Photo: History.comAlice's Astro Info is the host for todays Space Carnival. The link is HERE:
Friday, October 3, 2008
Branson Wants to Help Science Save Earth
(Photo: Wired Magazine)From Wired News:
Richard Branson has slapped the Virgin name on everything from airlines and space travel to record stores and comic books, and now he wants to add scientific research into global climate change.
The flamboyant British entrepreneur says his fledgling Virgin Galactic enterprise will use the Space Ship Two and White Knight Two (pictured) vehicles to carry research equipment to the highest levels of the atmosphere for a research project planned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The instruments will provide vast quantities of data regarding atmospheric conditions, particularly the level of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases, and allow the agency to calibrate measurements made by satellites.
"We need data and observations to understand how our climate changes," Conrad Lautenbacher, the agency's administrator, said in a statement. "This affords us a new and unique opportunity to gather samples and measurements at much higher altitudes than we can usually achieve."
Such a partnership would solve one of the NOAA's biggest challenges with atmospheric research -- it doesn't have anything capable of reaching such lofty altitudes.
Read more ....
Ask the Brains: Why Do We Laugh When Someone Falls?
Alexander Hafemann/iStockPhotoFrom Scientific America:
Why do we find it funny when someone falls down?
—William B. Keith, Houston
William F. Fry, a psychiatrist and laughter researcher at Stanford University, explains:
Every human develops a sense of humor, and everyone’s taste is slightly different. But certain fundamental aspects of humor help explain why a misstep may elicit laughter.
The first requirement is the “play frame,” which puts a real-life event in a nonserious context and allows for an atypical psychological reaction. Play frames explain why most people will not find it comical if someone falls from a 10-story building and dies: in this instance, the falling person’s distress hinders the establishment of the nonserious context. But if a woman casually walking down the street trips and flails hopelessly as she stumbles to the ground, the play frame may be established, and an observer may find the event amusing.
Read more ....
The Element That Could Change The World
Schematic depicts the inner workings of a vanadium battery, now in use in a Utah plant, that can supply 250 kilowatts for eight hours. VRB Power SystemsFrom Discover Magazine:
Making green energy work may depend on three unlikely heroes: an Australian engineer, a battery, and the element vanadium.
February 27, 2008, was a bad day for renewable energy. A cold front moved through West Texas, and the winds died in the evening just as electricity demand was peaking. Generation from wind power in the region rapidly plummeted from 1.7 gigawatts to only 300 megawatts (1 megawatt is enough to power about 250 average-size houses). The sudden loss of electricity supply forced grid operators to cut power to some offices and factories for several hours to prevent statewide blackouts.
By the next day everything was back to normal, but the Texas event highlights a huge, rarely discussed challenge to the adoption of wind and solar power on a large scale. Unlike fossil fuel plants, wind turbines and photovoltaic cells cannot be switched on and off at will: The wind blows when it blows and the sun shines when it shines, regardless of demand. Even though Texas relies on wind for just over 3 percent of its electricity, that is enough to inject uncertainty into the state’s power supplies. The problem is sure to grow more acute as states and utilities press for the expanded use of zero-carbon energy. Wind is the fastest-growing power source in the United States, solar is small but also building rapidly, and California is gearing up to source 20 percent of its power from renewables by 2017.
Read more ....
The Power Of Pond Scum
From CBS:(CBS) Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics - and with increasing interest, biofuel.
In a warehouse 120 miles southwest, a bioreactor of clear plastic tubes is producing algae in pressure-cooker fashion that its manufacturer hopes will one day power jet aircraft.
Experts say it will be years, maybe a decade, before this simplest of all plants can be efficiently processed for fuel. But when that day comes, it could go a long way toward easing the world's energy needs and responding to global warming.
Algae is the slimy stuff that clouds your home aquarium and gets tangled in your feet in a lake or ocean. It can grow almost everywhere there is water and sunlight, and under the right conditions it can double its volume within hours. Scientists and industrialists agree that the potential is huge.
Read more ....
Thursday, October 2, 2008
UK Urged To Fund Climate Project
From The BBC:The UK government has been urged to fund the next stage of a major European programme to monitor the effects of global climate change from space.
The trade body UKspace made the call ahead of a key ministerial meeting.
Britain entered Kopernikus, the world's biggest environmental monitoring project, at a quarter of the funding level preferred by industry.
UK companies are understood to have lost out on lucrative contracts as a result.
The programme will combine data from state-of-the-art satellites and hundreds of other sources to provide an accurate understanding of the land, oceans and atmosphere.
Read more ....
10 Future Shocks For The Next 10 Years
From InfoWorld:As InfoWorld turns 30, a look back at the changes wrought by technology since 1978 boggles the mind. The extended InfoWorld family predicts the shocking developments we can expect between now and 2018
The past 30 years of InfoWorld's existence have seen a series of future shocks, from the ascent of the personal computer to horrifying strains of malware to the sizzling sex appeal of the iPhone. In honor of InfoWorld's 30th anniversary, we've decided to take a playful look ahead at the future shocks that could occur in the next 10 years (30 years seemed a little too sci-fi).
An all-points bulletin went out to InfoWorld contributors, the replies to which we culled into 10 future shocks -- ranging from radical changes in IT's responsibility to "1984"-ish scenarios where privacy is a quaint notion. No doubt you've considered many of these possibilities yourself. Even more likely, you have just as many interesting scenarios to bring to the party, and we urge you to share them in the comments section of this article. Dream big -- given the drama of the past 30 years, the next 10 are anyone's guess.
Read more ....
Sunspot Activity At Its Lowest Level Since The Space Age Started
Table From Watts Up With ThatNASA: Sun Is “Blankety Blankest” It’s Been In The Space Age -- Watts Up With That?
From NASA Science News h/t to John-X
Spotless Sun: 2008 is the Blankest Year of the Space Age
Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.
As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.
“Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “We’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”
Read more ....
HIV/AIDS Is Not A New Disease
HIV-infected T cells. (Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Tom Folks, NIAID)HIV/AIDS Pandemic Began Around 1900, Earlier Than Previously Thought; Urbanization In Africa Marked Outbreak -- Science Daily
ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2008) — New research indicates that the most pervasive global strain of HIV began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924, suggesting that growing urbanization in colonial Africa set the stage for the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The estimated period of origin, considerably earlier than the previous estimate of 1930, coincides with the establishment and rise of urban centers in west-central Africa where the pandemic HIV strain, HIV-1 group M, emerged. The growth of cities and associated high-risk behaviors may have been the key change that allowed the virus to flourish.
The research, led by Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at The University of Arizona in Tucson, was co-sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Read more ....
Why Will It Take So Long to Fix the Large Hadron Collider?
CERN LabFrom Live Science:
After all the hooplah over firing up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the party turned out to be short-lived. On Sept. 20, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland announced that a large helium leak, likely due to a faulty electrical connection, would require at least a two-month delay for repairs. A week later, scientists said they would not restart the machine until next spring.
This lengthy shutdown is necessary because scientists need to warm up the faulty area of the machine from its standard operating temperature of minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit — that’s a few degrees colder than outer space and only 3 degrees above absolute zero, the temperature where all molecules stop moving. It will take weeks to warm this errant area back up to room temperature so engineers can venture in and fix it. Then, assuming they can quickly detect and remedy the problem, scientists would need to lower the temperature again before turning the LHC back on.
Read more ....
Japan's Tsunami History Shows What's In Store
December 28, 2004From MSNBC:
Tsunami from huge quake could destroy 5,600 homes, kill 850 people
Newly discovered tsunami deposits suggest the Japanese coastline was hammered by a series of massive waves thousands of years ago. The finding adds to growing evidence that the region is regularly pounded by killer waves, and could help in planning for future inundations.
The northern Japanese island of Hokkaido is nestled up against the Kuril-Kamchatka trench, a place where the Pacific tectonic plate dives beneath the Eurasian plate, and home to terrible earthquakes in excess of magnitude 8.0.
Now Wesley Nutter and a team of researchers say nine waves, each at least 33 feet high, battered the coastline before the dawn of civilization on the island.
Read more ....
During Exercise, Human Brain Shifts Into High Gear On 'Alternative Energy'
From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2008) — Alternative energy is all the rage in major media headlines, but for the human brain, this is old news. According to a study by researchers from Denmark and The Netherlands, the brain, just like muscles, works harder during strenuous exercise and is fueled by lactate, rather than glucose.
Not only does this finding help explain why the brain is able to work properly when the body's demands for fuel and oxygen are highest, but it goes a step further to show that the brain actually shifts into a higher gear in terms of activity. This opens doors to entirely new areas of brain research related to understanding lactate's specific neurological effects.
"Now that we know the brain can run on lactate, so to speak, future studies should show us when to use lactate as part of a treatment," said Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "From an evolutionary perspective, the result of this study is a no-brainer. Imagine what could have or did happen to all of the organisms that lost their wits along with their glucose when running from predators. They were obviously a light snack for the animals able to use lactate."
Read more ....
In Baseball, Head-First Slides Are Best
Seattle Mariners' Luis Valbuena, right, slides into third base as Oakland Athletics' Daric Barton waits for the ball in the ninth inning of a baseball game Saturday, Sept. 20, 2008, in Oakland, Calif. Valbuena was called out. Credit: AP Photo/Ben MargotFrom Live Science:
A player's slide to beat the throw at home plate is one of baseball's big thrills, especially during the postseason, which begins today. But of the two sliding styles — head-first and feet-first — which is faster?
Head-first, says David A. Peters of Washington University in St. Louis, an engineer and avid baseball fan.
The reasons that it's faster to lead off with your noggin all have to do with physics, Peters said.
Specifically, it's a matter of the player's center of gravity (or center of mass) — essentially the point where gravity exerts its tug. For most people, their center of gravity is right around the stomach area, Peters said.
Whenever you leave the ground, no matter which end of your body you lead with, your center of gravity will move forward with the speed (and momentum) you left the ground with, Peters explained.
Read more ....
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Genius
From Discover Magazine:1 The latest winners of the Nobel Prize—the big kahuna of genius awards—will be announced this month. Were you nominated? To find out, you’ll have to either win or wait 50 years, which is how long the Nobel committee keeps secret the list of also-rans.
2 Nyah, nyah. William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel in physics for inventing the transistor, was excluded as a child from a long-term study of genius because his I.Q. score wasn’t high enough.
3 History repeated itself in 1968 when Luis Alvarez won a Nobel for his work on elementary particles. He had been excluded from the same research program as Shockley. Who set up that study, anyway?
4 The genius study was created in 1928 by Louis Terman at Stanford University, who pioneered the use of I.Q. tests to identify geniuses, defined by him as those with an I.Q. greater than 140.
5 None of the children (known as “Termites”) in the study has won a Nobel.
Read more ....
New Thinking On When The Arctic Froze
Courtesy: NASAFrom Live Science:
The Arctic may be a frigid, ice-covered area today, but it hasn't always been quite so cold.
Scientists have long wondered when the Arctic first transitioned to its ice-covered state; a new study suggests this could have happened millions of years earlier than was previously thought.
The standard view of the formation of the huge ice sheets that cover Earth's poles was that continental-scale glaciation of Antarctica occurred about 34 million years ago, while the Arctic wasn't covered by ice until some 31 million years later — much more recently geologically-speaking.
But the new findings hint that Arctic ice may not have taken quite as long to form, with evidence placing its formation closer in time to that of Antarctic ice. Now researchers say Arctic ice could have formed about 23 million years ago.
A group of U.S. and U.K. climatologists, led by Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, used a model to test the idea that Arctic ice formed much earlier than thought. Their work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the results are detailed in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Nature.
Read more ....
Galileo Satellite Knocked Offline
Artist's view of a Galileo satellite. Crédits : ESA-J. HuartFrom the BBC News:
A test spacecraft for Europe's future satellite-navigation system has been rocked by a surge of space radiation.
The incident forced the Giove-B satellite to adopt a "safe mode" for two weeks in which only essential power systems were kept running.
European Space Agency (Esa) engineers have brought the satellite back up and are now studying what happened.
Giove-B carries the technologies that will be incorporated into the Galileo network when it becomes operational.
These include the atomic clocks which provide the precise timing that underpins all sat-nav applications.
Read more ....
50 Highlights of Space Travel -- 50 Years Of NASA
NASA Mission Apollo 16Photo NASA No AS16-114-18422 - Mission Apollo 16 on the Moon.
View of Plum crater photographed by Apollo 16 crew during EVA.
View of Plum crater photographed by Apollo 16 crew during EVA.
From National Geographic:
From Sputnik to Apollo 11 to Saturn's moons, click through our time line to tour 50 highlights from 50 years of space exploration.
The link is HERE.
Happy Birthday NASA!
From Popular Science:
The space agency celebrates it's 50th anniversary today and PopSci is on hand for the occasion. Find out the science behind space food, the history of the Apollo hoax and more.
The Link is HERE.
In The Language Of Love, Money Talks
From ABC News:New Study Finds Women are More Likely to Marry Men with Money.
Money can't buy love, but it seems to earn you more babies. Rich men sire more children than paupers, according to a new study of thousands of middle-aged British men.
Women are more likely to marry men who can provide for them and their children than penniless men, says Daniel Nettle, a behavioural scientist at Newcastle University, UK, who led the new study.
"It's not that if you're richer you'll have more children – if you're richer you're less likely to be childless," he says.
For much of civilization, females have tended to mate with better providers, but many sociologists argue that the industrial and sexual revolutions have immunised people in developed countries such evolutionary pressures.
Read more ....
Unknown Earth: Our Planet's Seven Biggest Mysteries
From The New Scientist:
It's the place we call home, but there is much about planet Earth that remains frustratingly unknown. How did it form from a cloud of dust? How did it manage to nurture life? And just what is going on deep within its core? New Scientist investigates these and other fundamental questions about our beautiful, enigmatic world.
How come Earth got all the good stuff?
What happened during Earth's dark ages?
Where did Earth's life come from?
Why does Earth have plate tectonics?
What is at the centre of the Earth?
Why is Earth's climate so stable?
Can we predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions?
Explore an interactive map of our Unknown Earth
Read more ....
'Hub' Of Fear Memory Formation Identified In Brain Cells
From Science Blog:A protein required for the earliest steps in embryonic development also plays a key role in solidifying fear memories in the brains of adult animals, scientists have revealed. An apparent "hub" for changes in the connections between brain cells, beta-catenin could be a potential target for drugs to enhance or interfere with memory formation.
The results are published online this week and appear in the October issue of Nature Neuroscience.
The protein beta-catenin acts like a Velcro strap, fastening cells' internal skeletons to proteins on their external membranes that connect them with other cells. In species ranging from flies to frogs to mice, it also can transmit early signals that separate an embryo into front and back or top and bottom.
During long-term memory formation, structural changes take place in the synapses – the connections between neurons in the brain, says Kerry Ressler, MD, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. Ressler is a researcher at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center, where the research was conducted, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Read more ....
Melamine Contaminated Milk
From Science Base:A brief summary and update to the Sciencebase original posts on Melamine in Milk and Melamine Scandal Widens.
Dairy farmers have been feeling the squeeze for years, particularly in parts of the world where technological advancement has been slow in coming and so their profit margins on their milk output have not been lifted by improved efficiency. In order to boost profits milk has been diluted. However, this brings with it the problem of falling quality - dilute with water and measurable concentrations of milk proteins, fats, and sugars fall. Dilution by up to 30% has not been uncommon, which is where melamine (as I’ve mentioned) comes in. Melamine is a small organic molecule with a high nitrogen content that can easily fool the quality control equipment into thinking that nitrogen (from protein) is present at normal levels and so the milk is passed as good.
Unfortunately, it is possible that melamine accumulates in the body and causes toxicity problemsmelamine accumulates in the body and causes toxicity problems - basically damaging the kidneys and forming stones (solid deposits within the kidneys or bladder). Infants fed regularly with milk containing melamine will be particularly susceptible to these effects. As we have seen tens of thousands have been affected and several have died in China. Why this problem is not more widespread, given the rather large number of infants potentially having been drinking contaminated formula-milk for months is unclear.
Read more ....
World’s Largest Study Of Near-Death Experiences To Start
From World-Science:The University of Southampton, U.K. announced it is launching this week the world’s largest-ever study on whether people have thoughts for a time while they are clinically “dead.”
The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study is to be launched by the Human Consciousness Project at the university, an international collaboration of scientists and physicians who study the brain, consciousness and clinical death.
The study is led by Sam Parnia of Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, with University of Southampton researchers. Following an 18-month pilot phase at some U.K. hospitals, the study is now being expanded to include other centres within the U.K., mainland Europe and North America, Parnia said.
“Contrary to popular perception,” Parnia said, “death is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning—a medical condition termed cardiac arrest, which from a biological viewpoint is synonymous with clinical death.
“During a cardiac arrest, all three criteria of death are present. There then follows a period of time, which may last from a few seconds to an hour or more, in which emergency medical efforts may succeed in restarting the heart and reversing the dying process. What people experience during this period of cardiac arrest provides a unique window of understanding into what we are all likely to experience during the dying process.”
Some studies have found that 10 to 20 percent of people who go through cardiac arrest and clinical death report lucid, well structured thought processes, reasoning, memories and sometimes detailed recall of events during their encounter with death, Parnia said.
During the AWARE study, doctors will use sophisticated technology to study the brain and consciousness during cardiac arrest. At the same time, they plan to test the validity of out of body experiences and claims of being able to “see” and “hear” during cardiac arrest.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
New Facility Uses Algae to Turn Coal Pollution Into Fuel
From Gas2.org:
A coal fired power-plant in Oregon has started a pilot project to curb pollution by using algae to harvest greenhouse gases and make fuel and other useful products.
The power plant in Boardman, Oregon, is the state’s only coal-fired facility — and also the the state’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide. To deal with this problem, Portland General Electric and Columbia Energy Partners have started a pilot project to turn the otherwise nasty emissions into biodiesel, ethanol, and even livestock feed.
How does it work? Just like you and I breathe in oxygen to make energy, algae breathe in carbon dioxide to make energy. So, if you capture all that carbon dioxide and feed it to the algae, they grow. Algae are particularly oily little buggers so after they’ve matured they can be squeezed to make oil. The leftover algae carcasses can then be converted to ethanol and used as feed for livestock.
Right now, the project’s scale is so tiny that it’ll hardly scratch the surface of the 600-megawatt facility’s 5 million tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions. But project proponents are quick to point out that when the project goes full scale in 2½ years, it should reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 60% during daylight hours and produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel per year.
Read more ....
Scientists Work With Algae To See If It Could Become The Fuel Of The Future
From Sympatico.ca:BORCULO, Netherlands - Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics - and with increasing interest, biofuel.
In a warehouse about 200 kilometres southwest, a bioreactor of clear plastic tubes is producing algae in pressure-cooker fashion that its manufacturer hopes will one day power jet aircraft.
Experts say it will be years, maybe a decade, before this simplest of all plants can be efficiently processed for fuel. But when that day comes, it could go a long way toward easing the world's energy needs and responding to global warming.
Algae is the slimy stuff that clouds your home aquarium and gets tangled in your feet in a lake or ocean. It can grow almost everywhere there is water and sunlight, and under the right conditions it can double its volume within hours. Scientists and industrialists agree that the potential is huge.
Read more ....
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 UniversityFrom 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.
Read more ....
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 EnlargeA 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 secondsFrom 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 imageFrom 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.
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Monday, September 29, 2008
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.
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Will We Soon Find Life in the Heavens?
Allen Telescope ArrayFrom 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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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 TrovatiFrom 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.
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