Physical Fitness Improves Spatial Memory, Increases Size Of Brain Structure

Active senior couple running in the woods. (Credit: iStockphoto/Marcel Mooij)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2009) — When it comes to the hippocampus, a brain structure vital to certain types of memory, size matters. Numerous studies have shown that bigger is usually better. Now researchers have found that elderly adults who are more physically fit tend to have bigger hippocampi and better spatial memory than those who are less fit.

The study, in the journal Hippocampus, shows that hippocampus size in physically fit adults accounts for about 40 percent of their advantage in spatial memory.

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The Challenge of Pizza Box Recycling

Pizza boxes are recyclable, but grease and cheese make them less so and can cause a whole batch of recyclable material to be diverted to the trash. Image credit: Dreamstime

From Live Science:

Many people assume that pizza boxes are recyclable. In fact, most boxes have recycling symbols on them and are traditionally made from corrugated cardboard. They are, in and of themselves, recyclable.

However, what makes parts of them non-recyclable is the hot, tasty treat that comes inside them, specifically, the grease and cheese from pizza that soil the cardboard.

So there you have it, pizza boxes that are tarnished with food, or any paper product that is stained with grease or food, are not recyclable — unless you remove the tainted portions.

But why is this? And what are the implications for the general, pizza-loving public? Mmm, pizza.

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Spotting Future Gamblers In Kindergarten

From Time Magazine:

It's disturbing to picture your kindergartner in a casino, but maybe you ought to try. American kids are born into a culture that loves its gambling, and the passion is only growing, as financial hardships sweeten the ever alluring prospect of a lucky break. The danger, of course, is that gambling can lead to compulsive gambling — and compulsive gambling can be a life wrecker. Now, a new study in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine suggests that it may be possible to spot the people most at risk when they're as young as 5 years old.

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Resistance To Flu Drug Widespread In U.S.: Study

A flu shot is prepared in Chicago, Illinois. US President Barack Obama has vowed to fight for his budget proposals that include investments in clean energy and healthcare as he faces a tough battle moving the measures through Congress. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Tim Boyle)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Virtually all cases of the most common strain of flu circulating in the United States now resist the main drug used to treat it, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Monday.

CDC researchers said 98 percent of all flu samples from the H1N1 strain were resistant to Roche AG's Tamiflu, a pill that can both treat flu and prevent infection. Four patients infected with the resistant strain have died, including two children.

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Curtains And Pyjamas To Become Weapons Against Superbugs

Intensive cleaning takes place on a hospital ward Photo: Rii Schroer

From The Telegraph:

Hospital curtains, bedding, and even patients' pyjamas could become weapons in the war against hospital superbugs.

A study has found that an antimicrobial treatment, which could be incorporated into dozens of surfaces on the ward, can kill MRSA on contact, reducing the risk of infection between patients.

Scientists hailed the discovery by researchers from Imperial College London as a "very significant" step in the war on hospital superbugs which kill 10,000 people a year.

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Scientists See Merit In Sharks' Many Teeth

Scientists have looked into the fearsome jaws of sharks and seen a possible benefit to humans: many rows of teeth. Kat Wade/the Chronicle

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Ever wonder why sharks get several rows of teeth and people only get one? Some geneticists did, and their discovery could spur work to help adults one day grow new teeth when their own wear out.

A single gene appears to be in charge, preventing additional tooth formation in species destined for a limited set.

When the scientists bred mice that lacked that gene, the rodents developed extra teeth next to their first molars - backups like sharks and other non-mammals grow, University of Rochester scientists reported Thursday.

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Lunacy And The Full Moon

Courtesy of Ninomy at Wikimedia

From Scientific American:

Does a full moon really trigger strange behavior?

Across the centuries, many a person has uttered the phrase “There must be a full moon out there” in an attempt to explain weird happenings at night. Indeed, the Roman goddess of the moon bore a name that remains familiar to us today: Luna, prefix of the word “lunatic.” Greek philosopher Aristotle and Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the brain was the “moistest” organ in the body and thereby most susceptible to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides. Belief in the “lunar lunacy effect,” or “Transylvania effect,” as it is sometimes called, persisted in Europe through the Middle Ages, when humans were widely reputed to transmogrify into werewolves or vampires during a full moon.

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From Stem Cells To New Organs: Scientists Cross Threshold In Regenerative Medicine

Computer-rendered image of human organs. New research suggests that bioengineered replacement organs may be closer thanks to a newly developed matrix on which stem cells can form a three-dimensional organ. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2009) — By now, most people have read stories about how to "grow your own organs" using stem cells is just a breakthrough away. Despite the hype, this breakthrough has been elusive.

A new report brings bioengineered organs a step closer, as scientists from Stanford and New York University Langone Medical Center describe how they were able to use a "scaffolding" material extracted from the groin area of mice on which stem cells from blood, fat, and bone marrow grew. This advance clears two major hurdles to bioengineered replacement organs, namely a matrix on which stem cells can form a three-dimensional organ and transplant rejection.

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Microsoft Vista Voted Tech World's Top "Fiasco"

From Scientific American:

It's official, Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system gets the prize for being the most overhyped, underperforming information and communication technology (ICT) project. Windows Vista garnered 5,222 of 6,043 votes (86 percent) entered via the Web to snag top honors in the first-ever Fiasco Awards announced in Barcelona, Spain, today, beating out other contenders, including Google's Lively virtual world, the One Laptop per Child computer (developed by the Nicholas Negroponte-chaired One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc.) and Second Life. Second prize went to SAGA, the oft-malfunctioning administration and academic management system developed by Spain's Catalan Education Department for public school teachers in Catalonia.

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Microsoft's Glimpse Of The Future

From CNET:

REDMOND, Wash.--At Microsoft's TechFest, it takes a little imagination to see how the research technologies might eventually come to market.

A new video from Microsoft shows in an elegant, if utopian way, what it might look like if all of those gadgets came together several years hence. Earlier on Friday, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop showed the video in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

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Intelligent Use Of The Earth's Heat

From E! Science News:

Geothermal energy is increasingly contributing to the power supply world wide. Iceland is world-leader in expanding development of geothermal utilization: in recent years the annual power supply here doubled to more than 500 MW alone in the supply of electricity. And also in Germany, a dynamic development is to be seen: over 100 MW of heat are currently being provided through geothermal energy. Alone in the region of Travale, in the pioneering country Italy, a team of european scientists have localizied geothermal reservoirs, holding a potential comparable to the effectiveness of 1.000 wind power plants. This is one of the results presented at the international final conference of the project „I-GET" (Integrated Geophysical Exploration Technologies for deep fractured geothermal systems) in Potsdam. The aim of this European Union project, in which seven european nations participated, was the development of cutting-edge geophysical methods with which potential geothermal reservoirs can be safely explored and directly tapped.

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reCaptcha: How To Turn Blather Into Books

Von Ahn: The professor invented reCaptcha in 2007. Since then, its users have translated 5 billion words. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Ten seconds of work has digitized libraries, whether the amateur translators know it or not.

When you buy a concert ticket on Ticketmaster, post something for sale on Craigslist, or poke an old friend on Facebook, you may not know it, but you’re helping to put millions of books online in a vast free library.

To access these websites, you must decipher two squiggly words to prove that you’re not a computer program designed to spam the site. Once it knows you’re human, the website lets you continue.

Those two decoded words don’t disappear, however. In fact, your brain has deciphered words that had baffled the scanning software used for an enormous project to digitize every public domain book in the world.

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Study Finds Sunny Side of Eggs

From Live Science:

When it comes to public consumption of nutrition studies, an old adage applies: Everything in moderation.

The latest study looking at what you should eat involves eggs. Despite decades of advice that the cholesterol in eggs is bad for you, researchers in Canada now report evidence that eggs might reduce another heart disease risk factor — high blood pressure.

The scientists found egg proteins that, in laboratory simulations of the human digestive process, seem to act like a popular group of prescription medications in lowering blood pressure. The findings are detailed in the Feb. 11 issue of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

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Is the Press Misreporting the Environment Story?

Melted water runs over the Greenlandic Icecap. Uriel Sinai / Getty

From Time Magazine:

When I tell other journalists that I cover the environment, I usually get the same reaction: you're really lucky. (I'm assuming they don't just mean because I still have a job.) After years on the back pages and the back burner, the environment has emerged as one of the major issues facing the globe today, with the attendant media attention to match. But what keeps it perpetually fresh as a subject is its scope — climate change touches on science, Washington, business, society, geopolitics, even religion, and the reporting does as well. The sheer complexity means there's always something to write, blog or podcast about — as my editor likes to remind me. Frequently.

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Fragments of Ancient Egyptian Papyrus Found

3,000-Year-Old Document. For 100 years, archaeologists have been trying to piece together fragments to this 3,000-year-old document, written on a papyrus stem. The Egyptian document enumerates all the Egyptian kings and when they ruled. Newly found fragments to the document should help in piecing together the puzzle. Museo Egizio, Torino

From Discovery News:

Feb. 27, 2009 -- Some newly recovered papyrus fragments may finally help solve a century-old puzzle, shedding new light on ancient Egyptian history.

Found stored between two sheets of glass in the basement of the Museo Egizio in Turin, the fragments belong to a 3,000-year-old unique document, known as the Turin Kinglist.

Like many ancient Egyptian documents, the Turin Kinglist is written on the stem of a papyrus plant.

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Bye, Tech: Dealing With Data Rot

Image: Audio recordings of 40-year-old interviews with rock stars were transferred to new tape to preserve them, but the newer tapes are disintegrating. (CBS)

From CBS News:

As Storage Media And Software Applications Advance Or Die Out, Years Of Precious Memories Are Threatened

(CBS) Sooner or later, it affects every audio recording, video recording and computer file. Contributor David Pogue looks at what happens when technological progress leaves your most precious memories and recordings behind.
Lydia Robertson is a filmmaker. But you've probably never seen her first movie, the one she made in high school.

"It's called 'The Chicken Lady,' a horror-comedy," she said. "It's the most ridiculous film ever made. It might be one of the worst films ever made! But we learned a lot, and that was the point."

Trouble is, she hasn't seen it, either.

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Lower Increases In Global Temperatures Could Lead To Greater Impacts Than Previously Thought, Study Finds

The "burning embers diagram": Risks from climate change by reason for concern, 2001 (left) compared with 2007. (Credit: Smith et al., PNAS)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2009) — A new study by scientists updating some of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 Third Assessment Report finds that even a lower level of increase in average global temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions could cause significant problems in five key areas of global concern.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is titled "Assessing Dangerous Climate Change Through an Update of the IPCC 'Reasons for Concern."

Read more ....

Complexity of Spit Revealed

From Live Science:

Saliva tells a lot about a person these days, ranging from ancestry to criminal connections. But drool still holds many mysteries, including what the heck lives in it and why each of us has our own salivary signature.

A new study tries to clean this up a bit, revealing that there is a lot of bacterial diversity living in the moisture in our mouths, both within and among individuals.

Read more ....

Spacecraft Sees Spectacular Solar Eclipse on Moon

A still of the Kaguya/Selene probe's high-definition video of the solar eclipse seen from the moon. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

From FOX News:

There was a solar eclipse earlier this month — but it wasn't visible anywhere on Earth.

Rather, a Japanese space probe in orbit around the moon got spectacular high-definition video of the sun being blocked — by the Earth, producing an otherworldly "diamond-ring" eclipse.

It may be only the third time such an eclipse has been viewed by terrestrials, human or otherwise.

An American lunar lander got a blurry snapshot of a solar eclipse in 1967, and two years later Apollo 12 astronauts got treated to the same thing on their way back from the moon.

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The Big Melt

From Popular Science:

A two-year polar survey finds ice sheets melting faster than expected, and more grim news.

Less than two weeks before scientists from around the world gather in Copenhagen to issue recommendations for a new global climate-change treaty, the results from the two-year International Polar Year survey have arrived. They are not pleasant.

Here's a quick summary: The Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves are melting more quickly than we realized. Year-round Arctic sea-ice levels reached their lowest levels in 30 years, which is how long we've been keeping records. The seawater beneath Antarctica is freshening, which indicates ice melt. Global ocean currents are beginning to shift. "We're beginning to get hints of change in ocean circulation; that'll have a dramatic impact on the global climate system," IPY director David Carlson told reporters in Geneva.

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Do These Mysterious Stones Mark The Site Of The Garden Of Eden?

The site has been described as 'extraordinary' and 'the most important' site in the world

From The Daily Mail:

For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.

The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.

Read more ....

Mega-Laser To Probe Secrets Of Exoplanets

Artist's impression of a gas giant planet circling the star Gliese 436. The new laser will investigate the internal chemistry of these vast planets (Image: NASA)

From New Scientist:

AN AWESOME laser facility, built to provide fusion data for nuclear weapons simulations, will soon be used to probe the secrets of extrasolar planets.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was declared ready for action earlier this month. Its vital statistics reveal it to be a powerful beast: its ultraviolet lasers can deliver 500 trillion watts in a 20-nanosecond burst. That power opens up new scientific possibilities.
It can deliver 500 trillion watts in a 20-nanosecond burst - opening up new scientific possibilities

For instance, Raymond Jeanloz, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, will use the device to recreate the conditions inside Jupiter and other larger planets, where pressures can be 1000 times as great as those at the centre of the Earth.

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HIV Is Evolving To Evade Human Immune Responses

Rendering of HIV infecting a cell. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2009) — HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system, an international study led by Oxford University has shown. The findings, published in Nature, demonstrate the challenge involved in developing a vaccine for HIV that keeps pace with the changing nature of the virus.

‘The extent of the global HIV epidemic gives us a unique opportunity to examine in detail the evolutionary struggle being played out in front of us between an important virus and humans,’ says lead researcher Professor Philip Goulder of the Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research at Oxford University.

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Writing Math On The Web

From American Scientist:

The Web would make a dandy blackboard if only we could scribble an equation.

The world wide web was invented at a physics laboratory, and the first users were scientists and engineers. You might think, therefore, that this new channel of communication would be especially well adapted to scientific discourse—that it would facilitate the expression of ideas like


or

If only it were so! The truth is, the basic protocols of the Web offer almost no support for rendering mathematics or other specialized notations such as chemical formulas. Presenting such material on a Web page often requires software add-ons or plug-ins to be installed by the author or the reader or both. Fine-tuning the display of mathematics can be a fussy and finicky process, not much easier than formatting equations with a typewriter. The results sometimes render differently—or not at all—in various Web browsers. This is a sad situation: As the Web has evolved into a thriving marketplace and playground, the scholarly and scientific community that created the technology has not been well served.

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The Shoe Fits! 1.5 Million-Year-Old Human Footprints Found

A photograph of the footprint's upper footprint surface showing good definition of the toe pads; the second toe is partially obscured by the third toe. Credit: Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University

From Live Science:

Early humans had feet like ours and left lasting impressions in the form of 1.5 million-year-old footprints, some of which were made by feet that could wear a size 9 men's shoe.

The findings at a Northern Kenya site represent the oldest evidence of modern-human foot anatomy. They also help tell an ancestral story of humans who had fully transitioned from tree-dwellers to land walkers.

"In a sense, it's like putting flesh on the bones," said John Harris, an anthropologist with the Koobi Fora Field School of Rutgers University. "The prints are so well preserved ."

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Are You Out There, ET? Searches For Habitable Planets Are About To Get A Boost

UP, UP AND AWAY: The Kepler satellite, scheduled to take flight March 6, is lifted for attachment to its launch rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Kepler will look for Earth-like planets that may be hospitable to life. NASA

From Scientific American:

Next week brings a milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life with the scheduled launch Friday of NASA's Kepler satellite. The mission, named for 16th- and 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, will study a group of stars for three-plus years in search of subtle, periodic dips in stellar brightness—the telltale signs of planetary orbits. Although more than 300 planets outside the solar system have already been found using this method, among other techniques, Kepler's strength will lie in its instruments' sensitivity to smaller, cooler planets more hospitable to life and more like our own.

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'Eye of God': The nebula that watches our tiny world from 700 light years away

The 'eye of god' - also known as the Helix nebula - is so huge, it would take a
beam of light two-and-a-half years to cross it

From The Daily Mail:

It stares down at us from the depths of space, watching our tiny world from 700 light years away.

Scientists have nicknamed the image - captured by a giant telescope on the Chilean mountains - the eye of God.

In fact, it shows the death throes of a star similar to our sun, before it retires as a 'white dwarf' believed to be the final evolutionary state of a medium-sized star.

Read more ....

Humans Facing Huge Population Cull If Global Temperatures Rise 4C In Next 100 Years

Survival ... Experts say that humans won't be able to handle
the heat if temperatures rise a predicted 4C / AFP

From News.com:

ALLIGATORS bask off the English coast, the Sahara desert stretches into Europe and 10 per cent of humans are left.

Science fiction?

No, this is the doomsday prediction if global temperatures make a predicted rise of 4C in the next 100 years. Some fear it could happen by 2050.

Read more ....

My Comment: I am skeptical.

Happy Birthday, Doomsday Seed Vault!

The Entrance to the Vault: Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust

From Popsci.com:

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to preserve the world's crops, turns one year old today

What do you get a seed bank for its birthday? More seeds, of course.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault celebrates its first birthday today with the addition of 90,000 seed samples. The vault serves as a heavy-duty backup for gene banks around the world, which strive to save humanity (and our food supply) from the scourges of monoculture and environmental catastrophes.

The Norwegian government meant business when it built the vault. They tunneled 400 feet into an Arctic mountain to protect the pips, which are guarded behind two security doors and two airlocks. The underground vault is designed to weather just about every doomsday scenario, including terrorists, nuclear war, and floods of biblical proportions. It was featured in an award-winning low-budget science fiction film last year: "Frozen Seed."

Read more ....

Planet Hidden In Hubble Archives

A new image processing technique reveals something not before seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image taken 11 years ago: A faint planet (arrows), the outermost of three discovered with ground-based telescopes last year around the young star HR 8799. Credit: D. Lafrenière et al., ApJ Letters

From Science News:

A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture

Like tiny jewels not yet uncovered, a trove of previously unknown extrasolar planets — perhaps as many as 100 — await discovery in a vast archive of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the results of a new search technique suggest.

Using the new method, astronomers can more precisely model the amount and distribution of scattered light produced by young nearby stars suspected of spawning planets, and then subtract the light from images of those stars. Once the glare of the light from the parent stars is removed, young Jupiter-mass planets that emit faint but detectable amounts of heat may show up in images already taken by Hubble’s near-infrared camera.

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Lifestyle Changes Could Prevent A Third Of Cancers: Report

From The CBC News:

An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure when it comes to cancer, according to an exhaustive international report.

The report by the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund was released Thursday in London, England.

It calls on governments to legislate healthy living, such as:

* Mandate walking and cycling paths that encourage physical activity.
* Support policies for better-priced, healthier food choices for consumers, such as reformulating processed foods to have less sugar, salt and fat.
* Ban ads for sugary drinks and unhealthy foods aimed at children.
* Require schools to provide built-in exercise opportunities for children.

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Fungus Threatens Prehistoric Cave Drawings

Photo: Part of Lascaux famed cave drawings in southwest France, shown last summer. (AP Photo/Pierre Andrieu, Pool)

From CBS News:

Scientists Meet To Try And Save Lascaux’s Murals In France At Risk Due To Global Warming.

(AP) Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened Thursday in Paris to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus stains - aggravated by global warming - that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings.

Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.

Marc Gaulthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee, said the challenges facing the group are vast and global warming now poses an added problem.

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Carbon Dioxide Drop And Global Cooling Caused Antarctic Glacier To Form

Projection of the what the first Antarctic ice sheet might have looked like as the global climate cooled about 33.5 million years ago. Antarctica is in gray, with the ice sheet shown in meters of ice thickness. The ice sheet is continental in scale, but somewhat smaller than today. The estimate is based on prior modeling work of DeConto and Pollard and is supported by this new data study. (Credit: DeConto & Pollard / Nature)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2009) — Global climate rapidly shifted from a relatively ice-free world to one with massive ice sheets on Antarctica about 34 million years ago. What happened? What changed? A team of scientists led by Yale geologists offers a new perspective on the nature of changing climatic conditions across this greenhouse-to-icehouse transition — one that refutes earlier theories and has important implications for predicting future climate changes.

Detailed in the February 27 issue of Science, their data disproves a long-held idea that massive ice growth in the Antarctic was accompanied by little to no global temperature change.

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Introducing The Gel-Filled Army Helmet That Will Crush Bullets As They Penetrate It

Richard Palmer, CEO of Blue Divine Ltd, with 'D3O' shock-absorbing material which will be used to line new British Army helmets

From The Daily Mail:

On the face of it a layer of orange jelly may not sound the best way to protect a soldier's head from high velocity bullets and shrapnel.

But the British Army's standard-issue combat helmet is set to be upgraded with a liner made from gooey miracle gel, which responds to a sudden impact by locking instantly into a solid form - absorbing huge amounts of energy harmlessly.

A UK-based technology company was today celebrating a £100,000 contract from the Ministry of Defence to develop its D3O shock-absorbing gel to help save the lives of British troops fighting on the frontline in Afghanistan.

Read more ....

My Comment: The use of nanotechnology at a basic level.

Moon and Venus Converge Friday Night

The scene about two hours after sunset from near Phoenix, Arizona on Friday, Feb. 27, 2009. Simulated sky map made using Starry Night Software.

From Live Science:

It has been a superb winter for viewing the queen of the planets, Venus. February marks the pinnacle of its evening visibility as it stands like a sequined showgirl nearly halfway up in the western sky at sunset.

You can't miss it. Just look west after sunset. In fact, you can see it during the day if you know where to look. Find it just after sunset one evening, then scan around the same spot just before sunset the next day.

Read more ....

Europe Names Crew For Mars 'Mission'

Red Mars from Spirit (Image from NASA)

From Breitart/AFP:

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Friday named a Frenchman and a German who will join four Russians in an innovative 105-day isolation experiment to test whether humans can one day fly to Mars.

From March 31, the six "crew" will be locked inside a special facility in Moscow that replicates conditions of a space trip to Mars.

The simulation will be followed by a 520-day experiment, starting later this year, that would last as long as a real mission to Mars.

The two Europeans are Oliver Knickel, 28, a mechanical engineer in the German army, and Cyrille Fournier, 40, a captain with Air France who flies A320 airliners, ESA said in a press release.

Read more ....

Warnings Issued On Nanotechnology

Photo: One example of nanotechnology is this Kevlar-treated fabric developed for the military in Cambridge, Mass. The coating is extremely thin. ELISE AMENDOLA AP

From The Houston Chronicle:

Some say time's right to assess its environmental impact.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may soon act to impose the first regulations specific to nanotechnology, a move that could have a significant impact in Houston.

Already, Canada has signaled its intent to require companies working with nanomaterials — designed at the molecular level to have special properties, such as enhanced strength — to report what materials they are working with and in what quantity.

Read more ....

Jurassic Web

Screenshot of a web page in 1996 (Image from Tulane)

From Slate:

The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—"Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

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Additional Evidence That Potato Chips Should Be Eaten Only In Moderation

Acrylamide, found in foods such as potato chips and french fries, may increase the risk of heart disease. Acrylamide has been linked previously to nervous system disorders and possibly to cancer. (Credit: iStockphoto/Alexander Zhiltsov)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2009) — A new study published in the March 2009 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Marek Naruszewicz and colleagues from Poland suggests that acrylamide from foods may increase the risk of heart disease. Acrylamide has been linked previously to nervous system disorders and possibly to cancer.

After ingesting large amounts of potato chips providing about 157 micrograms of acrylamide daily for four weeks, the participants had adverse changes in oxidized LDL, inflammatory markers and antioxidants that help the body eliminate acrylamide—all of which may increase the risk of heart disease.

Read more ....

Sex Goes Way Back, Fossil Find Shows

The armored fish, Materpiscis attenboroughi, may have given birth to its young tail-first, similar to some sharks and rays. Credit: Museum Victoria.

From Live Science:

Remains of embryos entombed in their fish mothers' wombs for 380 million years have been found in fossils from an ancient rock outcrop in Western Australia. The finding is a big deal because it suggests that sex goes way back.

The prehistoric fish, called placoderms, are found at the base of the vertebrate evolutionary tree (in a large group we humans also belong to), so it now looks like sexual intercourse, and the mating behaviors that go along with it, were more widespread in these ancient animals than previously thought, said the scientists who made the discovery.

Read more ....

The Weirdest New Source of Alternative Energy: Underwater Vibrations

A prototype underwater generator shows the fluid dynamics that will produce power from slow-moving currents using metal rods suspending near the ocean or river floor. Image courtesy of NOAA

From Discover Magazine:

Researchers say this longtime bane of offshore drilling is more cost-efficient than wind and solar.

The latest frontier for renewable energy is the ocean floor. A novel method of generating power uses a network of metal rods to tap into the currents that flow along the bottom of the ocean (and along riverbeds as well). Water swirls as it flows past the rods, making them vibrate. This phenomenon is painfully familiar to oil companies, which spend large sums of money minimizing such vibrations in order to stabilize offshore drilling equipment. “Everyone was obsessed with suppressing this motion,” says Michael Bernitsas, the University of Michigan engineer who developed the technology. “At some point it dawned on me that maybe we can do the opposite: Enhance it and harness the energy.”

Read more ....

Ice Ages and Sea Level

Figure 1: Orbital Parameters: Eccentricity, Precession and Obliquity- click for larger image
(Image from Watts Up With That)

From Watts Up With That?

The Earth is currently in an interglacial period of an ice age that started about two and a half million years ago. The Earth’s current ice age is primarily caused by Antarctica drifting over the South Pole 30 million years ago. This meant that a large area of the Earth’s surface changed from being very low-albedo ocean to highly reflective ice and snow. The first small glaciers were formed in Antarctica perhaps as long ago as 40 million years. They expanded gradually until, about 20 million years ago, a permanent ice sheet covered the whole Antarctic continent. About 10 million years later, glaciers appeared on the high mountains of Alaska, and about 3 million years ago, ice sheets developed on lower ground in high northerly latitudes.

Read more ....

Galaxy May Be Full Of 'Earths,' Alien Life

Photo: An artist's impression shows a planet passing in front of its parent star. Such events are called transits.

From CNN:

(CNN) -- As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.

Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."

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How To Make Your Computer Boot Faster

(Photograph by Kyoko Hamada)

From Popular Mechanics:

Why can’t a computers start up like a television? In short, it is all about the operating system. And contrary to common sense, the newer the operating system the longer it can take. But you can do something about it. Here are tips to get your tortoise-like boot time to hop like a bunny.

Why can’t a computer be more like a television? When you push the power button on a TV, it just turns on. Computers, on the other hand, boot—as in, they take so long to get started that you want to stick your boot into them.

You would think that the march of technological progress would have reduced boot times over the years, but newer operating systems can take longer—Microsoft Vista actually tends to boot more slowly than its predecessor, Windows XP. (Microsoft claims its next-generation operating system, Windows 7, should provide drastic improvements in boot time.)

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The Evolution of Human Aggression

From Live Science:

Everyone has experienced anger at one point in their lives and some of us — males mostly, going by statistics — have channeled that anger into violence, perhaps by throwing a punch during a hockey game or after too many beers at the bar.

Then there's aggression on a much more sinister scale, in the form of murder, wars and genocide. Trying to understand what fuels the different levels of human aggression, from fisticuffs to nation-on-nation battle, has long preoccupied human biologists.

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Genetic Discovery Could Lead To Advances In Dental Treatment

A normal mouse tooth on the left, where ameloblast cells that produce enamel are glowing in red. On the right is a tooth with the Ctip2 gene deleted, and little enamel has been able to form. (Credit: Image courtesy of Oregon State University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2009) — Researchers have identified the gene that ultimately controls the production of tooth enamel, a significant advance that could some day lead to the repair of damaged enamel, a new concept in cavity prevention, and restoration or even the production of replacement teeth.

The gene, called Ctip2, is a "transcription factor" that was already known to have several functions - in immune response, and the development of skin and the nervous system. Scientists can now add tooth development to that list.

The findings were just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Prosecution Alters Pirate Bay Charges in Bid to Win Conviction

From Wired News:

STOCKHOLM – The Pirate Bay prosecutor altered the copyright-infringement charges Tuesday to make it easier to convict the four defendants who co-founded the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker.

Moments later, Hollywood investigators testified about the ease with which they obtained copyright works using the 5-year-old site.

But at the outset of Tuesday's proceedings, the prosecutor, Håkan Roswall, announced a alteration of the charges, which legal scholars suggested would make it more likely to win a conviction.

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Top 10 Ig Nobels: The Best of Science's Strangest Prize

From Popular Mechanics:

A large portion of scientific research remains forever off the public radar. A select few studies deliver results that reverberate in the scientific community and make their way to textbooks. Then there are those research efforts that, as one group puts it, represent "achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced." Every year the Annals of Improbable Research highlights this last group with the Ig Nobel, an award for the top engineering solutions, science products and peer-reviewed papers that, according to the editors, "make you laugh, then make you think." We looked back at 18 years of the prizes to bring you our 10 favorite Ig Nobels of all time.

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On the Trail of Osama bin Laden: Scientists Use Biological Tracking Models to Pursue America's Most Wanted

Regional analysis of city islands within a 20-km radius
of bin Laden’s last known location (red dot).

From Popular Mechanics:

The United States military's attempts to track down Osama bin Laden in the seven-plus years since the World Trade Center attacks have been notoriously fruitless. But a new study suggests the way to find America's most wanted criminal is to treat him like an endangered species. In the study, released in MIT International Review, University of California-Los Angeles geographers Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew modeled the terrorist leader's possible whereabouts by using the same techniques conservationists use to track the dispersal of animals and likely migration patterns. Using a variety of criteria specific to Osama bin Laden's needs—electricity, room for his entourage, health problems—the study isolates three buildings in the remote Pakistani town of Parachinar in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as the most likely hideout. (The paper was submitted to the FBI before it went to the MIT journal and, according the FBI, it was forwarded to the appropriate personnel and is part of an active investigation.)

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Just How Fat Are We?

Big Little Kids: Obesity rates in Americans ages 12 to 19 have more than tripled since 1980.

From Popsci.com:

Headlines fret about the growing obesity epidemic, but what does it mean? How did it happen? And what are the costs?

Obesity, defined as a body-mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, is not equally distributed across the U.S. Check out this map to find out which state is the fattest (hint: it's the namesake of mud pie), which is the thinnest (think Coors Light), and which spends the most money on obesity-related health care (its governor pumps iron).

Read on, after the break, for more of America's (and the world's) fat facts.

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