis

Image from Clean Technica

From Fabius Maximus:

Great progress has been made over the decades since America built its last atomic power plant. These solutions arrive just in time to provide clean and relatively inexpensive energy as we convent from liquid fuels (oil, natural gas) after Peak Oil — sometime in the next ten years or so.

This is a brief update about the prospects for atomic power. For more information about new energy sources, see the FM reference page about Energy.

Small Nuclear Power Reactors

The World Nuclear Association has some excellent materials about small nukes, the cutting edge of the next atomic revolution. The following are excerpts from a July 2008 report.

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Smart DNA: Programming The Molecule Of Life For Work And Play

The DNA Molecule

From Scientific American:

Logic gates made of DNA could one day operate in your bloodstream, collectively making medical decisions and taking action. For now, they play a mean game of in vitro tic-tac-toe

* DNA molecules can act as elementary logic gates analogous to the silicon-based gates of ordinary computers. Short strands of DNA serve as the gates’ inputs and outputs.
* Ultimately, such gates could serve as dissolved “doctors”—sensing molecules such as markers on cells and jointly choosing how to respond.
* Automata built from these DNA gates demonstrate the system’s computational abilities by playing an unbeatable game of tic-tac-toe.

From a modern chemist’s perspective, the structure of DNA in our genes is rather mundane. The molecule has a well-known importance for life, but chemists often see only a uniform double helix with almost no functional behavior on its own. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that this molecule is the basis of a truly rich and strange research area that bridges synthetic chemistry, enzymology, structural nanotechnology and computer science.

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Exercise Is Safe, Improves Outcomes For Patients With Heart Failure

From EScience News:

Working out on a stationary bicycle or walking on a treadmill just 25 to 30 minutes most days of the week is enough to modestly lower risk of hospitalization or death for patients with heart failure, say researchers from Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI). The findings stem from the HF-ACTION trial (A Controlled Trial Investigating Outcomes Exercise TraiNing), the most comprehensive study to date examining the effects of exercise upon patients with heart failure. The study was reported today as a late-breaking clinical trial at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2008 by Christopher O'Connor M.D., director of the Duke Heart Center and principal investigator of the trial, and David Whellan, M.D., of Thomas Jefferson University, co-principal investigator.

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Strong Education Blunts Effects Of Alzheimer's Disease, Study Suggests

Some people who appeared to have the brain plaques long associated with Alzheimer's disease nonetheless received high scores on tests of their cognitive ability. Participants who did well on the tests were likely to have spent more years in school. (Credit: iStockphoto/Don Bayley)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — A test that reveals brain changes believed to be at the heart of Alzheimer's disease has bolstered the theory that education can delay the onset of the dementia and cognitive decline that are characteristic of the disorder.

Scientists at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that some study participants who appeared to have the brain plaques long associated with Alzheimer's disease still received high scores on tests of their cognitive ability. Participants who did well on the tests were likely to have spent more years in school.

"The good news is that greater education may allow people to harbor amyloid plaques and other brain pathology linked to Alzheimer's disease without experiencing decline of their cognitive abilities," says first author Catherine Roe, Ph.D., research instructor in neurology.

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Ancient 4,300-Year-Old Pyramid Discovered In Egypt

An Egyptian worker walks past the Saqqara Step pyramid near a newly discovered pyramid at an ancient burial ground in Saqqara south of Cairo. A 4,300-year-old pyramid has been discovered at the Saqqara necropolis outside Cairo, Egypt's culture minister has said.

From Breitbart/AP:

A 4,300-year-old pyramid has been discovered at the Saqqara necropolis outside Cairo, Egypt's culture minister said on Tuesday.

Faruq Hosni made the announcement at a press conference in Saqqara, an ancient burial ground which dates back to 2,700 BC and is dominated by the massive bulk of King Zoser's step pyramid, the first ever built.

Husni said the pyramid, five metres (16 foot) tall, is believed to have been 15 metres tall when it was first built for Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti who founded the 6th Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom.

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What Is The Origin Of Veterans Day?

Armistice Day Parade in Omaha, Nebraska in November 1938.
Credit: Library of Congress, John Vachon, photographer

From Live Science:

Veterans day can be traced back to the end of World War I.

The Allied powers a signed a cease-fire agreement with Germany at Rethondes, France on Nov. 11, 1918, bringing the great war to a close.

The Armistice (which means a suspension of hostilities by agreement) was celebrated in the streets. As documented by the Library of Congress, Massachusetts shoe laster James Hughes described the scene in Boston: "There was a lot of excitement when we heard about the Armistice…some of them old fellas was walkin' on the streets with open Bibles in their hands. All the shops were shut down. I never seen the people so crazy…confetti was a-flying in all directions…I'll never forget it."

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1 Of Every 50 People On Earth Now Belong To Facebook

From Dallas Morning News:

That's right. Facebook says it now has 120 million members. By my reckoning, that's 2% of the world's 6 billion people.

If you think that's astonishing, consider that there's still plenty of low hanging fruit for Facebook to pluck. I know plenty of tech savvy people, many of them under 30, who have yet to sign up. Inevitably, these people will give in.

Where will it end? Can Facebook sign up twice that many people? Can it sign up 500 million people? Can it sign up Victor, who may be the world's only tech blogger who has managed to resist Facebook this long?

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Incredible Deep-Sea Discoveries Announced

From Live Science:

An astounding batch of new deep-sea discoveries, from strange shark behavior to gigantic bacteria, was announced today by an international group of 2,000 scientists from 82 nations.

The Census of Marine Life is a 10-year project to determine what's down there. Among the new findings:

A large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean. Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large icesheet grew, nature created a "thermohaline expressway," a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content. Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved; some octopuses, for example, losing their defensive ink sacs — pointless at perpetually dark depths.

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Is Stupid Making Us Google?

From The New Atlantis:

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass’s skin in Balzac’s novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that “users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

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