Return of the Once-Rare Beaver? Not in My Yard.

CONSTRUCTION AREA A beaver dam in Boxborough Station Wildlife Management Area in Massachusetts has helped create wetlands. Travis Dove for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

CONCORD, Mass. — The dozens of public works officials, municipal engineers, conservation agents and others who crowded into a meeting room here one recent morning needed help. Property in their towns was flooding, they said. Culverts were clogged. Septic tanks were being overwhelmed.

“We have a huge problem,” said David Pavlik, an engineer for the town of Lexington, where dams built by beavers have sent water flooding into the town’s sanitary sewers. “We trapped them,” he said. “We breached their dam. Nothing works. We are looking for long-term solutions.”

Mary Hansen, a conservation agent from Maynard, said it starkly: “There are beavers everywhere.”

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The Web Back In 1996-1997

From Pingdom:

Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2008, looking 12 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience.

To give you some perspective, in 1996…

* Google.com didn’t exist yet.
* In January 1996 there were only 100,000 websites, compared to more than 160 million in 2008.
* The web browser of choice was Netscape Navigator, followed by Microsoft Internet Explorer as a distant second (Microsoft launched IE 3 in 1996).
* Most people used dial-up Internet connections with mighty speeds ranging from 28.8Kbps to 33.6Kbps. Highly modern 56Kbps modems would arrive in 1997.
* People had only recently started to switch from 640×480 to 800×600 screen resolutions.

We have used the good old WayBack Machine (a.k.a the Internet Archive) to track down screenshots of what websites looked like back in 1996-97.

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Hat Tip: Geek Press

NASA Will Try To Launch Space Shuttle Wednesday

The space shuttle Endeavour sits on Launch Pad 39-A hours after being scrubbed due a hydrogen leak Saturday morning, June 13, 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven astronauts were scheduled to liftoff on a trip to the international space station. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA will try to launch space shuttle Endeavour again Wednesday, after repairing a hydrogen gas leak that thwarted the first attempt.

Top officials decided Monday to bump an unmanned moon mission so Endeavour could have another shot at flying to the international space station. The delayed moon mission is NASA's first in a decade and is critical to the space agency's long-term effort to return humans to the lunar surface.

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500th Astronaut Heads For Space

From Scientific American:

A little-noticed but historic milestone will be reached this week when the 500th person ever to fly in space blasts off. The moment will come whenever NASA's shuttle Endeavour finally launches to continue building the international space station. Endeavour's crew of seven will include four rookie astronauts, making their first trip into orbit. But the crew agreed that former naval commander Chris Cassidy, 39, who has led combat missions in Afghanistan, will take the honour.

Endeavour's crew of seven will include four rookie astronauts, making their first trip into orbit. But the crew agreed that former naval commander Chris Cassidy, 39, who has led combat missions in Afghanistan, will take the honour.

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Carbon Nanotubes May Suppress Human Immunity

Artist's impression of a carbon nanotube. Image: Digital Art/Corbis

From The Guardian:

The findings from animal research suggest workers involved in the manufacture of the materials may be at risk

Inhaling carbon nanotubes can suppress the immune system, according to scientists. The findings raise possible health concerns for those working in the manufacture of the materials.

Carbon nanotubes are rolled-up sheets of graphite thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Because they are immensely strong and are good electric conductors, they are poised for use in a wide range of fields from engineering to medicine. However, there are concerns over the similar shape of nanotubes and asbestos fibres, which are known to cause damage to the lungs in conditions such as mesothelioma.

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New Test Reveals Parthenon's Hidden Colour

The Parthenon would once have been much more gaudy (Image: Roy Rainford/Robert Harding/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

Images of the Parthenon as a stark, white structure set against an azure sky will have to change. Researchers have found the first evidence of coloured paints covering its elaborate sculptures.

The temple, which tops the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, dates from the 5th century BC. Its carved statues and friezes show scenes from Greek mythology and are some of the most impressive sculptures to survive from ancient Greece.

Pigments are known to have adorned other Greek statues and temples, but despite 200 years of searching, archaeologists had found no trace of them on the Parthenon's sculptures.

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Five Discoveries Made While Dreaming

From The BBC:

Scientists believe that a nap can boost creative thought and help problem-solving. So what major breakthroughs in science and the arts have been made during sleep?

The old adage "I'll sleep on it" may have some truth in it, after all.

A study by researchers at the University of California San Diego has concluded that problems are more likely to be solved after a period of dreamy (rapid eye movement) sleep.

Scientists believe so-called REM sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when we are awake or in non-dreamy sleep.

Anecdotal evidence from some key figures in the arts and science suggests there could be some truth in this.

Here are some examples of major discoveries made in dreams.

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Some Wine Can Improve If Stored In A Carton Rather Than In A Bottle

From The Economist:

AMONG snobs and sommeliers, nothing can compete with wine in a glass bottle sealed with a cork stopper. Yet as cheap alternatives to cork have become available and high fuel prices have made transporting glass more expensive, some winemakers have adopted an alternative method of storage: putting wine in cartons, like those used for milk, made from layers of polythene, paper and aluminium foil. Admittedly, serving wine from a carton lacks the aesthetic appeal of a bottle, and cartons have also been criticised for allowing flavour-destroying oxygen to seep in during storage. A new study, however, reveals that although the criticism of wine cartons for allowing oxidation is valid, they have the advantage of soaking up chemicals that can ruin the flavour in other ways.

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Evolution Can Occur In Less Than 10 Years, Guppy Study Finds

Guppies are small fresh-water fish that biologists have studied for long. (Credit: Paul Bentzen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2009) — How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside's Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology.

Gordon and her colleagues studied guppies — small fresh-water fish biologists have studied for long — from the Yarra River, Trinidad. They introduced the guppies into the nearby Damier River, in a section above a barrier waterfall that excluded all predators. The guppies and their descendents also colonized the lower portion of the stream, below the barrier waterfall, that contained natural predators.

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Top 10 Amazing Moon Facts

From Live Science:

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), slated for launch this week, will map the moon's surface from orbit with unprecedented detail, capable even of imaging the tracks that lunar rovers left behind.

Also heading moonward is the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will slam into the Shackleton Crater on the south pole of the moon in a few months and kick up material that could have been in shadow for 2 billion years. Another probe will slam into the moon a few minutes later at a different location.

It's all an effort to learn more about what the moon is made of, whether there is water ice in the crater, and therefore where to send U.S. astronauts in a planned return by 2020.

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Herschel Telescope 'Opens Eyes'

Key features on the Herschel space observatory. The inset compares Herschel with Hubble and the future James Webb Space Telescope.

From The BBC:

Europe's new billion-euro Herschel space observatory, launched in May, has achieved a critical milestone.

The telescope has opened the hatch that has been protecting its sensitive instruments from contamination.

The procedure allowed light collected by Herschel's giant 3.5m mirror to flood its supercold instrument chamber, or cryostat, for the first time.

The observatory's quest is to study how stars and galaxies form, and how they evolve through cosmic time.

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Crops Under Stress As Temperatures Fall

Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, observes Christopher Booker.

From The Telegraph:

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.

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My Comment: I have a farm in Southern Quebec .... we are 3 weeks behind in our planting.

How The World's Greatest Golfer Lost His Game

Ralph Guldahl tees off in front of a large gallery during a 1940s Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia (Image: Augusta National / Getty Images)

From New Scientist:

In 1939, Ralph Guldahl was a giant in the game of golf. A towering figure on the links, the taciturn Texan seemingly came from nowhere to win successive US Opens in 1937 and 1938, and then the Masters in 1939. But after writing Groove Your Golf, a step-by-step guide for beginners, Guldahl never won another championship. "He went from being the being temporarily the best player in the world, to one who couldn't play at all," said fellow PGA champion Paul Runyan. The question that has haunted golfers ever since is: did too much thinking derail one of the sport's greatest talents?

"HOW can you hit and think at the same time?" the gnomic American baseball player Yogi Berra once asked. It's a question that has hung for decades over a forgotten great of golfing: a tall, shy Texan called Ralph Guldahl.

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My Comment: This still does not explain my (lousy) game.

NASA Builds World's Largest Space Parachute For Martian Landing

Parachute Diameter: 52 feet. (Photograph by NASA).

From Popular Mechanics:

To survive the thin Martian atmosphere, the 2000-plus-lb. Mars Science Laboratory rover will depend on the largest space parachute ever built. Here’s how NASA’s next chute will work.

When the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover lands on Mars in 2012, it will face a unique obstacle: With an Earth weight of nearly a ton (compared to about 400 pounds for previous Mars rovers) and a Mars weight of about 750 pounds, it is too massive for any existing space parachute. So to cushion its fall through the thin Martian atmosphere (which is less than 1 percent as dense as Earth’s), NASA engineers had to come up with something really big. The new parachute opens to a diameter of 52 feet, making it twice the size of any parachute ever flown beyond Earth.

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Argentine Glacier Advances Despite Global Warming

In this May 18, 2009 file photo, a tourist looks back through a cave on Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina's Patagonia region. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko, File)

From Yahoo News/AP:

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier is one of only a few ice fields worldwide that have withstood rising global temperatures.

Nourished by Andean snowmelt, the glacier constantly grows even as it spawns icebergs the size of apartment buildings into a frigid lake, maintaining a nearly perfect equilibrium since measurements began more than a century ago.

"We're not sure why this happens," said Andres Rivera, a glacialist with the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile. "But not all glaciers respond equally to climate change."

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Sonic Disruptions Create Artificial Black Hole

None More Black : Erlenmeyer fask. Check. Beaker. Check. Black hole. Ummm... courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

From Popsci.com:

After 30 years of trying, scientists create first-ever acoustic black hole.

Stephen Hawking once theorized that black holes would emit a stream of electromagnetic radiation named, what else, Hawking Radiation. However, in the 35 years since Hawking made his prediction, no one has observed the phenomena. Now, a team of Israeli scientists are working on a way to make their own Hawking Radiation by creating an artificial black hole in their lab.

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Can Microsoft's Bing Really Challenge Google?

From Times Online:

Bing will start to take on the mighty Google in the battle for web search supremacy this week; UK version a 'Beta test'

The two biggest names in technology are set to slug it out over the coming weeks in a $20 billion (£12 billion) battle for web supremacy. In one corner is Google, the dominant player in online searches; in the other is Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company. Microsoft is poised to launch Bing, a new search engine it says will give more useful results and end its rival’s hegemony.

If the software lives up to its maker’s claims, it will allow users to target their searches more accurately and do away with the millions of irrelevant results that many searches retrieve on Google. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine” because, it claims, it refines your search more carefully and offers a list of topics of related interest — something Google doesn’t do.

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How A Solar System 'Wobble' Could Make The Earth Crash Into Mars... But Don't Worry, It Won't Happen For 3 Billion Years

Scientists have discovered that small rocky planets like Earth are far less stable than the gas giants

From The Daily Mail:

A wobble in the precise clockwork of the solar system could see the Earth collide with Mercury, Mars or Venus, scientists predict.

But they say reassuringly that such a mishap is unlikely to occur for billions of years.

The orbits of the planets are not completely stable because of the gravitational interplay between them.

Over time, the system can become increasingly disordered - like a poorly balanced tyre that eventually tears itself off the axle of a moving car.

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What Really Prompts The Dog's 'Guilty Look'

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 14, 2009) — What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the “guilty look” in dogs in the recently published “Canine Behaviour and Cognition” Special Issue of Elsevier’s Behavioural Processes.

Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a “guilty look” to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.

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Marijuana Damages DNA and May Cause Cancer

From Live Science:

A lot of studies have shown marijuana is not good for you. It can fry the brain and contribute to psychosis. The latest one finds "convincing evidence" that marijuana smoke damages the genetic material DNA in ways that could increase the risk of cancer.

Toxic substances in tobacco smoke can damage DNA and increase the risk of lung and other cancers. However, there has been uncertainty over whether marijuana smoke has the same effect.

Scientists are especially concerned about the toxicity of acetaldehyde, present in both tobacco and marijuana. However, it has been difficult to measure DNA damage from acetaldehyde with conventional tests.

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