Second-hand Smoke May Trigger Nicotine Dependence Symptoms In Kids

Second-hand smoke may trigger symptoms of nicotine dependence in children, a new study has found. (Credit: iStockphoto/Thomas Pullicino)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2008) — Parents who smoke cigarettes around their kids in cars and homes beware – second-hand smoke may trigger symptoms of nicotine dependence in children.

The findings are published in the September edition of the journal Addictive Behaviors in a joint study from nine Canadian institutions.

"Increased exposure to second-hand smoke, both in cars and homes, was associated with an increased likelihood of children reporting nicotine dependence symptoms, even though these children had never smoked," says Dr. Jennifer O'Loughlin, senior author of the study, a professor at the Université de Montréal's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine and a researcher at the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal.

Read more ....

Earth's Air Divided By Chemical Equator

This model representation shows the chemical equator found in the study. The colors indicate the carbon monoxide concentrations on 30 January 2006; red is polluted air and blue is clean air.Credit: Glenn Carver, Cambridge University

From Live Science:

Scientists have found a temporary "chemical equator" that separates the heavily polluted air of the Northern Hemisphere from the cleaner air of the Southern Hemisphere over the Western Pacific — only it isn't where they expected to find it.

The Northern Hemisphere tends to have more polluted air than the Southern Hemisphere because it has more cities, more population in those cities on average and more industry. And each hemisphere's air masses tend to stay segregated from one another. That allows scientists to "see" chemical boundaries between the air masses of hemispheres by monitoring big changes in levels of air pollution.

These boundaries, or chemical equators, can typically be found at a "wall" created by global air circulation patterns that separates Northern and Southern hemispheric air. Called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), it is a belt of low pressure that circles the Earth roughly at the equator.

This is a good place to look for chemical equators, or partial ones, between the two hemispheres, but it is not where Geraint Vaughan of the University of Manchester in England and his colleagues found one in the Western Pacific.

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Mars Craft Detects Falling Snow

Artist's concept of Phoenix lander.

From The Washington Post:

Soil Tests Also Hint at Past Presence of Liquid Groundwater

Icy snow falls from high in Mars's atmosphere and may even reach the planet's surface, scientists working with NASA's Phoenix lander reported yesterday.

Laser instruments aboard the lander detected the snow in clouds about 2 1/2 miles above the surface and followed the precipitation as it fell more than a mile. But because of limitations with the technology, it was unclear whether any of the powdery stuff made it all the way to the surface.

"Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," said Jim Whiteway of York University in Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. "We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground."

In addition to finding snow, the Phoenix team reported discovering material in the Martian soil that had once been dissolved in water -- clays and calcium carbonate (limestone) that could have formed only in the presence of liquid water. Although the lander's instruments earlier found water ice below Mars's polar surface and had photographed surface fog and clouds, it has found nothing like liquid water on the surface.

Read more ....

Why Your Flight Got Canceled

This post is not necessarily a "science post", but it is one of my pet peeves .... so .....

Why Your Flight Got Canceled -- Popsci

Last year, U.S. airlines canceled 21,000 flights. Or rather, a small cadre of guys canceled 21,000 flights. Every gate agent reports up the ladder at a given airline to a set of command-center managers. We spoke with a few of the people who make the big decisions to learn what factors influence whether they cancel a flight.

Number one is no surprise: the weather. Here we present the other four. Knowing them won’t get your plane moving, but it will make for conversation the next time you’re stranded at the airport bar.

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The Five Diseases You Should Worry About

Click To Enlarge

A Primer To The Next Population-Threatening Oandemic -- Popsci

Last May, scientists met in Geneva, Switzerland, to update the World Health Organization’s plans for pandemic preparedness. It looks like a crisis could arrive sooner rather than later. Thanks to climate change and drug resistance, a handful of deadly organisms are spreading across the globe; some are poised to make a comeback in the U.S. after decades of absence. Growth in international travel and increasing urbanization around the world are sure to make this century’s inevitable pandemic much worse, and experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say we’re not at all prepared for what’s to come. But although bird flu has gotten most of the press (it’s still a threat to those in North America, as birds regularly migrate here from areas in Asia where the virus is firmly entrenched), here are five other diseases that deserve your attention.

Read more .....

Grid Of 100,000 Computers Heralds New Internet Dawn

A network of supercomputers called the Grid will allow information to be downloaded quicker than ever. Tasks that took hours will now take seconds

From The Times Online:

A network of 100,000 computers providing the greatest data processing capacity yet unleashed has been created to cope with information pouring from the world’s largest machine.

The Grid is the latest evolution of the internet and the world wide web and computer scientists will announce on Friday that it is ready to be connected to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

It is designed for schemes where huge quantities of data need crunching, such as large research and engineering projects. The Grid has the kind of power required to download movies in seconds, and the ability to make high-definition video phone calls for the same price as a local call. More importantly, it should help to narrow the search for cures for diseases. However, it is unlikely to be directly available to most internet users until telecoms providers build the fibre-optic network required to use it.

The Grid allows scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to get access to the unemployed processing power of thousands of computers in 33 countries to deal with the data created by the LHC.

Read more ....

Smallest Extrasolar Planet Found

From Science-News:

The hunt for true “Earth-like” planets is heated, with many participants eagerly searching, hoping to be the first to find one. We are not there yet, but getting very close.

At the American Astronomical Society (AAS) researcher David Bennett announced the finding of an extrasolar planet called MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb. It’s located 3,000 light-years away from Earth and has three times the mass of our planet. The lightest extrasolar planet discovered weighed in at five-Earth masses and was discovered in April.

The host planet’s star is anywhere from 3,000 to 1 million times fainter than our sun so the planet may be colder than Pluto, but based upon the findings in this discovery astrophysicists suggest MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb could have a thick atmosphere that blankets the planet by trapping in heat. They also go on to theorize this planet may also be covered with a deep ocean.

Once the Kepler Mission is under way (NASA mission to hunt for Earth sized planets. Kepler will launch in February 2009) news like this will occur much more often and bring many exciting possibilities with it.

Will September Be The Month The Sun Truly Transitions To Cycle 24?

Solar cycle 23 as seen from SOHO - click for larger image

From Watts Up With That?

Below is a note forwarded to me by John Sumption from Jan Janssens. For those who do not know him, Jan runs a very comphrehensive solar tracking website here.

Jan included the caveat:

This topic’s sure to start another heated discussion on the solar blogs

So I’m happy to oblige by posting it here. Jansen makes some good points about the possible first month that cylce 24 spots exceed cycle 23 spots. But when you are in a deep minimum like this one, it is hard to pinpoint the transition, because next month may bring the reverse condition. He writes:

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Mars Lander Finds Minerals Suggesting Past Water

This photo released by NASA shows the edge of a solar panel on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, right, in a trench on the surface of Mars, where a sample of soil was taken by the lander. NASA announced Monday, Sept. 29, 2008, that the spacecraft discovered two minerals in the Martian soil that suggest interaction with water in the past. (AP Photo/NASA, JPL-Caltech)

From Yahoo News/AP:

LOS ANGELES - NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has discovered evidence of past water at its Martian landing site and spotted falling snow for the first time, scientists reported Monday. Soil experiments revealed the presence of two minerals known to be formed in liquid water. Scientists identified the minerals as calcium carbonate, found in limestone and chalk, and sheet silicate.

But exactly how that happened remains a mystery.

"It's really kind of all up in the air," said William Boynton, a mission scientist at the University of Arizona at Tucson.

A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.

Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains in May on a three-month mission to study whether the environment could be friendly to microbial life. One of its biggest discoveries so far is confirming the presence of ice on the planet.

Read more ....

NASA Delays Shuttle Mission to Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope in a file image.
(NASA/Handout/Reuters)

From Space.com:

NASA has delayed the last shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope until early 2009 in order to repair a broken device that is blocking the orbital observatory from sending its iconic images of the cosmos back to Earth, agency officials said late Monday.

Seven astronauts were training to launch toward Hubble aboard the shuttle Atlantis on Oct. 14 on mission to extend the space telescope's life through at least 2013, but the unexpected failure of a vital data relay system on Saturday will add months of delay to their spaceflight.

"I think it's very obvious that Oct. 14 is off the table," NASA's space shuttle program manager John Shannon told reporters.

NASA announced Monday that a device known as the Side A Science Data Formatter failed, apparently for good, late Saturday, leaving the otherwise healthy Hubble with no means of relaying data and observations to scientists back on Earth. The electronics box failed after 18 years in service since Hubble launched in April 1990.

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Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential

From Scientific American:

Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.

One common problem gifted kids face is that they, and those around them, place too much importance on being smart. Such an emphasis can breed a belief that bright people do not have to work hard to do well. Although smart kids may not need to work hard in the lower grades, when the work is easy, they may struggle and perform poorly when the work gets harder because they do not make the effort to learn. In some cases, they may not know how to study, having never done it before. In others, they simply cannot accept the fact that some tasks require effort [see “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids,” by Carol S. Dweck; Scientific American Mind, December 2007/January 2008].

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The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To

From Wired News:

Dear President _________,
Congratulations! Now brace yourself for an avalanche of advice — from the 21 people in your Cabinet, from dozens of advisory councils, hundreds of members of Congress, thousands of lobbyists and pundits, and millions of voters. Everyone's got an opinion on what needs to be done. But the policies that emerge from such groupthink tend to be weird mashups of conflicting interests or warmed-over slabs of conventional wisdom. Enough of that. The country needs fresh directions and crisp action plans on intractable issues like climate change, energy, security, and defense. To help shape your thinking, we've come up with a Smart List of 15 Wired people with big ideas about how to fix the things that need fixing. Hail to the new chief — and please listen up.

Read the list of 15 ....

The Snore Wars

From Time Magazine:

I have always been happy that I'm not a snorer — or at least I was until recently, when my wife told me otherwise. After a few days of adamant denials, I decided to place a tape recorder on the bedside table. When I hit play the next morning, I was surprised to hear a rhythmic, rumbling noise that was enough to disturb my wife's sleep. In my case, the problem was transient, caused by a recent bout of allergies and sinus trouble. When my breathing cleared up, so did the snoring. Yet for millions of other couples out there, snoring is a cause not just of health worries but also of marital woes.

According to a recent study, nearly 1 out of 4 people married to a snorer will eventually be driven out of the bedroom rather than spend another night battling for sleep. Sometimes even that's not enough. "I see a lot of patients whose spouses can't just go to another room. They have to escape to a whole other area of the house," says Dr. Marc Kayem, medical director of the Snoring and Apnea Center of California, in Los Angeles.

Read more ....

Detect Epidemics Before They Start

Colorized transmission electron micrograph depicting the A/New Jersey/76 (Hsw1N1) virus, while in the virus’ first developmental passage through a chicken egg. This is an H1N1 strain of influenza A. (Credit: Dr. E. Palmer; R.E. Bates)

From Wired News:

Back in May 1993, as a medical resident at the University of Arizona, Mark Smolinski volunteered for a shift with the state's Department of Health. Right after he started, Arizona and neighboring states were struck by a deadly outbreak of an unidentified respiratory illness. The young doctor found himself face-to-face with an emerging epidemic, part of a team that spent sleepless months struggling to contain the outbreak. "I was going from hospital to hospital trying to determine the patients' exposures," he recalls of his harrowing first assignment. "Almost all the cases were under the age of 30, and it had a very high mortality rate."

The researchers finally identified the culprit — which eventually infected 53 people, 60 percent of whom died — as a new strain of hantavirus. They pinned the outbreak on a confluence of ecological and social factors: Wet weather during an El Niño year spawned heavier-than-normal vegetation. That in turn fueled an unusually large population of deer mice, which harbor the virus. The victims were exposed when they rummaged through closets or gardened, inhaling dust laced with mouse droppings, urine, or saliva. The disease soon receded, but Smolinski was hooked on the rush he got from investigating outbreaks. "It seemed like a career that would never be dull," he says. "That has certainly proven true."

These days, Smolinski's business card at Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Mountain View behemoth, identifies him simply as "threat detective." He's director of the organization's Predict and Prevent Initiative, a global health program. The 46-year-old's job is to channel money — one insider estimates up to $150 million — into projects and technologies that will help catch outbreaks like hantavirus wherever they crop up. What's even more ambitious is Smolinski's desire to push disease surveillance "two steps to the left of the epidemic curve." The strategy: Draw on Google's search acumen to predict hot spots before the first case of some imminent calamity hits the hospital.

Read more ....

Will We Soon Find Life in the Heavens?

Allen Telescope Array

From U.S. News And World Report:

Alien-hunting scientists have had an eventful year, and they're about to get busier. In just the past few months, life-friendly soil and ice turned up on Mars, astronomers bagged a trio of Earth-like planets in a distant star system, and scientists looking closer to home reported that certain hardy microbes thrive below Earth's ocean floor—a big clue that life may exist on planets that at first glance appear inhospitable.

None of the findings shout, "Here be aliens!" but each report has stoked optimism among astrobiologists that they will discover life beyond Earth. Some leading stargazers, in fact, suspect we're now on the verge of learning that we're not alone—and that genesis wasn't a unique event.

In space, "everywhere we look, we see the same processes that we think led to the origin of life on Earth," says John Rummel, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology.

In the coming months, two new tools will greatly expand astrobiologists' capacity to hear and see other promising signs of life. Later this summer, the nonprofit SETI Institute, named with the acronym for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, will begin listening for alien broadcasts on the new $50 million Allen Telescope Array. A spread of 42 radio dishes in California's Cascade Mountains, the array is the first such facility built specifically to listen for E.T. "We're looking for life that's clever enough to hold up its side of the conversation," says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. The array, half funded by Microsoft mogul Paul Allen, will search for alien signals at a clip "hundreds to thousands times faster" than current SETI projects, says Shostak.

Read more ....

Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2008) — Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

Brain areas for cognitive control

The switch in learning strategy has been demonstrated in behavioural research, which shows that eight-year-olds respond disproportionately inaccurately to negative feedback. But the switch can also be seen in the brain, as developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered using fMRI research. The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

Read more ....

Video Gamers Surprisingly Fit And Older

Players team up to fight a monster in the online role-playing game EverQuest II.
Credit: Sony Online Entertainment

From Live Science:

Drop those stereotypes about people who play online role-playing games — chances are they're more physically fit than the average American.

That's just one of several new survey findings that explode the popular image of video gamers as socially awkward, overweight teenage males. Or at least, researchers have now found this among players of EverQuest II, an online fantasy game centered on group quests and other social activities.

"Games have pretty much been on the defensive for the past 20 years by being attacked as unhealthy and culturally destructive," said Dmitri Williams, a communications researcher at the University of Southern California. "That's been changing in the past few years, but it's still the prevailing wisdom."

Read more ....

My Comment: I am in my late forties .... and .... I am guilty as charged.

Sunspot-Hurricane Link Proposed

From Nature News:

Controversial research hints that solar cycle affects cyclone intensity.

A new study suggests that more sunspots mean less intense hurricanes on Earth. But many hurricane experts are cool on the idea.

James Elsner, a climatologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has analyzed hurricane data going back more than a century. He says he has identified a 10- to 12-year cycle in hurricane records that corresponds to the solar cycle, in which the Sun's magnetic activity rises and falls.

The idea is that increased solar activity - associated with sunspots - means more ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth's upper atmosphere. That warms the airs aloft and decreases the temperature differential between high and low elevations that otherwise would fuel hurricanes.

"Our results indicate that there is an effect in the intensity of storms due to the higher temperatures aloft," says Elsner, who published the results on 19 September in Geophysical Research Letters1.

He says the statistical analysis suggests a 10% decrease in hurricane intensity for every 100 sunspots. At the peak of its cycle, the Sun might exhibit around 250 sunspots.

Read more ....

SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made It To Space

From Discover Magazine:

SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.

After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.

The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.

As the rocket ascended, cheers rang out during every crucial step of the launch sequence, and at the final stage their headquarters in Hawthorne, California erupted in excitement. (Wired.com viewed the launch over the Internet on SpaceX's live webcast.)

The tensest moment came just before stage separation. At that critical juncture, the third launch attempt had failed. This time, it worked out perfectly.

Eight minutes after leaving the ground, Falcon 1 reached a speed of 5200 meters per second and passed above the International Space Station.

"I don't know what to say... because my mind is just blown," said Musk, during a brief address to his staff after the successful launch. "This is just the first step of many."

Read more ....

Skywalking Heroes: Best Spacewalks of All Time

From Wired Science:

The spacewalk is the ultimate space experience. And among skywalkers, a few have risen above the rest and set the bar high for extravehicular activity. Here are my picks for the five greatest spacewalks of all time.

1st Untethered Spacewalk — Astronaut Bruce McCandless: (above) In March 1984 NASA tested out their Manned Maneuvering Unit. Although the units were only used on three Shuttle flights, this iconic image is one of the most famous from the Space Shuttle era.

1st Spacewalk — Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov: A true hero of mine, Leonov performed the original spacewalk in 1965 with an inflatable airlock. At the end of the extravehicular activity, or EVA, tense minutes went by as he struggled to get back into the spacecraft eventually bleeding air out of his suit to pass through. An avid artist, Leonov fastened colored pencils and a notepad to his suit leg to sketch from inside the capsule. He went on to command the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Read more ....

Tesla's Impact On Everyday Life

Host Bre Pettis and his Tesla coil on the set of his show "History Hacker."

History Reveals: Tesla Totally Awesome! -- MSNBC

Circuit-bending YouTube star Bre Pettis doesn’t want you to know that before making his History Channel pilot, he hadn’t seen “The Prestige.”

It’s not that he purposely failed to catch Chris Nolan’s 2006 adaptation of the steam punk novel about rival magicians starring Batman (Christian Bale) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).

It seems Pettis never got around to it. And by the time he started putting together “History Hacker,” premiering tonight at 8 p.m. and midnight, it was too late.

Not too late to ever see “ The Prestige,” mind you. But “History Hacker’s” premise is to focus each episode on the life and innovations of one inventor, and the pilot is about Nikola Tesla.

Pettis didn’t want to infect his flow by watching David Bowie’s critically-acclaimed portrayal of “The Father of Physics,” a pivotal — albeit fictionalized — character in the film.

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Why Old Athletes Come Back

In this July 23, 2005 file photo, overall leader Lance Armstrong, of Austin, Texas, crosses the finish line to win the 20th stage of the Tour de France cycling race, a 55.5-kilometer (34.5-mile) individual time trial looping around north of Saint-Etienne, central France. Now Armstrong is getting back on his bike, determined to win an eighth Tour de France. The Tour "is the intention," Armstrong's spokesman Mark Higgins told The Associated Press, "but we've got some homework to do over there." AP Photo/Alessandro Trovati

From Live Science:

Maybe its the fear of turning 40. Maybe its the feeling of unfinished business. Maybe its the fire in the belly that has not quite extinguished. For retired elite athletes, the itch is always there to make a return after experiencing "life after sport". For some, it becomes too strong to ignore.

This year has seen the return of at least three champions, Dara Torres, Lance Armstrong and Brett Favre. As they explain their individual reasons for coming back, some similarities emerge that have more to do with psychological needs than practical needs. In a recent Miami Herald article, Torres explained her comeback to competitive swimming at age 41, "For me, it's not like I sat around and watched swimming on TV and thought, 'Oh, I wish I was still competing'. It was more gradual. But all of a sudden, something goes off inside you and you start seriously thinking about a comeback. You'd think the competitive fire would die down with maturity, but I've actually gotten worse. I wasn't satisfied with silver medals. I hate to lose now more than I did in my 20s. I'm still trying to figure out why.''

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Even Viruses Catch Viruses

From Live Science:

Among pathogens, viruses are unique in their collective ability to infect all types of organisms. There are plant viruses, insect viruses, fungal viruses, and even viruses that infect only amoeba and bacteria. Now a group of researchers at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France has made the startling discovery that even some viruses can have viruses.

In a paper in Nature last month, the group described how they identified a giant mimivirus in a cooling tower in France. Mimiviruses are the largest viruses known to exist — so big they are visible under a normal optical microscope (usually much higher resolution electron microscopes are needed to view them). The new virus, large even by mimivirus standards, was appropriately named "mamavirus."

In the same cooling tower, the French group also discovered a second, tiny virus that infects the giant mamavirus. This they named "Sputnik."

Sputnik is unusual because it is the first virus ever discovered that is a parasite of another virus. When it reproduces in a cell infected by the larger virus, its action impairs the reproduction of mamavirus particles. The group sequenced Sputnik's genetic code and discovered that a number of its gene sequences are similar to those found in a massive survey of genetic material taken from oceans all over the globe. This suggests that a whole class of viruses might exist that infect other viruses.

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What Goes Into Naming A New Species? A Lot

An American scientist named Charles Paul Alexander is said to have named 10,000 species of crane flies, like the one above.

From NPR:

September 23, 2008 · There wasn't a whole lot to do in the Garden of Eden, as the Bible tells it. Adam, the original resident, just bided his time, snacked when he felt like it, avoided one particular tree, and hung out. Except once — just once — he was given an assignment: to name a vast array of "beasts of the field," plus "fowl of the air," after which, presumably, he rested. And people have been naming creatures ever since.

In the 1700s, the Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus created a new way to classify creatures that is still in use today, genus plus species. He classified thousands of organisms.

But the all-time record may go to an American insect scientist by the name of Charles Paul Alexander, who specialized in crane flies. I'm not exactly sure what a crane fly is, but apparently they come in many, many flavors; Alexander is said to have named more than 10,000 species.

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A Trip Inside The "Big Bang Machine"

Steve Kroft descends into the Large Hadron Collider some call it the "big bang machine" - that took billions of dollars and 9,000 physicists to build in the hope it will provide valuable insights.

From CBS 60 Minutes:

(CBS) As a rule, physics rarely makes news, but it did this past week after equipment malfunctions delayed for several months the start up of one of the biggest science experiments in history. We are talking about the Large Hadron Collider, a massive, multibillion dollar project designed to unlock the secrets of the universe.

For several years now, thousands of the world's most accomplished scientists have been gathering in Europe, not to explore the heavens but the frontiers of inner space. They are hoping to discover subatomic particles so tiny that they have never been detected. They think these particles will help explain why the universe has organized itself into so many different things - planets and stars, tables and chairs, flesh and blood.

To do it, they have constructed one of largest, most sophisticated machines ever built to replicate what the universe was like a few nanoseconds after it was created. And as Steve Kroft reports, it is all going to happen 300 feet underground on the border between Switzerland and France.

Read more ....

Are Some Solar Projects No Longer ‘Green’?

Workers install solar panels on the roof of an Austin, Texas, homeowner. (Ann Hermes / The Christian Science Monitor / FILES)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Conservationists worry that a plan for the Mojave desert will upset species’ habitats.

Solar companies proposing large power plants in the Mojave Desert are facing opposition from conservationists. They say a rush to build solar here threatens to tear up large tracts of desert habitat and open space.

The squabble is likely to intensify now that Congress this week moved forward on a long-term extension of the solar tax credit. Two other proposed bills would fast-track solar power projects looking to build on federal lands. State mandates on utilities to provide more renewable energy has created an enormous market for solar, an energy that requires two things the Mojave has in spades – acreage and sunshine. But the desert’s defenders argue that solar panels should be located on city rooftops rather than pristine lands.

“If there were just one [proposed plant], we could deal with that. But we are looking at essentially every valley that is not protected as a national monument or park as being a potential site for solar,” says John Hiatt, a Las Vegas-based environmental activist. “It will be the industrialization of the Mojave Desert.”

Read more ....

Einstein's long-lost telescope goes on display after being restored

In this undated photo made available by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Monday, Sept. 22, 2008, an unidentified man adjusts a telescope that once belonged to Albert Einstein, at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Hebrew University in Jerusalem, HO

From CNews/Science:

JERUSALEM - Albert Einstein's long-lost telescope, forgotten for decades in a Jerusalem storage shed, goes on display this week after three years and $10,000 spent restoring the relic.

The old reflecting telescope is cumbersome by modern standards, but a demonstration for The Associated Press showed it still works well enough to see five of Jupiter's moons and stripes on the surface of the huge planet.

The legendary physicist who famously theorized relations among energy, speed and mass received the telescope in 1954, the year before he died.

Read more ....

When Wind Power Goes Wrong

Wind Power -- Watts Up With That

I was in a conversation today at lunch with a fellow who told me that “wind power is better than anything we’ve ever done for generating electricity”. That made me wonder, how reliable (beyond the constancy of wind issues) is it?

Whenever I drive through Techachapi or Altamont passes here in California I note that there always seems to be a fair number of these three blade windmills that are out of commission. Perhaps failure is more common than one would expect. I found a couple of examples:

New Era Dawns At Home Of The Internet

A network of supercomputers called the Grid will allow information to be downloaded quicker than ever. Tasks that took hours will now take seconds

From Times Online:

The dawn of a new internet age has begun. A network of supercomputers, known as the Grid, is to revolutionise the speed at which information is downloaded to personal computers.

The power of the Grid is such that downloading films should take only seconds, not hours, and processing music albums just a single second. Video-phone calls should also cost no more than a local call. More importantly, it should help to narrow the search for cures for diseases.

The Grid, a network of 100,000 computers, is to be connected to the world’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is designed for projects, such as large research and engineering jobs, which need to crunch huge quantities of data, but scientists believe it will eventually be used on home computers.

The Grid allows scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to get access to the unemployed processing power of thousands of computers in 33 countries to deal with the data created by the LHC.

Read more ....

CERN Rivals See Melting Magnets As Par For Course

A Sept. 10, 2008 file photo shows European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists working at computers in the Cern's control center during the switch on operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom-smasher in a mission to answer some of the most perplexing questions in the cosmos controol, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The daring success of the world's largest atom smasher on its opening day was more surprising to scientists than the troubles it subsequently developed. The meltdown of a connection between superconducting magnets nine days later at CERN was more expected. (AP Photo/Fabrice Coffrini, Pool, File)

From Yahoo News/AP:

GENEVA - The daring success of the world's largest atom smasher on its opening day was more surprising to many scientists than the troubles it subsequently developed.

A problem with a magnet connection will delay the start of experiments for half a year, partly because the $3.8 billion accelerator is so complicated to repair. Physicists — some of whom waited two decades to use the new equipment — will now have to wait three more weeks for the damaged section to be warmed up to room temperature.

They can then get inside to see what went wrong.

Yet such glitches are not uncommon. Michael Harrison, who worked on Fermilab's Tevatron collider and designed and built the United States' other superconducting collider at Brookhaven on Long Island, said both machines had similar startup problems.

Read more ....

Why The Large Hadron Collider Is Already On The Fritz

From Time Magazine - Science:

Anyone who has struggled to change a fuse in their home should pity the scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. Last Friday, just nine days after celebrating the successful test run of the largest particle accelerator ever constructed, a tiny electrical connection between two magnets overheated and caused a minor meltdown.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) broke.

Although a final evaluation is yet to be completed, scientists believe the fault caused the machine to lose the near absolute-zero temperature it must maintain to operate. For now, however, repair work can't begin because the machine is still too cold; it will take about a month to warm up the area to a temperature at which replacement parts can be inserted. It will take another month to cool it back down, and given that CERN has pledged not to run its giant machine — which requires as much power as the entire city of Geneva — during winter months when Europe's energy needs are highest, Friday's breakdown could delay the actual smashing of atoms until early next year.

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PHOTOS: Best Science Images of 2008 Announced

First Place, Photography: "The Glass Forest"

From The National Geographic:

September 25, 2008--Tiny green diatoms create the illusion of a fernlike forest as they attach to their marine-invertebrate hosts.

Mario De Stefano of the Second University of Naples, Italy, captured this miniscule "jungle" from the Mediterranean Sea with a scanning electron microscope.

The image earned first place in the photography category of the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

The awards are given annually by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science for images that employ modern technology to visualize complex scientific topics. (See some of last year's winners.)

The winners will be announced in tomorrow's issue of Science.

--Brian Handwerk
—Image courtesy Mario De Stefano/The Second University of Naples/Science

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Top 10 Scrapped Spaceship Designs

Space: the final frontier, and a veritable graveyard of wacky, premature or impossible concepts for getting people there. From radioactive Mars ships to Russian space shuttle knock-offs, check out our top 10 spaceship drop-outs.

From Discovery Magazine:

10. Von Braun Ferry Rocket

Wernher Von Braun, designer of the German V-2 rocket, also dreamed up plenty of spaceships in his day -- including the Saturn V launch system that made it possible for Americans to step onto the moon.

But one that never left the drawing board was this three-stage "ferry rocket." Collier's Magazine ran the drawing on the cover of a 1952 issue touting "Man Will Conquer Space Soon".

So far, the difficulty of space travel is the only thing conquering anyone.

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Chinese Astronauts Return To Earth

China's Shenzhou-7 spacecraft's re-entry module landed safely in Siziwang Banner in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Sunday, Sept. 28, 2008. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Wang Jianmin)

From CBS News/Science:

(AP) Chinese astronauts returned to earth and emerged triumphant from their capsule Sunday after successfully completing the country's first-ever spacewalk mission.

State broadcaster CCTV showed their Shenzhou 7 spaceship landing under clear skies in the grasslands of China's northern Inner Mongolia region at 5:37 p.m. local time. Premier Wen Jiabao applauded at mission control in Beijing.

"The astronauts feel very good," mission commander Zhai Zhigang said as the vessel floated down to earth on a red-and-white-striped giant parachute.

After landing, the three astronauts were seen sipping bottled water as they were given medical examinations inside the module. They stayed inside for about 45 minutes to adapt to the Earth's gravity before slowly crawling out of the narrow circular entrance of the capsule.

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Bees Can Count

From Live Science:

Honeybees are clever little creatures. They can form abstract concepts, such as symmetry versus asymmetry, and they use symbolic language — the celebrated waggle dance — to direct their hivemates to flower patches. New reports suggest that they can also communicate across species, and can count — up to a point.

With colleagues, Songkun Su of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Shaowu Zhang of the Australian National University in Canberra managed to overcome the apian impulse to kill intruders and cultivated the first mixed-species colonies, made up of European honeybees, Apis mellifera, and Asiatic honeybees, A. cerana. The researchers confirmed that the two species have their own dialects: foraging in identical environments, the bees signaled the distance to a food source with dances of different durations.

Remarkably, despite the communication barrier, A. cerana decoded A. mellifera's dance and found the food.

Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe.

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Earth's Magnetic Field Reversals Illuminated By Lava Flows Study

Polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history – most recently about 780,000 years ago – but scientists are still trying to understand how and why. (Credit: iStockphoto/Tobias Machhaus)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2008) — Earth's north magnetic pole is shifting and weakening. Ancient lava flows are guiding a better understanding of what generates and controls the Earth's magnetic field – and what may drive it to occasionally reverse direction.

The main magnetic field, generated by turbulent currents within the deep mass of molten iron of the Earth's outer core, periodically flips its direction, such that a compass needle would point south rather than north. Such polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history – most recently about 780,000 years ago – but scientists are still trying to understand how and why.

A new study of ancient volcanic rocks, reported in the Sept. 26 issue of the journal Science, shows that a second magnetic field source may help determine how and whether the main field reverses direction. This second field, which may originate in the shallow core just below the rocky mantle layer of the Earth, becomes important when the main north-south field weakens, as it does prior to reversing, says Brad Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Memory Surprisingly Unreliable, Study Shows

From Cosmos:

LIVERPOOL, UK: Our memories of major past events can be surprisingly unreliable, says a new study of the July 2005 London bombings, which found that people can easily convince themselves they've seen things that never happened.

"Some people think that our memories are like video recorders and that if you press play the memories come flooding back. It doesn't work like that at all and should not form the basis of legal decision making" said James Ost, a psychologist from the University of Portsmouth, England.

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Does Hot Water Freeze Faster Than Cold Water?

From Live Science:

Determining whether or not hot water can freeze faster than cold water may seem like a no-brainer. After all, water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. And wouldn’t water hot enough to kill E. coli bacteria (about 120 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius) take a longer path than cooler water at a fall New England beach (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius) towards a frigid future as ice? While a logical assumption, it turns out that hot water can freeze before cooler water under certain conditions.

This apparent quirk of nature is the "Mpemba effect," named after the Tanzanian high school student, Erasto Mpemba, who first observed it in 1963. The Mpemba effect occurs when two bodies of water with different temperatures are exposed to the same subzero surroundings and the hotter water freezes first. Mpemba’s observations confirmed the hunches of some of history’s most revered thinkers, such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, who also thought that hot water froze faster than cold water.

Evaporation is the strongest candidate to explain the Mpemba effect. As hot water placed in an open container begins to cool, the overall mass decreases as some of the water evaporates. With less water to freeze, the process can take less time. But this doesn’t always work, especially when using closed containers that prevent evaporated water from escaping.

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Rocket Man Is Sucessful Crossing The English Channel -- News Updates And Links

Yves Rossy flies across the channel using his jet wing. The former Swiss Air pilot traced the route first flown by French aviator Loius Bleriot (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty Images)

Rocket Man Completes First One-Man Jetpack
Flight Across Channel -- Daily Mail

He came. He soared. He conquered.

Birdman Yves Rossy powered into the record books yesterday with a remarkable cross-Channel flight - and a grin almost as big as his wingspan.

The Swiss adventurer stood on the White Cliffs of Dover after flying from France with a jet-propelled wing on his back and declared: 'It's like a dream come true.'

He parachuted into an English field 22 miles from Calais 13 minutes after takeoff. The 49-year-old aviator flew at up to 125mph after jumping from a plane 8,200ft above France.

Four jet engines on the single, 8ft wing allowed him to prove what he has always believed - that with a little help from technology, there's no reason why man shouldn't fly like a bird.

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More News on The Rocket Man

"Fusion Man" makes historic Channel flight -- Reuters
Exclusive: I followed jetman Yves Rossy during the historic Channel crossing -- Times Online
To infinity... or just Dover?: Jetman crosses the English Channel -- The Independent
Jet Man Crosses English Channel -- New York Times
Swiss pilot flies across English Channel by jetpack -- National Post
Swiss 'rocketman' crosses the English Channel in 10 minutes (Pictures) -- L.A. Times

What's Driving China's Space Efforts?

This undated photo released on Tuesday September 23, 2008, by China's official Xinhua news agency shows technicians help the Shenzhou-7 manned spaceship to dock with the Long-March II-F rocket at an assembly plant. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Qin Xian'an)

From The BBC:

The launch of Shenzhou-VII by China is another reminder of the country's growing confidence and capability in space.

It delivers a message to the traditional space powers: after a slow start, China is rising fast.

This mission is a critical step in a "three-step" human spaceflight programme aimed at docking spacecraft together to form a small orbiting laboratory and, ultimately, building a large space station.

It has sent a robotic spacecraft, Chang'e, to the Moon and there are plans to land a robotic rover on the lunar surface in 2010.

Last year, China faced international criticism when it used a medium-range ballistic missile to destroy an ageing weather satellite in a weapons test.

But what are the forces driving Beijing's space endeavours?

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In A Storm Surge, Elevation Is The Key To Survive

Ike Obliterated Most Homes, But Spared One On Church Street -- Houston Chronicle

There's a new landmark in Gilchrist, one of the towns on Bolivar Peninsula that Hurricane Ike ravaged and left for dead.

The fire station is gone. The post office is gone. Every structure on the gulf side of this tight-knit community is gone.

Except for one house.

Standing tall, as if in defiance of Ike's windy, watery wrath, is the home of Pam and Warren Adams, who built the place in 2005 after Hurricane Rita destroyed their older home on the same lot.

On Friday, the first day many residents were allowed back on the peninsula, the couple returned to Church Street, ready to help neighbors whose homes no longer stood with theirs.

"I think I'm going through survivor's guilt," said Pam Adams, even though her home is uninhabitable, its main floor covered with mud brought in by the storm surge. "But the fact that the house is standing, that it survived, is awesome. Gilchrist is still here. It's faith and hopefulness."

The Adams had already been back to see their house, so they knew what to expect. But for the people who live west of Rollover Pass — the residents and homeowners returning to the peninsula for the first time since the hurricane — it was surreal.

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UN Urged To Coordinate Killer Asteroid Defences

From The New Scientist:

The technology to detect and deflect dangerous space rocks already exists – all that's missing is someone to coordinate its use.

That is the finding of a two-year investigation by the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), an international group of astronauts, cosmonauts, and members of space community. The group unveiled the results of its research at the offices of the Google Foundation in San Francisco yesterday.

The report asks the UN to assume responsibility for responding to potentially catastrophic asteroid threats. "For 4.5 billion years, we've been bashed continuously by asteroids. It's time for that to stop," former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart told the assembly.

The ASE's vision is first for a global information network, coordinated by the UN, that uses data from ground- and space-based telescopes to find, track and rate the risk of near-Earth objects (NEOs).

Currently, NASA is watching 209 NEOs, none of which is considered to be dangerous. But a threat is likely to be detected within the next 15 years, according to the ASE. "New telescopes coming online will increase these discoveries by a factor of 100," said Ed Lu, astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis.

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Extracting Energy From The Tides

Water Powered: Two prototype balloons for CETO’s wave farm. Photo by Jason Thomas

Burning the Tide -- Popsci

Alan Burns made a fortune in the oil business. But as oil wanes, he’s convinced that clean energy will be—must be—the next big thing. And so this inventor has poured his fortune into a challenge far greater than finding new oil deposits: extracting energy from the ocean

Alan Burns breaks the surface with a huge grin on his face, his baggy black wetsuit hanging off his body like walrus skin. It’s a scorching February afternoon, and we’re floating in the clear blue water of the Indian Ocean. To our left is the Australian resort island of Rottnest. To our right—just beyond Burns’s dazzling white yacht—is several thousand miles of open sea. And beneath us, the kelp forest where we had been diving moments before is swaying to the rhythm of the waves. “Can you feel the power down there?” Burns asks as we bob in the water, his sunburned cheeks puckered up behind a dripping diving mask. “This is what made me think of it, really.”

Burns is a prodigious inventor and a staunch supporter of clean energy, but he’s no sentimental environmentalist. He’s an oilman. He made his first fortune in the mid-1970s with oil and gas discoveries off Australia’s northwestern coast. In 1987 he founded the exploration company Hardman Resources, which, after an extremely profitable series of finds off the coast of Africa, was sold in 2006 to another oil company for more than $1 billion. Today the 67-year-old entrepreneur is among the wealthiest men in Perth, the tropical, seaside capital of Western Australia. And although he still runs a mineral-exploration company, he spends 90 percent of his time nurturing the wave-power-generation system he first sketched out some 30 years ago.

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Van Gogh Painting Uncovered By New Xray Machine

Rolling back the centuries: Dr Karen Rickers, above, fires the accelerator

From The Telegraph:

A new technique promises to reveal hundreds of masterpieces hidden beneath later works. Harry de Quetteville reports

It amounts to the biggest single art find: a host of unseen works by masters old and new, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. But these works can't be seen on the walls of any gallery or museum. And they are hidden not in a safe or bank vault, but on canvases which the artists themselves painted over.

Now, however, scientists are employing a revolutionary technique to reveal these spectacular images. Using circular particle accelerators, hundreds of metres across, they fire Xrays 10,000 times more powerful than any hospital scan at the priceless paintings.

It is not the first time that art historians have employed science to peer beyond the façade of masterworks. Leonardo, Brueghel and Courbet are some of the many artists whose canvases are emerging as ultra-valuable palimpsests, where the original image has been muffled by over-eager restoration or concealed by over-painting.

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New Life Found in Old Tombs

From Live Science:

Talk about secrets of the crypt: Two newly discovered species of bacteria have been found on the walls of ancient Roman tombs.

Bacteria often grow on the walls of underground tombs, causing decay and damaging these archaeological sites. Scientists in Italy found the two new microbes while studying decayed surfaces in the Catacombs of Saint Callistus in Rome.

The Catacombs of Saint Callistus are part of a massive underground graveyard that covers 37 acres. The tombs, named after Pope Saint Callistus I, were built at the end of the second century. More than 30 popes and martyrs are buried in the catacombs.

The new bacteria, part of the Kribbella genus first discovered in 1999, were isolated from whitish-gray patinas, or coatings, on surfaces in the catacombs. They have been named Kribbella catacumbae and Kribbella sancticallisti.

The discovery is detailed in the September issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Mircobiology.

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Why Earth's Magnetic Field Flip-Flops

Earth's magnetic field may actually be two fields from separate sources. Credit: Dreamstime

From Live Science:

Every so often, Earth's magnetic field flips on its head, turning the magnetic North Pole into the South Pole and vice versa.

It last happened 780,000 years ago, and is predicted to occur again in about 1,500 years ... maybe. The overall frequency is hard to predict — there was one period in Earth's history when the field didn't reverse for 30 million years.

Why these flip-flops happen at all is a great riddle, but a new hypothesis on the origins of the magnetic field could shed light on the reason.

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The Finest Science Images of 2008: Your Pick

From Wired Science:

The year's finest science images and visualizations have been announced -- and now it's your turn to pick a winner.

The entries come from the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science.

Below are not only the winners of the photography, illustration and visualization categories, but the runners-up. The images are so uniformly amazing that you might prefer one of the contenders.

One week from now, we'll close the voting and announce your category winners -- and, of course, the über-winner.

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Scientists Report Advance in Stem Cell Alternative

Human embryonic stem cell (gold) growing on a layer of supporting cells (fibroblasts).

From the Washington Post:

Scientists reported yesterday that they have overcome a major obstacle to using a promising alternative to embryonic stem cells, bolstering prospects for bypassing the political and ethical tempest that has embroiled hopes for a new generation of medical treatments.

The researchers said they found a safe way to coax adult cells to regress into an embryonic state, alleviating what had been the most worrisome uncertainty about developing the cells into potential cures.

"We have removed a major roadblock for translating this into a clinical setting," said Konrad Hochedlinger, a Harvard University stem cell researcher whose research was published online yesterday by the journal Science. "I think it's an important advance."

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