NASA Clears Shuttle For Space Station Visit

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) – NASA managers on Wednesday cleared the space shuttle Endeavour and seven astronauts for launch on Friday on a mission to make the International Space Station a bit more like home.

Endeavour's cargo includes two sleeping chambers, a second toilet and a water purification system that will let NASA double the station crew size to six and allow them to recycle urine and waste water for drinking. Launch is set for 7:55 p.m. EST from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"This mission is all about home improvements, both inside and outside of the International Space Station," said Endeavour commander Chris Ferguson. "We've had some large modules delivered in the last year. It's time to fill them up."

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Google Chases Skype With New Gmail Video Chat

From Webmonkey:

Video chat service Skype has some new competition — Google has just added audio and video chat to Gmail. The new chat tools essentially offer most of the features of Skype, or Apple’s iChat, within the standard Gmail interface.

When the SMS features we told you about earlier finally arrive, Google’s e-mail client will be a one-stop shop for almost every form of communication you can think of — e-mail, chat, video chat, audio chat and SMS.

Once the plugin is installed, using the new features is very simple. Just hover over any name in your Gmail chat list and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” There’s a full-screen view and you can also choose to pop out the chat into a new window.

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In A Pandemic, Who Gets to Live?

Influenza victims crowd into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kan., in this 1918 file photo. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed at least 20 million people worldwide, and officials say that if the next pandemic resemblers the birdlike 1918 Spanish flu, up to 1.9 million Americans could die. Collapse (National Museum of Health/AP Photo)

From ABC News/Science:

As if wars and economic crises and natural disasters weren't enough, here's a challenge for some future president that few people even want to think about: Some day, perhaps soon, a president will have to decide whose lives are the most important to save, and whose lives are "nonessential."

This isn't going to be a doomsday story, because most people will survive the next influenza pandemic, which some public health experts believe is past due. It's not a question of "if," it's a question of "when," and one study from Harvard University estimates that the pandemic will kill somewhere between 51 million and 81 million people, mostly in developing countries.

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What Happens If You Eat Dog Food?

From Live Science:

If you just eat a little bit of dog food, probably nothing will happen. But you don't really know that for sure because dog food is not subjected to the same health and safety regulations that human food is required to have.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for setting human food safety guidelines to prevent sickness due to contaminated or improperly handled products. In addition, the FDA is responsible for ensuring that food product labels are accurate in terms of ingredient listing and nutritional content.

Dog food does not have these same strict rules that human food has. Although most dog food contains the same basic components that are in people food — protein, carbohydrates and fats — the proportions of these ingredients are different than in human food and can be harmful if ingested in significant quantities or for prolonged periods of time. The same is true if you feed a dog the wrong proportion of these nutrients by giving it an unbalanced human diet.

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Nanotechnology Sparks Fears For The Future

From Times Online:

Nanomaterials are likely to kill people in the future just as asbestos did unless extensive safety checks are put in place, a Royal Commission report has said.

The team of experts assessing the likely impacts of the emerging technology are worried that when nanomaterials escape into the environment they will damage people and wildlife but that it will be years before the effects are seen.

Past generations have brought into general usage materials such as asbestos, leaded petrol, CFCs and cigarettes without adequately considering the potential damage and the commission fears nanomaterials will prove similarly dangerous.

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Lebanon Finds 2,900 Year Old Phoenician Remains

Archaeologists work on earthenware potteries found at an excavation site in the port city of Tyre, southern Lebanon November 12, 2008. (Haidar Hawila/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanese and Spanish archaeologists have discovered 2,900-year-old earthenware pottery that ancient Phoenicians used to store the bones of their dead after burning the corpses.

They said more than 100 jars were discovered at a Phoenician site in the southern coastal city of Tire. Phoenicians are known to have thrived from 1500 B.C. to 300 B.C and they were also headquartered in the coastal area of present-day Syria.

"The big jars are like individual tombs. The smaller jars are left empty, but symbolically represent that a soul is stored in them," Ali Badawi, the archaeologist in charge in Tire, told Reuters Wednesday.

Badawi and a Spanish team from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona have been excavating at the Phoenician site for years. The site was first discovered in 1997 but archaeologists have only been able to dig up 50 square meters per year.

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Sunlight Has More Powerful Influence On Ocean Circulation And Climate Than North American Ice Sheets

From Watts Up With That?

From Physorg.com: A study reported in today’s issue of Nature disputes a longstanding picture of how ice sheets influence ocean circulation during glacial periods.

The distribution of sunlight, rather than the size of North American ice sheets, is the key variable in changes in the North Atlantic deep-water formation during the last four glacial cycles, according to the article. The new study goes back 425,000 years, according to Lorraine Lisiecki, first author and assistant professor in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lisiecki and her co-authors studied 24 separate locations in the Atlantic by analyzing information from ocean sediment cores. By observing the properties of the shells of tiny marine organisms, called foraminifera, found in these cores, they were able to deduce information about the North Atlantic deep water formation. Scientists can discern historical ocean temperature and circulation patterns through the analysis of the chemical composition of these marine animals.

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Telescope Views Glowing Stellar Nurseries

Colour composite image of RCW120. It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed. (Credit: ESO/APEX/DSS2/SuperCosmos)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — Illustrating the power of submillimetre-wavelength astronomy, an APEX telescope image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birthplaces of new stars. Submillimetre light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the universe, such as these cold, dense clouds.

The region, called RCW120, is about 4200 light years from Earth, towards the constellation of Scorpius. A hot, massive star in its centre is emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which ionises the surrounding gas, stripping the electrons from hydrogen atoms and producing the characteristic red glow of so-called H-alpha emission.

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Origin Of Bad Hair Discovered

Those wiry extensions scattered about our bodies and concentrated on the head evolved from our reptilian and avian ancestors. Credit: dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Having a bad hair day? You're excused. After all, hair has its origins in stuff that used to make just claws. Research now suggests that hair of all kinds extends much further back into evolutionary time, with birds and reptiles having genes for hair proteins.

Scientists previously had thought hair was just a mammalian thing, with its evolution cropping up after the mammalian lineage split from the reptilian lineage. The first mammals arose on Earth about 210 million years ago. Humans, birds and reptiles have a common ancestor that goes back some 300 million years, said researcher Leopold Eckhart of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

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Southern Ocean Close To Acid Tipping Point

Researchers are concerned that the Southern Ocean could become
too acidic by 2030 (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

Australian researchers have discovered that the tipping point for ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought.

Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and CSIRO looked at seasonal changes in pH and the concentration of an important chemical compound, carbonate, in the Southern Ocean.

The results, published in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, show that these seasonal changes will actually amplify the effects of human carbon dioxide emissions on ocean acidity, speeding up the process of ocean acidification by 30 years.

Dr Ben McNeil, senior research fellow at the UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre, says the ocean is an enormous sink for CO2, but unfortunately this comes at a cost.

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A Look Inside Virgin Galactic's Flight Training

From Popsci:

Would-be astronauts train for the world’s first suborbital space tourism flight

As early as next year, if you are one of a lucky few, you may find yourself strapped in a six-passenger rocket some 50,000 feet above the Earth’s surface, bracing yourself as it disengages from the specially designed jet plane mothership, and shoots cannon-like 60 miles up into suborbital space at three times the speed of sound. If all goes well, you'll then get to unbuckle and float in zero gravity for a full fifteen minutes, spying on the earth’s curvature, all of North America and the Pacific Ocean.

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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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Is It Time To Chuck The Internet And Start Over?

Image © Regents of the University of California Berkeley

From Discover News:

Expanding today's overcrowded Web is like building a skyscraper on a pile of styrofoam.

The Internet is a fast-growing 40-year-old city in desperate need of renovation. In 2008 1.5 billion people worldwide used the likes of BitTorrent, IM, Facebook, e-mail, Google, and Skype via communications protocols originally intended for mere hundreds. The wear is not only showing but worsening: Upkeep and patchwork programming continue to make running networks expensive, and cybercrime is flourishing. In response, teams of computer scientists are gathering to form a Manhattan Project of sorts to rethink the Internet.

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2,000-Year-Old Gold Earring Found In Jerusalem

Archaeologists say they found a 2,000-year-old gold earring made around the time of Christ, between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

From U.S.A. Today:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israel Antiquities Authority says archeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old gold earring beneath a parking lot next to the walls of Jerusalem's old city.

The authority says the earring is inlaid with pearls and emeralds and was made sometime between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

In a statement released Monday the authority said the piece is "astonishingly well-preserved." It was discovered during excavation of the ruins of a building from the Byzantine period, dating from around the fifth century, A.D.

The authority says the earring appears to have been crafted using a technique similar to that depicted in portraits from Roman-era Egypt.

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Apollo 8 Crew Remembers Historic Mission Live On NASA TV

From SpaceRef.com:

WASHINGTON -- Almost 40 years after NASA executed the bold decision to send the first human flight of the gigantic Saturn V rocket to the moon, the crew of Apollo 8 will reunite as part of a special public program produced in cooperation with the Newseum in Washington.

The program features Apollo 8 crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. It will be broadcast live from the Newseum on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 1:30 p.m. EST. The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.

The event is part of the Newseum's commemoration of NASA's 50th anniversary and is open to visitors. Seating in the Newseum's Knight TV Studio is limited and seats will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional overflow seating will be available throughout the Newseum.

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Vigorous New Space Exploration Plan To Be Proposed

From Space.com:

Look for the Planetary Society to hold a National Press Club briefing in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 13, outlining "a vigorous new space exploration plan" – one designed "to achieve more, cost less, and engage the world."

The plan draws from town hall meetings, as well as a two-day workshop held in February at Stanford University that put NASA's Vision for Space Exploration not only under a microscope but also on-notice.

The soon-to-be-issued roadmap was blueprinted "with an eye to the world's current economic situation," according to the Planetary Society, and touches on:

* the driving goal for human spaceflight;
* the future of the lunar program;
* renewed commitment to Earth observations from space;
* and possible new human mission objectives.

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Phoenix Lander Finishes Its Work On Mars

From Red Orbit:

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft's work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.

"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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Mini Heart Attack Best Treated Like The Big One

From Science News:

Patients admitted to hospitals with mild symptoms may benefit from getting to a catheterization lab promptly

NEW ORLEANS — People who show up at a hospital with mild heart attack symptoms, but only ambiguous scores on medical tests, might still warrant emergency treatment, according to research presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

The new study, reported November 10 at the AHA’s annual Scientific Sessions meeting, suggests that getting some of these marginal patients into a heart catheterization lab within 24 hours causes no harm and sharply lessens their risk of having the problem recur over the following six months.

People with chest pains arriving in an emergency room get attention right away — for good reason. After ruling out those who are having acid reflux pain or an anxiety attack, doctors use an electrocardiogram (EKG) to assess the person’s heart function and a blood analysis to reveal any damage to the heart muscle.

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Plants: The Fuel Of The Future?

Christopher Somerville directs the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California-Berkeley, where scientists are developing technologies that convert plant cellulose into fuel. Richard Harris/NPR

From NPR:

Morning Edition, November 10, 2008 · The recent run-up in gasoline prices was a not-too-subtle reminder that there's a limited amount of oil on Earth. Someday soon, we're going to need a new source of fuel.

Part of the answer could be fuels made from the plant material cellulose. Researchers at the new Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California-Berkeley are working on a recipe for this biofuel.

From Plant To The Pump

The institute is trying to make at least part of the economy run on fuel from vegetation. It has taken over a lab building once used to answer the purely scientific question of how plants convert carbon dioxide into chemical energy. Now, Christopher Somerville and his colleagues hope to exploit that chemical energy by converting cellulose into fuel.

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Asking ‘Why Do Species Go Extinct?’

‘I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?’ - Stuart L. Pimm Alex di Suvero for The New York Times

From New York Times:

For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world.

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Pimped-Up T-Cells Seek Out And Destroy HIV

Thanks to a custom-designed receptor, this killer T-cell slays HIV-infected cells far better than normal T-cells do (Image: Andrew Sewell/University of Oxford)

From New Scientist:

Researchers have harnessed evolution to create souped-up immune cells able to recognise HIV far better than the regular "killer" T-cells our body produces.

The pimped up T-cell boasts a molecular receptor evolved in the lab to give the body the edge against a virus that has so far flummoxed our immune systems.

"When the body gets infected with HIV, the immune system doesn't know what the virus is going to do - but we do," says Andrew Sewell, an immunologist at Cardiff University, UK, who led the study.

One reason HIV has been able to skirt our immune systems, drugs and vaccines is the virus's chameleon-like behaviour - thanks to a genome that mutates with ease, HIV can quickly change guise to evade an attack.

But some parts of HIV are so vital to its functioning that changes result in dead or severely compromised viruses. Sewell's team targeted a part of one such protein, which holds the virus together.

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TimeTo Test Time

Could GEO600 have detected the fundamental fuzziness of time?Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)/Leibniz University Hannover

From Nature News:

A new theory suggests that the essential fuzziness of time may be the limiting factor for a German gravitational-wave detector.

Poets have long believed the passage of time to be unavoidable, inexorable and generally melancholic. Quantum mechanics says it is fuzzy, ticking along at minimum intervals within which the notion of time is meaningless. And Craig Hogan claims he can 'see' it — in the thus far unexplained noise of a gravitational-wave detector. "It's potentially the most transformative thing I've ever worked on," says Hogan, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It's actually a possibility that we can access experimentally the minimum interval of time, which we thought was out of reach."

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China's Hungry Pandas Face Tougher Winter

A panda eats special food prepared as result of shortage of bamboos earthquake on a nearby mountain is seen in the background at China Conservative and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong, China.
Alexander F. Yuan / AP

From The MSNBC:

More sick and hungry giant pandas may seek food at lower altitudes
BEIJING - More sick and hungry giant pandas than in past winters may seek food at lower altitudes in China's earthquake-affected areas, straining facilities at the local panda research center, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

The devastating May 12 Sichuan earthquake caused landslides and destroyed some of the wild pandas' habitat, reducing supplies of their main source of food, bamboo, in the range of to 8,200-10,500 feet where they normally live.

"They came down the mountains so early this year and that's why we predict there will be a worse situation for the wild pandas this winter," said Zhang Guiquan, assistant director of the Wolong Nature Reserve Administration.

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Using The Powers Of Hypnosis To Heal Body And Mind

From The International Herald Tribune:

My husband, Richard, smoked cigarettes for 50 years, having failed several attempts to quit on his own. When a friend told him in August 1994 that hypnosis had enabled her to quit, he decided to give it a try.

"It didn't work; I wasn't hypnotized," he declared after his one and only session. But it did work; since that day, he has not taken one puff of a cigarette.

Gloria Kanter of Boynton Beach, Florida, thought her attempt in 1985 to use hypnosis to overcome her fear of flying had failed. "When the therapist brought me out, I said it didn't work," she recalled in an interview. "I told her, 'I heard everything you said."'

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Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth

The universe may not have started off with a bang after all.
Pat Rawlings/SAIC

From Scientific American:

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects

* Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.
* According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.
* If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

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When It Comes To Sea Level Changing Glaciers, New NASA Technique Measures Up

The mass changes of the Gulf of Alaska glaciers are computed from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) inter-satellite rate data from April 2003 through September 2007. Using space-borne gravity measurements to assess glacier mass balance NASA scientists determine mass variations along the Gulf of Alaska. Areas of deep blue like the areas around Glacier Bay and the Yakutat Icefield represent significant mass loss where inland areas of dark gray represent slight mass gains. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2008) — A NASA-led research team has used satellite data to make the most precise measurements to date of changes in the mass of mountain glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, a region expected to be a significant contributor to global sea level rise over the next 50-100 years.

Geophysicist Scott Luthcke of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues knew from well-documented research that changes in the cryosphere – glaciers, ice caps, and other parts of the globe covered year-round by ice -- are a key source of most global sea level rise. Melting ice will also bring changes to freshwater resources and wildlife habitat. Knowing that such ice-covered areas are difficult to observe consistently, the team worked to develop a satellite-based method that could accurately quantify glacial mass changes across seasons and years, and even discern whether individual glacier regions are growing or shrinking.

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Internet Attacks Grow More Potent

From The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world’s largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

In these attacks, computer networks are hijacked to form so-called botnets that spray random packets of data in huge streams over the Internet. The deluge of data is meant to bring down Web sites and entire corporate networks. Known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks, such cyberweapons are now routinely used during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia in 2007 during a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. Such attacks are also being used in blackmail schemes and political conflicts, as well as for general malicious mischief.

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Life Spans In The U.S.

When U.S. life expectancy change is divided into six groups by county, patterns emerge. In group 1, life expectancy increased more than the national sex-specific mean (nssm); in group 2, life expectancy increased but did not differ from nssm; in group 3, life expectancy increased but significantly less than nssm; in group 4, change was statistically indistinguishable from zero and nssm; in group 5, there was no change but less increase than nssm; and in group 6, life expectancy declined. Southern women were most likely to lose life expectancy. Graphic courtesy of PLoS Medicine.

Reversal Of Fortune -- American Scientist

County-by-county comparison of death rates finds that lifespans dropped in some U.S. counties

As scientists from all disciplines know, where you look influences what you find.

By examining death rates county-by-county, public health researchers found that life spans, especially among women, fell in some United States counties. The numbers were small but such a reversal of fortune was, well, shocking.

"We started looking at disparity questions. This became arguably a bigger finding and a more depressing finding," said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ezzati, whose research results appeared in PLoS Medicine, is among scholars dicing and splicing mortality data to create more precise pictures of lifespan trends in the United States. The nation is not known as the life-expectancy leader in the developed world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks the life expectancy of women in the U.S. 27th globally

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The Carbon Footprint of Wine

From Live Science:

NEW YORK — While sipping a glass of wine one evening, wine enthusiast Tyler Colman began to think about the impact that particular wine, which happened to come from South America in a particularly heavy glass bottle, had on the environment.

That thought prompted him to begin examining wine production, from vineyard to wine glass, and "how the path that wine takes to get to us contributes to the carbon footprint of wine," he said at a lecture on wine and climate change here recently at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Wine enthusiasts such as Colman and winemakers are increasingly becoming aware of the impact their favorite beverage has on the environment, from the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow wine grapes, to the greenhouse gases released while transporting the wine from the vineyard to often far-reaching locales.

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Temps In Most Areas Of Country Below Average In '08

A Look At The 5 Men, 2 Women Who Will Fly Endeavour To The Space Station

From L.A. Times:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) _ Space shuttle Endeavour's seven astronauts will spend Thanksgiving circling Earth, and one of them — Sandra Magnus — will stick around for Christmas and New Year's as well.

Commander Christopher Ferguson said at least seven turkey dinners have been stowed aboard Endeavour for the trip to the international space station. Liftoff for the two-week mission is set for Friday night.

"They've given us the full seven-course Thanksgiving meal, and all we need to have now is the time to eat it," Ferguson said.

The made-to-order holiday menu includes irradiated smoked turkey, thermostabilized candied yams, rehydratable green beans and mushrooms, fresh corn bread dressing and cranberry-apple dessert.

A look at the five men and two women who will fly on Endeavour:

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Could Life Have Started In A Lump Of Ice?

From Physorg.com:

The universe is full of water, mostly in the form of very cold ice films deposited on interstellar dust particles, but until recently little was known about the detailed small scale structure. Now the latest quick freezing techniques coupled with sophisticated scanning electron microscopy techniques, are allowing physicists to create ice films in cold conditions similar to outer space and observe the detailed molecular organisation, yielding clues to fundamental questions including possibly the origin of life. Researchers have been surprised by some of the results, not least by the sheer beauty of some of the images created, according to Julyan Cartwright, a specialist in ice structures at the Andalusian Institute for Earth Sciences (IACT) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Granada in Spain.

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