The World's 18 Strangest Buildings—And Why We Love Them

St. Mary Axe. City: London

From Popular Mechanics:

This July, the American Institute of Architects forecasted steep declines in nonresidential construction spending through 2010. Spending is projected to decrease by 16 percent this year and another 12 percent in 2010. With less money flowing through the industry, high-end design projects are likely to be scaled back; architects, builders and regular folk are opting for retrofits with more practical design. While the demand may be turning to minimal and frugal architecture, unusual design still holds a place for museums and other prominent locations, primarily because it is so effective at turning heads. Here are some of our favorite unusual designs for museums, offices, homes and libraries—and why they are so effective at drawing attention.

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A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels

Image: Solar farming: A photobioreactor houses photosynthetic microorganisms that use the energy in sunlight to make fuel and other chemicals from carbon dioxide and water. Credit: Joule Biotechnologies

From Technology Review:

A startup unveils a high-yield process for making fuel from carbon dioxide and sunlight.

A startup based in Cambridge, MA--Joule Biotechnologies--today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels.

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Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?

Villagers herd goats near windblown sand dunes in the Sahel region of Niger, North Africa. Vast swaths of North Africa are getting noticeably lusher due to warming temperatures, new satellite images show, suggesting a possible boon for people living in the driest part of the continent. Photograph by Pascal Maitre/NGS

From National Geographic:

Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.

Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.

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Honeybees Warn Of Risky Flowers

From The BBC:

Honeybees warn each other to steer clear of dangerous flowers where they might get killed by lurking predators.

Scientists made the discovery by placing dead bees upon flowers and then watching how newly arriving bees react to the danger.

Not only do the bees avoid the flowers, they then communicate the threat when they return to the hive via their well known waggle dance.

The discovery is published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

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Scientists Drill a Mile Into Active Deep Sea Fault Zone

From Wired Science:

In the first deep sea drilling expedition designed to gather seismic data, scientists have successfully drilled nearly a mile beneath the ocean floor into one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.

Researchers aboard the drilling vessel Chikyu — meaning “planet Earth” in Japanese — used a special technology called riser drilling to penetrate the upper portion of the Nankai Trough, an earthquake zone located about 36 miles southeast of Japan. By collecting rock samples and installing long-term monitoring devices, the geologists hope to understand how stress builds up in subduction zones like Nankai, where the Philippine Sea plate plate is sliding beneath the island of Japan.

Riser drilling involves encasing a deep sea drill in a giant metal tube, called a riser, that extends from the ship down to the drilling site, effectively bolting the ship to the sea floor. The researchers circulate lightly pressurized mud down through the drilling tube and back up through the riser.

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Large Hadron Collider 'Atom Smasher' Restart Delayed Yet Again

A large dipole magnet is lowered ito the tunnel in April last year marking the end of a crucial phase of the installation of the LHC. CERN/AFP/Getty Images

From The Independent:

Repairs to two small helium leaks in the world's largest atom smasher will delay the restart of the giant machine another month until November, a spokesman for the operator said.

James Gillies said an additional setback to the timing could result if some other problem is found, but the European Organisation for Nuclear Research is taking pains to make sure it avoids another major shutdown like the electrical failure of Sept. 19.

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Web Use Flattens As Behaviors Change

From CBS News/CNET:

The amount of time people spend online has not increased since last year, according to a report released by Forrester on Monday. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the reason for the trend: people's online behavior has changed.

"Engagement with the online channel has deepened," writes Forrester analyst Jackie Anderson. "Web users are becoming savvier and are better multi-taskers. Many know exactly where they want to go when they log in."

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From Sand to Silicon: the Making of a Chip

From Intel:

Illustrations - Making of a Chip

View this graphic presentation offering a high-level demonstration of the process for manufacturing a central processing unit (CPU), which operates in every PC today. Here you can catch a glimpse of some of the amazingly sophisticated work going on daily inside Intel's cutting-edge silicon manufacturing fabs.

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Actions Taken Over Next Decade To Demonstrate And Deploy Key Technologies Will Determine US Energy Future

From Science Digest:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2009) — With a sustained national commitment, the United States could obtain substantial energy-efficiency improvements, new sources of energy, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through the accelerated deployment of existing and emerging energy technologies, according to America's Energy Future: Technology And Transformation, the capstone report of the America's Energy Future project of the National Research Council.

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Mammals Beat Reptiles in Battle of Evolution

Crocodiles, and their cousins, alligators, were shown to be less diversified than certain groups of mammals, birds and fish. Credit: Michael Alfaro

From Live Science:

Mammals, birds and fish are among evolution’s "winners," while crocodiles and other reptiles have ended up on the losing end, a new study suggests.

"Our results indicate that mammals are special," said study leader Michael Alfaro of UCLA.

The research allowed scientists to calculate for the first time which animal lineages have exceptional rates of success. The so-called "winners" have more species in their group, which means they have successfully evolved and diversified into many types of environments. The losers have diversified less, even over the course of millions of years.

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Can the World's Fisheries Survive Our Appetites?

Photo: Scottish fisherman Mike Nichol on board the trawler Carina in the North Atlantic helps haul in the catch. Chris Furlong / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada, made a startling prediction in the pages of Science in 2006: if overfishing continued at then-current rates, he said, the world would essentially run out of seafood by 2048. Worm's bold analysis whipped up controversy in the usually pacific world of marine science — one colleague, Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, called the Science study "mindbogglingly stupid." But Worm held fast to his predictions: that the oceans had limits, and that marine species were declining so fast that they would eventually disappear.

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Firefox Surpasses 1 Billion Downloads

From The L.A. Times:

The free, open-source browser gets high marks for speed, efficiency, adaptability and user-friendliness. It is an achievement for a browser backed not by a corporation but a small nonprofit group.

The popular Firefox Web browser, developed by a grass-roots group, reached a major milestone Friday -- its billionth download.

The download counter rolled over the 1-billion mark early Friday, marking a feat for a browser that, unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Apple's Safari, is run by a nonprofit organization, Mozilla, with fewer than 250 employees.

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Update: Firefox Hits 1 Billion Downloads -- So What's Next? -- PC World

This Year's Mild Season In Tornado Alley Frustrates Scientists

From Yahoo News/AP:

DES MOINES, Iowa – This has been an unusually mild year in Tornado Alley, which is good news, of course, for the people who live here, but a little frustrating to scientists who planned to chase twisters as part of a $10 million research project.

"You're out there to do the experiment and you're geared up every day and ready. And when there isn't anything happening, that is frustrating," said Don Burgess, a scientist at the University of Oklahoma. But he was quick to add that he is pleased the relative quiet has meant fewer injuries and less damage.

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Swiss Boat Aims To Be First To Circumnavigate The Globe Under Solar Power

Planet Solar courtesy Planet Solar, via CNN

From Popular Science:

In 2007, the first solar electric boat crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Now a Swiss group wants to cover that distance and keep going, circling the globe on nothing but the sun's power for the first time.

The team of engineers and scientists has embarked on the building of its 98-foot long vessel, dubbed Planet Solar, in Kiel, Germany. The boat's power will come from the 5,000 square feet of solar panels, about the size of two tennis courts, covering its broad deck. When the sun is shining bright above, they will convert 23 percent of the sun's rays to energy -- six percent more than average solar panels.

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Sharpest Ever Images Of Betelgeuse reveal How Explosive Red Supergiant Loses Mass

Superstar: An artist's impression of red giant Betelgeuse based on combined images from the European Space Agency's Very Large Telescope

From The Daily Mail:

It looks like a catastrophic explosion in the latest sci-fi action thriller but this awe-inspiring image is actually based on the latest state-of-the-art space imaging.

The artist’s impression, inspired by the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse, reveals an enormous plume of gas almost as big as our own Solar System blasting outwards.

The discoveries, revealed by the latest techniques on the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope, could help unravel why the mammoth plasma ball spews out material at such an incredible speed.

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Comet Likely Culprit In Tunguska Blast

Tunguska Blast

From Science News:

Night-shining clouds created after space shuttle launches may offer clues into the cause of the Tunguska event, a mysterious blast which rocked southern Siberia more than a century ago.

Thin clouds have appeared at abnormally high altitudes over polar regions following space shuttle launches on several occasions in the past decade. These noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds typically occur in summer and lie at altitudes of about 85 kilometers, in a layer of the atmosphere called the thermosphere, says Michael C. Kelley, an atmospheric physicist at Cornell University. Kelley and his colleagues suggest in the July 28 Geophysical Research Letters that data gleaned from analyses of these high-flying clouds, as well as knowledge about the speed at which shuttle exhaust wafted to polar regions, now hint that the Tunguska blast of June 1908 (SN: 6/21/08, p. 5) resulted from a comet slamming into Earth’s atmosphere.

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Laser Propulsion: Wild Idea May Finally Shine

From Space.com:

New laser propulsion experiments are throwing light on how to build future hypersonic aircraft and beam spacecraft into Earth orbit.

Indeed, a "Lightcraft revolution" could replace today's commercial jet travel. Passengers would be whisked from one side of the planet to the other in less than an hour - just enough time to get those impenetrable bags of peanuts open. Furthermore, beamed energy propulsion can make flight to orbit easy, instead of tenuous and dangerous.

That's the belief of Leik Myrabo an aerospace engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He's an expert in directed energy applications, aerospace systems, space prime power, and advanced propulsion.

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Collision Course: The Need for Better Space Junk Regulations

From Popular Mechanics:

With 3000 satellites and a growing arsenal of space junk, Earth’s orbit is a crowded area. If debris continues to accumulate, low Earth orbit could eventually become too congested for safe satellite use and space travel. Unfortunately, space junk is hard to regulate and even harder to clean up. Here’s an overview of existing space junk laws and some proposals for addressing the problems with debris in space.

Close calls in orbit happen all the time—scientists estimate that launch vehicles and other objects come within striking distance of one other over 1000 times a day. So when tracking reports on Feb. 10, 2009, predicted that Iridium 33, a 12-foot-long, 1200-pound communications satellite, and a 1-ton Russian military sat, Kosmos 2251, would pass within less than half a mile of each other, no one was alarmed. It wasn’t the closest call predicted for that day, or even the closest pass for any of the 66 Iridium satellites that coming week. But at the time of the predicted approach, Iridium 33 fell silent.

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Fermi Paradox Points to Fewer Than 10 Extraterrestrial Civilizations

From Technology Review:

The absence of alien probes visiting the solar system places severe limits on the number of advanced civilizations that could be exploring the galaxy.

The Fermi paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there--and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teeming with life--why haven't we seen evidence of them?

Today Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain add another angle to the discussion. One consideration is the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, a colonization wave could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain why we have yet to spot extraterrestrials.

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Mercury Released By Dental Amalgam Fillings Are Not High Enough To Cause Harm, FDA Finds

The FDA has found that while elemental mercury has been associated with adverse health effects at high exposures, the levels released by dental amalgam fillings are not high enough to cause harm in patients. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 31, 2009) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today issued a final regulation classifying dental amalgam and its component parts – elemental mercury and a powder alloy—used in dental fillings. While elemental mercury has been associated with adverse health effects at high exposures, the levels released by dental amalgam fillings are not high enough to cause harm in patients.

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