What Is Norovirus? How Contagious Is It? Can It Be Fatal?

NASTY NOROVIRUS: Virus particles like these are responsible for sickening 23 million people in the U.S. every year. GrahamColm via Wikimedia Commons

From Scientific American:

A Massachusetts college closes down after over 100 students fall ill with norovirus infections.

An outbreak of stomach flu believed to be caused by norovirus has prompted a temporary shutdown of Babson College, a small business college and graduate school in Babson Park, Mass. School officials announced that classes, meetings, athletic events and all other activities would be canceled until Wednesday, when the school is expected to have the outbreak under control.

Dennis Hanno, Babson's undergraduate dean, says that 131 students have visited the school's health services clinic since Wednesday complaining of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea—all symptoms associated with norovirus, a group of viruses formerly known as Norwalk-like viruses. "We saw a high of 40 reported cases on Friday," Hanno told ScientificAmerican.com, noting that the numbers have dropped significantly since then with only four cases reported today. The main concern with this stomach virus, Hanno says, is that it may cause severe dehydration; 12 of the students received fluids intravenously to replenish those lost.

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New Theory On Largest Known Mass Extinction In Earth's History

Hypothetically speaking, large areas of the hyper saline Zechstein Sea and its direct environment could have looked like this, which in the Permian Age was situated about where present day Central Europe is. At the end of the Permian Age the Zechstein Sea was irrevocably disconnected from the open sea and the remaining sections of sea soon dried out after that. As a result the microbial-limited halogenated gases from the Zechstein Sea stopped and vegetation was able to regenerate again. The pink colour of the Zechstein Sea was probably brought about by microbes with an extreme preference for salt, as is the case with salt lakes today. In the background sand dunes can be recognised from a landscape with hardly any water. (Credit: Dr. Karsten Kotte/Universität Heidelberg)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2009) — The largest mass extinction in the history of the earth could have been triggered off by giant salt lakes, whose emissions of halogenated gases changed the atmospheric composition so dramatically that vegetation was irretrievably damaged.

At least that is what an international team of scientists has reported in the most recent edition of the Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Dokladi Earth Sciences). At the Permian/Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago, about 90 percent of the animal and plant species ashore became extinct. Previously it was thought that volcanic eruptions, the impacts of asteroids, or methane hydrate were instigating causes.

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Coffee Lessens The Pain Of Exercise

Former competitive cyclist Robert Motl, now a professor of kinesiology and community health, is studying the effects of caffeine on pain during exercise. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

From Live Science:

That cup of coffee that many gym rats, bikers and runners swill before a workout does more than energize them. It kills some of the pain of athletic exertion, a new study suggests. And it works regardless of whether a person already had a coffee habit or not.

Caffeine works on a system in the brain and spinal cord (the adenosine neuromodulatory system) that is heavily involved in pain processing, says University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Robert Motl. And since caffeine blocks adenosine, the biochemical that plays an important role in energy transfer and thus exercise, he speculated that it could reduce pain.

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Women Excluded From 'Mars Mission' Crew To Prevent Sexual Tension Ruining 105-Day Voyage

Five of the crew during survival training near Star City, Russia.
They will live together for 105 days in cramped conditions.

From The Daily Mail:

Today an all-male crew of six space enthusiasts were shut inside the Mars-500 'spaceship' in Moscow, for a simulated 105-day mission.

The purpose of the reality TV-like mission is to study the psychological and physiological effects of isolation on stress levels, sleep quality, mood and immunity levels.

The experiment paves the way for a 500 day mission which will completely replicate the conditions of a real mission to Mars.

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Cosmonaut: Russians Can't Use American Toilet in Space

Which bathroom do I use? The International Space Station as seen from the departing space shuttle Discovery on March 25. NASA

From FOX News:

MOSCOW — Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station's food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew's morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

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My Comment: This news is getting better everyday.

Hobbit Skeleton Replica Goes On Display

Image: Artist's rendition of Homo floresiensis. Credit: National Geographic Society/ Peter Schouten

From Live Science:

A cast of a "hobbit" skeleton will go on public display for the first time as part of a human evolution symposium April 21 on Long Island, New York.

The hobbit fossils (and near fossils) were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Some scientists think the discovery represents a new species of human. Others argue it was human like us, only with a disorder called microcephaly which gave it an unusually small head.

The skeleton is set to go on display at Stony Brook University's Staller Center for the Arts as part of the 7th Human Evolution Symposium there.

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Why Some People Shake Off The Flu In A Couple Of Days, While Others Suffer Longer, Or Die

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2009) — For some people it is a certainty: as soon as the annual flu season gets underway, they are sure to go down with it. It is little comfort to know that there are other people who are apparently resistant to flu or overcome the illness after just a couple of days. It is this phenomenon that is now being investigated by researchers at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, using various strains of mice.

"Where there are many scientific works dealing solely with the flu virus, we have investigated how the host reacts to an infection," says Klaus Schughart, head of the Experimental Mouse Genetics research group. In infection experiments the researchers have now discovered that an excessive immune response is responsible for the fatal outcome of the disease in mice. This overreaction has genetic roots.

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Discover Interview The Man Who Found Quarks And Made Sense Of The Universe

From The Discover Magazine:

Murray Gell-Mann had a smash success with particles, notorious dustups with Feynman, and a missed opportunity with Einstein.

It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

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How Enormous Batteries Could Safeguard The Power Grid

Big battery: Wind turbines charge these large-scale batteries in Luverne, Minn., while the wind blows. If the breeze calms, the batteries keep power flowing into the utility grid. (Courtesy of XCel Energy)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Since sunlight and wind can be unreliable, renewable utilities install big backups.

One evening in late February 2008, the famously steady winds of west Texas began to wane until, at last, hundreds of giant wind turbines were becalmed – their enormous blades slowed or stilled.

In just three hours, grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas watched wind power output fall by 1,400 megawatts – power needed to supply roughly 600,000 homes. Following emergency procedures, a blackout was avoided by quickly cutting power to several industrial customers.

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Giant Laser Experiment Powers Up

From BBC:

The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.

The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy.

The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.

To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it.

Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a "seismic event".

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Volcanoes Spawn Mini-Cyclones, Then Lightning "Sheaths"

A waterspout forms offshore from an erupting Kilauea volcano vent in Kilauea, Hawaii. A March 2009 study revealed a newfound link between two of nature's most violent phenomena that could explain how volcanic ash clouds can generate lightning and tornado-like dust devils and waterspouts. Photograph by Steve and Donna O'Meara

From National Geographic:

A newfound link between two of nature's most violent phenomena could explain how volcanic ash clouds can generate bolts of lightning and tornado-like dust devils and waterspouts.

Scientists have long known that tornadoes are the products of colossal columns of spinning air—mesocyclones—inside large storm clouds.

A new study suggests mesocyclones can also form in the ash plumes of volcanic eruptions.

Under certain circumstances, these volcanic mesocyclones can aid in lightning production and create tornado-like structures that corkscrew toward the Earth, said study team member Pinaki Chakraborty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Cosmonaut Grumbles About Space Bureaucracy

Image top: The International Space Station, the largest scientific
cooperative program in history Credit: NASA

From Yahoo News/AP:

MOSCOW – Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station's food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew's morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

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New Portable Energy Source Utilizes Microbes To Turn Electricity Directly To Methane

This photo shows Bruce E. Logan, Shaoan Cheng and Defeng Xing with a microbial cell that produces methane directly from electricity. (Credit: Bruce Logan's Lab, Penn State)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2009) — A tiny microbe can take electricity and directly convert carbon dioxide and water to methane, producing a portable energy source with a potentially neutral carbon footprint, according to a team of Penn State engineers.

"We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, Penn State. "We may now understand why."

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Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

A look at Russia's Soyuz rocket stages. Credit: SPACE.com Graphic.

From Live Science:

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

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Nathan Wolfe: Did We Mention This Guy Was Brilliant?

From Popsci.com:

PopSci "Brilliant 10" alum takes the TED stage to talk about his groundbreaking work as a virus hunter; see the video!

When it comes to viruses, especially the serious kind that can make you bleed from your eye sockets and wipe out entire villages, most people naturally prefer to keep their distance. Not Nathan Wolfe. The 39-year-old epidemiologist has spent the past 10 years hunting them down in the jungles of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. By collecting thousands of blood samples from wild animals and the people who live in close contact with them, Wolfe and his team have uncovered new viruses related to HIV and smallpox. He's even documented how these animal-borne killers leap to humans, with blood serving as a vector in transmitting viruses from slaughtered animals to hunters.

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A (Radioactive) Cut in the Earth That Will Not Stay Closed

DANGEROUS ELEMENT: The uranium for the original atomic bombs came from a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Shinkolobwe. ©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/DAVID FREUND

From Scientific American:

Tom Zoellner's book Uranium explores how a historic mine in Africa poses an existential threat in this excerpt.

One of the most potentially dangerous places in the world is called Shinkolobwe, the name of a now-destroyed village in central Africa which took its name from a thorny fruit resembling an apple. After boiling, the outside of the fruit cools quickly but the inside is like a sponge. It retains hot water for a long time. Squeezing it results in a burn.

The word is also local slang for a man who is easygoing on the surface but becomes angry when provoked.

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The Tech Behind 3D's Big Revival

Left: James Cameron on the set of his 3D epic Avatar. Right: An NFL Films cameraman captures last season’s San Diego—Oakland game using a stereo­scopic camera rig built by 3ality. (Photograph by Associated Press)

From Popular Mechanics:

3D has been around for a century, but only now are we seeing 3D in Super Bowl ads and in big Hollywood 3D releases like Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens. So what has convinced Hollywood that 3D is finally ready for its closeup? The short answer is that technology has finally caught up with the concept.

Hollywood is buzzing about 3D. Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has compared it to the introduction of color. Director James Cameron delayed the release of his stereoscopic epic Avatar in part to give theaters more time to convert to 3D capability. A dozen or more stereoscopic films will be released in 2009, and more than 30 movies are in production. But stereoscopic films are not a revolutionary concept; in fact, audiences have been paying for them since The Power of Love in 1922. The golden age of 3D was in the 1950s, with a brief resurgence in the 1980s. Each time experts heralded the format as the next big thing in filmmaking, and each time, the surge quietly subsided.

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Solar Activity And Climate Change: New Sun-Watching Satellite To Monitor Sunlight Fluctuations

During periods of peak activity (front three images) sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections are more common, and the sun emits slightly more energy than during periods of low activity (back images). The amount of energy that strikes Earth's atmosphere -- called total solar irradiance (TSI) -- fluctuates by about 0.1 percent over the course of the sun's 11-year cycle, even though the soft X-ray wavelengths shown in this image vary by much greater amounts. (Credit: Steele Hill, SOHO, NASA/ESA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2009) — During the Maunder Minimum, a period of diminished solar activity between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were rare on the face of the sun, sometimes disappearing entirely for months to years. At the same time, Earth experienced a bitter cold period known as the "Little Ice Age."

Were the events connected? Scientists cannot say for sure, but it's quite likely. Slowdowns in solar activity -- evidenced by reductions in sunspot numbers -- are known to coincide with decreases in the amount of energy discharged by the sun. During the Little Ice Age, though, few would have thought to track total solar irradiance (TSI), the amount of solar energy striking Earth's upper atmosphere. In fact, the scientific instrument needed to make such measurements -- a spaceborne radiometer -- was still three centuries into the future.

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Perfect Running Pace Revealed

The kinematics of walking (left) and running are quite different. © Nature

From Live Science:

Most regular runners can tell you when they reach that perfect equilibrium of speed and comfort. The legs are loose, the heart is pumping and it feels like you could run at this pace forever.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison now have an explanation for this state of running nirvana, and we can thank our ancestors and some evolutionary biology for it.

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Scientists Map The Brain, Gene By Gene

"The brain is details on top of details on top of details." — Michael Hawrylycz
Photo: David Clugston

From Wired Magazine:

The human brain is surprisingly bloody. I've worked in neuroscience labs, and I'm used to seeing brains that are stored in glass jars filled with formaldehyde, the preserved tissue a lifeless gray. But this brain—removed from a warm body just a few hours ago—looks bruised, its folds stained purple. Blood drips from the severed stem, forming puddles on the stainless steel table.

I'm in the dissection room of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and the scientist next to me is in a hurry: His specimen—this fragile cortex—is falling apart. Dying, the gray matter turns acidic and begins to eat away at itself; nucleic acids unravel, cell membranes dissolve. He takes a thin, sterilized knife and slices into the tissue with disconcerting ease. I'm reminded of Jell-O and guillotines and the meat counter at the supermarket. He saws repeatedly until the brain is reduced to a series of thin slabs, which are then photographed and rushed to a freezer. All that remains is a pool of blood, like the scene of a crime.

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Leaving Computers On Overnight = $2.8 Billion A Year

Vice President Gore's Office

From Yahoo Tech:

Admittedly I don't think much about it at all. I leave my laptop running overnight because I know it'll take five minutes or more to get things going in the morning -- not just booting up, but launching the various apps I start the day with, downloading my overnight email, filtering out the spam, and otherwise "getting settled."

But all the power wasted while computers are sitting idle overnight adds up, and one study has finally tried to measure it. The tally: An estimated $2.8 billion wasted on excess energy costs each year in the U.S. alone.

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My Comment: I think it is more than that. I have 3 computers in my office. I have always left them on 24 hours. About 6 months ago I started to shut them down when I was no longer working with them. My electricity bill has dropped appreciably since then.

Another Volcano In Alaska Erupts?

From Watts Up With That?:

(h/t to Ron de Haan) This time it appears to be Mount Gareloi, something big is going on there seismically. The webicorder is going nuts.

Update: I double checked the webicorder to see if it was still operating, and it appears to be. Still no word on the AVO website about the status of Gareloi.

UPDATE2: About an hour after I posted this, seeing nothing from AVO, I decided to call them. They answered right away and were quite surprised that anyone was watching. The scientist there said “we don’t see anything unusual on our trace” but when I pointed out the webicorder trace below, she said “ah yes it’s a noisy signal, I was looking at our internal trace, not the public one”. She also confirmed my initial speculation listed in the CAVEAT below that it was a windstorm, as evidenced by the gradual onset and lack of transients.

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The (Real!) Science Behind Lie to Me

As the foremost deception expert in the country, Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) knows when someone is lying. He oversees The Lightman Group, a private agency hired to expose the truth behind the lies in the new series Lie to Me. (Photograph by Mike Yarish/FOX)

From Popular Mechanics:

In Lie to Me, Tim Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, a deception consultant and expert. But Lightman doesn't rely on some futuristic mind-reading tricks cooked up by TV writers. Instead, his character is based on clinical psychologist Paul Ekman, a leading expert on lie detection. PM's Digital Hollywood asked Ekman how well his life and research translate to the small screen, delving into the science behind Fox's latest drama.

If Fox's Fringe is full of junk science (including people who walk through walls and communicate with the dead), then Lie to Me, the network's newest law enforcement-themed drama, is just the opposite.

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Rise Of Sea Levels Is 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'

From The Telegraph:

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

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20 Years Later: Exxon Valdez Spill Lingers

Exxon Valdez

From ScienCentral:

Just after midnight on this day in 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez crashed against a reef off the coast of Alaska. Within six or so hours of the incident, nearly 10.8 million gallons of crude oil had spilled into the surrounding waters of the Prince Island Sound. Within a few days, that oil had spread 90 miles from the accident site. And now, two decades later, the after effects of the Valdez spill linger.

Oil and Water

In 1989, America consumed over 252 billion gallons of oil. Compared to that number, the 10.8 million gallons that was dumped from the Valdez and into Prince Island Sound seems insignificant. In fact, the Exxon Valdez spill was by no means the largest spill in history. It wasn’t even the tenth largest.

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Airborne Dust Reduction Plays Larger Than Expected Role In Determining Atlantic Temperature

A dust storm off the coast of Morocco was imaged by NASA's MODIS Aqua meteorological satellite on March 12, 2009. A new study by UW-Madison researcher Amato Evan shows that variability of African dust storms and tropical volcanic eruptions can account for 70 percent of the warming North Atlantic Ocean temperatures observed during the past three decades. Since warmer water is a key ingredient in hurricane formation and intensity, dust and other airborne particles will play a critical role in developing a better understanding of these storms in a changing climate. (Credit: Photo: courtesy Amato Evan)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2009) — The recent warming trend in the Atlantic Ocean is largely due to reductions in airborne dust and volcanic emissions during the past 30 years, according to a new study.

Since 1980, the tropical North Atlantic has been warming by an average of a quarter-degree Celsius (a half-degree Fahrenheit) per decade. Though this number sounds small, it can translate to big impacts on hurricanes, which thrive on warmer water, says Amato Evan, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and lead author of the new study. For example, the ocean temperature difference between 1994, a quiet hurricane year, and 2005's record-breaking year of storms, was just one degree Fahrenheit.

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The World's Biggest Laser Powers Up

Fusion central: 192 lasers will shoot through openings in this spherical chamber, focusing near the tip of the cone projecting from the right. A worker in a service module can be seen at the left. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy

From Technology Review:

Now complete, the National Ignition Facility could soon create controlled fusion using lasers.

The most energetic laser system in the world, designed to produce nuclear fusion--the same reaction that powers the sun--is up and running. Within two to three years, scientists expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they're successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way--in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is--and could eventually lead to fusion power plants.

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How Cell Towers Work

From Gizmodo:

I recently visited a cell site shared by Clearwire and two other unnamed carriers—without frying my nuts. We've all driven past them so many times, but have you ever actually wondered how they work?

How They Work
Whether it's handling simple phone calls or 12Mbps WiMax data, cell sites are organized with more or less the same flow:

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British Engineer Blows Away Land Speed Record For Wind-Powered Vehicles After 10-Year Quest

Record-breaker: The Greenbird clocked up 126.1mph

From The Daily Mail:

A British engineer has smashed the land speed record for wind powered vehicles, becoming the fastest naturally powered human on the planet.

Richard Jenkins clocked 126.1mph in his Ecotricity 'Greenbird' powered only by 30mph winds. He eclipsed the previous record of 116 mph, set by American Bob Schumacher ten years ago.

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Archaeologist: Oldest Cyprus Temple Discovered

From The International Herald Tribune:

NICOSIA, Cyprus: An Italian archaeologist claimed Friday to have discovered Cyprus' oldest religious site, which she said echoes descriptions in the Bible of temples in ancient Palestine.

Maria Rosaria Belgiorno said the 4,000-year-old triangular temple predates any other found on the east Mediterranean island by a millennium.

"For sure it's the most ancient religious site on the island," she told The Associated Press from her home in Rome. "This confirms that religious worship in Cyprus began much earlier than previously believed."

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Do Animals Enjoy Sex?

From Live Science:

Animals obviously hook up, at least during mating season. But do they like it? According to experts, there are two answers: "yes" and "it is impossible to know."

"Mosquitoes, I don’t know," hedged Mark Bekoff, a University of Colorado biologist and author of "The Emotional Lives of Animals" (New World Library), "but across mammals, they enjoy sex."

In fact the enjoyment of sex among humans and among animals may be similar in that it's all experienced in very primitive parts of the brain.

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Erratic Black Hole Regulates Itself

This optical and infrared image from the Digitized Sky Survey shows the crowded field around the micro-quasar GRS 1915+105 (GRS 1915 for short) located near the plane of our Galaxy. The inset shows a close-up of the Chandra image of GRS 1915, one of the brightest X-ray sources in the Milky Way galaxy. (Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/Harvard/J.Neilsen); Optical & IR (Palomar DSS2))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2009) — New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made a major advance in explaining how a special class of black holes may shut off the high-speed jets they produce. These results suggest that these black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow.

Black holes come in many sizes: the supermassive ones, including those in quasars, which weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, and the much smaller stellar-mass black holes which have measured masses in the range of about 7 to 25 times the Sun's mass. Some stellar-mass black holes launch powerful jets of particles and radiation, like seen in quasars, and are called "micro-quasars".

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How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

DANGER: Wild animals can carry pathogens capable of jumping into humans—the first step toward becoming a major infectious killer—so a new plan for avoiding pandemics begins with them. Oxford Scientific Getty Images; JEN CHRISTIANSEN (photoillustration)

From Scientific American:

* Most human infectious diseases originated in animals.
* Historically, epidemiologists have focused on domestic animals as the source of these scourges. But wild animals, too, have transmitted many diseases to us, including HIV.
* To address the threat posed by wild animals, researchers are studying the microbes of these creatures and the people who come into frequent contact with them.
* Such monitoring may enable scientists to spot emerging infectious diseases early enough to prevent them from becoming pandemics.

Sweat streamed down my back, thorny shrubs cut my arms, and we were losing them again. The wild chimpanzees my colleagues and I had been following for nearly five hours had stopped their grunting, hooting and screeching. Usually these calls helped us follow the animals through Uganda's Kibale Forest. For three large males to quiet abruptly surely meant trouble. Suddenly, as we approached a small clearing, we spotted them standing below a massive fig tree and looking up at a troop of red colobus monkeys eating and playing in the treetop.

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Space Smells Funny, Astronauts Say

Astronaut Richard Arnold, STS-119 mission specialist, participates in the mission's first scheduled session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the ISS on March 19, 2009. Credit: NASA.

From Live Science:

The smell of space will linger for the seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery long after they return to Earth on Saturday.

"One thing I've heard people say before, but it wasn't so obvious, was the smell right when you open up that hatch," Discovery pilot Dominic "Tony" Antonelli said after a March 21 spacewalk. "Space definitely has a smell that's different than anything else."

The odor, Antonelli said, could be smelled once spacewalkers locked the station airlock's outer hatch and reopened the inner door.

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Why Certain Fishes Went Extinct 65 Million Years Ago

Fossil herrings from the Eocene Green River Formation of the western United States where Colorado, Utah and Nevada meet. Herrings are one of the small-bodied groups of bony fishes that survived the end-Cretaceous extinction and persist to this day in marine environments. (Credit: Photo by Matt Friedman)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2009) — Large size and a fast bite spelled doom for bony fishes during the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, according to a new study.

Today, those same features characterize large predatory bony fishes, such as tuna and billfishes, that are currently in decline and at risk of extinction themselves, said Matt Friedman, author of the study and a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago.

"The same thing is happening today to ecologically similar fishes," he said. "The hardest hit species are consistently big predators."

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Women Talk Three Times As Much As Men, Says Study

Photo: Women talk almost three times as much as men, according to the research.

From The Daily Mail:

It is something one half of the population has long suspected - and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men.

In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.

The book - written by a female psychiatrist - says that inherent differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men.

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Smart People Really Do Think Faster

This colorful brain image is like a map of mental speed. The bright spaghetti structures represent the pathways connecting different brain cells. David Shattuck/Arthur Toga/Paul Thompson/UCLA

From NPR:

The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at the brains and intelligence of 92 people. All the participants took standard IQ tests. Then the researchers studied their brains using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI.

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Thousands Of 'Cold Cases' Could Be Reopened Thanks To New DNA Technique

From The Telegraph:

Thousands of "cold cases" could be reopened thanks to a new technique to analyse DNA from crime scenes.

The Forensic Science Service (FSS) hailed the breakthrough as the most significant advancement in the science "in a decade".

Scientists will now be able to use the technique in all serious crimes, after it proved successful in a series of pilots.

Police forces and forensic scientists are also combing the archives of thousands of so-called "cold cases", in which no-one has been convicted of the crime, for DNA samples which could be reassessed.

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The Brilliant Scientist Who Rejects Global Warming As A Problem

The Whimsical Gaze Dyson still travels widely, giving talks at churches and colleges, reminding people how dangerous nuclear weapons are. Eugene Richards for The New York Times.

The Civil Heretic -- The New York Times

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

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Personal Supercomputer Is Coming

From PC World:

Within the next three to four years, most PC users will see their machines morph into personal supercomputers. This change will be enabled by the emergence of multicore CPUs and, perhaps more importantly, the arrival of massively parallel cores in the graphical processing units.

In fact, ATI (a division of Advanced Micro Devices) and Nvidia are already offering multiple programmable cores in their high-end discreet graphics processing platforms. These cores can be programmed to do many parallel processing tasks, resulting in dramatically better display features and functions for video, especially for gaming. But these platforms currently come at a hefty price and often require significant amounts of power, making them impractical in many laptop designs.

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Safe Water In Paradise

From Popsci.com:

Honeymooning in the developing world? There are a lot of reasons why a SteriPEN should be at the top of your packing list.

When you’re getting ready to honeymoon in Thailand, issues like water purity suddenly become more relevant. So, my fiancé and I got ridiculously excited about the latest purification technology from Hyrdro-Photon. The SteriPEN Journey LCD uses ultraviolet light to kill 99.9999% of bacteria, 99.99% of viruses and (only?) 99.9% of protozoa. Just stick the wand into a water bottle, push the button, wait a minute or so, and drink.

In the frequently asked question portion of the SteriPEN website, there’s one question that easily justifies its $99.99 cost: Will the SteriPEN be effective in water from ______ (insert country or destination name here!)?

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Venice To Convert Invading Chinese Seaweed Into Electricity In £200m Eco-Project

From The Telegraph:

Venice is to convert invading Chinese seaweed that has been clogging the city's canals into electricity in a £200 million eco-project.

The Chinese seaweed, along with its native Italian counterpart, has been growing at a phenomenal rate along the canals and in the outlying lagoon, but officials have said that green algae will be converted to produce as much as half of the city's energy in a biomass fermentation plant on the outskirts of the city, the Port of Venice Authority said.

"The plant would have zero emissions and would produce half of the electricity needed for the city. If the go ahead is given the plant could be up and running within two years," Paolo Costa, president of the Port of Venice Authority, said Japanese researchers developed a system which uses microorganisms to break down the seaweed. The methane gas that results from this process is used as fuel for a gas engine that produces electricity.

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Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds From Catastrophe

From New Scientist:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

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Super-sized Supernova: Scientists Observe Largest Exploding Star Yet Seen

Scientists have managed to observe a super-sized supernova explosion from start to finish, including the black hole ending. (Credit: Image courtesy of Weizmann Institute of Science)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2009) — In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes. As they continued to track the spectacular event, they found that most of the star’s mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a large black hole.

While exploding stars – supernovae – have been viewed with everything from the naked eye to high-tech research satellites, no one had directly observed what happens when a really huge star blows up. Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute’s Faculty of Physics and Prof. Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University recently located and calculated the mass of a gigantic star on the verge of exploding, following through with observations of the blast and its aftermath. Their findings, reported in the journal Nature, have lent support to the reigning theory that stars ranging from tens to hundreds of times the mass of our sun all end up as black holes.

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Space 'Rosetta Stone' Unlike Anything Seen Before

Asteroids - Visions of the Universe, p.34 by Kazuaki Iwasaki

From The Live Science:

Meteorite fragments of the first asteroid ever spotted in space before it slammed into Earth's atmosphere last year were recovered by scientists from the deserts of Sudan.

These precious pieces of space rock, described in a study detailed in the March 26 issue of the journal Nature, could be an important key to classifying meteorites and asteroids and determining exactly how they formed.

The asteroid was detected by the automated Catalina Sky Survey telescope at Mount Lemmon , Ariz., on Oct. 6, 2008. Just 19 hours after it was spotted, it collided with Earth's atmosphere and exploded 23 miles (37 kilometers) above the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan.

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DARPA At Phase 2 On Human 'Regeneration' Tech

Image from It's Just Cool

From The Register:

Famed US military mad-professor bureau DARPA has inked a second deal with Massachusetts researchers to develop ways of "regenerating" human body tissues cut, shot or blown off in combat. The new biotech therapies would employ the same methods used by newts in growing replacement limbs.

News of the award comes courtesy of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), which announced the $570,000 agreement between DARPA and WPI-spawned company CellThera yesterday. CellThera is expected to work with the university's bioengineering department in delivering Phase II of DARPA's "restorative injury repair" programme.

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Study: Brain Switches Off Rationality When Given 'Expert Advice'

From Times Online:

Financial advice can make us take leave of our senses, according to research that shows how the brain sets aside rationality when it gets the benefit of supposedly expert opinion.

When a bank manager or investment adviser recommends a financial decision, the brain tends to abdicate responsibility and defer to their authority with little independent thought, a study has suggested.

Such expert advice suppresses activity in a neural circuit that is critical to sound decision-making and value judgments, scientists in the US have found.

Their results may explain why people are so apt to follow experts’ recommendations blindly, when a little reflection might be sufficient to suggest an alternative course of action.

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Quantum Leap For Quantum Dots

Photo: Silicon nanoparticles are engineered to glow red under ultraviolet light with quantum dots or organic chemicals. (Photo courtesy of UCSD)

From North County Times:

Nanoparticles may wind up in your medicine chest, on your money.

Specks of semiconductors called quantum dots, could soon spread around the world, around us, and perhaps, even inside of us.

A few billionths of a meter in diameter, or 5,000 to the width of a human hair, quantum dots glow fluorescently in a variety of colors. Once strictly a lab curiosity, they can reveal molecular processes inside cells, detect dangerous chemicals and improve the efficiency of solar power systems.

Pioneering work on quantum dots is being performed at Carlsbad-based Life Technologies, at UC San Diego and other local biotech companies and non-profit research institutes.

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Pentagon Plan to Regrow Limbs: Phase One, Complete

(Click the Image to Enlarge)

From Danger Room:

The first phase of the Pentagon's plan to regrow soldiers' limbs is complete; scientists managed to turn human skin into the equivalent of a blastema — a mass of undifferentiated cells that can develop into new body parts. Now, researchers are on to phase two: turning that cellular glop into a square inch of honest-to-goodness muscle tissue.

The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) just got a one-year, $570,000 grant from Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, to grow the new tissues. "The goal is to genuinely replace a muscle that's lost," biotechnology professor Raymond Page tells Danger Room. "I appreciate that's a very aggressive goal." And it's only one part in a larger, even more ambitious Darpa program, Restorative Injury Repair, that aims to "fully restore the function of complex tissue (muscle, nerves, skin, etc.) after traumatic injury on the battlefield."

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Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told

From Live Science:

Are you listening to me? Didn't I just tell you to get your coat? Helloooo! It's cold out there...

So goes many a conversation between parent and toddler. It seems everything you tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But that's not how it works.

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different."

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'Ice That Burns' May Yield Clean, Sustainable Bridge To Global Energy Future

Gas hydrates, known as "ice that burns," may provide a clean, sustainable fuel source in the future. (Credit: J. Pinkston and L. Stern/US Geological Survey)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2009) — In the future, natural gas derived from chunks of ice that workers collect from beneath the ocean floor and beneath the arctic permafrost may fuel cars, heat homes, and power factories. Government researchers are reporting that these so-called "gas hydrates," a frozen form of natural gas that bursts into flames at the touch of a match, show increasing promise as an abundant, untapped source of clean, sustainable energy.

The icy chunks could supplement traditional energy sources that are in short supply and which produce large amounts of carbon dioxide linked to global warming, the scientists say.*

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Inside The Hottest Place On Earth

Erta Ale, the most active volcano in Ethiopia, is located in the Afar Region

From The BBC:

Earth scientist Dr Dougal Jerram, from Durham University, joined a BBC team to investigate the geology of the Danakil desert in northern Ethiopia - officially the hottest place on Earth. Here is his account of mapping an active volcano from inside the crater.

Like a true journey to the centre of the Earth, volcanoes provide a unique window into our planet's interior.

They provide a direct means by which our Earth cools itself, form a vital link with the developing atmosphere and can be an awesome yet terrible hazard to the people and animals that live around them.

But just how do we get into the guts of a volcano?

This is exactly what I set out to do as part of a scientific expedition into the Danakil desert.

As part of a team headed by Kate Humble, with vet Steve Leonard, medic Mukal Agarwal and biologist Richard Wiese, and a full expedition crew, we explored the region's legendary Afar tribes people, saw how the animals and man live in the extreme environment and came face to face with one of the Earth's most geologically active areas.

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