Winter Cold Puts A Chill On Green Energy

In Minnesota, Alan Stankevitz did a new winter chore for homeowners: clearing the solar panels. Alan Stankevitz

From The New York Times:

Old Man Winter, it turns out, is no friend of renewable energy.

This time of year, wind turbine blades ice up, biodiesel congeals in tanks and solar panels produce less power because there is not as much sun. And perhaps most irritating to the people who own them, the panels become covered with snow, rendering them useless even in bright winter sunshine.

So in regions where homeowners have long rolled their eyes at shoveling driveways, add another cold-weather chore: cleaning off the solar panels. “At least I can get to them with a long pole and a squeegee,” said Alan Stankevitz, a homeowner in southeast Minnesota.

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Space Station Cargo Delivery Still Expensive

From Future Pundit:

Orbital Sciences Corp has won a $1.9 billion contract to carry 20 metric tons of cargo to the International Space Station in 8 flights. Think about those numbers. That's $95 million per metric ton to move cargo from ground level to low orbit. Those deliveries start in 2011 and run through 2015. A metric ton is 1000 kilograms or 2204.6 lbs. So the cost of putting stuff into low Earth orbit in 2015 is still going to be around $43k per lb or $95k per kg. At these prices large scale human colonization of space still seems a very distant prospect.

Those costs will come down a lot if a beanstalk into space built using nanotubes becomes possible. A bigger cost reduction for a Mars mission will come from nanotech advances. A bunch of nanodevices that can transform Mars landscape and produce needed supplies for a colony would reduce the size of the payload needed for setting up an initial colony.

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Google's Grand Ambitions

From CBS:

(CNET) Google stretched its wings in 2008, furthering an expansion beyond its core search and search-advertising business. But the economy and the government raised the possibility that those wings could be clipped.

The company began the year overcoming opposition to its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, a move that gave Google more clout in the market for graphical "display" ads. But that antitrust fight was a harbinger of things to come.

In April, Google showed its ambitions to house not just its own online applications such as Google Docs, but also others' with a project called Google App Engine. Basic applications are free, but more taxing ones cost money, a pay-as-you-go model that's popular with the cloud-computing concept.

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Tiny Clues To Collision In Space

From BBC:

Evidence that a massive meteorite shower had an impact on Earth on a global scale 470 million years ago have been found on a Highlands beach.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen uncovered tiny remnants of meteorites, smaller than a grain of sand, within rocks in Sutherland.

The find is linked to others made in China, the US and Australia.

The scientists think the meteorites - a result of a collision in space - triggered earthquakes and tsunami.

The university said the find near Durness confirmed previous scientific speculation that the meteorite shower - which followed a "catastrophic event" in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - was so vast in size that it affected locations across the globe.

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The World's Most High-Tech Nation

From ABC News:

If there ever is an "Easy Tech Adaptation for Dummies" book, I’d be the first one to grab it. Living in the most wired country in the world is quite a struggle for people with technology phobia like me. I’m not talking new gadgets or software that are released every few months or years. I’m talking almost every day learning how to use new functions on my mobile phone or keeping up to date with new ways to communicate.

Today, I joined the tech-savvy generation’s new thing: T-mobile money, only to find myself all frustrated because the whole concept is too good to be true and way too complex. It is a prepaid smart card that is embedded into your mobile’s SIM card, which works as a wallet, navigator or personalized weather forecaster. It even tells you how crowded -- not with car traffic but with human traffic -- certain places are so that you can avoid holiday shopping at those spots!

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Honey Bees On Cocaine Dance More, Changing Ideas About The Insect Brain

In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate. (Credit: iStockphoto/Florin Tirlea)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2008) — In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.

Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they've found high quality nectar or pollen, and only when the hive is in need. They do this by performing a dance, called a "round" or "waggle" dance, on a specialized "dance floor" in the hive. The dance gives specific instructions that help the other bees find the food.

Foraging honey bees on cocaine are more likely to dance, regardless of the quality of the food they've found or the status of the hive, the authors of the study report.

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Discovery Indicates Mars Was Habitable

From Live Science:

Evidence of a key mineral on Mars has been found at several locations on the planet's surface, suggesting that any microbial life that might have been there back when the planet was wetter could have lived comfortably.

The findings offer up intriguing new sites for future missions to probe, researchers said.

Observations NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which just completed its primary mission and started a second two-year shift, found evidence of carbonates, which don't survive in conditions hostile to life, indicating that not all of the planet's ancient watery environments were as harsh as previously thought.

The findings are detailed in a study in the Dec. 19 issue of the journal Science and will be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco

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Quantum Computer Could Solve Problems In A Few Months That Would Take Conventional Computers Millions Of Years

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2001) — How to build a super fast computer that uses the bizarre properties of quantum physics is the aim of a project by computer scientists Fred Chong of the University of California, Davis, Isaac Chuang at MIT and John Kubiatowicz at UC Berkeley. The five-year project is supported by a grant of $3 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The grant will establish a Quantum Architecture Research Center between MIT, UC Davis and UC Berkeley.

A quantum computer could solve problems in a few months that would take conventional computers millions of years, Chong said.

Quantum physics describes the special rules that apply to atoms and subatomic particles. One principle is that when you observe a particle, you change it. If a particle can be in one of two states, for example "up" or "down," it only settles on one state when you look at it. Before you look at it, it can be in both states at the same time.

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The Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs Of 2008

From ABC News:

Progress This Year Wasn't Just in Hardware but in Understanding the Urgency of Key Issues.

The year 2008 closes with two enormous scientific and technological challenges unresolved: How to create renewable and benign sources of energy and how to lessen the damage we're doing to the global climate system.

Those twin issues are the "greatest challenge facing modern science," according to Nobel laureate Steven Chu, the gifted physicist who has been nominated to head the Department of Energy. He will be at the center of the effort to deal with these vexing problems, and his nomination signals a new day in that effort.

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Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible

From E! Science News:

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we are given. The findings are published in today's issue of the journal Neuron. Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers

Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

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Caffeine Works Better For Men

From Live Science:

Caffeine affects men more strongly than women, new research reportedly shows.

However, the same study found that while decaf coffee perks up both of the sexes, it affects women more.

The results come from a University of Barcelona study of caffeine's effects on 668 university students, with an average age of 22. Measurements were taken before and after the caffeine was ingested. Tests were carried out at between 11 am to 1 pm, as well as between 4pm to 6pm, to check for differences caused by the time of day.

"Although both the men and women saw an improvement in their activity levels with the coffee, which increased in later measurements, we observed a greater impact among the males," researcher Ana Adan told Spain’s Scientific Information and News Service (SINC).

"Numerous studies have demonstrated the stimulant effects of caffeine, but none of these have looked at their effects in terms of the consumer's gender," she added.

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Top 10 Places Already Affected by Climate Change

CLIMATE CHANGE: The effects of climate change are beginning to appear around the globe, including the conflict in Darfur. © Lynsey Addario/Corbis

From Scientific American:

Cities deep underwater, frozen continents, the collapse of global agriculture: so far, much of the discussion about climate change has focused on these distant, catastrophic effects of a superheated world. What's less talked about is how global warming is making itself felt already. Even the modest temperature rise we've already experienced has set in motion fundamental shifts—and the further warming we can expect in the next few decades has the potential to set off dramatic changes.

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New Type Of Laser Discovered

Quantum cascade lasers are small and efficient sources of mid-infrared laser beams, which are leading to new devices for medical diagnostics and environmental sensing. (Credit: Frank Wojciechowski)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 24, 2008) — A Princeton-led team of researchers has discovered an entirely new mechanism for making common electronic materials emit laser beams. The finding could lead to lasers that operate more efficiently and at higher temperatures than existing devices, and find applications in environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics.

"This discovery provides a new insight into the physics of lasers," said Claire Gmachl, who led the study. Gmachl, an electrical engineer, is the director of the Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE) center. The phenomenon was discovered in a type of device called quantum cascade laser, in which an electric current flowing through a specially designed material produces a laser beam. Gmachl's group discovered that a quantum cascade laser they had built generated a second beam with very unusual properties, including the need for less electrical power than the conventional beam. "If we can turn off the conventional beam, we will end up with a better laser, which makes more efficient use of electrical power," said Gmachl.

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Slow Starvation of Brain Triggers Alzheimer's

A 3-D image of brain atrophy differences in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and mild Alzheimer's disease patients. Alzheimer's patients show far more damage overall, especially in cortical areas of the brain. Credit: Dr. Liana G. Apostolova, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

From Live Science:

A slow starvation of the brain over time is one of the major triggers of the biochemistry that causes some forms of Alzheimer's, according to a new study that is helping to crack the mystery of the disease's origins.

An estimated 10 million baby boomers will develop Alzheimer's in their lifetime, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The disease usually begins after age 60, and risk rises with age. The direct and indirect cost of Alzheimer's and other dementias is about $148 billion a year.

Robert Vassar of Northwestern University, the study's lead author, found that when the brain doesn't get enough of the simple sugar called glucose — as might occur when cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain — a process is launched that ultimately produces the sticky clumps of protein that appear to be a cause of Alzheimer's.

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Scientists Seek Ways To Ward Off Killer Asteroids

Artist's rendition released by NASA shows an asteroid belt in orbit around a star. Between 500 and 1,000 massive asteroids cross the Earth's path regularly and any one of them could cause a global catastrophe, space experts warned Tuesday, urging quick preventive measures. (AFP/NASA-HO/File)

From Yahoo News/McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — A blue-ribbon panel of scientists is trying to determine the best way to detect and ward off any wandering space rocks that might be on a collision course with Earth.

``We're looking for the killer asteroid,'' James Heasley , of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy , last week told the committee that the National Academy of Sciences created at Congress' request.

Congress asked the academy to conduct the study after astronomers were unable to eliminate an extremely slight chance that an asteroid called Apophis will slam into Earth with devastating effect in 2036.

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Aubrey de Grey Google Tech Talk On Defeat Of Aging

From Future Pundit:

A friend points out that Aubrey de Grey's October 8, 2007 Google Tech Talk on the defeat of aging has only 402 views. That's a waste of a valuable talk on a very important topic. So here's a post to begin to remedy this waste:

Aubrey and Dave Gobel co-founded the Methuselah Foundation accelerate the defeat of the aging process. Toward this goal Aubrey proposes Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) to reverse the aging process and repair our bodies to save us from the ravages of aging.

If you are new to SENS and or just haven't heard a recent talk by Aubrey on this topic then watch his lecture.

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Bionic 'Sex Chip' That Stimulates Pleasure Centre In Brain Developed By Scientists

The chip could stimulate the orbitofrontal cortex, which is associated with
the pleasure felt when eating and having sex

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists are developing an electronic 'sex chip' that works by stimulating the pleasure centres in the brain.

The technology, which creates tiny shocks deep in the brain, has already been used in America to treat Parkinson's disease.

Now researchers are focusing on the orbitofrontal cortex, which is associated with feelings of pleasure caused by eating and sex.

A research survey conducted by Morten Kringelbach, a fellow at Oxford University, found the orbitofrontal cortex could be a 'new stimulation target' to help people with anhedonia - an inability to experience pleasure from such activities.

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Bees Acts As Bodyguards For Flowers By Protecting Them From Munching Insects

Photo: A bee hovers above a flower - their buzz scares off other insects such as caterpillars

From The Daily Mail:

Flowers use bright colours and strong scents to attract honeybees to their pollen. But the stripy insects also defend them from other insects, according to a new study in Current Biology.

Their buzzing noise warns off others such as caterpillars who would otherwise munch on the blooms undisturbed.

The researchers, led by Jürgen Tautz from Biozentrum Universität Würzburg, Germany, found many caterpillars possess fine sensory hairs on the front portions of their bodies that enable them to detect air vibrations, such as the sound of an approaching predatory wasp or honeybee.

'These sensory hairs are not fine-tuned,' Mr Tautz said.

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TOP TEN SPACE PHOTOS: Most Viewed Of 2008

From National Geographic:

10. Supernova Creates "Ribbon" in Space

Like a ribbon trailing from a parade float, a streamer of hydrogen gas seems to waft across the stars in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Released in July, this festive shot of a supernova remnant was National Geographic News's tenth most viewed space photo of 2008.

Bright stripes within the ribbon—which is actually the shock wave from the stellar explosion—appear where the wave is moving edge-on to Hubble's line of sight.

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Science And The Holidays

From Scientific American:

From greening your Christmas tree to what oil producers could learn from the story of Hanukkah, your guide to the science of the holiday season

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Peripheral Artery Disease: Pain When Walking Can Be Reduced With Moderate Exercise, Study Suggests

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2008) — You probably know that poor diet and lack of exercise can lead to dangerous deposits of fatty plaques in arteries. But it is not just the heart that is affected – blood flow can be blocked to the legs too, leading to pain when walking, immobility and even in extreme cases, amputation.

Approximately 20% of us will suffer from this peripheral artery disease (PAD) once we are 65 or over, and with risk factors including smoking, diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure it is on the rise. Surgical intervention can sometimes help, but the prognosis is not good.

Encouragingly, new research by Ronald Terjung et al. published in The Journal of Physiology shows that regular, moderate exercise can go a long way to relieving the symptoms of PAD, and by some unexpected mechanisms.

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Chocolate, Wine And Tea Improve Brain Performance

Chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance. (Credit: iStockphoto/Silvia Jansen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 24, 2008) — All that chocolate might actually help finish the bumper Christmas crossword over the seasonal period. According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.

The team from Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74).

Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests.Those who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. The team reported their findings in the Journal of Nutrition.

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Spirituality Spot Found in Brain

From Live Science:

What makes us feel spiritual? It could be the quieting of a small area in our brains, a new study suggests.

The area in question — the right parietal lobe — is responsible for defining "Me," said researcher Brick Johnstone of Missouri University. It generates self-criticism, he said, and guides us through physical and social terrains by constantly updating our self-knowledge: my hand, my cocktail, my witty conversation skills, my new love interest ...

People with less active Me-Definers are more likely to lead spiritual lives, reports the study in the current issue of the journal Zygon.

Most previous research on neuro-spirituality has been based on brain scans of actively practicing adherents (i.e. meditating monks, praying nuns) and has resulted in broad and inconclusive findings. (Is the brain area lighting up in response to verse or spiritual experience?)

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Apollo 8: A Picture Of The Earth From The Moon 40 Years Ago

Apollo 8 "Earth Rise" (Click The Above Image To Enlarge)

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries For 2008

From Time Magazine:

1. Large Hadron Collider

Jean-Pierre Clatot / AFP / Getty

Good news! The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the massive particle accelerator straddling the Swiss-French border — didn't destroy the world! The bad news: The contraption didn't really work either. In September, the 17-mile collider was switched on for the first time, putting to rest the febrile webchatter that the machine would create an artificial black hole capable of swallowing the planet or at least a sizeable piece of Europe — a bad day no matter what. No lucid observer ever thought that would really happen, but what they did expect was that the LHC would operate as advertised, recreating conditions not seen since instants after the Big Bang and giving physicists a peek into those long-vanished moments. Things looked good at first, until a helium leak caused the collider to shut down after less than two weeks. Repairs are underway and the particles should begin spinning again sometime in June.

For the other 9, read more ....

The Politicization Of Global Warming

Photo: Dr. William Happer (Source: Princeton University)

Princeton Physicist Calls Global Warming Science "Mistaken" -- Daily Tech

Scientist fired by Al Gore was told, "science will not intrude on public policy".

Noted energy expert and Princeton physicist Dr. Will Happer has sharply criticized global warming alarmism. Happer, author of over 200 scientific papers and a past director of energy research at the Department of Energy, called fears over global warming "mistaken".

"I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect", said Happer. "Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science."

Dr. Happer views climate change as a predominately natural process. "The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past."

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Remembering Apollo 8, Man's First Trip To The Moon

Apollo 8 astronauts (l. to r.) William Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman train in the command module one month before their mission. Francis Miller / Time Life Pictures / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion — it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric corridor just 2.5 degrees wide in order to survive the fireball of reentry, a cautious commander would also consider it a couple of minis too many. So Borman ordered his crewmates, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, to keep the brandy stowed.

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Scientists Doubt Inventor's Global Cooling Idea — But What If It Works?

Ron Ace has filed for a patent on a way to prevent global warming.
George Bridges / MCT

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — Ron Ace says that his breakthrough moments have come at unexpected times — while he lay in bed, eased his aging Cadillac across the Chesapeake Bay bridge or steered a tractor around his rustic, five-acre property.

In the seclusion of his Maryland home, Ace has spent three years glued to the Internet, studying the Earth's climate cycles and careening from one epiphany to another — a 69-year-old loner with the moxie to try to solve one of the greatest threats to mankind.

Now, backed by a computer model, the little-known inventor is making public a U.S. patent petition for what he calls the most "practical, nontoxic, affordable, rapidly achievable" and beneficial way to curb global warming and a resulting catastrophic ocean rise.

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SpaceShipTwo’s Carrier Makes First Flight

Virgin Galactic's twin-fuselage White Knight Two carrier airplane takes to the air for the first time on Sunday after weeks of taxi tests. The plane will serve as the mothership for the SpaceShipTwo suborbital rocket plane. Bill Deaver / Mojave Desert News

From MSNBC:

Twin-fuselage White Knight Two goes through test at Mojave airport

A carrier aircraft designed to be the first stage of a commercial spaceline system made its maiden test flight Sunday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

Designed by Scaled Composites, the huge and unique White Knight Two mothership rolled down the runway and muscled itself into the air using four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines. The White Knight Two flew for about an hour, departing the runway at roughly 8:17 a.m. PT, safely touching down at the Mojave airport at approximately 9:17 a.m. PT.

"It's a big day," said Stuart Witt, general manager of Mojave Air and Space Port. "I think it's a real reflective time. When everybody's looking for a bailout, there are still people that are doing something for a much larger reason," he told Space.com.

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Facts Melted By 'Global Warming'

Butterflies and polar ice are enlisted in warmist cause Photo: Getty

From The Telegraph:

Something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website last weekend, writes Christopher Booker.

Last weekend, that heroically diligent US meteorologist Anthony Watts noticed that something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website that shows how much sea-ice there is in the Arctic. Without explanation, as he reported on his Watts Up With That website, half a million square kilometres of ice simply vanished overnight.

This might have brought cheer to all those, such as Al Gore and the BBC, who have been obsessively telling us that the Arctic ice will soon disappear altogether. They were dismayed enough last winter when, after reaching its lowest point in 30 years, the ice bounded back to near "normal". This winter the freeze has been even faster and greater, making the extent of the ice, according to the other main Arctic website, Crysophere Today, 500,000 sq km greater than this time last year. How better to maintain the chosen narrative than to lose that half-million square kilometres simply by "adjusting" the graph downwards?

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Obama Names 4 Top Members Of Science Team

In this Oct. 17, 2007 file photo, John Holdren, professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, speaks at the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy presentations in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama's selection Saturday of a Harvard physicist and a marine biologist for science posts is a sign he plans a more aggressive response to global warming than did the Bush administration.

John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who have advocated forceful government action. Holdren will become Obama's science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees ocean and atmospheric studies and does much of the government's research on global warming.

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Why Does War Breed More Boys?

From PopSci:

Surge of male babies in wartime is due to a male gene, says evolution researcher

A curious shift occurs during and right after a war: more boys tend to be born than girls. It’s been documented for decades in many nations, especially during long conflicts with many troops deployed. The cause of this boy boom has long flummoxed thinkers and scientists. Ideas have veered from the theological—a divine call for new men to replace those lost in battle—to the coital—returning soldiers have lots of sex, and so will be more likely to fertilize at a time in their ladies’ cycle that’s ripe for making boy babies. A new study in the journal Evolutionary Biology rejects them all. Instead, it pins the “returning soldier effect” on a gene expressed by men only. It also shows how researching your family tree can help you place bets on the sex of your next kid.

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Reproduction Of 2,100-Year-Old Calculator Deepens Mystery

From Net Work World:

The model of the Antikythera Device is based on the latest discoveries of the mysterious mechanism

A new working model of the mysterious 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator, dubbed the Antikythera Device, has been unveiled, incorporating the most recent discoveries announced two years ago by an international team of researchers.

The new model was demonstrated by its creator, former museum curator Michael Wright, who had created an earlier model based on decades of study. He demonstrates how the more complete device works in a video originally created on the New Scientist Website. (It's part of an update story by Jo Marchant, author of Decoding the Heavens, an account not only of the device itself but also the century-old scientific quest to recover its meaning.)

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Is The Internet Going Down? Undersea Sub-Cables Have Just Broken

From Times Online/Tech Central:

Breaking news: something's happening to the internet, right now. We're just not quite sure what.

Interoute, the internet networks company, reports that three of the four internet sub-cables that run from Asia to North America have been damaged.

These carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America. It's hard to gather what this actually means - is it that the internet is down or (more likely) significantly slower than usual between the Middle East and America? (If you're reading this, let's face it, the internet has not shut down altogether)

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Obama Team Raises New Questions About NASA’s Plans To Replace The Shuttle

From Discovery:

NASA officials have long pronounced themselves ready to move on from the aging space shuttles, which could be retired as soon as 2010, but the incoming Barack Obama administration has raised new doubts about what the next step should be. Last week, news reports surfaced that Obama’s transition team was questioning NASA about alternatives to the Ares I rocket that is currently under development as the shuttle’s replacement, and now transition team members are reportedly considering using modified military rockets instead. No decision has been made and the concept raises major technical, funding and policy issues. But in recent weeks, the transition team assigned to [NASA] has been asking aerospace industry officials about the feasibility of such a dramatic shift in priorities [The Wall Street Journal].

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Cosmic Rays Do Not Explain Global Warming, Study Finds

Changes in cosmic rays are not likely to contribute to climate change.
(Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — A new study supports earlier findings by stating that changes in cosmic rays most likely do not contribute to climate change. It is sometimes claimed that changes in radiation from space, so-called galactic cosmic rays, can be one of the causes of global warming. A new study, investigating the effect of cosmic rays on clouds, concludes that the likelihood of this is very small.

A group of researchers from the University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), CICERO Center for Climate and Environmental Research, and the University of Iceland, are behind the study.

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Stealthy Cats' Achilles Heel Discovered

From Live Science:

The stealth and balance that cats are known for when they move comes at the expense of energy efficiency, a new study finds, showing that evolution isn't always about efficiency.

"It is usually assumed that efficiency is what matters in evolution," said evolutionary anthropologist Daniel Schmitt of Duke University. "We've found that's too simple a way of looking at evolution, because there are some animals that need to operate at high energy cost and low efficiency."

Namely, cats.

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Scientists Find Way To Turn Cheap Plonk Into Premium Wine

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have found a quick way to turn cheap plonk into something pleasantly drinkable.

With a burst of electricity, a young acidic wine can be rapidly aged, creating something more mellow and aromatic.

So promising are the results, that no fewer than five wineries have invested in the technology which could allow them to get their wines into the shops faster and cut the costs of storage.

While inventors have come up with a variety of widgets to make the undrinkable drinkable without the wait, this one 'stands out from the rest', says New Scientist magazine.

'It is backed by a decade of research, the results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal and the end product has passed the ultimate test - blind tasting by a panel of wine experts,' says.

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Good News For Wind, Bad For Ethanol In Major Energy Study

From Ars Technica:

Growing concerns over climate change and energy security have kicked research on alternative energy sources into high gear. The list of options continues to expand, yet few papers have comprehensively reviewed them. And fewer still have weighed the pros and cons in as much depth as a new study published earlier this month in the journal, Energy & Environmental Science. The results are a mixed bag of logical conclusions and startling wake-up calls.

The review pits twelve combinations of electric power generation and vehicular motivation against each other. It is a battle royal of nine electric power sources, three vehicle technologies, and two liquid fuel sources. It rates each combination based on eleven categories. And it was all compiled by one man, Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

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10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

From Reuters:

Daily habits can affect our well-being. Here are 10 simple actions that research has shown makes people feel good.

In the last few years, psychologists and researchers have been digging up hard data on a question previously left to philosophers: What makes us happy? Researchers like the father-son team Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Stanford psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, and ethicist Stephen Post have studied people all over the world to find out how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being. The emerging field of positive psychology is bursting with new findings that suggest your actions can have a significant effect on your happiness and satisfaction with life. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for getting happy.

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One More Mystery To Think About

Mystery: Archeologists have uncovered a 100-year-old watch in a tomb believed to have been undisturbed for 400 years

Mystery As Century-Old Swiss Watch Discovered In Ancient Tomb sealed for 400 years -- Daily Mail

Archeologists are stumped after finding a 100-year-old Swiss watch in an ancient tomb that was sealed more than 400 years ago.

They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral.

But inside they uncovered a miniature watch in the shape of a ring marked 'Swiss' that is thought to be just a century old.

The mysterious timepiece was encrusted in mud and rock and had stopped at 10:06 am.

Watches were not around at the time of the Ming Dynasty and Switzerland did not even exist as a country, an expert pointed out.

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"First Contact With Inner Earth": Drillers Strike Magma

A collapsed vent allows hot lava to peek through solidified rock at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano in an undated photo. For the first time on record, workers drilling at a geothermal plant near Kilauea accidentally hit a pocket of magma in its natural environment deep inside Earth. Announcing the find at a December 2008 meeting, one volcano expert likened the discovery to a paleontologist finding a dinosaur romping on a remote island. Photograph courtesy Hawaii Volcano Observatory

From National Geographic:

A drilling crew recently cracked through rock layers deep beneath Hawaii and accidentally became the first humans known to have drilled into magma—the melted form of rock that sometimes erupts to the surface as lava—in its natural environment, scientists announced this week.

"This is an unprecedented discovery," said Bruce Marsh, a volcanologist from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who will be studying the find.

Normally, he said, volcanologists have to do "postmortem studies" of long-solidified magmas or study active lava during volcanic eruptions.

But this time they'd found magma in its natural environment—something Marsh described as nearly as exciting as a paleontologist finding a dinosaur frolicking on a remote island.

"This is my Jurassic Park," he said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

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Earth's Original Ancestor Was LUCA, Not Adam Nor Eve

From E! Science News:

Here's another argument against intelligent design. An evolutionary geneticist from the Université de Montréal, together with researchers from the French cities of Lyon and Montpellier, have published a ground-breaking study that characterizes the common ancestor of all life on earth, LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their findings, presented in a recent issue of Nature, show that the 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined. The study changes ideas of early life on Earth. "It is generally believed that LUCA was a heat-loving or hyperthermophilic organism. A bit like one of those weird organisms living in the hot vents along the continental ridges deep in the oceans today (above 90 degrees Celsius)," says Nicolas Lartillot, the study's co-author and a bio-informatics professor at the Université de Montréal. "However, our data suggests that LUCA was actually sensitive to warmer temperatures and lived in a climate below 50 degrees."

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Astronomers Use Ultra-sensitive Camera To Measure Size Of Planet Orbiting Star

When the planet WASP-10b crosses the disk of its star, WASP-10, the brightness of the star decreases, allowing scientists to measure the precise size of the planet. (Credit: Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — A team of astronomers led by John Johnson of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy has used a new technique to measure the precise size of a planet around a distant star. They used a camera so sensitive that it could detect the passage of a moth in front of a lit window from a distance of 1,000 miles.

The camera, mounted on the UH 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, measures the small decrease in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of its star along the line-of-sight from Earth. These "planet transits" allow researchers to measure the diameters of worlds outside our solar system.

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Want A Retired Space Shuttle? They're Up For Grabs

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA's soon-to-be-retired space shuttles are up for grabs. The space agency said Wednesday it's looking for ideas on where and how best to display its space shuttles once they stop flying in a few years. It's put out a call to schools, science museums and "other appropriate organizations" that might be interested in showcasing one of the three remaining shuttles.

Beware: NASA estimates it will cost about $42 million to get each shuttle ready and get it where it needs to go, and the final tab could end up much more.

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Bright Future: LEDs Revolutionize Lighting

LEDs (light emitting diodes) are similar to regular light bulbs but have no filament. Their light is generated by electrons moving through a semiconductor material. They produce more light, less heat, and consume less energy than other types of lighting. Credit: NIST

From Live Science:

You might have noticed energy-efficient LED lights replacing the traditional holiday bulb lights on many store shelves this year. They're not cheap, but the sales pitch is they save energy, cut the risk of fire and last practically forever.

By all accounts, LED lighting has a very bright future, and the future is arriving rapidly as utility companies tout the benefits of LEDs, and individuals and businesses make the switch both for environmental reasons and to save money.

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Bringing Stem Cells to War: Meet the Blood Pharmers

(Photograph by Davies and Starr/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

New research from DARPA could open the door to on-demand blood-cell manufacturing on battlefields and in hospitals. All medics need is a machine that uses a nanofiber that mimics bone marrow to turn a handful of stem cells into gallons of blood. Who needs blood donations when you have blood pharming?

Fresher blood is better than stale: It carries more oxygen and, when transfused into patients, speeds recovery. Military medics are all too familiar with this problem in the field, where donated blood may take two or more weeks to reach soldiers who need it immediately. But medical researchers—also known as blood pharmers—are working on manufacturing the red stuff on the spot.

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Aging Brains Allow Negative Memories To Fade

From E! Science News:

It turns out there's a scientific reason why older people tend to see the past through rose-coloured glasses. A University of Alberta medical researcher, in collaboration with colleagues at Duke University, identified brain activity that causes older adults to remember fewer negative events than their younger counterparts.

"Seniors actually use their brain differently than younger people when it comes to storing memory, especially if that memory is a negative one," said study author Dr. Florin Dolcos, an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

The study, published online in December in the U.S.-based journal Psychological Science, found age-related changes in brain activity when participants with an average age of 70 where shown standardiz

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The Rise Of The Machines

From The IEEE Spectrum:

There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10 000 manufacturing workers—a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).

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Earth’s Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach - Scientists Baffled

(Click To Enlarge)

Watts Up With That:

I know. This sounds like a plot of a 1950’s scifi movie. But it is real. From my view, our localized corner of the solar system is now different than it used to be and changes in the magnetic interactions are evident everywhere. First we have the interplanetary magnetic field that took an abrupt dive in October 2005 and has not recovered since and remains at very low level:

Then we have the recent discovery that the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.

We have a solar cycle 24 (driven by the solar magnetic dynamo) which can’t seem to get out of the starting gate, being a year late with forecasts for activity from it being revised again and again.

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Leaks Found In Earth's Protective Magnetic FieldI

A close-up of a solar flare taken with the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft in Sept. 2005. Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

Scientists have found two large leaks in Earth's magnetosphere, the region around our planet that shields us from severe solar storms.

The leaks are defying many of scientists' previous ideas on how the interaction between Earth's magnetosphere and solar wind occurs: The leaks are in an unexpected location, let in solar particles in faster than expected and the whole interaction works in a manner that is completely the opposite of what scientists had thought.

The findings have implications for how solar storms affect the our planet. Serious storms, which involved charged particles spewing from the sun, can disable satellites and even disrupt power grids on Earth.

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Over 2T Tons Of Ice Melted In Arctic Since '03

In this July 19, 2007 file photo, an iceberg melts off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland. More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. (AP Photo/John McConnico)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON – More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren't complete yet, but this year's ice loss, while still significant, won't be as severe as 2007.

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