Is Farming The Root Of All Evil

Cereal killer: the introduction of agriculture was followed by malnutrition and disease Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Academics have claimed that moving away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle was 'the worst mistake in history'. But are they right?

Last week, Sir Paul McCartney urged us, amid a blaze of publicity, to curb our carnivorous lifestyles and go meat-free on Mondays, in order to reduce the damage that modern agriculture does to the planet. But for all the recent talk about the pros and cons of farming, and how the methods we use are affecting the environment, a more basic point has been missed e_SEnD that growing crops might be damaging not just to the environment but to the development of our own species. Could it be that rather than being a boon to mankind, the invention of agriculture was, in the words of one academic, "the worst mistake in human history"?

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Scots Fought 'In Bright Yellow War Shirts Not Braveheart Kilts'

From The Telegraph:

Medieval Scottish soldiers fought wearing bright yellow war shirts dyed in horse urine rather than the tartan plaid depicted in the film Braveheart, according to new research.

Historian Fergus Cannan states that the Scots armies who fought in battles like Bannockburn, and Flodden Field would have looked very different to the way they have traditionally been depicted.

Instead of kilts, he said they wore saffron-coloured tunics called "leine croich" and used a range of ingredients to get the boldest possible colours.

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Science Must Never Be Politicized Nor "Suppressed"

EPA analyst Alan Carlin raised questions about the impact of global warming on areas like Greenland. Shown here is an iceberg off Ammassalik Island, Greenland. (AP Photo)

Sen. Inhofe Calls for Inquiry Into 'Suppressed' Climate Change Report -- FOX News

Republicans are raising questions about why the EPA apparently dismissed an analyst's report questioning the science behind global warming.

A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

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My Comment: News like this only reinforces the perception that climate change is driven more by politics than by science.

First Electronic Quantum Processor Created

The two-qubit processor is the first solid-state quantum processor that resembles a conventional computer chip and is able to run simple algorithms. (Credit: Blake Johnson/Yale University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 29, 2009) — A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28.

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Getting Old Is Better Than Expected

From Live Science:

When do we get old? People age 18 to 29 say "old age" starts at about 60. But those in middle-age figure it starts at 70. And those 65 and older put the threshold at 74.

So it goes with other perceptions about aging in a new survey form the Pew Research Center. The disparities between what younger people expect will happen as they age, and what really happens, are stark.

Good memory, good health, good sex. It's enough to make the grandkids cringe!

Adults age 18 to 64 were asked what they expect will happen when they get old. Those 65 and older were asked what actually has happened to them. The results (18-64 / 65 and older):

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Oldest Known Portrait Of St Paul Revealed By Vatican Archaeologists

The 4th-century portrait was found in the catacombs of St Thecla,
not far from the Basilica of St Paul's Outside the Walls.

From Times Online:

Vatican archaeologists have uncovered what they say is the oldest known portrait of St Paul. The portrait, which was found two weeks ago but has been made public only after restoration, shows St Paul with a high domed forehead, deep-set eyes and a long pointed beard, confirming the image familiar from later depictions.

L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, which devoted two pages to the discovery, said that the oval portrait, dated to the 4th century, had been found in the catacombs of St Thecla, not far from the Basilica of St Paul’s Outside the Walls, where the apostle is buried. The find was “an extraordinary event”, said Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

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Swine Flu 'Shows Drug Resistance'

From The BBC:

Experts have reported the first case of swine flu that is resistant to tamiflu - the main drug being used to fight the pandemic.

Roche Holding AG confirmed a patient with H1N1 influenza in Denmark showed resistance to the antiviral drug.

David Reddy, company executive, said it was not unexpected given that common seasonal flu could do the same.

The news comes as a nine-year-old girl has become the third to die in the UK with swine flu.

It is understood from her doctors at Birmingham Children's Hospital that she had underlying health conditions. It is not yet known whether swine flu contributed to her death.

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Men Agree On What's Hot In The Opposite Sex (But Girls Do Not)

Image: Queen of the seductive pose: Katie Price ticks the boxes for men as she is thin and confident

From The Daily Mail:

Men agree on what is attractive in the opposite sex far more than women do, says a study.

The survey of 4,000 adults found that most men liked women who were thin and posing seductively.

Women, in contrast, were enticed by a far wider range of male characteristics.

The results could explain why women feel pressured to conform to a narrow view of attractiveness, and suffer more eating disorders, the scientists said.

Participants in the study rated photographs of men and women aged 18 to 25 for attractiveness.

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Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out

From Wired News:

Larry Page should have been in a good mood. It was the fall of 2007, and Google's cofounder was in the middle of a five-day tour of his company's European operations in Zurich, London, Oxford, and Dublin. The trip had been fun, a chance to get a ground-floor look at Google's ever-expanding empire. But this week had been particularly exciting, for reasons that had nothing to do with Europe; Google was planning a major investment in Facebook, the hottest new company in Silicon Valley.

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High-Tech Telescopes Yield New Galactic Photos: Gallery

From Popular Mechanics:

Some of the most important telescopes ever created are now floating in space. A freshly repaired Hubble Space Telescope is again snapping pictures, NASA's Kepler telescope is orbiting Earth fresh off its first light and Herschel—the largest space telescope ever—has taken its first images since its May 14th launch. While astronomers using ground-based telescopes are finding exoplanets at an impressive rate, thanks to refined techniques and collaborative efforts, space telescopes operating from beyond Earth's atmosphere have a geographic edge: With no interference, they can get a clearer view of the universe. The following images show some of the spectacular sights astronomers have been able to glimpse through the new hardware.

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Innovation: Physics Brings Realism To Virtual Reality

From New Scientist:

Innovation is our regular column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

Computer games have come a long way from the pixelated graphics of the 1980s to the more polished characters of today. But the inexorable creep of Moore's Law has now taken us to the brink of further giant changes.

The latest multi-core processors and some smart software allow techniques used by physicists and engineers to simulate the real world in extreme detail to be used to create virtual worlds governed by real physics, rather than the simplified versions used today.

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Debate: Can The Internet Handle Big Breaking News?

From CNET News:

It happens time and time again: when news breaks, the Internet slows.

It's quite obvious at this point that the Internet has muscled its way into the lives of anyone who needs information. And Michael Jackson's death Thursday had as great an impact on the Internet as anything in the history of the medium that didn't involve the World Trade Center.

The statistics are amazing: Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson's death was breaking. That traffic forced even Google to its knees for a brief period of time Thursday afternoon.

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Archaeological Treasure Trove Surfaces In S.C.

From The State:

HILTON HEAD — An archaeologist who’s been digging at the Topper Site in Allendale County for 11 years is uncovering new evidence that could rewrite America’s history.

University of South Carolina archaeologist Albert Goodyear found artifacts at this rock quarry site near the Savannah River that indicate humans lived here 37,000 years before the Clovis people. History books say the Clovis were the first Americans and arrived here 13,000 years ago by walking across a land bridge from Asia.

Goodyear’s discovery could prove otherwise.

His findings are controversial, opening scientific minds to the possibility of an even earlier pre-Clovis occupation of America.

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Why A Low-Calorie Diet Extends Lifespans: Critical Enzyme Pair Identified

The enzyme WWP-1, shown in green, is a key player in the signaling cascade that links dietary restriction to longevity in roundworms. Sensory neurons are shown in red. (Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Andrea C. Carrano, Salk Institute for Biological Studies)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 28, 2009) — Experiment after experiment confirms that a diet on the brink of starvation expands lifespan in mice and many other species. But the molecular mechanism that links nutrition and survival is still poorly understood. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified a pivotal role for two enzymes that work together to determine the health benefits of diet restriction.

When lacking one enzyme or the other, roundworms kept on a severely calorie-restricted diet no longer live past their normal lifespan, they report in the June 24, 2009, advance online edition of the journal Nature.

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Potential New Drugs Put at 970 Million

From Live Science:

Millions of new and useful drugs remain undiscovered. All chemists need to do is mix the right stuff.

That's the view of a new study that analyzes the "chemical universe" to identify existing molecules that could be combined into as-yet unknown chemicals. The researchers estimate there are at least 970 million chemicals suitable for study as new drugs.

The researchers have created a new publicly available database of the virtual molecules, and they will detail their results in the July 1 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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Electronic Nose Can Pinpoint Where Wine Was Made

The new technology is said to be able to pinpoint where wine was made,
even identifying the barrel in which it fermented.

From The Telegraph:

Scientists have developed a way of identifying wine so accurately they can even say which barrel it was produced in.

It uses an electronic nose to make even the most confident sommelier a little nervous.

The technique exploits the unique and complex mix of thousands of compounds found in each bottle of wine that gives the drink subtly different scents and flavours

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Stone Age Wells Found In Cyprus

From The BBC:

Archaeologists have found a group of water wells in western Cyprus believed to be among the oldest in the world.

The skeleton of a young woman was among items found at the bottom of one shaft.

Radiocarbon dating indicates the wells are 9,000 to 10,500 years old, putting them in the Stone Age, the Cypriot Antiquities Department says.

A team from Edinburgh University has found six such wells, near the coastal town of Paphos. They are said to show the sophistication of early settlers.

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Google Voice Gives You One Number to Ring Them All

From Popsci.com:

The service, which launched publicly this week, includes automatic transcription of voicemail and recording of calls

Google Voice is one of those technical advancements that could change your way of communication. With it, you can sign up for a single phone number that rings every phone you own. Then you can hand out the number to everyone you know.

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PICTURES: Prehistoric European Cave Artists Were Female

From National Geographic:

June 16, 2009--Inside France's 25,000-year-old Pech Merle cave, hand stencils surround the famed "Spotted Horses" mural.

For about as long as humans have created works of art, they've also left behind handprints. People began stenciling, painting, or chipping imprints of their hands onto rock walls at least 30,000 years ago.

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China’s Manufacturing Boom Has Brought Widespread Pollution And Unexpected Changes To The Bodies, Minds, And Souls Of The Chinese People

A River Runs Through It -- Search Magazine

China’s manufacturing boom has brought widespread pollution—and unexpected changes to the bodies, minds, and souls of the Chinese people.

The cancer ward of Shenqiu County Hospital is busy on this weekday morning. Bicycles and motorbikes are scattered around the dusty brick courtyard and a white doctor’s jacket hangs from a tree to dry. A line of people stand outside a small one-story concrete building, patiently waiting their turn for a few minutes with Dr. Wang Yong Zeng, the chief oncologist. Most carry their life’s medical records with them, clutching the thick folders full of X-rays and documents tightly to their chest.

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Black Holes On A Desktop

From The Economist:

Sound may offer a better way than light to test Stephen Hawking’s prediction that black holes emit radiation.

WHEN the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator near Geneva, was switched on last September, the press was full of scare stories about the risk of it producing a tiny black hole that would, despite its minuscule size, quickly swallow the Earth. In fact, the first test runs could never have made such an object. And, just over a week later, the LHC broke and has not yet been repaired. But it is true that one of the things its operators would like to create, if and when they get it going again, are miniature versions of those fabled astronomical objects whose intense gravity means no light can escape them.

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One In 25 Deaths Worldwide Attributable To Alcohol

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2009) — Research from Canada's own Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) featured in this week's edition of the Lancet shows that worldwide, 1 in 25 deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption. This rise since 2000 is mainly due to increases in the number of women drinking.

CAMH's Dr Jürgen Rehm and his colleagues found that alcohol-attributable disorders are among the most disabling disease categories within the global burden of disease, especially for men. And in contrast to other traditional risk factors for disease, the burden attributable to alcohol lies more with younger people than with the older population.

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Study Dispels Myth of Post-Workout Fat Burn

Yes, you burn calories while weightlifting, running or doing other exercise. No, the calorie burn does not continue as you pig out later. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

After an intense hour of sweating on the treadmill or pumping iron, most of us look forward to the extra post-exercise "afterburn" of fat cells that has been promised to us by fitness pundits. This 24-hour period of altered metabolism is supposed to help with our overall weight loss.

Unfortunately, a recent study found this to be a myth for moderate exercisers.

The new research clarifies a misunderstanding that exercisers can ignore their diet after a workout because their metabolism is in this super active state.

"It's not that exercise doesn't burn fat," said Edward Melanson, associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, "It's just that we replace the calories. People think they have a license to eat whatever they want, and our research shows that is definitely not the case. You can easily undo what you set out to do.”

The findings were detailed in the April edition of Exercise and Sport Sciences Review.

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Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels But Data

From The New York Times:

MOUNT GRAHAM, Ariz. — Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham.

“Got it. O.K., it’s happy,” says Christopher J. Corbally, the Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, as he sits in the control room making adjustments. The idea is not to watch for omens or angels but to do workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

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Brains Replay Memories While We Sleep And Store The Highlights, Claim Scientists

From The Telegraph:

We may think we are asleep - but deep in the recesses of our mind a "memory editor" is working overtime, replaying the experiences of the day and storing the highlights on our brain's version of a video recorder, claim scientists.

Researchers have discovered that the mind keeps most memories for just a day but then at night acts like a film editor sifting through the "video clips" before transferring the best bits to long term storage in our own movie archive.

The research has "profound implications" for the importance of sleep and its link with long term memory, they said.

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Sun Leaves Earth Wide Open To cCsmic Rays

The sun protects the earth from cosmic rays and dust from the solar system but squeezing of various stars could leave us unprotected (Image: NASA/HST collection)

From New Scientist:

THE sun provides ideal conditions for life to thrive, right? In fact, it periodically leaves Earth open to assaults from interstellar nasties in a way that most stars do not.

The sun protects us from cosmic rays and dust from beyond the solar system by enveloping us in the heliosphere - a bubble of solar wind that extends past Pluto. These cosmic rays would damage the ozone layer, and interstellar dust could dim sunlight and trigger an ice age. However, when the solar system passes through very dense gas and dust clouds, the heliosphere can shrink until its edge is inside Earth's orbit.

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Light Goes Out On Solar Mission

From The BBC:

After more than 18 years studying the Sun, the plug is finally being pulled on the ailing spacecraft Ulysses.

Final communication with the joint European-US satellite will take place on 30 June.

The long-serving craft, launched in October 1990, has already served four times its expected design life.

The Esa-Nasa mission was the first to survey the environment in space above and below the poles of the Sun.

Data from the craft, published last year, also suggested that the solar wind - the stream of charged particles billowing away from the Sun - is at its weakest for 50 years.

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Ancient Climate Change: When Palm Trees Gave Way To Spruce Trees

New research reveals the demise of an ancient forest. These are dawn redwood stumps on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut. (Credit: Copyright David Greenwood / Used with permission)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2009) — For climatologists, part of the challenge in predicting the future is figuring out exactly what happened during previous periods of global climate change.

One long-standing climate puzzle relates to a sequence of events 33.5 million years ago in the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. Profound changes were underway. Globally, carbon dioxide levels were falling and the hothouse warmth of the dinosaur age and Eocene Period was waning. In Antarctica, ice sheets had formed and covered much of the southern polar continent.

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Nanoparticles Explored for Preventing Cell Damage

Sudipta Seal, materials scientist and engineer at the University of Central Florida, holds a bottle containing billions of ultrasmall, engineered nanoceria. In the background, are jars filled with different types of nanoceria. Credit: Sudipta Seal, University of Central Florida

From Live Science:

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Sudipta Seal is enthralled by nanoparticles, particularly those of a rare earth metal called cerium. The particles are showing potential for a wide range of applications, from medicine to energy.

Seal is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and several years ago he and his colleagues engineered nanoparticles of cerium oxide (CeO2), a material long used in ceramics, catalysts and fuel cells. The novel nanocrystalline form is non-toxic and biocompatible — ideal for medical applications.

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Dreaming Of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma Of Dream Content

From Scientific American:

Friday, June 19, 2:12 a.m.: Loading up the trunk of my car with clothes hangers when approached by two transients… try to engage them in good-natured conversation about the benefits of wooden clothes hangers over metal ones, but they make me uneasy, say they want to go out to get a drink but I’ve got to go. In a city somewhere… looks like a post-apocalyptic Saint Louis.

Saturday, June 20, 4:47 a.m.: Was just now trying to return my dead grandmother’s cane to her. Took elevator to her apartment… meant to go to the 8th floor, but elevator lurched up to the 18th floor, swung around violently then shot back down. Could hear voices in the corridors outside elevator shaft…. a mother yelling at her child. Grandma then became my other grandma, also decesased, yet in a nursing home; doctors say she’s doing fine.

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FYI: Why Does My Voice Sound Different When I Hear it On A Recording?

Tone Deaf: Your voice makes
 vibrations that only you can hear iStock

From Popsci.com:

It sounds different because it is different. "When you speak, the vocal folds in your throat vibrate, which causes your skin, skull and oral cavities to also vibrate, and we perceive this as sound," explains Ben Hornsby, a professor of audiology at Vanderbilt University. The vibrations mix with the sound waves traveling from your mouth to your eardrum, giving your voice a quality — generally a deeper, more dignified sound — that no one else hears.

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How Michael Jackson's Death Shut Down Twitter, Brought Chaos To Google... And 'Killed Off' Jeff Goldblum

TMZ.com was the first to break the story that Michael Jackson had had a cardiac arrest.

From The Daily Mail:

The internet came alive like never before as people around the world logged on to follow the stunning news of Michael Jackson's death.

The story created such a surge in online traffic last night that Google returned an 'error message' for searches of the singer's name as it assumed it was under attack.

And just seconds after the story broke on the American entertainment website TMZ.com, messages or 'Tweets' about the singer on the micro-blogging site Twitter doubled, leading to a temporary shutdown of the site.

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Magnetic 'Superatoms' Promise Tuneable Materials

Designer clusters of atoms that can mimic other elements have for the first time been devised with magnetic properties (Image: Ulises Reveles, VCU)

From The New Scientist:

New "superatoms" – clusters of atoms that share electrons and can mimic the behaviour of other elements – have been devised with magnetic properties for the first time. The breakthrough provides a way to design novel nano-scale building blocks with controllable magnetic properties that could be used to make faster computer processors and denser memory storage.

Superatoms were discovered in the 1980s when Walter Knight and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that groups of sodium atoms can share electrons amongst themselves.

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The Milk Myth: What a Body Really Needs

Photo: Milk is dandy, but yogurt has more calcium and is easier to digest. Collards and other greens also have about as much or more calcium than milk by the cup. Greens, unlike milk, have the added benefit of vitamin K, also necessary for strong bones. Tofu and sesame are also very high in calcium. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Young adults are not drinking enough milk, according to a study published in the July/August issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior by researchers from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Well, at least that's according to the press release about the study, along with a few press reports on the matter. But according to lead author Nicole Larson, the focus on the study was on calcium.

Once again, we see the words "milk" and "calcium" used interchangeably in the popular press. Milk is a calcium source, but by no standard other than that of the National Dairy Council is it the best calcium source.

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Space Shuttle Science Shows How 1908 Tunguska Explosion Was Caused By A Comet

In 1927 Professor Leonid Kulik took the first photographs of the massive destruction of the taiga forest after the Tunguska catastrophe. (Credit: Professor Leonid Kulik)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2009) — The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

The research, accepted for publication (June 24, 2009) by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, connects the two events by what followed each about a day later: brilliant, night-visible clouds, or noctilucent clouds, that are made up of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.

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Evolutionary Origins Of Your Right And Left Brain

Photoillustration by TWIST CREATIVE; MedicalRF.com Corbis (brain); Medioimages Getty Images (calculator); Joerg Steffens Corbis (faces); Westend61 Corbis (woman smiling); Dougal Waters Getty Images (ballerina); Mike Kemp Getty Images (rattlesnake); C Squared Studios Getty Images (palette); Vladimir Godnik Getty Images (paintbrushes); Carrie Boretz Corbis (girls whispering); Robert Llewellyn Corbis (calipers)

From Scientific American:

The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates.

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space. Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone. Other animals, it was thought, have no hemispheric specializations of any kind.

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Cloud Computing: Just Another Online Fad--or the Biggest Revolution Since the Internet?

Credit: James Gulliver Hancock

From Technology Review:

According to its advocates, cloud computing is poised to succeed where so many other attempts to deliver on-demand computing to anyone with a network connection have failed. Some skepticism is warranted. The history of the computer industry is littered with the remains of previous aspirants to this holy grail, from the time-sharing utilities envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s to the network computers of the 1990s (simple computers acting as graphical clients for software running on central servers) to the commercial grid systems of more recent years (aimed at turning clusters of servers into high-­performance computers). But cloud computing draws strength from forces that could propel it beyond the ranks of the also-rans.

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Stuck on Mars, Spirit Rover Does Science

From Yahoo News/Space:

The Mars rover Spirit is keeping scientists' spirits up by doing some science while it is stuck in soft soil on the red planet.

The rover has been immobile, trapped hub-deep since May 6. Engineers have replicated the landscape in lab back home and, using an identical rover model, tried to figure out what to do, so far to no avail.

A rock seen beneath Spirit in images from the camera on the end of the rover's arm may be touching Spirit's belly, NASA said in a statement today. It appears to be a loose rock not bearing the rover's weight.

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Buzz Aldrin To NASA: U.S. Space Policy Is On The Wrong Track

Platon photographed Buzz Aldrin for PM in Los Angeles, May 2009. “It’s mankind’s destiny to walk on another planet,” Aldrin says. “We can achieve it, but we’ve got to have the right plan.” (Photograph by Platon)

From Popular Mechanics:

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin has a problem with NASA’s current manned space plan: Namely, the five-year gap between the shuttle’s scheduled retirement next year and the debut of the Ares I rocket and the Orion spacecraft, which will take us no further than the moon—a place we’ve already been. Aldrin thinks NASA can do better. His plan is to scrap Ares I, stretch out the remaining six shuttle flights and fast-track the Orion to fly on a Delta IV or Atlas V. Then, set our sites on colonizing Mars. Here, Buzz challenges NASA to take on his bolder mission.

I had a splendid career at NASA as an astronaut in the Gemini and Apollo programs. The capstone, of course, was my moonwalk on the Sea of Tranquility 40 years ago. I have only two regrets from my NASA days, and both were my own fault: I failed to speak out when I saw bad decisions being made. The first came in 1966, when NASA, in a fit of excessive caution, canceled the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (AMU), the Buck Rogers–style jet backpack I was scheduled to try out on Gemini 12. Despite difficulties with the AMU on Gemini 9, I was very confident I could make it work. But like a good astronaut, I kept my mouth shut, and I’ve regretted it ever since. As it turned out, it took 18 years for NASA to develop another jet pack, the Manned Maneuvering Unit, used on three space shuttle missions in 1984.

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Oldest Musical Instrument Found

Flute: The earliest modern humans in Europe carved this 8.5-inch flute from a vulture bone more than 35,000 years ago.

From Popsci.com:

Bird-bone flute hints that Paleolithic humans banded together to the demise of Neanderthals

How’s this for classic rock? German scientists have unearthed the oldest-known musical instrument fashioned by human hands. It’s a delicate flute made from the wing bone of a vulture that dates to at least 35,000 years old—just after the first modern humans entered Europe. The team discovered the flute littered among a trove of early-human loot at a mountain cave in southwest Germany. It included a few other flute fragments and a female figurine carved from the ivory tusks of a mammoth with body proportions that are beyond Rubenesque.

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Ice On Fire: The Next Fossil Fuel

From The New Scientist:

DEEP in the Arctic Circle, in the Messoyakha gas field of western Siberia, lies a mystery. Back in 1970, Russian engineers began pumping natural gas from beneath the permafrost and piping it east across the tundra to the Norilsk metal smelter, the biggest industrial enterprise in the Arctic.

By the late 70s, they were on the brink of winding down the operation. According to their surveys, they had sapped nearly all the methane from the deposit. But despite their estimates, the gas just kept on coming. The field continues to power Norilsk today.

Where is this methane coming from? The Soviet geologists initially thought it was leaking from another deposit hidden beneath the first. But their experiments revealed the opposite - the mystery methane is seeping into the well from the icy permafrost above.

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Longer Life Linked To Specific Foods In Mediterranean Diet

Eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, pulses and olive oil, and drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, while not consuming a lot of meat or excessive amounts of alcohol is linked to people living longer. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — Some food groups in the Mediterranean diet are more important than others in promoting health and longer life according to new research published on the British Medical Journal website.

Eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, pulses and olive oil, and drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, while not consuming a lot of meat or excessive amounts of alcohol is linked to people living longer.

However, the study also claims, that following a Mediterranean diet high in fish, seafood and cereals and low in dairy products were not indicators of longevity.

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Ancient Mummy's Face Recreated

Chicago artist Joshua Harker used traditional forensic methods to build layers of fat, muscle and flesh upon the skull images of a mummy made with CT scans at the University of Chicago. Credit: Joshua Harker for the University of Chicago

From Live Science:

The face of a long-dead mummy has been brought back to life through forensic science.

Based on CT-scans of the skull of the ancient Egyptian mummy Meresamun, two artists independently reconstructed her appearance and arrived at similar images of the woman.

Meresamun, a temple singer in Thebes (ancient Luxor) at about 800 B.C., died of unknown causes at about age 30. Until recently, modern viewers of the University of Chicago-owned mummy have had to guess about the woman behind the mask.

Now scientists think they have a pretty good idea of what she looked like.

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Life On Saturn? Caverns Of Salt Water May Lie Beneath Frozen Surface Of Planet's Moon

Evidence: This picture shows water vapour jets
erupting from Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus

From The Daily Mail:

Alien life could have evolved on one of Saturn's moons, scientists say.

They have found evidence that seas may lie beneath the frozen surface of Enceladus - the planet's sixth biggest moon.

It follows the discovery of a giant plume of salt water and ice spurting hundreds of miles into space from the moon's surface.

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Evolution Faster When It's Warmer

The results could help explain why the warm tropics are so species-rich

From The BBC:

Climate could have a direct effect on the speed of "molecular evolution" in mammals, according to a study.

Researchers have found that, among pairs of mammals of the same species, the DNA of those living in warmer climates changes at a faster rate.

These mutations - where one letter of the DNA code is substituted for another - are a first step in evolution.

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Can Wind Power Get Up to Speed?

The Burbo Bank Offshore Wind Farm in Liverpool Bay, England
Christopher Furlong / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Pop quiz: what source of power doesn't come out of the ground, doesn't burn and isn't radioactive? Hint: it contributed the most new electricity generation to the U.S. grid in 2008.

The answer is wind power, the technology that has become synonymous with going green. Companies that started out small, like Denmark's Vestas and India's Suzlon Energy, have become multinational giants selling steel and fiberglass wind turbines; even blue chippers like General Electric have identified wind power as a major revenue source for the future, while the construction and installation of wind turbines will employ workers here in the U.S. Investing in wind power, said President Barack Obama at a turbine factory in Iowa on Earth Day, "is a win-win. It's good for the environment; it's great for the economy."

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The First Europeans Were Cannibals: Archaeologists

Photo: Skull named Miguelon, estimated to be 400,000 years old and the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found, is seen at the Atapuerca archaeological site, in the Atapuerca mountains in northern Spain. In 2007 a historic discovery of the fossilised remains of the 'first european' human was made at the site. (AFP/File/Philippe Desmazes)

From Yahoo News/AP:

ATAPUERCA, Spain (AFP) – The remains of the "first Europeans" discovered at an archaeological site in northern Spain have revealed that these prehistoric men were cannibals who particularly liked the flesh of children.

"We know that they practiced cannibalism," said Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, one of the co-directors of the Atapuerca project, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A study of the remains revealed that they turned to cannibalism to feed themselves and not as part of a ritual, that they ate their rivals after killing them, mostly children and adolescents.

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Giant Prehistoric Kangaroos Wiped Out By Hungry Ice Age Hunters

Artist's illustration of the extinct Procoptodon goliah which roamed around Australia 45,000 years ago. (Artist Peter Trusler/Australian Postal Corporation)

From Times Online:

It stood tall at 6’5, weighed over 500lbs, had the face of a koala and the body of a sturdy kangaroo. And apparently it was delicious.

Scientists think they have discovered the reason behind the demise of the prehistoric Australian marsupial Procoptodon goliah – better known as the giant, short-snouted kangaroo. They say it was not climate change, as has always been assumed, but hungry Ice Age hunters.

The animal – about three times bigger than a modern-day kangaroo and with slightly different features - was one of many Ice-Age megafauna whose demise has long been debated among experts, but usually put down to the changing environment.

However an international team of scientists, led by Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University in South Australia, has discovered a different theory behind the reason the animal became extinct 45,000 years ago.

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My Comment: I am hungry.

The New Nuclear Revolution -- A Commentary

From The Wall Street Journal:

Safe fission power is our future -- if regulators allow it.

After the Internet, the next big thing will be cheap and clean energy. Coal, oil and gas pollute and are increasingly expensive: We need alternatives. Because nuclear energy (stored among particles inside atoms) is millions of times more dense than chemical energy (stored among atoms in molecules), nuclear reactors belong high on our long list of energy alternatives.

Nuclear energy is released during fission and fusion. During fission, large elements like uranium are split into smaller elements. During fusion, small elements like hydrogen are combined into larger elements. These two processes have occurred naturally since the beginning of time -- 13.7 billion years. The Earth is warmed naturally by its own nuclear fission reactors within and also by the sun, that big nuclear fusion reactor.

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Not Space Junk Yet: Mars Rovers Carry On Despite Age, Ailments

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON — In one of the most remarkable engineering feats of our time, the aging Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still taking orders and sending home pictures more than five years after they were supposed to turn into slabs of space junk.

Opportunity is still rolling along, but Spirit is hung up on a rock and may be reaching the end of its travels. The rovers' masters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., hope they can nurse either or both of them through another harsh Martian winter.

"I'm very attached to them," said John Callas, the rover project manager. "They exhibit human-like qualities. They have trials and tribulations. Like aging humans, they've got arthritic joints, they forget things, their vision is not what it used to be. When something's not right, you get that sinking feeing in your stomach.''

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Girl Who Doesn't Age Baffles Doctors

Photo: Brooke Greenberg is 16 years old, but looks like a 16-month-old. (ABC America)

From Ninemsm:

A 16-year-old girl who is the size of an infant and has the mental capacity of a toddler continues to baffle doctors in the US.

Medical experts believe Brooke Greenberg suffers from some kind of genetic mutation that shapes the way she ages, leaving her with the perpetual appearance of a baby.

The exact cause of the phenomenon has not been pinpointed.

Doctors say Brooke is not growing in a coordinated way, with her body parts out of synchronisation, as if each has a mind of its own.

"Why doesn't she age?" her father, Howard Greenberg, asked on US network ABC.

"Is she the fountain of youth?"

Brooke's mother Melanie Greenberg, 48, said she was so used to people asking how old her daughter is she did not even try to explain.

"My system always has been to turn years into months," Mrs Greenberg said.

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When Wild Animals Attack: An Encounter With A Rabid Skunk

(Photograph by Tom Brakefield/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

Animal encounters on our turf are on the rise—and it's not just big animals like mountain lions, bears and alligators. Here, TheDailyGreen.com's Brian Clark Howard revisits the time a rabid skunk attacked him while he camped in a friend's yard, just 1 hour away from New York City.

I was jerked awake in my sleeping bag by a sharp, pinching pain centered on my nose. My eyes failed me, and I teetered on the edge of consciousness. I felt viscous liquid streaming down my neck. The only tangible thought I could muster was fear that my nose must have become stuck in a zipper. As a strained throat would later attest, I screamed hysterically.

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A Magnetic Machine Plucks Pathogens From Blood

Nonfatal Attraction: An electromagnet pulls out 80 percent
of an infectious pathogen Medi-mation

From Popsci.com:

A new treatment could save some of the hundreds of thousands of Americans dying sepsis-related deaths every year.

If your uncle says he's getting magnetic therapy, you might feel the urge to tell him to save his money instead for that tinfoil hat to keep the CIA from reading his mind. But if he's being hooked up to Don Ingber's magnet machine, it just might save his life.

Ingber's device magnetizes microbes and draws them out of the blood. It could save some of the 210,000 Americans—mostly newborns and the elderly—who die sepsis-related deaths every year. Sepsis sets in when bacteria or fungi invade the blood, which can cause organ failure before drugs have time to take effect. "Traditionally, you prescribe antibiotics and pray," says Ingber, a vascular biologist at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital. His machine operates more quickly.

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