Into The Mushroom Cloud

The mushroom cloud of the first test of a hydrogen bomb, "Ivy Mike", as photographed on Enewetak, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean, in 1952. Photo: Reuters

From Air & Space Smithsonian:

Most pilots would head away from a thermonuclear explosion.

He wasn’t supposed to do it, but on May 15, 1948, Lieutenant Colonel Paul H. Fackler, commanding officer of the U.S. Air Force 514th Reconnaissance Squadron Weather, flew his airplane into the seething mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb detonation.
As part of Zebra, the final shot of America’s second series of atomic tests at Enewetak atoll in the Pacific, Fackler had the job of tracking the atomic cloud from at least 10 miles away, hoping that special filters attached to the airplane would catch samples of the radioactive debris. But as he pulled away from the enormous roiling cloud in a climbing turn to the left, Fackler suddenly found his weather reconnaissance Boeing WB-29 inside a small finger-like projection of the main cloud.

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Mystery Of The Missing Mini-Galaxies

Something missing? (Image: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA/A. Aloisi)

From New Scientist:

LIKE moths about a flame, thousands of tiny satellite galaxies flutter about our Milky Way. For astronomers this is a dream scenario, fitting perfectly with the established models of how our galaxy's cosmic neighbourhood should be. Unfortunately, it's a dream in more ways than one and the reality could hardly be more different.

As far as we can tell, barely 25 straggly satellites loiter forlornly around the outskirts of the Milky Way. "We see only about 1 per cent of the predicted number of satellite galaxies," says Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn in Germany. "It is the cleanest case in which we can see there is something badly wrong with our standard picture of the origin of galaxies."

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Shuttle Set For Dramatic Night Launch

From Information Week:

NASA's Discovery is ready to light up the sky in Southeast Florida early Tuesday.

NASA controllers said the space shuttle Discovery is go-for-launch for tonight's mission to the International Space Station. Discovery is set to light up the sky around Florida's Kennedy Space Center early Tuesday with a 1:36 a.m. launch.

As of late Sunday, NASA said there were no issues that would prevent an on-time liftoff.

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We DO like Mondays... But We Really Don't Like The Mid-Week Misery Of Wednesday

From The Daily Mail:

With work beckoning after a relaxing weekend, Monday has traditionally been thought of as the most miserable day of the week.
But with memories of the days off still fresh, Mondays are actually the second happiest day of the week according to researchers.

Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth, applied mathematicians at the University of Vermont, believe they have found a way to measure collective happiness and found we are at our lowest on Wednesdays.

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Ares Managers Say October Test Flight Should Go On

Photo: The fully stacked Ares 1-X rocket stands inside the Vehicle Assembly Building last week. Credit: NASA/Jack Pfaller

From Space Flight Now:

Managers in charge of an October flight test of NASA's new Ares rocket defended the merits of the $350 million launch Sunday, telling reporters the demo provides valuable experience for engineers, no matter what booster the agency uses to replace the retiring space shuttle.

"We have a very high confidence level that Ares 1-X is germane to NASA, period," said Bob Ess, the flight's mission manager. "No caveats."

The Ares 1-X vehicle, a 327-foot-tall rocket that nearly reaches the rafters of the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building, is undergoing final checks before its scheduled Oct. 31 launch.

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The Origin of Rubber Boots

ROASTING RUBBER: Amazonian Indians may have originated the rubber boot over a campfire. ISTOCKPHOTO/SKI88

From Scientific American:

Galoshes seem to have come from a little fire, Amazonian Indians' boredom and Charles Goodyear's luck.

Perhaps the Indians roasted them like s'mores—rotating them ever so slowly to make sure every side got just dark enough, but not so long that they caught on fire. Or maybe they went all out, expediting the process and blowing out any flames. Of course, for the art of hovering a rubber-coated foot over a fire, one's pain tolerance may have ultimately determined how long the process went on.

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Can Microsoft's Bing, or Anyone, Challenge Google?

From Time Magazine:

Every year, the market-research firm Millward Brown conducts a survey to determine the economic worth of the world's brands — in other words, to put a dollar value on the many corporate logos that dominate our lives. Lately the firm's results have been stuck on repeat: Google has claimed the top spot for the past three years. The most recent report values Google's brand — those six happy letters that herald so many of our jaunts down the Web's rabbit hole — at more than $100 billion.

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Tweeting No Longer For The Birds, But Not Just For Twitter, Either

Photo: U.S. trademark ruling says many other companies have filed requests to claim ownership of the word ‘tweet'.

From The Globe And Mail:

Tweeting used to be for the birds, but the term has taken on a whole new meaning with the explosion in popularity of Twitter, an online service that allows users to blog via 140-character “tweets.”

But efforts by Twitter to trademark the word “tweet” have suffered a major setback after U.S. officials said others might have beaten the microblogging pioneer to the punch.

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How We Support Our False Beliefs

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2009) — In a study published in the most recent issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry, sociologists from four major research institutions focus on one of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election: the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Although this belief influenced the 2004 election, they claim it did not result from pro-Bush propaganda, but from an urgent need by many Americans to seek justification for a war already in progress.

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Powerful Ideas: Beer Waste Makes Fuel

From Live Science:

After beer is made, the waste from breweries could help generate power, researchers now suggest.

One problem brewers face is what to do with the thousands of tons of grain left over at the end of the brewing process. In the past, they just sold the waste to farmers who either fed it to their animals or spread it on their fields as fertilizer. However, in Europe, given reductions in cattle breeding and stricter regulations on what waste is allowed on land, neither option is as easy anymore.

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NASA Clears Shuttle Discovery for Tuesday Launch

Space Shuttle Discovery on launch pad: Photo courtesy NASA

From Space.com:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA officials today cleared the space shuttle Discovery to blast off Tuesday as the weather outlook improved for the planned predawn launch.

Mike Moses, head of Discovery's mission management team, said the shuttle and its seven-astronaut crew are ready for their 1:36 a.m. EDT (0536 GMT) launch toward the International Space Station on Tuesday.

"We are go for launch," Moses told SPACE.com late Sunday.

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Will Antitrust Probe Keep Microsoft, Yahoo Apart?

From The Miami Herald/AP:

WASHINGTON -- Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. hope that by joining forces, they can tilt the balance of power in Internet search away from Google Inc. First, however, Yahoo and Microsoft have to convince regulators that their plan won't hurt online advertisers and consumers.

As the U.S. Justice Department reviews the proposed partnership, approval figures to hinge on this question: Will the online ad market be healthier if Google's dominance is challenged by a single, more muscular rival instead of two scrawnier foes?

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Cutting The Cord: America Loses Its Landlines

From The Economist:

Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous consequences.

MUCH has been made of the precipitous decline of America’s newspapers. According to one much-cited calculation, the country’s last printed newspaper will land on a doorstep sometime in the first quarter of 2043. That is a positively healthy outlook, however, compared with another staple of American life: the home telephone. Telecoms operators are seeing customers abandon landlines at a rate of 700,000 per month. Some analysts now estimate that 25% of households in America rely entirely on mobile phones (or cellphones, as Americans call them)—a share that could double within the next three years. If the decline of the landline continues at its current rate, the last cord will be cut sometime in 2025.

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Northwest Fears That Invasive Mussels Are Headed Its Way

(Click Image to Enlarge)

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON — Highly invasive mussels are lurking on the Northwest's doorstep, threatening to gum up the dams that produce the region's cheap electricity, clog drinking water and irrigation systems, jeopardize aquatic ecosystems and upset efforts to revive such endangered species as salmon.

Despite efforts to stop them, the arrival of zebra and quagga mussels may be inevitable.

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Moonquake Mystery Deepens

From Earth Magazine:

Between 1969 and 1972, five Apollo missions installed seismic stations at their landing sites on the nearside of the moon. Because the moon was thought to be seismically dead, the instruments were left almost as an afterthought to detect meteor strikes. But from the time the stations were switched on until they were decommissioned in 1977, they recorded hundreds of internally generated moonquakes, some as strong as magnitude 5.5 on the Richter scale.

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New Way To Reproduce A Black Hole?

Illustration of a binary black hole system. (Credit: NASA/JPL)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2009) — Despite their popularity in the science fiction genre, there is much to be learned about black holes, the mysterious regions in space once thought to be absent of light. In a paper published in the August 20 issue of Physical Review Letters, Dartmouth researchers propose a new way of creating a reproduction black hole in the laboratory on a much-tinier scale than their celestial counterparts.

The new method to create a tiny quantum sized black hole would allow researchers to better understand what physicist Stephen Hawking proposed more than 35 years ago: black holes are not totally void of activity; they emit photons, which is now known as Hawking radiation.

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Gigantic Lightning Jets Shoot From Clouds To Space

A series of still images from a captured video sequence of a gigantic jet observed near Duke University. The thunderstorm that produced this jet was about 200 miles away and is below the visible horizon. Credit: Steven Cummer

From Live Science:

Strokes of lightning flashing down towards the ground are a familiar sight during summer thunderstorms, but scientists have capture an image of a rare lightning bolt shooting out upwards from a cloud, almost to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.

These bolts of upwards lightning, one type among a variety of electrical discharges now known to occur above thunderstaorms, are called gigantic jets, and were only first discovered in 2001.

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Four Ways to Fight Back Against Cyber Attacks

From Popular Mechanics:

This week, prosecutors indicted notorious hacker Albert Gonzalez. He's accused of having masterminded a scheme to steal more than 130 million credit card numbers. Gonzalez may be behind bars, but his trial underscores the fact that your personal and financial information are vulnerable to attack from thieves in cyberspace. Here are four ways to fight back.

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NASA May Outsource Amid Budget Woes

From Wall Street Journal:

For the first time since the advent of manned space exploration, the U.S. appears ready to outsource to private companies everything from transporting astronauts to ferrying cargo into orbit.

Proposals gaining momentum in Washington call for contractors to build and run competing systems under commercial contracts, according to federal officials, aerospace-industry officials and others familiar with the discussions.

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Steve Jobs's New Trick: The Apple Tablet

A design concept for the Apple tablet.

From The Guardian:

Rumours are rife that Steve Jobs is about to unveil a revolutionary touchscreen gadget.

Feverish speculation all over the internet, gadget shoppers nearing mass hysteria and pundits predicting our lives will never be the same. It must mean that an Apple product launch is on the way.

The company that makes the Mac computer, iPod music player and iPhone is reportedly poised to launch a tablet computer – small enough to carry in a handbag or briefcase but big enough to comfortably surf the web, read newspapers and watch films. It could be Apple's latest billion-dollar jackpot.

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Ten Days Left To Buy Traditional Lightbulbs: EU Ban Means Only Low-Energy Ones Will Be On Sale

Photo: Banned: Pearl, incandescent lightbulbs are being cleared from shelves in a bid to slash energy bills and carbon dioxide emissions

From The Daily Mail:

Traditional lightbulbs will disappear from our shops in just ten days.

All conventional pearl, incandescent lightbulbs are being banned by the European Union to slash energy bills and carbon dioxide emissions.

The move covers every type of frosted traditional bulb, from the 60 watt pearl bulbs used in table lamps to more specialised opaque 25 and 40 watt bulbs shaped like golf balls and candles.

Clear and frosted 100 watt lightbulbs will also not be on sale from September 1.

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Expanding Waistlines May Cause Shrinking Brains

From New Scientist:

BRAIN regions key to cognition are smaller in older people who are obese compared with their leaner peers, making their brains look up to 16 years older than their true age. As brain shrinkage is linked to dementia, this adds weight to the suspicion that piling on the pounds may up a person's risk of the brain condition.
The brains of elderly obese people looked 16 years older than the brains of those who were lean

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My Comment: Does this mean that "skinny" people are smarter?

Phones, PCs Put E-Book Within Reach Of Kindle-Less

Many phones are now sophisticated enough, and have good enough screens, that they can be used as e-book reading devices. They can now rival the Kindle, pictured. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Amazon's pioneering device may not dominate the market for long. Many phones are now sophisticated enough to be used as e-book reading devices.

A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.

“Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself,” Castaldo thought.

He didn’t have a Kindle, but he did have a BlackBerry. He pulled it out and looked for available applications. Sure enough, Barnes & Noble Inc. had just put up an e-reading program. Castaldo, 54, downloaded it, and within a minute, began reading Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

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Learning To Live Without The Net

From The BBC:

Bill Thompson feels the pain of the digitally dispossessed.

I have just endured a week of limited connectivity and it has given me a salutary lesson in what life is like for the digitally dispossessed here in the UK and around the world.

I have been driven to searching for open wireless access points so that I can download my e-mail, sometimes wandering the beach looking for elusive 3G signals just to get my Facebook status updated.

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How Do Scientists Really Use Computers?

From American Scientist:

Computers are now essential tools in every branch of science, but we know remarkably little about how—or how well—scientists use them. Do most scientists use off-the-shelf software or write their own? Do they really need state-of-the-art supercomputers to solve their problems, or can they do most of what they need to on desktop machines? And how much time do grad students really spend patching their supervisors’ crusty old Fortran programs?

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First Avatar Trailer Reveals Pandora’s Intoxicating Alien World

From Underwire/Wired Science:

The new Avatar trailer gives the world its first glimpse of the alien world dreamed up by James Cameron for his coming sci-fi epic.

The fast-paced clip is short on dialogue and long on brief flashes of the dazzling flora and fauna that inhabit Pandora, the distant moon where the movie’s sweeping action unfolds.

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Mysterious Origins: 8 Phenomena That Defy Explanation

Photo: A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERIES: Why aren't there suns, planets and galaxies made of antimatter? NASA

From Scientific American:

The unknown origins behind language, handedness, flu seasons, superconductivity, antimatter, proton spin, cosmic rays and sex.

Our September 2009 special issue on origins contains articles on 57 innovations and insights that shape our world today. They include some big ones, like the origin of life, the universe and the mind; sobering stories, like mad cow disease and HIV; and whimsical tales, like paper clips and cupcakes. This past week, we've posted a dozen additional online-only origins: the open-plan office space, fruit ripening, malaria, the computer mouse, atmospheric oxygen, hatred, wine, dogs, rubber boots, zero and, of course, Scientific American.

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Engineers Develop Flexible, Inorganic LED Display

Flexible Inorganic LED Pacific Northwest National Lab via Ars Technica

From Popular Science:

The promise of OLED technology is that, unlike its inorganic counterpart, it can be used to create flexible and nearly transparent ultra-thin screens, opening up myriad possibilities for what we can do with displays and lighting. But just as market-ready OLED technology suffered a setback as Sony delayed its latest OLED television this week (only the world’s second commercial OLED TV, after Sony's XEL-1 set), engineers have devised a way to make cheaper, more efficient inorganic LED technology bend to their whims. Literally.

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The Crew Of STS-128

STS128-S-002 (30 Jan. 2009) --- Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, these seven astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-128 crew portrait. Seated are NASA astronauts Rick Sturckow (right), commander; and Kevin Ford, pilot. From the left (standing) are astronauts Jose Hernandez, John "Danny" Olivas, Nicole Stott, European Space Agency's Christer Fuglesang and Patrick Forrester, all mission specialists. Stott is scheduled to join Expedition 20 as flight engineer after launching to the International Space Station on STS-128.

From Yahoo News/Space:

A former off-road racer, a Swedish physicist and three tweeting astronauts form just part of the eclectic crew poised to blast off Tuesday aboard NASA's space shuttle Discovery.

Discovery's six-man, one-woman crew is slated to launch on a 13-day mission to the International Space Station, where they astronauts will deliver vital supplies and experiments, as well as a new crewmember for the orbiting laboratory.

"This is a great crew," said Discovery commander Rick Sturckow in a NASA interview. "I think from the very beginning we got off to a good start and we've maintained a good pace throughout the training ... and still manage to have fun together doing it, so I've really enjoyed training with this crew."

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Space Shuttle Discovery On Track For Tuesday Launch

Space shuttle Discovery back on Earth (AFP: Pierre Ducharme)

From Yahoo News/Space:

NASA's space shuttle Discovery is on track for a planned Tuesday launch toward the International Space Station, mission managers said Saturday.

The shuttle and its seven-astronaut crew are nearly ready for their predawn launch Tuesday at 1:36 a.m. EDT (0536 GMT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said NASA test director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

"All of our vehicle systems are in good shape. Our countdown work is progressing well," Blackwell-Thompson said today in a morning status briefing. "Discovery and her launch team are ready to go."

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Universal Vaccine Could Put An End To All Flu

From New Scientist:

IT IS not a nice way to die. As the virus spreads through your lungs, your immune system goes into overdrive. Your lungs become leaky and fill with fluid. Your lips and nails, then your skin, turn blue as you struggle to get enough oxygen. Basically, you drown.

Flu can kill in other ways, too, from rendering you vulnerable to bacterial infections to triggering heart attacks. Of course, most flu strains, including (so far) the 2009 pandemic virus, cause only mild symptoms in the vast majority of people. But with 10 to 20 per cent of people worldwide getting flu every year, that still adds up to a huge burden of illness - and even in a good year some half a million die.

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Evolution Of The Human Appendix: A Biological 'Remnant' No More

Normal location of the appendix relative to other organs of the digestive system (frontal view). (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Aug. 21, 2009) — The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

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What You Should Know About Arthritis

A graphic shows what's inside your joints, and what can go wrong.

From Live Science:

This Week's Question: I'm pretty sure I have arthritis in my knee. Is there any danger this will spread?

First, anyone who thinks they may have arthritis should see a doctor. Self-diagnosis is hazardous to your health. Now for some information about arthritis all geezers should know.

Arthritis, which comes in different forms, is inflammation of the joints. Osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and gout are the three most common forms of arthritis among seniors. Osteoarthritis is the most prevalent. None is contagious.

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You Are What You Listen To, Says New Study Of Music Lovers

Playlists can give an insight into your personality Photo: GETTY IMAGES

From The Telegraph:

Think twice before proudly showing off your iPod playlist. Your choice of music may mark you out as boring, dim and unattractive, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

The study found that we make assumptions about someone’s personality, values, social class and ethnicity based on their musical preferences.

Classical buffs are seen as ugly and boring, while rock lovers are regarded as emotionally unstable and pop fans are considered to be rather dim.

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Let Private Sector Help NASA

From Autopia/Wired News:

After leading the way in the human exploration of space for nearly 50 years, the future of U.S. manned space flight is in question. The space shuttle makes its last flight next year. After that, NASA must rely on the Russians to put astronauts in space.

Unless the country looks to the private sector.

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Yahoo Wins Appeal Of Music-Streaming Case

From CNET:

A three-judge panel ruled Friday that Yahoo will not have to pay up every time it plays a song on its Internet radio service, affirming an earlier verdict.

In what is being seen as a defeat for the music industry, Yahoo Music was not deemed "interactive" enough to require the company to negotiate with record companies for the rights to play songs over the Internet. Instead, according to Reuters, it merely has to pay licensing fees to digital music rights organization SoundExchange.

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France Worried By Hornet Invasion

The Asian predatory wasp could threaten bee-keepers' livelihoods

From The BBC:

France faces an invasion of Chinese hornets that could hasten the decline of the honeybee population.

The wasps, known by their scientific name Vespa velutina, could also threaten bee-keepers' livelihoods, researchers say.

They have spread rapidly in south-western France - a region popular with tourists - and could reach other European countries soon.

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Why We Walk in Circles

Into the woods. People walking through a forest were more likely to walk in circles on cloudy days (blue paths) than they were on days when the sun was visible (yellow paths). Credit: (Map) Adapted from Google Earth by J. L. Souman et al., Current Biology 19 (20 August 2009); (inset: Jan Souman)

From Science Now:

Adventure stories and horror movies ramp up the tension when hapless characters walk in circles. The Blair Witch Project, for example, wouldn't have been half as scary if those students had managed to walk in a straight line out of the forest. But is this navigation glitch real or just a handy plot device? A new study finds that people really do tend to walk in circles when they lack landmarks to guide them.

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End Of Civil War Opens Up Angolan 'Jurassic Park'

Fossils are seen in the Bentiaba desert, southern province of Namibe in Angola. Much of Angola's fossil richness results from dramatic continental shifts tens of millions of years ago, which saw the land transform from desert to tropics. (AFP/HO/File/Anne Schulp)

From Yahoo News.AFP:

LUANDA (AFP) – Angola is best known for oil and diamonds, but dinosaur hunters say the country holds a "museum in the ground" of rare fossils -- some actually jutting from the earth -- waiting to be discovered.

"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," explained Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.

"Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find.

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Building Safer Airplanes Out of Teeth

Smile for Airplane Safety!: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk USAF Museum

From Popular Science:

In a recent study, molars beat materials science.

Airplane design could be improved with a little inspiration from mammalian chompers. Or so said aerospace engineer Herzl Chai of Tel Aviv University in a press release Wednesday.

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The Origin of Zero

ZERO IN: The number zero developed in fits and starts over thousands of years.
©iStockphoto/dbuffoon

From Scientific American:

Much ado about nothing: First a placeholder and then a full-fledged number, zero had many inventors.

The number zero as we know it arrived in the West circa 1200, most famously delivered by Italian mathematician Fibonacci (aka Leonardo of Pisa), who brought it, along with the rest of the Arabic numerals, back from his travels to north Africa. But the history of zero, both as a concept and a number, stretches far deeper into history—so deep, in fact, that its provenance is difficult to nail down.

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A Look Into The Hellish Cradles Of Suns And Solar Systems

The dense star cluster RCW 38 glistens about 5500 light years away in the direction of the constellation Vela (the Sails). RCW 38 is an "embedded" cluster, in that the nascent cloud of dust and gas still envelops its stars. (Credit: Image courtesy of ESO)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2009) — New images released today by ESO delve into the heart of a cosmic cloud, called RCW 38, crowded with budding stars and planetary systems. There, young stars bombard fledgling suns and planets with powerful winds and blazing light, helped in their task by short-lived, massive stars that explode as supernovae. In some cases, this onslaught cooks away the matter that may eventually form new solar systems. Scientists think that our own Solar System emerged from such an environment.

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Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years

From Live Science:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, often the harbinger of bad news about e. coli outbreaks and swine flu, recently had some good news: The life expectancy of Americans is higher than ever, at almost 78.

Discussions about life expectancy often involve how it has improved over time. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy for men in 1907 was 45.6 years; by 1957 it rose to 66.4; in 2007 it reached 75.5. Unlike the most recent increase in life expectancy (which was attributable largely to a decline in half of the leading causes of death including heart disease, homicide, and influenza), the increase in life expectancy between 1907 and 2007 was largely due to a decreasing infant mortality rate, which was 9.99 percent in 1907; 2.63 percent in 1957; and 0.68 percent in 2007.

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Artificial Life Will Be Created 'Within Months' As Genome Experts Claim Vital Breakthrough

Breakthrough: New DNA was protected by a process called methylation (step 5)

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists are only months away from creating artificial life, it was claimed today.

Dr Craig Venter – one of the world’s most famous and controversial biologists – said his U.S. researchers have overcome one of the last big hurdles to making a synthetic organism.

The first artificial lifeform is likely to be a simple man-made bacterium that proves that the technology can work.

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Vast Oceans Lay Beneath Surface Of The Earth

From The Telegraph:

Vast oceans may lay beneath the Earth's surface, new research suggests.

Scientists believe areas of enhanced electrical conductivity in the mantle - the thick region between the Earth's crust and its core - betray the presence of water.

Water divining researchers produced a global three-dimensional map of the mantle showing the areas through which electricity flowed most freely.

Conductivity hot spots were found to coincide with subduction zones, sites where the tectonic plates that divide up the Earth's surface are being forced downwards.

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Scientists Develop Intelligent Coffee Mug

From Spiegel Online:

Materials to keep drinks cold or hot for longer have been around for quite a while. Now a pair of German scientists has come up with a high-tech mug they claim keeps coffee at the perfect temperature.

The idea came to the researchers at the Christmas market in the Bavarian town of Rosenhiem. "We got upset because the mulled wine" -- Glühwein, in German -- "was always either too hot or too cold," say Klaus Sedlbauer, the head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP), and his colleague Herbert Sinnesbichler. "We had to find a solution."

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Why Is Human Mars Exploration So Surprisingly Hard?

Mars as seen near opposition late August 2003, by the Hubble Space Telescope
Credit: NASA/STSci/Hubble; Captioning credit MSSS/ ASU Themis/ NASA/ JPL

From The Space Review:

As space policy experts mull over alternative strategies for astronaut exploration of the solar system, possibly including human flight to Mars, the recently-concluded fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Apollo 11 moon landing inspire one specific question: what’s taken so long?

In the heady days of the Apollo triumphs, even the “pessimistic” forecasts imagined it might take as long as twenty years to get astronauts to Mars. Optimistic schedules put the first footsteps on the Red Planet—another “giant leap for mankind”—as early as 1982.

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Echoes Of The Birth Of The Universe: New Limits On Big Bang's Gravitational Waves

Aerial view of LIGO facility in Livingston, Louisiana.
(Credit: LIGO, California Institute of Technology.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2009) — An investigation by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration has significantly advanced our understanding the early evolution of the universe.

Analysis of data taken over a two-year period, from 2005 to 2007, has set the most stringent limits yet on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang in the gravitational wave frequency band where LIGO can observe. In doing so, the gravitational-wave scientists have put new constraints on the details of how the universe looked in its earliest moments.

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Astronauts Eye Hurricane Bill

The spiral bands of Hurricane Bill in the Atlantic Ocean fill the view as Expedition 20 crew members on the International Space Station look east-southeastward along the horizon. This view was taken on Aug. 18, 2009 at 16:08:54 GMT with a Nikkor 28-70mm zoom lens at the 40mm lens setting. At the time this photograph was taken, Hurricane Bill was centered at 15.9 degrees north latitude and 51.2 degrees west longitude, the winds were 90 knots (103.7 miles per hour) gusting to 110 knots (126.7 mph) and it was moving west-northwest (285 degrees) at 14 knots (16.1 mph). Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

From space, fury is beauty.

The spiral bands of Hurricane Bill in the Atlantic Ocean fill the view of a new image by Expedition 20 crew members on the International Space Station.

The picture looks east-southeastward along the horizon.

It was taken on Aug. 18, 2009 when the storm was centered at 15.9 degrees north latitude and 51.2 degrees west longitude.

Bill is expected to stay offshore as it curves north and then eastward along the eastern coast of North America, according to the latest update from the National Hurricane Center. The route is a typical one for hurricanes.

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Giant Robotic Cages to Roam Seas as Future Fish Farms?

A worker cleans an Aquapod fish cage off Peurto Rico in an undated photo. Another Aquapod has been outfitted with remote-control propellers. Someday such automated cages could herald an entirely new form of fish farming, with robotic cages roaming the seas, mimicking the movements of wild schools. Photograph courtesy Ocean Farm Technologies

From National Geographic:

In the future, giant, autonomous fish farms may whir through the open ocean, mimicking the movements of wild schools or even allowing fish to forage "free range" before capturing them once again. Already scientists have constructed working remote control cages.

Such motorized cages could help produce greener, healthier, and more numerous fish, just when we need them most.

The world's growing population is devouring seafood as quickly as it can be caught and has seriously depleted the world's wild fish stocks, experts warn.

Read more ....

Worldwide Battle Rages For Control Of The Internet

From New Scientist:

WHEN thousands of protestors took to the streets in Iran following this year's disputed presidential election, Twitter messages sent by activists let the world know about the brutal policing that followed. A few months earlier, campaigners in Moldova used Facebook to organise protests against the country's communist government, and elsewhere too the internet is playing an increasing role in political dissent.

Now governments are trying to regain control. By reinforcing their efforts to monitor activity online, they hope to deprive dissenters of information and the ability to communicate.

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Entertainment Weekly To Embed Video Ad In Print Magazine

From Popular Science:

Last year Esquire rolled out an e-ink cover to celebrate the mag's 75 anniversary and introduced moving pictures (well, scrolling text and flashing images, at least) to the world of print. Next up: talkies. Yesterday, CBS and Time Inc. announced a video ad set to appear in the September 18 issue of Entertainment Weekly.

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Average Video Gamer Is 35, Fat And Depressed

The average video gamer: Players are typically 35, overweight and suffering from depression, and rely more on the internet for social support (file pic)

From The Daily Mail:

Playing video games is often regarded as a pastime for children and teenagers.

But the average age of players is now 35 - and it seems they have similar problems to their younger counterparts, according to researchers.

Adults who spend hours in front of a games console every day are more likely to be fat and depressed than those who don't, a U.S. study found.

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