New Malaria Vaccine More Than 50 Percent Effective

(Photo from Foreign Policy Passport)

From Foreign Policy Passport:

Results of the latest malaria vaccine trials will be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, and from the looks of it, the news is good -- fantastic, in fact. "We are closer than every before to having a malaria vaccine for use by children in Africa, says Christian Lucq, director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

First, some background: The new trials use a vaccine candidate known as RTSS, the most clinically advanced malaria vaccine in development. The two tests took place in Kenya and Tanzania, and included 340 and 894 children, respectively. After vaccination, children were visited in their homes to follow up on their health and most importantly, their contraction (or not) of malaria.

Here are some highlights from the results:

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Making Vinegar At Home

Maple Vinegar: Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot

From Popsci:

Turn sour old wine into a beautiful holiday gift -- thanks to science.

Vinegar is one of those ingredients that people don't think of as often as they should. It is mostly just seen in salad dressings and pickles, which is a shame, because there is a whole world of flavor there just waiting to be tapped into. There are often times, especially during the holidays, when there is leftover wine after a festive dinner. Many of us will cork the bottle, with or without various safeguards to preserve the contents, and set it aside for the next day. Occasionally the bottles are forgotten, and when you finally open them again you find that the wine has evolved into something quite a bit different from what you were expecting. In these moments the change is often viewed with disappointment, as a delicate beverage has transformed into something sharper and edgier. Frankly, though, a smart cook will see the change as an opportunity. Good wine makes good vinegar and good vinegar is a stellar cooking ingredient.

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Why Do Men Buy Sex?

Photo: iStockphoto

From Scientific Magazine:

* In the U.S., police officers detained about 78,000 people in 2007 for prostitution-related crimes, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Only about 10 percent of these arrests are of the sex patrons, who almost exclusively are men.
* A considerable proportion of men worldwide buy sex from female prostitutes, with most estimates of lifetime prevalence ranging from 7 to 39 percent, depending on the country and study. Many experts argue that it is a male appetite—and not the choices of prostitutes—that fundamentally drives the sex trade.
* Men’s motives for buying sex are hotly contested among researchers. Some believe the practice serves as a salve for common psychological afflictions, such as an unfulfilled craving for sex or romance. Others, meanwhile, paint a dimmer portrait of johns, believing they are driven by chauvinistic motives, such as a desire to dominate and control women.

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Large Hadron Collider Repairs To Cost £14million

Extensive work will be needed to fix the Large Hadron Collider after a problem thought to be related to a faulty electrical connection Photo: GETTY IMAGES

From The Telegraph:

Repairs to the Large Hadron Collider, dubbed the biggest experiment in history, will cost almost £14m and take until at least next summer to be completed.

A faulty electrical connection between magnets was likely to blame for a large helium leak which caused the £4.4m LHC to be shut down in September.

At first the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) thought it would only be out of action until last month but the damage was worse than expected.

Now it is hoped repairs will be completed by May or early June with the machine restarted at the end of June or later.

James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, said: "If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer.

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Early Snowfalls In Europe Hit Historic Levels

From Watts Up With That?:

Early snowfalls in Europe hit Historic Levels
Posted Wednesday 3rd December 2008, 2:15 pm by Dunx

* 20 year record snowfall in Dolomites enough to last all season
* Some Swiss train services cancelled due to excess snow
* Still more heavy snow in the Pyrenees
* More snow for Scotland

www.Skiinfo.com is following still more heavy snowfalls across Europe over the past 48 hours, with much more snow in other parts of Europe and many areas of North America too.

The snowfall has been so great that it has closed roads, brought down power lines and even led to the cancellation of some Swiss rail services this week.

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Is Einstein The Last Great Genius?

From Live Science:

Major breakthroughs in science have historically been the province of individuals, not institutes. Galileo and Copernicus, Edison and Einstein, toiling away in lonely labs or pondering the cosmos in private studies.

But in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding.

And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.

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Dogs Can Feel Envy, Study Suggests

Dogs can feel envy, a December 2008 study suggests. In experiments with 43 dogs, an Austrian research team showed that dogs reacted to inequity. One dog watched another dog receive a reward for a trick. When the watcher dog performed the same trick and was not rewarded, that dog refused to do the trick again. Photograph by William Albert Allard/NGS

From National Geographic:

The first scientific study to find envy in non-primates affirms what many already know: dogs can get jealous.

"Everybody who has a dog at home probably [suspects] that dogs can be very jealous of other dogs and also of people," said lead author Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria.

In experiments with 43 dogs, Range's team showed that the canines reacted to inequity.

The team had one dog watch another dog receive a reward for doing a trick. When the watching dog performed the same trick and was not rewarded, that dog refused to do the trick again, Range said.

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Will Solar Power Ever Be As Cheap As Coal?

Wafer handlers: Senior photovoltaic engineer Adam Lorenz works on some solar wafers. The company he works for, 1366 Technologies, aims to convert sunshine into power as cheaply as coal-burning power plants do. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Some predict that within five years, it could rival fossil-fuel energy.

Lexington, Mass.

“Solar power is the energy of the future – and always will be.”

That tired joke, which has dogged solar-generated electricity for decades due to its high cost, could be retired far sooner than many think.

While solar contributes less than 1 percent of the energy generated in the United States today, its costs are turning sharply downward.

Whether using mirrors that focus desert sunlight to harvest heat and spin turbines or rooftop photovoltaic panels that turn sunshine directly into current, solar is on track to deliver electricity to residential users at a cost on par with natural gas and perhaps even coal within the next four to seven years, industry experts say.

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Carbon Dioxide Helped Ancient Earth Escape Deathly Deep Freeze

Researchers speculate that during the Cryogenian Period, about 840 to 635 million years ago, advancing ice was stalled by the interaction of the physical climate system and the carbon cycle of the ocean, with carbon dioxide playing a key role in insulating the planet. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2008) — The planet’s present day greenhouse scourge, carbon dioxide, may have played a vital role in helping ancient Earth to escape from complete glaciation, say scientists in a paper published online today.

In their review for Nature Geoscience, UK scientists claim that the Earth never froze over completely during the Cryogenian Period, about 840 to 635 million years ago.

This is contrary to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, which envisages a fully frozen Earth that was locked in ice for many millions of years as a result of a runaway chain reaction that caused the planet to cool.

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My Comment: I live half of the time up north in the Laurentians of Quebec. It is -22C. outside right now. Hmmmm .... more carbon dioxide please.

The Energy Debates: Solar Farms

From Ontario Solar Farms

From Live Science:

The Facts

The amount of energy from the sun that falls on Earth is staggering. Averaged over the entire surface of the planet, roughly each square yard collects nearly as much energy each year as you’d get from burning a barrel of oil. Solar farms seek to harness this energy for megawatts of power.

There are two ways solar power is used to generate electricity. Solar thermal plants — also known as concentrating solar power systems — focus sunlight with mirrors, heating water and producing steam that drives electric turbines, while photovoltaic cells directly convert sunlight to electricity.

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Making Computers Based On The Human Brain

Nigel Buchanan

From Business Week:

How the biology of gray matter is having an increasing influence on computer design

When Lloyd Watts was growing up in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had a knack for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and plunking out the melodies on the family piano. But he wondered, wouldn't it be great to have a machine that could "listen" to songs and immediately transcribe them into musical notation? Watts never built the gizmo, but his decades-long quest to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain.

Microchips designed by Audience, the Silicon Valley company Watts launched, are now being used by mobile handset makers in Asia to improve dramatically the quality of conversations in noisy places. Even a truck passing right by someone using the technology won't be heard at the other end of the phone line. The chip is modeled on functions of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. "We have reverse-engineered this piece of the brain," declares Watts.

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Unhappy People Watch TV, Happy People Read/Socialize, Says Study

From E! Science News:

A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research. Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time-use studies and a continuing series of social attitude surveys, the Maryland researchers report that spending time watching television may contribute to viewers' happiness in the moment, with less positive effects in the long run.

"TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does," says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author and a pioneer in time-use studies. "It's more passive and may provide escape - especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to u

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The Science Of The Future Of War

(Photo from Infowars)

From Blog Science:

TODAY'S MOST BRUTAL WARS are also the most primal. They are fought with machetes in West Africa, with fire and rape and fear in Darfur, and with suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices in Israel, Iraq, and elsewhere. But as horrifying as these conflicts are, they are not the greatest threat to our survival as a species. We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species’s existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species. From hands and teeth tearing at isolated individuals, to coordinated raids with clubs and bows and arrows, to pitched battles, prolonged sieges, and on into the age of firearms, the impulse has remained the same but as the efficiency of our weapons has increased, the consequences have grown ever more extreme.

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My Comment: A long essay .... but a fascinating one to read. Grab a cup of coffee, and take your time reading it.

Mass Testing Plan To Tackle Aids

Intervention with anti-Aids drugs before symptoms appear could reduce HIV rates to under 1% in 50 years, a study claims. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

From The Guardian:

• Radical WHO strategy aimed at halting epidemic
• Preventive use of drugs raises human rights issues

A radical new strategy to stop the Aids epidemic in its tracks was proposed yesterday by World Health Organisation scientists but ran into immediate controversy over its implications for human rights.

The plan involves testing everybody for HIV every year in hard-hit areas like
sub-Saharan Africa and immediately putting those who are positive on Aids drugs. It could slash dramatically the number of new infections, because Aids drugs lower the levels of virus in the body, making HIV transmission through unprotected sex much less likely.

But the strategy, expounded in a paper published online today by the Lancet medical journal, raises major issues both over implementation and over ethics.

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10 Years Of The International Space Station

Astronaut Piers J. Sellers moves along a truss on the International Space Station, while space shuttle Discovery is docked in July 2006. Photo: NASA

From Wired:

Floating 190 miles above the Earth's surface, the extraplanetary crash pad known as the International Space Station careens through the sky at an average of over 17,000 miles per hour, making almost 16 Earth orbits a day.

Set for completion in 2011, it's been 10 years since construction first began on the ISS. The final version will double its current capacity of three residents to six and provide incalculable contributions to science. In honor of its 10th birthday, we've assembled some of our favorite photos from the space station's lifetime. Click through the gallery for a glimpse at one of the world's most impressive sci-fi realities.

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Particle Collider To Restart In Summer Of 2009

At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider could recreate conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. Above is one of the collider's massive particle detectors, called the Compact Muon Solenoid. Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

From The CBC:

The world's biggest particle collider will resume operation in the summer of 2009 with a new warning system to prevent further breakdowns, its operators said Friday.

The Large Hadron Collider, which lies underground near the Franco-Swiss border, was shut down after nine days of operation on Sept. 19 when the meltdown of a small electrical connection caused the release of a large amount of liquid helium into the 27-kilometre long tunnel that houses the experiment.

The collider's operators, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the French acronym CERN, released its report Friday on the mishap, confirming that "a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets" was the cause of the initial malfunction.

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Extraordinary IImmune Cells May Hold The Key To Managing HIV

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2008) — People who manage to control HIV on their own are providing scientists with valuable information about how the immune system eliminates virus-infected cells. A new study identifies specific characteristics of the immune cells that successfully destroy HIV-infected cells and may drive strategies for developing the next generation of HIV vaccines and therapies.

Long-term nonprogressors (LTNPs) or elite controllers are rare individuals who are able to contain HIV for many years without any type of antiretroviral therapy. "Direct and indirect lines of evidence in humans and animal models suggest that virus-specific immune cells, called CD8+ T cells, mediate this control. However, the mechanisms by which this occurs remain unknown," says senior study author Dr. Mark Connors from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Polar Dinosaurs Endured Cold Dark Winters

The skull of a polar dinosaur, Saurolophus osborni, displayed on Dec. 3, 2008, by Phil Bell (left) and Eric Snively (right) of the University of Alberta. Some Saurolophus specimens have been found in polar regions. Credit: Jamie Hanlon, University of Alberta

From Live Science:

Polar dinosaurs such as the 3.3-ton duckbill Edmontosaurus are thought by some paleontologists to have been champion migrators to avoid the cold, dark season. But a study now claims that most of these beasts preferred to stick closer to home despite potentially deadly winter weather.

While some polar dinosaurs may have migrated, their treks were much shorter than previously thought, University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively conclude from a recent review of past research on the animals and their habitat. Polar dinosaurs include hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, tyrannosaurs, troodontids, hypsilophodontids, ankylosaurs, prosauropods, sauropods, ornithomimids and oviraptorosaurs.

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Fringe Pushes Probability To The Limit As Characters Walk Through Walls

(Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn/FOX)

From Popular Mechanics:

Fringe's 10th episode, "Safe," opens with a team of burglars who rob banks without the tedious trouble of picking locks. Instead, the intrepid thieves change the molecular structure of the wall allowing them to pass through the wall. Unfortunately, one member doesn't make it out in time and the wall resolidifies around him. The next day the Fringe team shows up to find a dead man stuck inside a wall. We talked to experts about the real quantum mechanical phenomenon of tunneling to find out just how unlikely the scenario is.

Can people walk through walls?
Fringe loves to toe the line between science fact and fiction, but this time its tilted far over onto the fiction side. In the episode, mad scientist Walter Bishop concludes that the thieves would've needed cutting-edge knowledge of quantum physics, plus more money than many banks' assets combined, to make it through the wall. However, the closest thing to a scientific explanation Bishop offers is a lab demonstration with rice—when he puts an action figure on top of a bowl of uncooked rice, it can stand on top, but when he shakes the back it sinks to the bottom.

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One Man's 3-Year Experiment In Eating Organic Food - All The Time

(Photo: Stuart Bradford)

Form International Herald Tribune:

Fruits, vegetables and animals can be 100 percent organic. What about people? In a fascinating experiment - on himself - Dr. Alan Greene, a pediatrician and author in Danville, California, decided to find out. For the last three years, Greene has eaten nothing but organic foods, whether he's cooking at home, dining out or snacking on the road.

He chose three years as a goal because that was the amount of time it took to have a breeding animal certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While food growers comply with organic regulations every day, Greene wondered whether a person could meet the same standards.

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The First Aid: Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds

The 5,000-year-old Tyrolean iceman may have used bog moss as a prehistoric wound dressing, according to a new analysis of his body's remains.

From Wired Science:

Suffering from an arrow wound and a deep cut to the right hand, the iceman, known as Ötzi, may have engaged in some ancient first aid using the moss, a well-known wound dressing used as recently as the 20th century.

"If he knew of the useful properties of bog mosses, as seems entirely plausible, then he may have gathered some to staunch the wound or wounds," wrote James Dickson, an archaeobotanist at the University of Glasgow, and his team in the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. "Tiny pieces could well have stuck to the blood drying on his fingers and then he accidentally ingested some of them when next eating meat or bread as we know he did during his last few days."

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Blast From The Past: Astronomers Resurrect 16th-Century Supernova

Multi-band image of the remnant of Tycho's Supernova, composed from images taken with the 3.5 m telescope of Calar Alto and the camera Omega 2000 (infrared), the Spitzer space telescope (infrared) and the Chandra space telescope (X-rays). (Credit: Image courtesy of Calar Alto Observatory)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2008) — Astronomers have used light echoes as a time machine to unearth secrets of one of the most influential events in the history of astronomy –a stellar explosion witnessed on Earth more than 400 years ago.

By using a Galactic cloud as interstellar “mirror” an international team led by Oliver Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany has now re-analysed the same light seen on Earth in the 16th century and have, for the first time, determined the exact type of the explosion that happened. Calar Alto Observatory has contributed to this discovery and these results were published in the scientific journal Nature, 4th December 2008 issue.

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Happiness: Contagious As The Flu

From Live Science:

In a good mood? Your neighbor, her friends and even her friends' friends should thank you – you're likely infecting them with your cheer. Happiness spreads through social networks about as easily as the flu, according to a new study.

The researchers analyzed data compiled from nearly 5,000 interconnected people over a 20-year period. After establishing a baseline mood for each participant, the team found that when one person became happier, it rippled through the network, increasing the likelihood that others would become happier too.

Sadness, thankfully, is not nearly as infectious. An attack of the blues creates a much smaller ripple than a case of giddiness, said head researcher James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego.

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Lost City Of 'Cloud People' Found In Peru

Buildings carved into the Pachallama peak mountainside in Peru, by Chachapoya

From the Telegraph:

Archaeologists have discovered a lost city carved into the Andes Mountains by the mysterious Chachapoya tribe.

The settlement covers some 12 acres and is perched on a mountainside in the remote Jamalca district of Utcubamba province in the northern jungles of Peru's Amazon.

The buildings found on the Pachallama peak are in remarkably good condition, estimated to be over 1,000 years old and comprised of the traditional round stone houses built by the Chachapoya, the 'Cloud Forest People'.

The area is completely overgrown with the jungle now covering much of the settlement but explorers found the walls of the buildings and rock paintings on a cliff face.

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Nasa Delays Its Next Mars Mission

From the BBC:

The US space agency (Nasa) has delayed the launch of its Mars Science Laboratory rover mission.

MSL was scheduled to fly next year, but the mission has been dogged by testing and hardware problems.

The rover's launch would now be postponed until late 2011, agency officials said.

The mission is using innovative technologies to explore whether microbial life could ever have existed on the Red Planet.

The delay could add $400m to the price tag, which is likely to top $2bn.

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Scientists Find Key To Keeping Killer T Cells In Prime Shape For Fighting Infection, Cancer

From Physorg.:

Like tuning a violin to produce strong, elegant notes, researchers at The Wistar Institute have found multiple receptors on the outside of the body's killer immune system cells which they believe can be selectively targeted to keep the cells in superb infection- and disease-fighting condition.

In a study published online November 30 in Nature Immunology, the researchers describe their discovery of seven different receptors on T cells that can tamp down immune responses during a prolonged battle with an infectious pathogen or against developing cancer.

Chronic over-stimulation of the immune system can lead to poor control of infections and cancer, so the results explain why it is that these key immune cells gradually become "exhausted" and ineffective over time, says the study's lead author, E. John Wherry, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Wistar's Immunology Program.

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Harvard Team Unlocks Clues to Genes that Control Longevity

From The Daily Galaxy:

Harvard Medical School Researchers have used a single compound to increase the lifespan of obese mice, and found that the drug reversed nearly all of the changes in gene expression patterns found in mice on high calorie diets--some of which are associated with diabetes, heart disease, and other significant diseases related to obesity.

The research, led by investigators at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging, is the first time that the small molecule resveratrol has been shown to offer survival benefits in a mammal.

"Mice are much closer evolutionarily to humans than any previous model organism treated by this molecule, which offers hope that similar impacts might be seen in humans without negative side-effects," says co-senior author David Sinclair, HMS associate professor of pathology, and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Labs for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging.

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Check Out Tonight's Sky After Sunset; It May Be Like The One The Wise Men Saw

(The Associated Press)

From Greenville Online:

If you haven't seen the southwestern sky just after sunset, and even if you have, feast your eyes tonight -- it may be the same spectacular show that drew the wise men to Bethlehem in search of a newborn king.

From our vantage point on the planet, it's a glowing triangle of Venus, Jupiter and the waxing crescent moon.

"Tonight would be another good night to get out," said astronomer Doug Gegen of the Roper Mountain Science Center.

The weather forecast is mostly clear.

"The fun part of this is it's all a naked eye kind of thing so everybody can enjoy it," Gegen said.

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Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

Experimental set-up to induce illusory ownership of an artificial body (left panel). The participant could see the mannequin's body from the perspective of the mannequin's head (right panel). Credit: Valeria Petkova, H. Henrik Ehrsson, PLoS ONE

From Live Science:

Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a "humanoid body," experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other's body.

The bizarre achievement hearkens to body swaps portrayed on numerous TV shows and movies such as "Freaky Friday" and "All of Me."

In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.

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2,700-Year-Old Marijuana Found In Chinese Tomb

From The Toronto Star:

Stash seems to have been intended for buried shaman to use in the afterlife

OTTAWA – Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly ``cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

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Has Universal Ageing Mechanism Been Found?

The ageing-related protein Sir1 was first found in yeast, and has now been found to serve a similar role in mice. This fluorescent micrograph shows yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), with some proteins tagged with Green Fluorescent Protein (Image: Spitfire ch, Philippsen Lab, Biozentrum Basel)

Form The New Scientist:

An overworked protein that causes yeast to age when it neglects one of its functions may trigger ageing in mice too. If the same effect is found in people, it may suggest new ways to halt or reverse age-related disease.

As we get older, genes can start to be expressed in the wrong body tissues - a process that is thought to contribute to diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer's. But while sunlight or chemicals are known to cause limited DNA damage, how more widespread changes in gene expression come about has been unclear.

To investigate, David Sinclair and colleagues at Harvard Medical School turned to yeast cells. These produce a dual-function protein called Sir2 that, while being involved in DNA repair, also helps keep certain genes switched off.

As yeast cells age, the protein can't do both jobs and neglects its role as a gene suppressor.

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Atlantic Hurricane Season Blows Away Records

This September 2008 NASA GOES satellite image shows Hurricane Ike seen at 1225 GMT. The Atlantic hurricane season in 2008 is coming to a close after producing 16 storms, including eight hurricanes, and inflicting record damage in the United States, a report by university researchers said on Wednesday. (AFP/HO NASA/File/Ho)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON – The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season, which ends Sunday, seemed to strike the United States and Cuba as if on redial, setting at least five weather records for persistence and repeatedly striking the same areas.

"It was pretty relentless in a large number of big strikes," said Georgia Tech atmospheric sciences professor Judith Curry. "We just didn't have the huge monster where a lot of people lost their lives, but we had a lot of damage, a lot of damage."

Data on death and damage are still being calculated, but the insurance industry recorded at least $10.6 billion in losses this hurricane season. That includes $8.1 billion in insured damage from Hurricane Ike, which ranked as the seventh most expensive catastrophe in the United States history, according to Mike Barry of the Insurance Information Institute in New York.

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Some Cancers Disappear Untreated, Study Finds

From The International Herald Tribune:

Cancer researchers have known for years that it was possible in rare cases for some cancers to go away on their own. There were occasional instances of melanomas and kidney cancers that just vanished. And neuroblastoma, a very rare childhood tumor, can go away without treatment.

But these were mostly seen as oddities - an unusual pediatric cancer that might not bear on common cancers of adults, a smattering of case reports of spontaneous cures. And because almost every cancer that is detected is treated, it seemed impossible even to ask what would happen if cancers were left alone.

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Europe's 10bn-Euro Space Vision

Ministers took the view that hi-tech investments would help the economy

From The BBC:

Member states of the European space agency (Esa) have agreed a 10bn-euro budget at their meeting in The Hague.

The figure, which covers the next three to five years, represents a substantial increase in funding.

Ministers said the investment in space would help European industry pull through the current economic downturn.

The new money will help build new Earth observation satellites, maintain Esa's participation in the space station, and fund probes to the planets.

"The decisions of this ministerial conference are very important just in the middle of an economic crisis," said Peter Hintze, the minister who led the German delegation.

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No Electricity? Island Now Energy Independent

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway (Photo from Simply Moving)

From MSNBC:

Three-acre property boasts wind turbine, solar panels and Segways

MYSTIC, Conn. - Energy independence is still only a hypothetical goal for the U.S., but the owner of a tiny island off the coast of Connecticut says he has already achieved that feat and is offering his work as a model.

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and numerous medical devices, jokingly refers to his North Dumpling Island as an independent nation and himself as Lord Dumpling. Kamen claims to have his own currency and offers visas to visitors to the tiny island a few miles from Mystic, where he is the only resident.

But Kamen, who bought the three-acre island in the 1980s as a retreat, is serious about energy independence and the lessons it offers at a time of volatile gas prices and fears about global warming.

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5 Surprising Turkey Facts

Eastern wild turkeys. Credit: Maslowski/National Wild Turkey Federation

From Live Science:

Some 271 million turkeys will be raised in the United States this year, according to the National Turkey Federation, and a good number of them will be consumed on Thanksgiving, after which many Americans will loll about, overstuffed, sleepy and in many cases intoxicated.

This is not what the Pilgrims had in mind.

The first Thanksgiving was a moment for the Pilgrims to thank God for allowing them to kill enough game and grow sufficient crops to get through the winter, says Anne Blue Wills, assistant professor of religion at Davidson College. Those Pilgrims would have spent much of their day in church contemplating the mercies of God's covenantal love, Wills argues.

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Popular Science Looks At The Science Of Shooting Stars

From Popular Science:



In the first video we see footage of a fireball generated by a large meteor recently sighted careening over the skies of western Canada. Impressively bright! Since we get only a brief glimpse of the action we've also included another amazing video, below, of a meteor streaking over Guadalajara. It's a common misconception that the heat generated from meteors impacting the atmosphere is due to friction. In fact it's due to a thermodynamic process known as adiabatic compression. Let's see how this works.

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Plumes Spewing From Saturn Moon May Contain Water

(Photo from NASA)

From AP News:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Astronomers looking at the spectacular supersonic plumes of gas and dust shooting off one of Saturn's moons say there are strong hints of liquid water, a key building block of life.

Their research, appearing in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, adds to the growing push to explore further the moon Enceladus, as one of the solar system's most compelling places for potential life.

Using images from NASA's Cassini probe, astronomers had already figured that the mysterious plumes shooting from Enceladus' icy terrain contain water vapor. New calculations suggesting the gas and dustspew at speeds faster-than-sound make the case for liquid, said study lead author Candice Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. Her team calculated the plumes travel more than 1,360 mph.

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Global Warming Predictions Are Overestimated, Suggests Study On Black Carbon

Savanna fires occur almost every year in northern Australia, leaving behind black carbon that remains in soil for thousands of years. (Credit: Grant Stone, QCCCE)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2008) — A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.

A new Cornell study, published online in Nature Geosciences, quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, said Johannes Lehmann, the paper's lead author and a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry. The survey was the largest of black carbon ever published.

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Nanotech Clothing Fabric 'Never Gets Wet'

The new fabric strongly repels water thanks to nanoscale filaments with a spiky structure (Image: University of Zurich/Wiley Vch)

From New Scientist:

If you were to soak even your best raincoat underwater for two months it would be wet through at the end of the experience. But a new waterproof material developed by Swiss chemists would be as dry as the day it went in.

Lead researcher Stefan Seeger at the University of Zurich says the fabric, made from polyester fibres coated with millions of tiny silicone filaments, is the most water-repellent clothing-appropriate material ever created.

Drops of water stay as spherical balls on top of the fabric (see image, right) and a sheet of the material need only be tilted by 2 degrees from horizontal for them to roll off like marbles. A jet of water bounces off the fabric without leaving a trace (see second image).

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Triple Helix: Designing A New Molecule of Life

Peptide nucleic acid (gold) readily enters DNA's major groove to form triple-stranded and other structures with DNA, allowing it to modify the activity of genes in new ways. Jean-Francois Podevin

From Scientific American:

Peptide nucleic acid, a synthetic hybrid of protein and DNA, could form the basis of a new class of drugs—and of artificial life unlike anything found in nature

* A synthetic molecule called peptide nucleic acid (PNA) combines the information-storage properties of DNA with the chemical stability of a proteinlike backbone.
* Drugs based on PNA would achieve therapeutic effects by binding to specific base sequences of DNA or RNA, repressing or promoting the corresponding gene.
* Some researchers working to construct artificial life-forms out of mixtures of chemicals are also considering PNA as a useful ingredient for their designs.
* PNA-like molecules may have served as primordial genetic material at the origin of life.

For all the magnificent diversity of life on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life as we know it” exists. All these organisms are based on nucleic acids—DNA and RNA—and proteins, working together more or less as described by the so-called central dogma of molecular biology: DNA stores information that is transcribed into RNA, which then serves as a template for producing a protein. The proteins, in turn, serve as important structural elements in tissues and, as enzymes, are the cell’s workhorses.

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Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner

From Wired News:

Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents' Thanksgiving dinner table.

Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn't look or taste much at all like our modern variants do.

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A Great Endeavour: Stunning Images As Astronauts Complete DIY Repairs On Space Station 225 Miles Above Earth

All in a days work: Shane Kimbrough seen on during his space walk as he carries out construction and maintenance on the International Space Station

From The Daily Mail:

Captured against the stunning backdrop of infinite space, an astronaut floats precariously 225 miles above the Earth as he tinkers with a greasy gummed-up joint.

On the 10th anniversary of the International Space Station, the mission specialist's every weightless movement is caught on camera as he carries out all-important repair works during one of four spacewalks.

NASA has been closely following the crew with a video camera ever since the Endeavour space shuttle lit up the night sky over Florida with a mighty roar.

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Planets, Crescent Moon To "Frown" On Skywatchers Dec. 1

Venus and Jupiter appear close together in the sky over Pasadena, California, on February 12, 2008. The two bright planets will slowly converge in the evening skies for a dazzling summit on November 30. On the following night, the pair will be joined by a thin crescent moon. Photograph by Anthony J. Cook

From National Geographic:

Skywatchers across the world are in for a celestial treat as two of the brightest naked-eye planets, Venus and Jupiter, slowly converge in the evening skies for a celestial summit on November 30.

The real showpiece, however, will be on the following night, when a thin crescent moon joins the planetary pair—creating a brief "unhappy face" in the sky.

The planets will appear closest together—an event known as a planetary conjunction—on November 30 around 4 p.m. Pacific time, and the moon will cozy up to the pair on the evening of December 1.

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Hubble Captures Outstanding Views Of Mammoth Stars

From E! Science News:

The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth. The Carina Nebula contains several ultra-hot stars, including these two star systems and the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity yet confirmed. As well as producing incredible amounts of heat, these stars are also very bright, emitting most of their radiation in the ultraviolet and appearing blue in colour. They are so powerful that they burn through their hydrogen fuel source faster than other types of stars, leading to a "live fast, die young" lifestyle. WR 25 is the brightest, situated near the centre of the image. The neighbouring Tr16-244 is the third brightest, just to the upper left of WR 25. The second brightest, to the left of WR 25, is a low mass star located much closer to the Earth than the Carina Nebula. Stars like WR 25 and Tr16-244 are relatively rare compared to other, cooler types. They interest astronomers because they are associated with star-forming nebulae, and influence the structure and evolution of galaxies.

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Strangulation Of Spiral Galaxies: ‘Missing Link’ Discovered

These images of three galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo (top) and STAGES surveys (bottom) show examples of how the newly discovered population of red spiral galaxies on the outskirts of crowded regions in the Universe may be a missing link in our understanding of galaxy evolution. At left, both surveys find examples of normal spiral galaxies displaying all the hallmarks of youth: blue in colour, they are disk-like in structure. The obvious spiral arms host knotty structures where large numbers of hot young stars are being born. On the right are examples of typical rounded balls of stars known as elliptical galaxies. The reddish colour indicates that their stars are mostly old. With no gas left to use as fuel to form any more, they are old, dead and red In the centre are examples of the new "red spiral" galaxy found in large numbers by both the STAGES and Galaxy Zoo collaborations. While still disk-like and recognizably spiral in shape, their spiral arms are smoother. Furthermore, their colour is as red as the ellipticals. Astronomers from both teams believe these red spirals are objects in transition, where star formation has been shut off by interactions with the environment. (Credit: STAGES image credit: Marco Barden, Christian Wolf, Meghan Gray, the STAGES survey; STAGES image from Hubble Space Telescope, colour from COMBO-17 survey; Galaxy Zoo image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2008) — Astronomers in two UK-led international collaborations have separately uncovered a type of galaxy that represents a missing link in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

Galaxy Zoo, which uses volunteers from the general public to classify galaxies, and the Space Telescope A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey (STAGES) projects have used their vast datasets to disentangle the roles of "nature" and "nurture" in changing galaxies from one variety to another.

Both studies have identified a population of unusual red spiral galaxies that are setting out on the road to retirement after a lifetime of forming stars. Crucially, nature and nurture appear to play a role in this transformation: both the mass of a galaxy as well as its local environment are important in determining when and how quickly its star formation is shut down. The scientists’ work appears together in a forthcoming edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Origin of Sex Pinned Down

From Live Science:

We all came from hermaphrodites, organisms with both male and female reproductive organs. And though the origin traces back more than 100 million years, biologists have scratched their heads over how and why the separate male and female sexes evolved.

Now, research on wild strawberry plants is providing evidence for such a transition and the emergence of sex, at least in plants. And the results, which are detailed in the December issue of the journal Heredity, likely apply to animals like us, the researchers say.

The study showed that two genes located at different spots on a chromosome can cast strawberry offspring as a single sex, a hermaphrodite or a neuter (neither male nor female, and essentially sterile). The researchers suspect the two genes could be responsible for one of the earliest stages of the transition from asexual to sexual beings.

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Experts Question Use Of Space Station

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A new toilet.

A second refrigerator.

A new water recycling system.

Philadelphia-born astronaut Christopher Ferguson and his colleagues delivered those items to the International Space Station yesterday in what NASA has called an extreme makeover.

"It's the most jam-packed logistics module we have ever carried up there. We're taking a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house and turning it into a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a gym," Ferguson said in a pre-flight interview posted on NASA's Web site.

The improvements were supposed to have been finished years ago. With the project far behind schedule, scientists and engineers on the ground worry that the United States will never get its money's worth from what is now the biggest engineering project in history.

Just one shuttle flight costs about $500 million, several experts have estimated.

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Today's Unsettling Comparison To 'The Great Dying'

From ABC News:

250 Million Years Ago, Rising Greenhouse Gas Levels Set Off Catastrophic Changes

In 1980, scientists Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, proposed a new explanation for the dinosaurs' disappearance 65 million years ago: a meteor strike. Initially, the idea was met with resistance. But the evidence was convincing: a sediment layer high in iridium, an element common in asteroids, was found the world over, along with a 110-mile-wide impact crater in the Yucatán of the same age. What started as a fringe idea has gone mainstream.

Now scientists are rethinking another of earth's great die-offs. The end-Permian extinction 251 million years ago was the worst of earth's five mass extinctions. Ninety percent of all marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life disappeared. It took five million years, perhaps more, for the biosphere to recover.

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IBM To Build “Thinking” Computers Modeled On The Brain

From Discover:

IBM has won a $4.9 million government grant from DARPA to begin the first phase of research on “cognitive computing”– essentially building computers that work like living brains. The new brain-like computers will aim to process vast amounts of data to solve problems without relying on specific programmed algorithms. Mark Dean, Vice President of IBM said, “The challenge is that computers today are very good at computing, but what we really need is a more efficient way of sifting through information” [International Herald Tribune].

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You Too Can Be A Genius (If You Can Spare 10,000 Hours)

Studies show that top musicians like Nigel Kennedy have all put in at least 10,000 hours of graft to be a leader in their field

From The Daily Mail:

They say that genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.

Now scientists claim they know just how much sweat and toil this actually is.

It takes someone 10,000 hours of practice to reach the top in their chosen discipline, they say.

Studies suggest that top sportsmen, musicians and chess players have all put in this amount of graft.

Talent and luck are important, but it is practice that makes the difference between being good and being brilliant, say the researchers.

A study at Berlin's Academy of Music looked at violin students who started playing at around the age of five, practising for two or three hours a week. As they grew older the amount of practice increased.

By the age of 20, the elite performers had each totalled 10,000 hours of practice, while the merely good students had accrued 8,000.

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