Strong Education Blunts Effects Of Alzheimer's Disease, Study Suggests

Some people who appeared to have the brain plaques long associated with Alzheimer's disease nonetheless received high scores on tests of their cognitive ability. Participants who did well on the tests were likely to have spent more years in school. (Credit: iStockphoto/Don Bayley)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — A test that reveals brain changes believed to be at the heart of Alzheimer's disease has bolstered the theory that education can delay the onset of the dementia and cognitive decline that are characteristic of the disorder.

Scientists at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that some study participants who appeared to have the brain plaques long associated with Alzheimer's disease still received high scores on tests of their cognitive ability. Participants who did well on the tests were likely to have spent more years in school.

"The good news is that greater education may allow people to harbor amyloid plaques and other brain pathology linked to Alzheimer's disease without experiencing decline of their cognitive abilities," says first author Catherine Roe, Ph.D., research instructor in neurology.

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Ancient 4,300-Year-Old Pyramid Discovered In Egypt

An Egyptian worker walks past the Saqqara Step pyramid near a newly discovered pyramid at an ancient burial ground in Saqqara south of Cairo. A 4,300-year-old pyramid has been discovered at the Saqqara necropolis outside Cairo, Egypt's culture minister has said.

From Breitbart/AP:

A 4,300-year-old pyramid has been discovered at the Saqqara necropolis outside Cairo, Egypt's culture minister said on Tuesday.

Faruq Hosni made the announcement at a press conference in Saqqara, an ancient burial ground which dates back to 2,700 BC and is dominated by the massive bulk of King Zoser's step pyramid, the first ever built.

Husni said the pyramid, five metres (16 foot) tall, is believed to have been 15 metres tall when it was first built for Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti who founded the 6th Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom.

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What Is The Origin Of Veterans Day?

Armistice Day Parade in Omaha, Nebraska in November 1938.
Credit: Library of Congress, John Vachon, photographer

From Live Science:

Veterans day can be traced back to the end of World War I.

The Allied powers a signed a cease-fire agreement with Germany at Rethondes, France on Nov. 11, 1918, bringing the great war to a close.

The Armistice (which means a suspension of hostilities by agreement) was celebrated in the streets. As documented by the Library of Congress, Massachusetts shoe laster James Hughes described the scene in Boston: "There was a lot of excitement when we heard about the Armistice…some of them old fellas was walkin' on the streets with open Bibles in their hands. All the shops were shut down. I never seen the people so crazy…confetti was a-flying in all directions…I'll never forget it."

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1 Of Every 50 People On Earth Now Belong To Facebook

From Dallas Morning News:

That's right. Facebook says it now has 120 million members. By my reckoning, that's 2% of the world's 6 billion people.

If you think that's astonishing, consider that there's still plenty of low hanging fruit for Facebook to pluck. I know plenty of tech savvy people, many of them under 30, who have yet to sign up. Inevitably, these people will give in.

Where will it end? Can Facebook sign up twice that many people? Can it sign up 500 million people? Can it sign up Victor, who may be the world's only tech blogger who has managed to resist Facebook this long?

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Incredible Deep-Sea Discoveries Announced

From Live Science:

An astounding batch of new deep-sea discoveries, from strange shark behavior to gigantic bacteria, was announced today by an international group of 2,000 scientists from 82 nations.

The Census of Marine Life is a 10-year project to determine what's down there. Among the new findings:

A large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean. Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large icesheet grew, nature created a "thermohaline expressway," a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content. Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved; some octopuses, for example, losing their defensive ink sacs — pointless at perpetually dark depths.

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Is Stupid Making Us Google?

From The New Atlantis:

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass’s skin in Balzac’s novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that “users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

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Is It Time To Chuck The Internet And Start Over?

Image © Regents of the University of California Berkeley

From Discover News:

Expanding today's overcrowded Web is like building a skyscraper on a pile of styrofoam.

The Internet is a fast-growing 40-year-old city in desperate need of renovation. In 2008 1.5 billion people worldwide used the likes of BitTorrent, IM, Facebook, e-mail, Google, and Skype via communications protocols originally intended for mere hundreds. The wear is not only showing but worsening: Upkeep and patchwork programming continue to make running networks expensive, and cybercrime is flourishing. In response, teams of computer scientists are gathering to form a Manhattan Project of sorts to rethink the Internet.

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2,000-Year-Old Gold Earring Found In Jerusalem

Archaeologists say they found a 2,000-year-old gold earring made around the time of Christ, between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

From U.S.A. Today:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israel Antiquities Authority says archeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old gold earring beneath a parking lot next to the walls of Jerusalem's old city.

The authority says the earring is inlaid with pearls and emeralds and was made sometime between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

In a statement released Monday the authority said the piece is "astonishingly well-preserved." It was discovered during excavation of the ruins of a building from the Byzantine period, dating from around the fifth century, A.D.

The authority says the earring appears to have been crafted using a technique similar to that depicted in portraits from Roman-era Egypt.

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Apollo 8 Crew Remembers Historic Mission Live On NASA TV

From SpaceRef.com:

WASHINGTON -- Almost 40 years after NASA executed the bold decision to send the first human flight of the gigantic Saturn V rocket to the moon, the crew of Apollo 8 will reunite as part of a special public program produced in cooperation with the Newseum in Washington.

The program features Apollo 8 crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. It will be broadcast live from the Newseum on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 1:30 p.m. EST. The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.

The event is part of the Newseum's commemoration of NASA's 50th anniversary and is open to visitors. Seating in the Newseum's Knight TV Studio is limited and seats will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional overflow seating will be available throughout the Newseum.

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Vigorous New Space Exploration Plan To Be Proposed

From Space.com:

Look for the Planetary Society to hold a National Press Club briefing in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 13, outlining "a vigorous new space exploration plan" – one designed "to achieve more, cost less, and engage the world."

The plan draws from town hall meetings, as well as a two-day workshop held in February at Stanford University that put NASA's Vision for Space Exploration not only under a microscope but also on-notice.

The soon-to-be-issued roadmap was blueprinted "with an eye to the world's current economic situation," according to the Planetary Society, and touches on:

* the driving goal for human spaceflight;
* the future of the lunar program;
* renewed commitment to Earth observations from space;
* and possible new human mission objectives.

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Phoenix Lander Finishes Its Work On Mars

From Red Orbit:

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft's work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.

"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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Mini Heart Attack Best Treated Like The Big One

From Science News:

Patients admitted to hospitals with mild symptoms may benefit from getting to a catheterization lab promptly

NEW ORLEANS — People who show up at a hospital with mild heart attack symptoms, but only ambiguous scores on medical tests, might still warrant emergency treatment, according to research presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

The new study, reported November 10 at the AHA’s annual Scientific Sessions meeting, suggests that getting some of these marginal patients into a heart catheterization lab within 24 hours causes no harm and sharply lessens their risk of having the problem recur over the following six months.

People with chest pains arriving in an emergency room get attention right away — for good reason. After ruling out those who are having acid reflux pain or an anxiety attack, doctors use an electrocardiogram (EKG) to assess the person’s heart function and a blood analysis to reveal any damage to the heart muscle.

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Plants: The Fuel Of The Future?

Christopher Somerville directs the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California-Berkeley, where scientists are developing technologies that convert plant cellulose into fuel. Richard Harris/NPR

From NPR:

Morning Edition, November 10, 2008 · The recent run-up in gasoline prices was a not-too-subtle reminder that there's a limited amount of oil on Earth. Someday soon, we're going to need a new source of fuel.

Part of the answer could be fuels made from the plant material cellulose. Researchers at the new Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California-Berkeley are working on a recipe for this biofuel.

From Plant To The Pump

The institute is trying to make at least part of the economy run on fuel from vegetation. It has taken over a lab building once used to answer the purely scientific question of how plants convert carbon dioxide into chemical energy. Now, Christopher Somerville and his colleagues hope to exploit that chemical energy by converting cellulose into fuel.

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Asking ‘Why Do Species Go Extinct?’

‘I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?’ - Stuart L. Pimm Alex di Suvero for The New York Times

From New York Times:

For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world.

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Pimped-Up T-Cells Seek Out And Destroy HIV

Thanks to a custom-designed receptor, this killer T-cell slays HIV-infected cells far better than normal T-cells do (Image: Andrew Sewell/University of Oxford)

From New Scientist:

Researchers have harnessed evolution to create souped-up immune cells able to recognise HIV far better than the regular "killer" T-cells our body produces.

The pimped up T-cell boasts a molecular receptor evolved in the lab to give the body the edge against a virus that has so far flummoxed our immune systems.

"When the body gets infected with HIV, the immune system doesn't know what the virus is going to do - but we do," says Andrew Sewell, an immunologist at Cardiff University, UK, who led the study.

One reason HIV has been able to skirt our immune systems, drugs and vaccines is the virus's chameleon-like behaviour - thanks to a genome that mutates with ease, HIV can quickly change guise to evade an attack.

But some parts of HIV are so vital to its functioning that changes result in dead or severely compromised viruses. Sewell's team targeted a part of one such protein, which holds the virus together.

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TimeTo Test Time

Could GEO600 have detected the fundamental fuzziness of time?Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)/Leibniz University Hannover

From Nature News:

A new theory suggests that the essential fuzziness of time may be the limiting factor for a German gravitational-wave detector.

Poets have long believed the passage of time to be unavoidable, inexorable and generally melancholic. Quantum mechanics says it is fuzzy, ticking along at minimum intervals within which the notion of time is meaningless. And Craig Hogan claims he can 'see' it — in the thus far unexplained noise of a gravitational-wave detector. "It's potentially the most transformative thing I've ever worked on," says Hogan, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It's actually a possibility that we can access experimentally the minimum interval of time, which we thought was out of reach."

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China's Hungry Pandas Face Tougher Winter

A panda eats special food prepared as result of shortage of bamboos earthquake on a nearby mountain is seen in the background at China Conservative and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong, China.
Alexander F. Yuan / AP

From The MSNBC:

More sick and hungry giant pandas may seek food at lower altitudes
BEIJING - More sick and hungry giant pandas than in past winters may seek food at lower altitudes in China's earthquake-affected areas, straining facilities at the local panda research center, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

The devastating May 12 Sichuan earthquake caused landslides and destroyed some of the wild pandas' habitat, reducing supplies of their main source of food, bamboo, in the range of to 8,200-10,500 feet where they normally live.

"They came down the mountains so early this year and that's why we predict there will be a worse situation for the wild pandas this winter," said Zhang Guiquan, assistant director of the Wolong Nature Reserve Administration.

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Using The Powers Of Hypnosis To Heal Body And Mind

From The International Herald Tribune:

My husband, Richard, smoked cigarettes for 50 years, having failed several attempts to quit on his own. When a friend told him in August 1994 that hypnosis had enabled her to quit, he decided to give it a try.

"It didn't work; I wasn't hypnotized," he declared after his one and only session. But it did work; since that day, he has not taken one puff of a cigarette.

Gloria Kanter of Boynton Beach, Florida, thought her attempt in 1985 to use hypnosis to overcome her fear of flying had failed. "When the therapist brought me out, I said it didn't work," she recalled in an interview. "I told her, 'I heard everything you said."'

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

The universe may not have started off with a bang after all.
Pat Rawlings/SAIC

From Scientific American:

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects

* Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.
* According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.
* If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

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When It Comes To Sea Level Changing Glaciers, New NASA Technique Measures Up

The mass changes of the Gulf of Alaska glaciers are computed from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) inter-satellite rate data from April 2003 through September 2007. Using space-borne gravity measurements to assess glacier mass balance NASA scientists determine mass variations along the Gulf of Alaska. Areas of deep blue like the areas around Glacier Bay and the Yakutat Icefield represent significant mass loss where inland areas of dark gray represent slight mass gains. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2008) — A NASA-led research team has used satellite data to make the most precise measurements to date of changes in the mass of mountain glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, a region expected to be a significant contributor to global sea level rise over the next 50-100 years.

Geophysicist Scott Luthcke of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues knew from well-documented research that changes in the cryosphere – glaciers, ice caps, and other parts of the globe covered year-round by ice -- are a key source of most global sea level rise. Melting ice will also bring changes to freshwater resources and wildlife habitat. Knowing that such ice-covered areas are difficult to observe consistently, the team worked to develop a satellite-based method that could accurately quantify glacial mass changes across seasons and years, and even discern whether individual glacier regions are growing or shrinking.

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Internet Attacks Grow More Potent

From The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world’s largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

In these attacks, computer networks are hijacked to form so-called botnets that spray random packets of data in huge streams over the Internet. The deluge of data is meant to bring down Web sites and entire corporate networks. Known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks, such cyberweapons are now routinely used during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia in 2007 during a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. Such attacks are also being used in blackmail schemes and political conflicts, as well as for general malicious mischief.

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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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