Life Spans In The U.S.

When U.S. life expectancy change is divided into six groups by county, patterns emerge. In group 1, life expectancy increased more than the national sex-specific mean (nssm); in group 2, life expectancy increased but did not differ from nssm; in group 3, life expectancy increased but significantly less than nssm; in group 4, change was statistically indistinguishable from zero and nssm; in group 5, there was no change but less increase than nssm; and in group 6, life expectancy declined. Southern women were most likely to lose life expectancy. Graphic courtesy of PLoS Medicine.

Reversal Of Fortune -- American Scientist

County-by-county comparison of death rates finds that lifespans dropped in some U.S. counties

As scientists from all disciplines know, where you look influences what you find.

By examining death rates county-by-county, public health researchers found that life spans, especially among women, fell in some United States counties. The numbers were small but such a reversal of fortune was, well, shocking.

"We started looking at disparity questions. This became arguably a bigger finding and a more depressing finding," said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ezzati, whose research results appeared in PLoS Medicine, is among scholars dicing and splicing mortality data to create more precise pictures of lifespan trends in the United States. The nation is not known as the life-expectancy leader in the developed world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks the life expectancy of women in the U.S. 27th globally

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The Carbon Footprint of Wine

From Live Science:

NEW YORK — While sipping a glass of wine one evening, wine enthusiast Tyler Colman began to think about the impact that particular wine, which happened to come from South America in a particularly heavy glass bottle, had on the environment.

That thought prompted him to begin examining wine production, from vineyard to wine glass, and "how the path that wine takes to get to us contributes to the carbon footprint of wine," he said at a lecture on wine and climate change here recently at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Wine enthusiasts such as Colman and winemakers are increasingly becoming aware of the impact their favorite beverage has on the environment, from the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow wine grapes, to the greenhouse gases released while transporting the wine from the vineyard to often far-reaching locales.

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Temps In Most Areas Of Country Below Average In '08

A Look At The 5 Men, 2 Women Who Will Fly Endeavour To The Space Station

From L.A. Times:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) _ Space shuttle Endeavour's seven astronauts will spend Thanksgiving circling Earth, and one of them — Sandra Magnus — will stick around for Christmas and New Year's as well.

Commander Christopher Ferguson said at least seven turkey dinners have been stowed aboard Endeavour for the trip to the international space station. Liftoff for the two-week mission is set for Friday night.

"They've given us the full seven-course Thanksgiving meal, and all we need to have now is the time to eat it," Ferguson said.

The made-to-order holiday menu includes irradiated smoked turkey, thermostabilized candied yams, rehydratable green beans and mushrooms, fresh corn bread dressing and cranberry-apple dessert.

A look at the five men and two women who will fly on Endeavour:

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Could Life Have Started In A Lump Of Ice?

From Physorg.com:

The universe is full of water, mostly in the form of very cold ice films deposited on interstellar dust particles, but until recently little was known about the detailed small scale structure. Now the latest quick freezing techniques coupled with sophisticated scanning electron microscopy techniques, are allowing physicists to create ice films in cold conditions similar to outer space and observe the detailed molecular organisation, yielding clues to fundamental questions including possibly the origin of life. Researchers have been surprised by some of the results, not least by the sheer beauty of some of the images created, according to Julyan Cartwright, a specialist in ice structures at the Andalusian Institute for Earth Sciences (IACT) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Granada in Spain.

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Sad About The Economy? Dream About The Future

At a Web 2.0 Summit start-up mock-pitch event called Launchpad, organizer John Battelle says the companies onstage would not be fly-by-night start-ups, but rather emerging companies with solid business models and the potential to have a big social impact. (Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)

From CNET News:

SAN FRANCISCO--The wild days of Web 2.0 may have thrown their last sheep. Here's how you can tell that things have gotten serious: at O'Reilly Media and Techweb's Web 2.0 Summit this week, people actually showed up for breakfast.

That's because they probably weren't out as late. The party scene at tech conferences tends to be a bacchanalia--take South by Southwest Interactive, with enough events to make any little black book burst at the seams, or TechCrunch50 a few months ago, where rumor has it that a high-profile dot-commer got so drunk at an afterparty that conference organizers politely asked him to delete some intoxicated Twitter posts.

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Physicists Create BlackMax To Search For Extra Dimensions In The Universe

Black holes are theorized to be regions in space where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing can escape its pull after crossing what is called the event horizon. BlackMax simulates these regions. (Credit: iStockphoto/Christophe Rolland)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2008) — A team of theoretical and experimental physicists, with participants from Case Western Reserve University, have designed a new black hole simulator called BlackMax to search for evidence that extra dimensions might exist in the universe.

Black holes are theorized to be regions in space where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing can escape its pull after crossing what is called the event horizon. BlackMax simulates these regions.

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Fusion Energy: Europe's New Holy Grail? (Part 2)

In the fusion process Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of Hydrogen) are compressed to create Helium and an energetic particle or neutron. This neutron can be captured to produce energy by heating water to drive a steam turbine. But producing more energy than is used in the process remains the key to a real breakthrough.

From TCS Daily:

Not all senior physicists believe an early breakthrough in fusion energy is either possible or, given the prevailing global economic conditions, even viable. And when Professor Dunne, director of the European HIPER project gives us an analogy for "perspective," it is not hard to see why. Dunne puts it this way:

"The laser is 10,000 times the power of the entire UK National Grid. And then you're going to focus that down onto a spot that's 10 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The pressure is equivalent to 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers sitting on your thumb. Some pretty crazy things are going to happen."

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Fusion Energy: Europe's New Holy Grail? (Part 1)

From TCS Daily:

A long-standing joke among physicists is that a breakthrough in pursuit of the holy grail of fusion energy is 'always just around the corner'. In October scientists in Europe formally launched the latest fusion energy project the High Power Laser Energy facility (HIPER). Due to be built and operational by 2020, HIPER represents phase 2 of Europe's twin-track approach; a phase that will involve constructing the world's largest laser, a laser the size of a football stadium.

But while HIPER's lead scientist believes a fusion energy breakthrough is just years away, some senior physicists are not only sceptical but question the whole need for fusion energy at all.

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Volcanism On The Far Side Of The Moon

Counting craters: A close-up of the terraced structure within a crater taken by the Japanese SELENE probe. Credit: SELENE/JAXA

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: New images of the far side of the Moon show that volcanoes continued to erupt there for much longer than previously thought.

The Moon is covered by large 'seas' of basalt, called mares. Most mares stopped forming three billion years ago, one billion years after the Moon formed from a collision between the Earth and another nascent planetoid.

Episodic volcanism

However, several mare deposits on the lunar farside (the side that always faces away from Earth) show a much younger age of around 2.5 billion years old, according to research published today in the U.S. journal Science.

These young ages indicate that mare volcanism on the Moon lasted longer than experts realised and may have occurred episodically, the authors write.

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Volcanoes: Nature's Way of Letting Off Steam

From Scientific American:

Whether it's natural gas drilling unleashing a mud volcano that has engulfed 12 Indonesian villages or the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 blanketing the world in enough particles to block out the sunshine and lower temperatures by more than a 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), volcanoes are among Earth's most destructive natural phenomena.

These openings, or vents, in Earth's crust allow hot ash, steam or even magma to erupt. Lava flows can then build new land in the ocean—as in the case of Hawaii—or entomb whole cities, as in the case of Pompeii in A.D. 79.

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Mystery Of The Screaming Mummy

Unexpected: Alongside the remains of great Egyptian pharoahs lay the body of a young man, his face locked in an eternal blood-curdling scream, in a plain, undecorated coffin

From the Daily Mail:

It was a blood-curdling discovery. The mummy of a young man with his hands and feed bound, his face contorted in an eternal scream of pain. But who was he and how did he die?

On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings.

The 1881 discovery of the tombs, in the Deir El Bahri valley, 300 miles south of Cairo, had been astonishing and plentiful. Hidden from the world for centuries were some of the great Egyptian pharaohs - Rameses the Great, Seti I and Tuthmosis III. Yet this body, buried alongside them, was different, entombed inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased's identity.

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The Great Fear Of The Unknown

Part of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is seen in its tunnel at the CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. By Martial Trezzini, AP

From USA Today:

So much for the end of the world.

Fears that the atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider would create black holes — gravitational sinkholes from which not even light can escape — and end life as we know it have joined UFOs and Bigfoot on the roster of pseudoscientific scares.

Before it was launched on Oct. 10, bloggers, late-night comedians, worried parents around the world and at least two lawsuits greeted the mere start-up of the collider with dismay. But Earth clearly survived the collider's first nine days of operations before a technical glitch shut it down.

Experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN — an acronym kept from an earlier name), which created the $6 billion grand experiment in particle physics, are resigned to the scares kicking up again when the collider starts back up next year and begins smashing protons.

"It's only natural. We are curious about the unknown, and that's why we explore mysteries like the conditions of the early universe," says CERN spokesman James Gillies. "At the same time, we fear the unknown, and particle physics can be one of those things that is hard for people to understand."

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Vitamin B Supplements Could Prevent Alzheimer's Memory Loss

From The Telegraph:

Patients with Alzheimer's disease have been given fresh hope as scientists discover that off the shelf vitamin B supplement halts memory loss.

Researchers have discovered that high doses of Vitamin B3, which costs as little as £4 over the counter, could have a dramatic effect on the onslaught of the progressive disease.

The breakthrough by US scientists could mean a cheap and easily obtainable treatment for the 417,000 or so sufferers in the UK.

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How To Recover Your Google Account

From Wired:

Recently some high-profile people have found themselves suddenly locked out of their Google Accounts. The lockouts have started some rumbling in the blogosphere that maybe, just maybe, we’re all a little too reliant on Gmail and the rest of Google’s very handy, but potentially unreliable, services.

It’s about time we started waking up. Take a cue from Free Software advocate Richard Stallman who suggests handing all your data over to the cloud is "worse than stupidity."

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Astronauts Head For Extreme Home Makeover In Space

Hubble Space Telescope is seen in this picture taken from Space Shuttle in March 2002.
(NASA/Handout/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The international space station is about to get all the comforts of a modern, high-end, "green" home: a fancy recycling water filter, a new fridge, extra bedrooms, workout equipment and the essential half-bath.

Later this week, space shuttle Endeavour's seven astronauts will carry up all the frills for more luxurious space station living — and a larger household. Liftoff is set for Friday night.

It will be a home makeover in the extreme. The space station will go from a three-bedroom, one-bath house with kitchenette to a five-bedroom, two-bath house with two kitchenettes and the latest gizmos NASA has to offer.

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Are Alternative Fuels Reliving The 1980s?

Workers install solar panels on the roof of an Austin, Texas, home.
(Ann Hermes/CSM/File)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Today’s slumping oil prices may undermine viability of alt-fuel programs – again.

Tumbling gas-pump prices make motorists smile, but not Peter Vanderzee. They remind him how falling oil costs sank his effort to unshackle the United States from Middle East oil two decades ago.

As project manager for two large alternative-energy projects under President Carter’s US Synthetic Fuels program launched in 1980, Mr. Vanderzee was pushing his team to make methanol from coal for auto fuel.

But in 1985, just as his technology was starting to produce results, oil plummeted. In today’s inflation-adjusted dollars, oil went from $53 a barrel to $28, with pump prices falling from $2.20 a gallon to $1.60. The next year, President Reagan pulled the plug on the US Synfuels program.

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'Anti-Aging' Pill Makes Mice Mighty

Mighty and Mini
After 15 weeks a high-calorie diet, mice taking at least 500 mg of a new drug gained no weight. Meanwhile, their cholesterol levels improved and their running ability got a measurable boost. But don't run to the pharmacy: for now, this prescription is for rodents only.

From Discovery:

Nov. 7, 2008 -- Eat more than you should. Stay skinny. Run twice as far. Those are the big claims coming from a new drug study from Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass. This latest study clears the way for human clinical trials of SRT1720, often touted as an "anti-aging pill."

SRT1720 activates the same receptor as the much-discussed resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that may slow some effects of aging. Both resveratrol and SRT1720 are being tested as a way to treat type-two diabetes first, and possibly other age-related diseases, later.

"We are very excited by these results," said Michelle Dipp of Sirtris. "These compounds are mimicking calorie restriction and exercise while lowering levels of glucose and insulin in mice. It's a game changer."

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Wonders Of Ocean Life Counted In Massive Census

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A city of brittle stars off the coast of New Zealand, an Antarctic expressway where octopuses ride along in a flow of extra salty water and a carpet of tiny crustaceans on the Gulf of Mexico sea floor are among the wonders discovered by researchers compiling a massive census of marine life.

"We are still making discoveries," but researchers also are busy assembling data already collected into the big picture of life in the oceans, senior scientist Ron O'Dor said.

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Plucky Mars rovers on the move again

The Opportunity rover climbed out of Victoria Crater (right) in late August
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

New Scientist Space:

The arrival of spring in southern Mars is reviving NASA's two venerable Mars rovers as deepening autumn in the arctic north slowly freezes the Phoenix lander.

After hibernating for the winter on the northern edge of a plateau called Home Plate, the Spirit rover moved uphill in October to collect more sunlight.

On the other side of the planet, the Opportunity rover, which climbed out of a large crater called Victoria at the end of August, has completed the first month of a 12-kilometre trek towards an even bigger crater called Endeavour. That journey is expected to take more than two years.

Designed to last only 90 days, the two rovers have survived for nearly five years on the Red Planet. Both are showing their age, but Jake Matijevic, chief of rover engineering at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says they still are doing fine.

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Prefabulous: 9 Amazingly Modern Factory Built Homes

From Style Crave:

Factory-built homes have a “trailer park” stigma no more. These amazing modern homes are built in a factory then shipped to site. Not only is the process more efficient and less expensive, it is the green way to build a quality, sustainable home. Process aside, these homes are beautiful, and much cheaper than any comparable site-built home on the market. Here are 9 of the USA’s greatest modern prefab homes…

For those who are new to the world of prefab architecture, the process is basic. An architect develops a plan for a home, but instead of contracting the development to a builder, they build the home in sections in a climate-controlled warehouse. These sections are then shipped to the final worksite where they are joined and finalized into a finished home. This process is more cost-effective as it takes advantage of bulk material purchasing and construction, it avoids weather-induced delays, it maintains a regular staff familiar to the blueprints and allows for a greater level of control over quality. Now that you’re up to speed, here are 9 reasons why your next home might just be a prefab.

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A Look At The Dow Jones Industrial Average And Sunspots

From Watts Up With That:

This paper appeared in the journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change:

Sunspots, GDP and the stock market (View paper PDF)

by: Theodore Modis

Abstract

A correlation has been observed between the US GDP and the number of sunspots as well as between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the number of sunspots. The data cover 80 years of history. The observed correlations permit forecasts for the GDP and for the stock market in America with a future horizon of 10 years. Both being above their long-term trend they are forecasted to go over a peak around Jun-2008.

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Carbon Dioxide Levels Already In Danger Zone, Revised Theory Shows

Atmospheric carbon dioxide if coal emissions are phased out linearly between 2010 and 2030, calculated using a version of the Bern carbon cycle model.
(Credit: Hansen, et al/Open Atmospheric Science Journal)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2008) — If climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) must be reduced below the levels that already exist today, according to a study published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of 10 scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

The authors, who include two Yale scientists, assert that to maintain a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, an optimum CO2 level would be less than 350 ppm — a dramatic change from most previous studies, which suggested a danger level for CO2 is likely to be 450 ppm or higher. Atmospheric CO2 is currently 385 parts per million (ppm) and is increasing by about 2 ppm each year from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) and from the burning of forests.

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Earth Can't Cope, New Planets Needed

From Live Science:

In their recent Living Planet Report for this year, the World Wildlife Federation is suggesting that this planet's resources won't be enough for us.

"The Earth’s biocapacity is the amount of biologically productive area – cropland, pasture, forest, and fisheries – that is available to meet humanity’s needs.

"Since the late 1980s, we have been in overshoot - the Ecological Footprint has exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity - by about 25%.

"Effectively, the Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand – people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.

"A moderate business-as-usual scenario, based on United Nations projections of slow, steady growth of economies and populations, suggests that by 2050, humanity’s demand on nature will be twice the biosphere’s productive capacity [graph]."

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Unknown "Structures" Tugging At Universe, Study Says

The so-called Bullet Cluster of galaxies lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of hundreds that have been found to be carried along by a mysterious "dark flow," an October 2008 study says. The dark flow is caused by unknown clumps of matter outside the known universe, which are pulling our entire universe toward them, the study suggests. The report hints that, whatever may be beyond the known universe, it's like nothing we know. Image courtesy NASA/STScI/Magellan/U. Arizona/D. Clowe, et al

From The National Geographic:

Something may be out there. Way out there.

On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

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Mini Nuclear Plants To Power 20,000 Homes

From The Guardian:

£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

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Web's Eulogy For The Phoenix Mars Lander

From PopSci:

As NASA's robotic 'naut tweets away its dying breath, the blogosphere pays its respect

NASA has begun bidding a planned goodbye to its Phoenix Mars Lander. The lander relies on solar panels and the sun's golden touch to reawaken it each day, but a dust storm has hastened the end in the face of the oncoming Martian winter.

However, the lander's cold fate has evoked an outpouring of netizen love. Wired hosted a pithy epitaph contest to mark the occasion. Phoenix also polished its geek credentials by guest-blogging for Gizmodo about its mission. Readers can still catch Phoenix's personal Twitter stream from the popular social networking site, complete with robotic tweets such "Space exploration FTW!"

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First Complete Cancer Genome Sequenced

These acute myeloid leukemia cells are from the bone marrow of the female patient whose complete genome was sequenced in the first decoding of a complete cancer genome. The genetic study implicated eight genes not previously associated with this form of cancer. Timothy Ley

From Science News:

Scientists decipher each of the 3 billion DNA bases from the genome of an acute myeloid leukemia tumor

For the first time, a complete cancer genome, and incidentally a complete female genome, has been decoded, scientists report online Nov. 5 in Nature. In a study made possible by faster, cheaper and more sensitive methods for sequencing DNA, the researchers pinpoint eight new genes that may cause a cell to turn cancerous.

“Since cancer is a disease of the genome, this newfound ability to determine the complete DNA sequence of a cancer cell is enormously powerful,” comments Francis Collins, a geneticist and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., a group that raced to sequence the first entire human genome.

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Has Biodefense Spending Made Us Safer

Postal Anthrax Aftermath: Has Biodefense Spending Made Us Safer? -- Scientific American

The Anthrax attacks in 2001 led to a massive increase in biodefense funding, which critics claim has done more harm than good.

As the Federal Bureau of Investigation was about to move in, U.S. Army biodefense scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide, thus possibly closing the chapter on the first—and so far only—fatal bioattack in U.S. history. The FBI alleges that Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md., mailed anthrax-laden letters in September and October 2001 that killed five people. The incidents sparked a massive infusion of research funds to counter civilian bioterrorism, $41 billion spread over seven federal departments and agencies. Yet some observers argue that those funds have done little to guard against another bioterror incident, especially if the FBI is right about Ivins.

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The Historic Beginnings Of The Space Arms Race Part Two

From Space War:

he Soviet government was set to adopt the Polyot-Kosmos anti-satellite -- ASAT -- weapons system after Kosmos-252 successfully destroyed the first spacecraft in orbit on Nov. 1, 1968, and after successful subsequent launches.

However, in 1972 the Soviet Union and the United States signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty -- SALT-I -- and the Anti-Ballistic Missile -- ABM -- Treaty, which also covered ASAT systems.

Depending on the pace of bilateral talks, the ASAT test program was either mothballed or resumed. The ASAT system was eventually adopted and subsequently upgraded.

In 1976 the Soviet Union began to launch second-generation satellite interceptors, featuring new target-acquisition and homing systems, first installed aboard Kosmos-814. Flying along a lower orbit, the latter quickly overtook the target satellite, accelerated and found itself less than 1,000 meters from the "victim."

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Physics The Next President Needs To Know

From Wired:

Physics may be the furthest thing from the minds of the presidential candidates right now, but a solid grasp of the science behind some of the latest headlines will be critical for the winner.

Physics has a history of intersecting with politics in ways both large and small, from the creation of the atomic bomb to nuclear meltdowns to terrorist methods. And now, with more specialized, high-tech issues to tackle than ever before, it is increasingly important that world leaders have an understanding of the underlying scientific concepts.

But that’s not necessarily the case, says UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, author of the book Physics for Future Presidents. For example, he argues that some terrorist threats, like dirty bombs, are overrated, while others, the low-tech stuff like natural gas bombs, receive little attention.

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Ancient Cave Yields Clues to Chinese History

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A stalagmite rising from the floor of a cave in China is providing clues to the end of several dynasties in Chinese history.

Slowly built from the minerals in dripping water over 1,810 years, chemicals in the stone tell a tale of strong and weak cycles of the monsoon, the life-giving rains that water crops to feed millions of people.

Dry periods coincided with the demise of the Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

In addition, the team led by Pingzhong Zhang of Lanzhou University in China noted a change in the cycles around 1960 which they said may indicate that greenhouse gases released by human activities have become the dominant influence on the monsoon.

The Wanxiang Cave is in Gansu Province, a region where 80 percent of the rainfall occurs between May and September.

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Products (And Toys) From The Future

The link to the video is HERE.

How Anesthesia Knocks You Out

From Live Science:

During surgery, anesthesia immobilizes a person while putting them in a sleep-like state where there is no awareness and no pain.

But after more than a century of "going under," we still do not fully understand how anesthesia works, said Anthony Hudetz in the Department of Anesthesiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

New research by Hudetz and his colleagues now suggests that anesthesia somehow disrupts information connections in the mind and perhaps inactivates two regions at the back of the brain.

Here's how it works: Think of each bit of information coming into the brain as the side of a die. Then, the first step in consciousness would be to identify which number or state turns up once you throw the die. But you can't identify that number without access to the other faces of the die. That's because every experience, every perception (or number in this example) is connected to all the others. When the faces of the die somehow become disconnected, a person would fall unconscious.

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Giant Simulation Could Solve Mystery Of 'Dark Matter'

A map of the dark matter in six halos similar to that of the Milky Way. The brighter colours correspond to regions of higher density and indicate where most of the gamma rays are expected to be produced. (Credit: Image courtesy of Durham University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2008) — The search for a mysterious substance which makes up most of the Universe could soon be at an end, according to new research.

Dark matter is believed to account for 85 per cent of the Universe's mass but has remained invisible to telescopes since scientists inferred its existence from its gravitational effects more than 75 years ago.

Now the international Virgo Consortium, a team of scientists including cosmologists at Durham University, has used a massive computer simulation showing the evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way to "see" gamma-rays given off by dark matter.

They say their findings, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature (Thursday, November 6), could help NASA's Fermi Telescope in its search for the dark matter and open a new chapter in our understanding of the Universe.

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Energy Agency Warns Of 6°C Rise In Temperatures

From New Scientist Environment:

Our voracious appetite for energy is potentially putting the planet on the path for a 6°C rise in temperatures – which is far more than what climate specialists say the environment can cope with.

In its 2008 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency says the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit will have to set ambitious carbon-limiting caps and that the energy sector must play a key role in making this possible.

European policy-makers have set themselves the goal of keeping temperature rises below 2°C relative to what they were before the industrial revolution. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its forecasts of how rises between 1°C and 5°C would change the environment (see table in Climate hange is here now, says major report). A rise of 6°C was off the charts.

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How Disease Can Wipe Out An Entire Species

Photo by Patricia Wynne
This illustration shows the rat species Rattus nativitatis, which went extinct on Australia's Christmas Island by 1908. In a new study of museum DNA samples, researchers report that the likely cause of the animals' extinction was an introduced disease.

From The MSNBC:

Rat study presents first evidence for extinction due to ‘hyperdisease’.

Disease can wipe out an entire species, reveals a new study on rats native to Australia's Christmas Island that fell prey to "hyperdisease conditions" caused by a pathogen that led to the rodents' extinction.

The study, published in the latest issue of the journal PLoS One, presents the first evidence for extinction of an animal entirely because of disease.

The researchers say it's possible for any animal species, including humans, to die out in a similar fashion, although a complete eradication of Homo sapiens would be unlikely.

"I can certainly imagine local population or even citywide 'extinction,' or population crashes due to introduced pathogens under a condition where you have a pathogen that can spread like the flu and has the pathogenicity of the 1918 flu or Ebola viruses," co-author Alex Greenwood, assistant professor of biological sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., told Discovery News.

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Fountain of Youth: Drug Restores Muscles

From Live Science:

A daily dose of an investigational medication has been found to restore muscle mass in the arms and legs of older adults and improve some of their biochemistry to levels found in healthy young adults, suggesting an anti-frailty drug has been found.

The drug, called MK-677, was evaluated for its safety and effectiveness in a study that showed the drug restored 20 percent of muscle mass loss associated with normal aging. In fact, levels of growth hormone (GH) and of insulin-like growth factor I (IGF- I) in healthy seniors who took the drug increased to the levels found in healthy young adults, said Michael O. Thorner, a professor of internal medicine and neurosurgery at the University of Virginia Health System.

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Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

From The Smithsonian:

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization.

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.

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Want a Free Education? A Guide to Free Online Video Lectures

U Tube -- Boston.com

Want a free education? A brief guide to the burgeoning world of online video lectures.

RESERVE ANOTHER LAUREL for Edward O. Wilson, the Pellegrino University Professor emeritus at Harvard, serial Pulitzer winner, and prominent intellectual: online celebrity.

Forget Charlie Rose - Wilson has Google for a soapbox. Amid the amateur-hour piffle of YouTube "talent" and skateboarding dogs, the famed botanist stands in bold relief, with more than 500 Google video search results to his credit: Interviews ranging far afield of TV shows to a spate of appearances on several Web-only video platforms such as Meaningoflife.tv, Bigthink.com, Fora.tv, and the online home of the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference.

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Has New Physics Been Found At The Ageing Tevatron?

The Collider Detector at Fermilab has found hints of new physics
(Image: Fermilab)

From The New Scientist Space:

While engineers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) race to fix its teething problems and start looking for new particles, its ageing predecessor is refusing go silently into the night.

Last week, physicists announced that the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, has produced particles that they are unable to explain. Could it be a sign of new physics?

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) monitors the particles that spew from collisions between protons and anti-protons, which are accelerated and smashed head-on by the Tevatron. The collision occurs inside the 1.5-centimetre-wide "beam pipe" that confines the protons and anti-protons, and the particles created are tracked by surrounding layers of electronics.

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World’s Largest Concentrated Solar Project in Spain

From Clean Technica:

Earlier today, concentrated solar company SolFocus announced that it has signed a deal to install over 10 MW of its systems in Spain for EMPE Solar. Upon its completion in 2010, the $103 million, multi-site project will be the largest concentrated solar deployment in the world. SolFocus estimates that the project will be able to meet the domestic energy requirements of 40,000 homes.

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Japanese Clone Mouse From Frozen Cell, Aim For Mammoths

This handout picture, released by Japan natural science research center shows a cloned mouse (left) created with a new technology by using a frozen dead cell of a mouse. (AFP/Teruhiko Wakayama)

From Breitbart/AFP:

Japanese scientists said Tuesday they had created a mouse from a dead cell frozen for 16 years, taking a step in the long impossible dream of bringing back extinct animals such as mammoths.

Scientists at the government-backed research institute Riken used the dead cell of a mouse that had been preserved at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a temperature similar to frozen ground.

The scientists hope that the first-of-a-kind research will pave the way to restore extinct animals such as the mammoth.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

The scientists extracted a cell nucleus from an organ of the dead mouse and planted it into an egg of another mouse which was alive, leading to the birth of the cloned mouse, the researchers said.

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Massive Waves A Mystery At Maine Harbor

Owen Johnson (left) and his father, Peter, repaired damage yesterday done by waves in Boothbay Harbor. (Joel Page for The Boston Globe)

From Boston.com:

Dockworker Marcy Ingall saw a giant wave in the distance last Tuesday afternoon and stopped in her tracks. It was an hour before low tide in Maine's Boothbay Harbor, yet without warning, the muddy harbor floor suddenly filled with rushing, swirling water.

In 15 minutes, the water rose 12 feet, then receded. And then it happened again. It occurred three times, she said, each time ripping apart docks and splitting wooden pilings.

"It was bizarre," said Ingall, a lifelong resident of the area. "Everybody was like, 'Oh my God, is this the end?' " It was not the apocalypse, but it was a rare phenomenon, one that has baffled researchers. The National Weather Service said ocean levels rapidly rose in Boothbay, Southport, and Bristol in a matter of minutes around 3 p.m. on Oct. 28 to the surprise of ocean watchers. Exactly what caused the rogue waves remains unknown.

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James Bond Gadgets

Photos: Top 15 James Bond Gadgets
-- Computer Weekly

There is a definite bond between secret agents and gadgets. From the Geiger counter in Dr No, James Bond has been bedecked with hardware that has ranged from the plausible to the fantastical. The current Bond (Daniel Craig, starring in The Quantum of Solace) is a relative technophobe, which is a pity because the Bond devices have always stirred the imagination. Here are our top fifteen gadgets that are either real or have perhaps inspired technological innovation.

What do you think? E-mail us your favourite Bond gadget or even let us know if we've missed any. Send your comments to computerweekly.com with 'Bond gadgets' in the headline.

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How Geoengineering Works: 5 Big Plans to Stop Global Warming

(Photograph by Tarko Sudiarno/AFP/Getty Images)

From Popular Science:

At first blush, geoengineering sounds like outrageous junk science. Surely there's an easier solution to the problem of global warming than technologically altering Earth's atmosphere, its cloud formations and even outer space. But when compared with the alternative—drastically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide blanketing the planet by changing the behavior of billions of people and thousands of industries, not to mention slow-moving governments—some scientists are beginning to take the seemingly outrageous schemes a lot more seriously. Here are the mechanics behind five plans to jury-rig the Earth.

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The First Few Minutes After Death

EEG During Cardiac Arrest (Image From Popsci)

From Popsci:

A three-year study will explore the nature of death and consciousness

After countless accounts of near-death experiences, dating as far back as ancient Greece, science is now taking serious steps forward to explore the nature of the phenomenon. A new project aims to determine whether the experience is a physiological event or evidence that the human consciousness is far more complicated than we ever believed.

The Human Consciousness Project sets out to explore the nature of human consciousness and the brain. The first step of the project is the "Awareness During Resuscitation" study, a collaboration among more than 25 medical centers throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

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Grapes Slow Development Of High Blood Pressure In Rats

From Future Pundit:

The researchers studied the effect of regular table grapes (a blend of green, red, and black grapes) that were mixed into the rat diet in a powdered form, as part of either a high- or low-salt diet. They performed many comparisons between the rats consuming the test diet and the control rats receiving no grape powder — including some that received a mild dose of a common blood-pressure drug. All the rats were from a research breed that develops high blood pressure when fed a salty diet.

In all, after 18 weeks, the rats that received the grape-enriched diet powder had lower blood pressure, better heart function, reduced inflammation throughout their bodies, and fewer signs of heart muscle damage than the rats that ate the same salty diet but didn't receive grapes. The rats that received the blood-pressure medicine, hydrazine, along with a salty diet also had lower blood pressure, but their hearts were not protected from damage as they were in the grape-fed group.

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Bacteria On The Move, Eating Their Fill

The rippling pattern of a swarm of M. xanthus moving over their prey. John R. Kirby/University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

From The New York Times:

Bacteria move in mysterious ways. Myxococcus xanthus, for example, a harmless soil microbe, forms rippling swarms by the millions as it devours other microbes as prey.

This organized back-and-forth behavior “was thought to occur particularly in response to starvation,” said John R. Kirby, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa. But Dr. Kirby, James E. Berleman and others at Iowa report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that M. xanthus acts this way in response to food, and uses chemical sensing and signaling pathways to do so.

Directed bacterial movement that is controlled in this way is known as chemotaxis, and has been observed in individual microbes as well as in colonies that organize into biofilms or other structures. Because M. xanthus uses chemotaxis-like pathways to move over its prey, the researchers call this behavior predataxis. (A video is at nytimes.com/science.)

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DARPA Developing A Device That Stops Internal Bleeding Using Ultrasounds

(Image from Device Daily)

From Device Daily:

When I hear about an interesting technology project, I’m always thinking that DARPA is involved as there guys always come up with the best of things which is absolutely normal due to the enormous funding coming from tax payers. DARPA’s latest project is called DBAC, or Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation, and it consists of a device which stops internal bleeding almost instantaneously.

Internal bleeding is very dangerous and it’s very important to cure soldiers wounded in battle, but also for people who suffer car or other accidents. Irreversible hemorrhagic shock can be caused by internal bleeding which can kill soldiers, and now DARPA is trying to develop a portable device that will detect and stop the bleeding using ultrasounds.

DARPA has contracted the University of Washington’s Centre for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound and Texas A&M to develop the DBAC cuff which should be semi-automatic and any soldier with minimal training will be able to operate it.

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My Comment: This is going to save a lot of lives. The focus of this tech is on soldiers, but its applications can be used everywhere.

Commercial Production of Chickens Takes Toll on Genetic Diversity

From New York Times:

To the connoisseur of fine food, chicken may seem depressingly monotonous no matter how it’s prepared. But scientists worry about a more basic degree of sameness — a lack of genetic diversity in the birds that are raised for meat and eggs.

An analysis of commercial chicken populations around the world by William M. Muir of Purdue University and colleagues has revealed the extent of the problem. Fifty percent or more of the diversity of ancestral breeds has been lost, they report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That could make chicken production more susceptible to disease outbreaks for which resistant genes have disappeared.

Sampling about 2,500 birds, the researchers looked at several thousand instances of genetic variation and used that to estimate what a hypothetical ancestral population looked like genetically. “Then we were able to say what is missing” in commercial birds, Dr. Muir said.

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