Pictured: The Moment A Grey Heron Catches A Baby Rabbit By The Ears, Drowns It, Then Swallows The Thing Whole

(Photo from Daily Mail)

From The Daily Mail:

These amazing pictures show how cruel nature can sometimes be as a grey heron snacks on a rabbit.

Herons mainly eat fish but will also take birds and small mammals. This one was searching for a meal when it spotted the baby rabbit emerging from a hole.

Swooping down it grabbed its prey by the ears, took it to water and drowned it - then swallowed the rabbit whole.

Read more ....

Spacecraft Reveals Stunning New Views of Mercury

The features this image from MESSENGER's Oct. 6, 2008 flyby shows never-before seen terrain. The region in the foreground near the right side of the imag is close to the border between darkness and daylight, so shadows are long and prominent. Two very long scarps are visible in this region, and the scarps appear to crosscut each other. The easternmost scarp also cuts through a crater, showing that it formed after the impact that created the crater. Other neighboring impact craters, such as in the upper left of this image, appear to be filled with smooth plains material. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW. (Photo from Live Science)

From Live Science:

A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

NASA's MESSENGER probe captured never-before-seen views of the Mercury during its encounter on Monday. The spacecraft zipped past Mercury for the second time this year and used the planet's gravity to adjust its path as it continues en route to become the first probe to orbit the planet in March 2011.

One new image shows large patterns of ray-like lines extending southward across much of the planet surface from a young, newly-imaged crater. The previously-imaged Kuiper crater and others craters also have similar webs of lines radiating outward.

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One Bad Weld Shuts Down A Billion Dollar Science project

A welder begins works on the interconnections of magnets in the Large Hadron Collider
(Photo courtesy The Telegraph)

Large Hadron Collider Broke Down Because Of Bad Soldering On A Single Connection -- Daily Telegraph

The £4.4 billion Large Hadron Collider was put out of action for months because one electrical connection out of 10,000 was badly soldered, the experiment's chief scientist said.

"It is very probable that there was a connection that wasn't good," said Lyn Evans, project leader of the 17-mile LHC, buried deep under Swiss soil at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organisation.

The LHC, which aims to shed light on how the universe began by replicating conditions just after the Big Bang, has to operate at extremely cold temperatures.

It was switched on to great fanfare on Sep 10, but had to be turned back off nine days later because the cooling mechanism broke.

It takes weeks to rechill the machine to "superconducting" temperatures - allowing it to fire protons around a 17 mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to light speed and break into even tinier particles

Mr Evans said he did not think a single fault in 10,000 connections was bad, but "it cost dearly".

Read more ....

My Comment: Only one? I worked as a welder a number of years ago. To be right 9,999 out of 10,000 .... Hmmmmm .... I am very skeptical.

Smart Slime, Ovulating Strippers Among 2008 Ig Nobels

Opera singers perform at Thursday's Ig Nobel Prize awards, given for laughable (but scientifically sound) research. This year's event honored scientists who had studied strippers and slime, among other topics. (Photograph by Josh Reynolds/AP -- National Geographic)

From The National Geographic:

Some fake drugs are better than others, armadillos are assaulting our history, and slime mold is smarter than we think—these and other offbeat scientific triumphs were honored Thursday night at the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

The prizes celebrate "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

More than 1,200 people attended a raucous affair at Harvard University, dubbed the "18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony" in honor of this year's theme—redundancy.

William Lipscomb, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1976, dispensed prizes to the ten honorees. He himself was the prize in the Win a Date With a Nobel Laureate contest.

The gala is thrown every year by the science/humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR).

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Controversy About Our Ancestors

A sculptor's rendering, part of an exhibit focusing on the 3.2-million-
year-old hominid called Lucy, shows how she might have looked in life.
(Photo: Dave Einsel / Getty Images file)

Puzzling Over Pre-Humans -- Cosmic Log/MSNBC

The world’s best-known skeleton of a human ancestor - whose name, "Lucy," came from a Beatles song - now lies splayed out in Seattle's Pacific Science Center like ornaments in a glass jewelry case. Or, more aptly, like 3.2-million-year-old pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Anthropologists are still working on the puzzles about human origins that have been posed by Lucy and other fossils, including a major find that was made just a couple of miles away from the place where Lucy was found 34 years ago.

The long-running mystery surrounding the "First Family" - a grouping of fossil bones representing up to 17 of Lucy's kin from Ethiopia's Afar region - is just one of the many unresolved plot threads in the scientific story about our long-ago ancestors.

"Lucy's Legacy," an exhibition that began its Seattle run last weekend, recaps the story so far. The traveling exhibit made news last year when it came to the Houston Museum of Natural History, because it represented the first time the Ethiopian government allowed Lucy's skeleton to be displayed abroad. Since then, the cultural controversy has settled down - but scientific controversies continue.

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NASA Spacecraft Zooms Above Surface Of Mercury

This image of Mercury was taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft on October 5, 2008 as it approached the planet nearest the sun for the second time this year.
REUTERS/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/Handout

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A car-sized NASA spacecraft zoomed above the surface of Mercury on Monday, viewing rocky terrain never before seen up close on our solar system's sun-baked innermost planet, scientists said.

The MESSENGER probe flew as low as 124 miles near the equator of Mercury as part of its ongoing exploration of the planet nearest the sun, said project scientist Ralph McNutt of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Initial images sent back to Earth showed newly discovered cliffs on Mercury's surface, with the bulk of the data to be transmitted on Tuesday, McNutt said.

"This is all covering about 30 percent of the planet that has never been seen by a spacecraft before," McNutt said in a telephone interview. "As far as we can tell, everything executed just as it was supposed to."

This was the second of three scheduled encounters before MESSENGER enters into orbit around Mercury in 2011. It flew past Mercury on January 14 and will return in September 2009.

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NASA Spacecraft Ready To Explore Outer Solar System

An artist's impression of NASA's IBEX spacecraft exploring the edge of our solar system.
(Photo: NASA/GSFC)

From e! Science News:

The first NASA spacecraft to image and map the dynamic interactions taking place where the hot solar wind slams into the cold expanse of space is ready for launch Oct. 19. The two-year mission will begin from the Kwajalein Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Called the Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX, the spacecraft will conduct extremely high-altitude orbits above Earth to investigate and capture images of processes taking place at the farthest reaches of the solar system. Known as the interstellar boundary, this region marks where the solar system meets interstellar space.

"The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," said David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and senior executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

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Top NASA Photos Of All Time

EarthRise, 1968 The Last Whole Earth Catalog described this image as: “The famous Apollo 8 picture of Earthrise over the moon that established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness (dry moon, barren space) and began to bend human consciousness.” (Photo: NASA)

From Air And Space Magazine:

50 indelible images from the first 50 years of spaceflight.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which began its operations on October 1, 1958, we offer this list of the 50 most memorable images from NASA’s history (see all 50 in the photo gallery at right). We recognize that any such ranking is inherently subjective. The rationale for why any one image ranked two slots higher than any other combines several factors, including our attempt to balance the list between human spaceflight, satellite imaging, and planetary exploration. Many wonderful images did not make the final cut—we couldn’t convince the editors to give us 20 pages instead of 10.

The list omits significant events from space history that were not NASA achievements, such as the famous 1958 photograph of Wernher von Braun and the other architects of the Explorer 1 satellite celebrating their success by holding a model of the satellite over their heads, an event that occurred months before NASA existed. Photos from the Apollo moon program predominate, as well they should—it remains the agency’s crowning achievement. We also recognize that, even though the first “A” in NASA stands for “aeronautics,” our list is light on aeronautical breakthroughs (see Moments & Milestones, p. 84). Our only excuse is that the ranking reflects the affinity of the division of space history staff for space topics.

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Can Engineers Achieve The Holy Grail Of Energy: Infinite And Clean?

The guts of ITER, a pioneering fusion
reactor; include the massive electromagnets
needed to hold 200-million-degree hydrogen
fuel in place. © Eric Verdult/Kennis in Beeld

From Discover Magazine:

All they need to do is tame 200-million-degree plasma—without using too much energy.

For more than half a century, engineers have been trying to build a miniature sun in a bottle: a fusion reactor. Now an international team is embarking on the most intense effort ever to make it happen. If the group succeeds, we could soon generate nearly boundless power from an isotope of hydrogen that is plentiful in our oceans. That’s a big if, though.

In a basic fusion reaction, hydrogen atoms collide, creating helium and releasing energy. Making the reaction work requires heating the atoms to tens or hundreds or millions of degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures matter exists only as a plasma, a soup of negatively charged electrons and positively charged atomic nuclei. In a star like our sun, the plasma is held tightly together by gravity. On Earth, a fusion reactor needs a container—and no material is tough enough to withstand direct contact with the plasma.

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Bad Connection Caused Atom Smasher Shutdown

A scientist works in the CERN LHC computing grid centre in Geneva, October 3, 2008. This centre is one of the 140 data processing centres, located in 33 countries, taking part in the grid processing project. More than 15 million Gigabytes of data produced from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) should be collected every year. (Valentin Flauraud/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/AP:

GENEVA - A bad electrical connection likely caused the malfunction that sidelined the world's largest atom smasher days after it was launched with great fanfare, a senior scientist said Monday.

The fault was probably a poor soldering job on one of the particle collider's 10,000 connections, said Lyn Evans, project leader of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organization.

Only one fault in 10,000 isn't bad, "but it cost dearly," Evans said. It will take at least two months for the repair, meaning the collider cannot be restarted until spring, after its mandatory shutdown due to high electricity costs during the winter.

Evans said he still hasn't been able to examine the damage because the collider is too cold to be opened. The machine operates at extremely cold temperatures to take advantage of superconductivity — the ability of some metals to conduct electricity without any resistance near absolute zero degrees.

Read more ....

No Nobel For You: Top 10 Nobel Snubs

King Carl XVI Gustaf presents the Nobel Prize at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.
Photo: Hans Pettersson/The Nobel Foundation/www.imagebank.sweden.se

From Scientific America:

As the 2008 laureates are announced, SciAm looks back at some of Nobel history's also-rans.

Every year, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, announces up to three winners each in the scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. As of this morning, since 1901, 780 individuals have joined the hallowed ranks of Nobel laureates in these and other categories. And every year, there are murmurings—some louder than others—about the Nobel-worthy scientists who were overlooked. In 1974, when Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left out of the physics prize, her fellow astronomer and Nobel reject, Fred Hoyle, told reporters it was a "scientific scandal of major proportions." Physician-inventor Raymond Damadian famously took out full-page newspaper ads protesting his omission from the 2003 Nobel for MRI technology. This year, some will be asking questions about Robert Gallo, who did not share today's Nobel for medicine or physiology with Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi.

Nobel committee proceedings are notoriously shrouded in secrecy, so it's impossible to know all the details behind how each prizewinner is chosen, especially the more recent ones. But, according to Nobel historians, most award exclusions seem to relate to one or more of these criteria: limited slots available (Nobel rules limit the number of recipients to three for each category); ambiguity over who made the crucial contribution; and lack of experience and/or reputation within one's research community.

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Scientist: Holographic Television To Become Reality

From CNN:

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Picture this: you're sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the "Sex and the City" movie and you're watching all the action unfold in 3-D on your coffee table.

It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes.

The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona.

Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university's Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.

Read more ....

Nobel Prize For Medicine 2008

From left, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, Luc Montagnier and Harald zur Hausen. (Stephane De Sakutin/AFP; Olivier Maire/AP; Alex Grimm /Reuters ) (Photo From International Herald Tribune)

3 Share Nobel Prize For Work On AIDS And Cancer
-- Yahoo News/AP

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Three European scientists shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for separate discoveries of viruses that cause AIDS and cervical cancer, breakthroughs that helped doctors fight the deadly diseases.

French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1983.

They shared the award with Germany's Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.

U.S. researcher Dr. Robert Gallo was locked in a dispute with Montagnier in the 1980s over the relative importance of their roles in groundbreaking research into HIV and its role in AIDS. Gallo told The Associated Press that he was disappointed at not being included in the prize.

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More News On The Nobel Prizes

AIDS pioneers and cancer scientist win Nobel prize -- Yahoo News/Reuters
Research on AIDS virus and cancer wins Nobel Medicine Prize -- Yahoo News/AFP
3 Europeans share Nobel prize in medicine -- International Herald Tribune
3 Europeans Take Nobel Prize In Medicine -- CBS News
Nobel Prize awarded for AIDS, cervical cancer research -- L.A. Times
Nobel prize for medicine split between cervical cancer and HIV research -- The Guardian
Nobel Prize In Medicine For Major Virus Discoveries -- NPR
Nobels awarded for AIDS, cancer virus research -- Wired News
Nobel prize for viral discoveries -- BBC
Nobel Medicine prize goes to Germany and France -- Deutsche Welle
'There could be an Aids vaccine in four years,' says Nobel Prize winner -- Daily Mail
Nobel Medicine Prize row as HIV scientist is excluded -- Times Online
Nobel medicine prize reopens old AIDS wounds -- Yahoo news/Reuters
Human Papilloma Virus And Cancer, HIV Discoveries Recognized In 2008 Nobel Prize In Physiology Or Medicine -- Science Daily
FACTBOX - Nobel medicine prize - Who are the winners? -- Yahoo News/Reuters

U.S. To Rely On Russia For Manned Spaceflight

An image of Peggy A. Whitson, an American astronaut at the International Space Station, in April at mission control in Korolev, outside Moscow. A plan to suspend NASA's capacity to fly astronauts into space has set off a geopolitical controversy. (James Hill for The New York Times)

From The International Herald Tribune:

STAR CITY, Russia: This place was once no place, a secret military base northeast of Moscow that did not show up on maps. The Soviet Union trained its astronauts here to fight on the highest battlefield of the Cold War: space.

Yet these days, Star City is the place for America's hard-won orbital partnership with Russia, where astronauts train to fly aboard Soyuz spacecraft. And in two years, according to the Bush administration's plans, Star City will be the only place for sending astronauts from any nation to the International Space Station.

The gap is coming: Between 2010, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuts down the space shuttle program, and 2015, when the next generation of U.S. spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, NASA expects to have no human flight capacity and will depend on Russia to get to the $100 billion station, buying seats on Soyuz craft as space tourists do.

As NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, the administration's plan to retire the shuttle and work on a return to the Moon has thrust the U.S. space program squarely into national politics and geopolitical controversy.

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The True Costs of Renewable Energy

Beyond the Money: Mark Vargas put solar panels on his home in Santa Clara, Calif., but they get blocked by his neighbor's redwood trees. Earlier this year, Vargas asked prosecutors to press charges against his neighbors for shading the sun. But the couple next door insisted they should not have to chop down the trees to accommodate Vargas' energy demands because they planted the redwoods before he installed the solar panels in 2001. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu from Live Science)

From Live Science:

As utility costs mount ever higher, Americans now have real options to take home energy matters into their own hands with "green" systems that can pay for themselves in as little as a few years.

Among the choices: wind, solar, geothermal and a "microhydro" option that is potentially cheaper than a year's tuition at many state colleges.

Choosing the do-it-yourself route can offer the freedom of going partially or totally off the grid. And, if the energy generated exceeds your actual usage, you can even sell the excess juice to your utility company. But none of this is free. Here's how much change you should expect to kick in:

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Are Mammals Heading For Extinction

Two Tasmanian Devil females are seen in captivity at the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park in Taranna. Half the world's mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, according to an update of the "Red List," the most respected inventory of biodiversity. (Photo: Breitbart)

Half Of Mammals 'In Decline', Says Extinction 'Red List'
-- Breitbart/AFP

Half the world's mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, said an update Monday of the "Red List," the most respected inventory of biodiversity.

A comprehensive survey of mammals included in the annual report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which covers more than 44,000 animal and plant species, shows that a quarter of the planet's 5,487 known mammals are clearly at risk of disappearing forever.

But the actual situation may be even grimmer because researchers have been unable to classify the threat level for another 836 mammals due to lack of data.

"In reality, the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent," said IUCN scientist Jan Schipper, lead author of the mammal survey, in remarks published separately in the US-based journal Science.

The most vulnerable groups are primates, our nearest relatives on the evolutionary ladder, and marine mammals, including several species of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," said Schipper.

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Ancient Peru Pyramid Spotted By Satellite

In this satellite image, the white arrows show the buried pyramid and the black arrows other structures which have yet to be investigated. (Photo: National Research Council Italy)

From MSNBC:

Infrared and multispectral images reveal 9,000-square-mile structure.

A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru's Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome.

Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy's National Research Council (CNR) discovered the pyramid by analyzing images from the satellite Quickbird, which they used to penetrate the Peruvian soil.

The researchers investigated a test area along the river Nazca. Covered by plants and grass, it was about a mile away from Cahuachi's archaeological site, which contains the remains of what is believed to be the world's biggest mud city.

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AI Being Put The Test

Hal, the supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(Photograph: RGA/The Guardian)

'Intelligent' Computers Put To The Test' -- The Guardian

Programmers try to fool human interrogators

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.

In the 'Turing test' a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be 'thinking'.

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - 'artificial conversational entities' - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' - and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off.

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World’s Biggest Computing Grid Launched

Cern computer grid (Photo from Wikimedia)

From The Science Blog:

The world’s largest computing grid is ready to tackle mankind’s biggest data challenge from the earth’s most powerful accelerator. Today, three weeks after the first particle beams were injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid combines the power of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries to analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of LHC data every year.

The United States is a vital partner in the development and operation of the WLCG. Fifteen universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories from 11 states contribute their power to the project.

“The U.S. has been an essential partner in the development of the vast distributed computing system that will allow 7,000 scientists around the world to analyze LHC data, complementing its crucial contributions to the construction of the LHC,” said Glen Crawford of the High Energy Physics program in DOE’s Office of Science. DOE and the National Science Foundation support contributions to the LHC and to the computing and networking infrastructures that are an integral part of the project.

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China Sets Sights On First Space Station

From Space Daily:

The success of China's first spacewalk on the Shenzhou 7 mission paves the way for greater things. For China, the next great task will be its first space station. Much reportage has been circulated on this, but ironically, the more we read, the more confused space analysts become. What is China really planning?

It all seemed so simple just a month ago. China would launch a space laboratory on the Shenzhou 8 mission. Despite its name, this would not be a Shenzhou capsule spacecraft, but a new type of vehicle.

This would be followed by the unmanned Shenzhou mission, a conventional Shenzhou, which would dock with it. Finally Shenzhou 10 would carry a crew of three astronauts to the Shenzhou 8-9 complex.

This report seemed reliable for a long time, but this is apparently not the real plan. China has since revealed plans for a small space laboratory module called "Tiangong 1". The name is apparently a reference to a castle or fortress in the sky.

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Winds Are Dominant Cause Of Greenland And West Antarctic Ice Sheet Losses

Above image is not part of original papers, but included to demonstrate the issue. Animation of Arctic sea-ice being pushed by wind patterns. Note that the animation is large, about 7 MB and may take awhile to load on your computer. Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center (Photo from Watts Up With That)

From Watts Up With That:

From Climate Research News.

Two new studies summarized in a news article in Science magazine point to wind-induced circulation changes in the ocean as the dominant cause of the recent ice losses through the glaciers draining both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, not ‘global warming.’

The two studies referred to are:

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A Future Timeline for Economics

The Futurist:

The accelerating rate of change in many fields of technology all manifest themselves in terms of human development, some of which can be accurately tracked within economic data. Contrary to what the media may peddle and despite periodic setbacks, average human prosperity is rising at a rate faster than any other time in human history. I have described this in great detail in prior articles, and I continue to be amazed at how little attention is devoted to the important subject of accelerating economic growth, even by other futurists.

The time has thus come for making specific predictions about the details of future economic advancement. I hereby present a speculative future timeline of economic events and milestones, which is a sibling article to Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating, v2.0.

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Arctic Sea Ice Annual Freeze-up Underway

Parry Channel in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, as seen by Envisat's ASAR on 25 August 2008, when the direct Northwest Passage was open (right image), and on 22 September 2008 when sea ice is closing the direct Northwest Passage. (Credit: ESA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2008) — After reaching the second-lowest extent ever recorded last month, sea ice in the Arctic has begun to refreeze in the face of autumn temperatures, closing both the Northern Sea Route and the direct route through the Northwest Passage.

This year marked the first time since satellite measurements began in the 1970s that the Northern Sea Route, also known as the Northeast Passage, and the Northwest Passage were both open at the same time for a few weeks.

"NIC analysis of ESA’s Envisat and other satellite datasets indicated that the Northern Sea Route opened when a path through the Vilkitski Strait finally cleared by 5 September," NIC Chief Scientist Dr Pablo Clemente-Colón said via email from aboard the US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy in the Arctic, where he is conducting joint mapping operations with the Canadian Coast Guard.

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Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth

(Photo from Windsor Humanist Society)

From American Scientist:

Atoms are now such a commonplace idea that it is hard to remember how radical they used to seem. When scientists first hypothesized atoms centuries ago, they despaired of ever observing anything so small, and many questioned whether the concept of atoms could even be called scientific. Gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with Albert Einstein’s 1905 analysis of Brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid.

... Physicists’ understanding of the composition of space and time is following a similar path, but several steps behind. Just as the behavior of materials indicates that they consist of atoms, the behavior of space and time suggests that they, too, have some fine-scale structure—either a mosaic of spacetime “atoms” or some other filigree work.

Material atoms are the smallest indivisible units of chemical compounds; similarly, the putative space atoms are the smallest indivisible units of distance. They are generally thought to be about 10–35 meter in size, far too tiny to be seen by today’s most powerful instruments, which probe distances as short as 10–18 meter. Consequently, many scientists question whether the concept of atomic spacetime can even be called scientific.

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The Growth Of Geothermal Power

Wairakei Geothermal Power Plant New Zealand (Photo: Wikimedia)

Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat -- Washington Post

ORMOC, Philippines -- Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's shoes. But there is another Marcos legacy, and it is drawing new attention at a time of high oil prices, global warming and urgent questions about the role of government in alternative energy development.

Reacting to the early 1970s oil shock, Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground. Since then, the Philippine government has championed this form of energy.

Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines. With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, this country has become the world's largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources. Billions of dollars have been saved here because of reduced need for imported oil and coal.

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See A Pattern On Wall Street?

From The New York Times:

Take a look at the two blurry images below. Can you see an object hidden in each one?

Before I give the answers, here’s another question: Do you feel a certain lack of control over events right now?

These questions are not unrelated, according to a report in the new issue of Science by Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky. The researchers found that when people were primed to feel out of control, they were more likely to see patterns where none exist. They would spot an object in each of the images above, even though only the image on the right contains one (the outline of Saturn and its rings). If you thought you saw something in the image on the left, don’t be too hard on yourself — your feeling may be perfectly understandable given the chaos on Wall Street.

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Windfarms Of the Future

An illustration of what wind turbines would look like at different distances from the shore.
P.S.E.G (Photo: New York Times)

New Jersey Grants Rights to Build a Wind Farm About 20 Miles Offshore -- New York Times

Regulators in New Jersey awarded the rights on Friday for construction of a $1 billion offshore wind farm in the southern part of the state to Garden State Offshore Energy. The rights, which include access to as much as $19 million in state grants, is part of New Jersey’s Energy Master Plan, which calls for 20 percent of the state’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2020. The decision comes on the heels of decisions by Delaware and Rhode Island to allow the installation of offshore wind farms.

Energy experts say that these approvals could prompt regulators in New York to support projects off the south shore of Long Island and New York City.

Garden State Offshore Energy is a joint venture that includes P.S.E.G. Renewable Generation, a subsidiary of P.S.E.G. Global, which is a sister company of the state’s largest utility, Public Service Electric and Gas Company.

The proposal by Garden State Offshore Energy includes the installation of 96 turbines to produce as much as 346 megawatts of electricity, enough to power tens of thousands of houses, starting in 2013. The turbines would be arranged in a rectangle about a half-mile long by one-third of a mile wide and would be placed 16 to 20 miles off the coast of New Jersey’s Atlantic and Ocean Counties, much farther out and in much deeper water than other proposed wind farms. Deepwater Wind, which will work with P.S.E.G. to build the wind farm, said it could affordably build turbines in 100 feet of water with the same technology used to build oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and other places.

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China And Smoking Go Hand In Hand

China Lung Disease 'To Kill 83m' -- BBC News

A US study has suggested that more than 80 million people in China will die in the next 25 years as a result of lung disease.

The research says the vast majority of those premature deaths are preventable.

The study focused on the devastating impact of smoking and the widespread practice of burning wood or coal at home for cooking and heating.

The Harvard School of Public Health research looked at a 30-year period, spanning the last five and the next 25.

Respiratory disease is already a leading cause of deathChi in China, but this latest study suggests a startling rise.

In the 30-year period, it calculates, about 83 million Chinese people will die prematurely of lung disease.

Read more ....

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. (Credit: iStockphoto/Emre Ogan)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

"We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box'," Folley said. "We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity."

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Grief: The Price of Love

Old Man Crying (Photo from Trekearth)

From Live Science:

Years ago while observing a troop of Barbary macaques for behavioral research, I was surprised to see a new mother holding on to her obviously stillborn baby. She clutched the corpse to her chest and made soft cooing sounds, obviously in distress.

More remarkable, she held on to that dead baby for more than a week as it began to decompose.

Eventually, the mother showed up alone, but then it got even sadder. She began to haunt other mothers, those with live babies. She would sit close to them and try to grab those babies and hug them, as if to make up for her loss.

I was clearly witnessing a mother in deep grief, and I felt great empathy.

After all, she had been stuck in an evolutionarily dilemma that all of us, at one time or another, experience. Monkey, apes, humans and all other social animals are born to attach to others because those connections help keep us alive and up the chances of passing on genes. But at the same time, we pay dearly for that advantage when our loved ones leave.

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Earliest Known Human Had Neanderthal Qualities

This map shows the Kibish Formation site, where the fossils of the earliest modern human were found. The site is located in southwest Ethiopia. (Photo from Discover)

From Discover:

Aug. 22, 2008 -- The world's first known modern human was a tall, thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference: He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with Neanderthals, according to a series of forthcoming studies conducted by multiple international research teams.

The extraordinary findings, which will soon be outlined in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution devoted to the first known Homo sapiens, also reveal information about the material culture of the first known people, their surroundings, possible lifestyle and, perhaps most startling, their probable neighbors -- Homo erectus.

"Omo I," as the researchers refer to the find, would probably have been considered healthy-looking and handsome by today's standards, despite the touch of Neanderthal.

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French Bees Find A Haven In Paris

Photo from Advocacy Britannica

From The International Herald Tribune:

Corinne Moncelli offers guests at her Eiffel Park Hotel more than a view of the Paris landmark. She serves them honey from bees she keeps on the rooftop.

There are more than 300 known colonies in the French capital, up from about 250 five years ago, according to the National Beekeepers' Association. Hives have appeared on the roof of the Opéra Garnier, on balconies and in parks.

Bees are thriving in cities because "flowers and plants are changed constantly and there aren't pesticides," said Moncelli, who co-owns the hotel with her husband, Pascal.

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Old Violins Reveal Their Secrets

(Photo from Nashville Violins)

From Nature:

Acoustic measurements identify the signature of a Stradivarius.

Why do the violins made by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù sound so good? Countless theories have been proposed for the secret of these eighteenth-century Italian instrument-makers, but attempts to identify a unique acoustic signature have proved fruitless. Now a study has finally identified a measurable sound quality that distinguishes these old violins from cheap, factory-made instruments.

After spending ten years painstakingly measuring the acoustics of violins rated from "bad" to "excellent" by professional musicians, George Bissinger of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, says that the 'excellent' old Italian violins in his sample show a significantly stronger acoustic response in the lower octaves than do the 'bad' violins, whereas those rated merely 'good' have intermediate values1. The high-quality tone is caused by a single mode of vibration of air inside the body, which radiates sound strongly through the violin's f-holes.

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The Beginning of E-Paper?

Liquavista device (Photo from the Guardian)

Scientists Aim To Deliver E-Paper In Full
Computerised Colour -- The Guardian

Scientists in Cambridge have launched a £12m three-year project to create the next generation of e-paper, which may herald the arrival of fully interactive, all-colour computerised newspapers and magazines.

Liquavista, spun out of the Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven two years ago, has won part of the backing from the government-funded Technology Strategy Board. The project is also backed by Plastic Logic. The US technology company last month unveiled a prototype e-paper that looks much more like a sheet of A4 than the offerings of rivals such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony eReader, which resemble paperback books.

But Plastic Logic's device is only black and white, not very flexible and its screen updates quite slowly. Liquavista is working on a full-colour flexible screen that would allow newspapers and other publications to give their audience a much more interactive product that could include video.

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The Continual Existance Of Tuberculosis

(Click To Enlarge)
World TB incidence. Cases per 100,000; Red => 300, orange = 200–300, yellow = 100–200, green = 50–100, blue =< grey =" n/a." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis">Photo of world map is from Wikipedia)

Tuberculosis: An Ancient Disease Continues to Thrive
-- Time Magazine

The Church of Scotland Hospital in Tugela Ferry, South Africa, sits in an arid valley among the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal. Occupying a dozen or so tin-roofed, low-slung buildings, the hospital serves its rural patients well: Women come to have babies, H.I.V. patients register to receive their medications, and those infected with tuberculosis check in for a chance to recover from an ancient scourge.

But in 2005 a physician noticed that some of those TB patients, many of whom were H.I.V.-positive, were not getting any better, despite being on anti-TB medications. Nothing he provided them seemed to control the tubercle bacillus flourishing in their bodies. Of the 53 who were sickest, 52 died, most within a month of entering the hospital.

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This Will Completely Change The Wine industry

Proud: Entrepeneur and inventor Casey Jones, 53, shows off the revolutionary ultrasonic wine ager in a vinyard (Photo from the Daily Mail)

The Miracle Machine That Turns Cheap Plonk Into Vintage Wine - In Just Half An Hour -- The Daily Mail

A device that claims to turn cheap supermarket plonk into vintage wine and banish hangovers is set to hit the high street.

Inventors say a bottle of any bargain booze can be transformed in just 30 minutes, using space-age ultrasound technology.

The £350 gadget - which looks like an ordinary ice bucket - recreates the effects of decades of aging by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle.

Dragons Den veteran, entrepreneur and inventor Casey Jones, 53, is the man behind the machine, which is yet to be given a retail name.

He said: 'This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into a finest bottle of vintage, tasting like it's hundreds.

'It works on any alcohol that tastes better aged. Even a bottle of paint-stripper whisky can taste like an 8-year-aged single malt.'

Mr Jones is now in talks with leisure chain Hotel Du Vin about marketing the working-titled 'Ultrasonic Wine Ager'.

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Warming To Spur Potato Famine In The Andes?

From National Geographic:

When Tito Guillen Rosales was a young boy, his grandfather was a rich man, growing 50 bags of potatoes a year and sharing his surplus with community members who didn't have enough.

"But now his potatoes are covered with worms and plagues and he barely has enough to feed himself," said Rosales, 27, a farmer himself and the mayor of a Peruvian village at 11,000 feet (3,353 meters) in the Cordillera Blanca range of the Andes mountains.

"We are all becoming desperate to find a solution to the changes in the weather and climate that have brought these new pests," Rosales said.

Here in the Andean highlands scientists attribute warmer temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns to global climate change. These shifts are seriously affecting the health of tuber, or root, crops such as the potato.

Late blight, a fungus responsible for the Irish potato famine in the 1800s, appeared for the first time in Coyllurqui sometime in the last 20 years, surprising and flummoxing farmers such as Rosales and his grandfather.

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Carnival of Space: October 2, 2008

Photo: History.com

Alice's Astro Info is the host for todays Space Carnival. The link is HERE:

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.

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Ask the Brains: Why Do We Laugh When Someone Falls?

Alexander Hafemann/iStockPhoto

From 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.

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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 Systems

From 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Sunspot Activity At Its Lowest Level Since The Space Age Started

Table From Watts Up With That

NASA: 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.”

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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.

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Why Will It Take So Long to Fix the Large Hadron Collider?

CERN Lab

From 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.

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Japan's Tsunami History Shows What's In Store

December 28, 2004

From 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.

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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."

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