Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?

Adam Kazmierski

From Scientific American:

A new study demonstrates that thinking about love--but not about sex--causes us to think more "globally," making it easier to come up with new ideas.

Love has inspired countless works of art, from immortal plays such as Romeo and Juliet, to architectural masterpieces such as the Taj Mahal, to classic pop songs, like Queen's “Love of My Life”. This raises the obvious question: why is love such a stimulating emotion? Why does the act of falling in love – or at least thinking about love – lead to such a spur of creative productivity?

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Slime-Dispensing Hulls Could Boost Fuel Efficiency For Ships

Slick Hull A fine sheen of slime could someday cover Navy vessel hulls such as this, and cut fuel consumption to boot. U.S. Navy

From Popular Science:

A DOD-backed project would give ships a regenerating slime layer to help shed unwanted marine life.

Slime ships ahoy! A vessel that oozes a continual slick layer of slime from its hull could shed barnacles and other marine life forms, and possibly cut its fuel consumption by up to 20 percent.

Such a novel idea tackles the problem of removing marine plants, barnacles and tube worms from ship hulls every year, lest the buildup cut into both speed and fuel efficiency. The fuel savings in particular may look especially tempting for the U.S. Department of Defense, which has backed the project and previously invested in hull-cleaning bots.

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Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers

This means war (Image: ColorBlind Images/Getty)

From New Scientist:

Victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone – but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. When male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, levels of the potent sex hormone plummeted.

This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone's effect on aggression is advantageous.

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Are Recessions Good For Our Health?

Opportunity in Crisis? Although the Great Depression made have had a severe impact on the American economy, the crisis was actually good for U.S. health, according to a new study. The findings offer a silver lining for today's financial crisis. StockPhoto

From Discovery News:

Sept. 28, 2009 -- The name seems to say it all. The Great Depression was bad all around, wasn't it? Maybe not.

New findings show that the Great Depression was actually good for U.S. health. Annual death rates declined during years of downturn and increased in years of expansion.

The findings could offer a silver lining to today's financial crisis.

The results reinforce earlier research showing recessions reduce mortality, but researchers didn't know whether the effect would hold through a full blown economic meltdown like the Great Depression.

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Popular Kids Grow Into Healthier Adults

A study over 50 years has revealed that popular school children are less likely to suffer conditions such as heart disease and diabetes than their unpopular counterparts. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Children who are the most popular and powerful at school also enjoy better health in adult life compared to counterparts at the bottom end of the pecking order, say Swedish scientists.

The long-term study covers 14,000 children born in 1953, who were questioned in 1966 when they were 12 or 13 years old and whose health was tracked up to 2003.

The children's place in the social hierarchy was determined by asking them who they most preferred to work with at school.

To assess their health in later life, the study delved into a national databank for hospital admissions.

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Giant Fish 'Verges On Extinction'

From The BBC:

One of the world's largest freshwater fish is on the verge of going extinct.

A three-year quest to find the giant Chinese paddlefish in the Yangtze river failed to sight or catch a single individual.

That means that the fish, which can grow up to 7m long, has not been seen alive for at least six years.

There remains a chance that some escaped the survey and survive, say experts, but without action, the future of the species is bleak.

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Time Lens Speeds Optical Data

Photo: Time lens: This silicon chip, called a time lens, is patterned with waveguides that split optical signals and combine them with laser light to speed data rates. Credit: Alexander Gaeta

From Technology Review:

An energy-efficient silicon device compresses light to make ultrafast signals.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a simple silicon device for speeding up optical data. The device incorporates a silicon chip called a "time lens," lengths of optical fiber, and a laser. It splits up a data stream encoded at 10 gigabits per second, puts it back together, and outputs the same data at 270 gigabits per second. Speeding up optical data transmission usually requires a lot of energy and bulky, expensive optics. The new system is energy efficient and is integrated on a compact silicon chip. It could be used to move vast quantities of data at fast speeds over the Internet or on optical chips inside computers.

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By 2040 You Will Be Able To Upload Your Brain...

Standing up for GM: Kurzweil believes that opposition to advances such as genetic modification harm humankind. GETTY IMAGES

From The Independent:

...or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age – the 'singularity' – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

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Global Increase In Atmospheric Methane Likely Caused By Unusual Arctic Warmth, Tropical Wetness

View of wetlands and tidal streams in the Ashe Island area. (Credit: NOAA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second.

NOAA scientists and their colleagues analyzed measurements from 1983 to 2008 from air samples collected weekly at 46 surface locations around the world. Their findings will appear in the September 28 print edition of the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters and are available online now.

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Plumbing Of A Supervolcano Revealed

Geologist points to the edge of a boulder of reddish volcanic rock from the fossilized supervolcano in Sesia Valley, Italy. The volcanic rock is encased by a light-gray tuff, a relationship characteristic of deposits produced during caldera-forming, explosive eruptions. Credit: Silvano Sinigoi, Universita di Trieste

From Live Science:

The fossilized remains of a supervolcano that erupted some 280 million years ago in the Italian Alps are giving geologists a first-time glimpse at the deep "plumbing system" that brings molten rock from far underground to the Earth's surface.

James E. Quick of Southern Methodist University in Texas and his team discovered the "fossil," or extinct, supervolcano in the Alps' Sesia Valley two years ago, but they are just now reporting the results after careful study.

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Obama Appoints Scholar As New Copyright Czar

From The Threat Level:

The “copyleft” and the “copyright” are both applauding the presidential appointment Friday of Victoria A. Espinel to become the nation’s first copyright czar.

Congress created the new czar position last year as part of intellectual property reform legislation.

Espinel, who requires Senate confirmation, has a past in teaching and government. Most recently, she was a visiting scholar at the George Mason University School of Law, where she taught intellectual property and international trade. The White House said she was an intellectual property adviser to the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Ways and Means Committee. Espinel, in 2005, served as the nation’s top trade negotiator for intellectual property at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

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Googlle: Google Releases Misspelt Logo To Mark 11th Anniversary

The google logo that celebrates the search engine's eleventh birthday

From The Telegraph:

Google has released a special misspelt version of its logo – apparently to mark 11 years since the company was founded.

The search giant's name appeared with an extra letter "l" on its home page on Sunday, a change that did not escape the notice of the internet.

Within hours of the new logo going live, "why is google spelt wrong" and "why does google have two ls" were two of the most popular search phrases on the web.

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Yahoo's New Web Portal Goes Live

From BBC:

Internet giant Yahoo has relaunched its web portal, supported by a $100m global advertising campaign.

The company hopes the website refresh will boost both traffic and revenues.

Yahoo will also open its home page to rivals, allowing users to integrate third-party web services like Facebook or Hotmail into its portal.

Yahoo has been struggling to turn its position as the world's most popular website into profits. The portal is the first move of new boss Carol Bartz.

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Supertyphoons To Strike Japan DueTo Global Warming

Supertyphoon Sepat bears down on the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean on August 15, 2007. Increasingly powerful storms will devastate countries in the western Pacific Ocean, including Japan, as rising temperatures add fuel to storms, scientists said in September 2009. Photograph by NOAA/AP

From National Geographic:

Increasingly powerful "supertyphoons" will strike Japan if global warming continues to affect weather patterns in the western Pacific Ocean, scientists say.

Supercomputer simulations show there will be more typhoons with winds of 179 miles (288 kilometers) per hour—considered an F3 on the five-level Fujita Scale—by 2074.

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Chemicals In Breast Milk Linked To Testicular Cancer

Photo: Pollutant chemicals found in breast milk have been linked to testicular cancer Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Pollutant chemicals found in mothers' breast milk have been linked to an increased rate of testicular cancer.

A study in Denmark suggests hormone-disrupting environmental chemicals may explain why so many men in the country develop the disease.

Danish men are up to four times more likely to have testicular cancer as men in neighbouring Finland.

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A Simpler, Gentler Robotic Grip

Image: Soft touch: This four-fingered robotic hand contains sensors that help it pick up a variety of objects. Credit: Leif Jentoft

From Technology Review:

A new artificial hand shows promise for home robots and prosthetics.

Industrial robots have been helping in the factories for a while, but most robots need a complex hand and powerful software to grasp ordinary objects without damaging them.

Researchers from Harvard and Yale Universities have developed a simple, soft robotic hand that can grab a range of objects delicately, and which automatically adjusts its fingers to get a good grip. The new hand could also potentially be useful as a prosthetic arm.

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Hot Space Shuttle Images

Photo: Hot body: These thermal images were taken of space shuttle Discovery on September 11. Temperature data was used to make the color images (middle and bottom), blue being the lowest temperatures and red the highest. Credit: NASA/HYTHIRM team

From Technology Review:

NASA researchers capture thermal images of the shuttle's reentry to design better heat shields.

Researchers at NASA are using a novel thermal-imaging system on board a Navy aircraft to capture images of heat patterns that light up the surface of the space shuttle as it returns through the Earth's atmosphere. The researchers have thus far imaged three shuttle missions and are processing the data to create 3-D surface-temperature maps. The data will enable engineers to design systems to protect future spacecraft from the searing heat--up to 5,500 degrees Celsius--seen during reentry.

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Seti: The Hunt For ET

Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years. Rex

From The Independent:

Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years, scanning the skies with an ever-more sophisticated array of radio telescopes and computers. Known as Seti, the search marks its half-century this month. Jennifer Armstrong and Andrew Johnson examine its close – and not so close – encounters.

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Alzheimer's Linked To Lack Of Zzzzs

From Science News:

Losing sleep could lead to losing brain cells, a new study suggests.

Levels of a protein that forms the hallmark plaques of Alzheimer’s disease increase in the brains of mice and in the spinal fluid of people during wakefulness and fall during sleep, researchers report online September 24 in Science. Mice that didn’t get enough sleep for three weeks also had more plaques in their brains than well-rested mice, the team found.

Scientists already knew that having Alzheimer’s disease was associated with poor sleep, but they had thought that Alzheimer’s disease caused the sleep disruption.

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Discovery Brings New Type Of Fast Computers Closer To Reality

Alex High and Aaron Hammack adjust the optics in their UCSD lab. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called “excitons” that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.

Their discovery, detailed this week in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, follows the team’s demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit—an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices—capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. That temperature, equivalent to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, is not only less than the average temperature of deep space, but achievable only in special research laboratories.

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Evidence For Stone Age Multitasking

A researcher heats experimental adhesive. Credit: Lyn Wadley

From Live Science:

Modern parents, teenagers, and executives are all masters of multitasking, but people who lived 70,000 years ago may have shared that talent. Stone blades found in Sibudu Cave, near South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, bear traces of compound adhesives that once joined them to wooden hafts to make spears or arrows.

Our distant ancestors discovered that mixtures of plant gum and red ocher or fat, heated carefully over a fire, made the superglue of their day, say Lyn Wadley and two colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. So how is that evidence of multitasking?

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US Life Expectancy Lags Due To Cigarettes

From Future Pundit:

In political debates over health care the fact that the United States lags many other industrialized countries in average life expectancy is sometimes blamed on how health care is funded in the US. But John Tierney of the New York Times reports that once the lifestyles of Americans are adjusted for America's health care system comes out looking pretty good in terms of its effects on longevity.

But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis.

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How To Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas To 16,000 Feet

From Wired Science:

After a 17-mile trek up to a plateau in the Chilean Andes, scientists installed the first of 66 giant antennae on the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope this week.

The antenna, which weighs about 100 tons and measures 40 feet in diameter, was carried to its operations site at 16,400 feet by a massive, custom-built transporter. Eventually, the antenna will be linked with dozens of others to form a single, enormous telescope. Scientists hope the extremely dry air on the Chajnantor Plateau will help ALMA study some of the coldest and most distant objects in the observable universe.

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Scientists Announce Trove of Fragile New Species In Mekong

The Cat Ba leopard gecko, discovered in 2008, found in the Cat Ba Island National Park in northern Vietnam. Thomas Ziegler / WWF / Epa

From Time Magazine:

Right now, bird-eating frogs with fangs wait for their prey in the streams of eastern Thailand. Technicolor geckos scurry up trees on the Thai-Malaysian border, and ruby-red fish — previously only found in the Ukrainian ornamental fish trade — are swimming in the rivers of Burma. These are three of the 163 species discovered by various researchers in the Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia last year, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) announced on Sept. 25.

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LHC Gets Warning System Upgrade

Cern has spent about 40m Swiss Francs (£24m) on repairs to the LHC

From The BBC:

Engineers hope an early warning system being installed at the Large Hadron Collider could prevent incidents of the kind which shut the machine last year.

The helium leak last September, which resulted from a "faulty splice" between magnets, has delayed the start of science operations by more than a year.

Officials aim to re-start the collider, known as the LHC, in mid-November.

The vast physics lab is built inside a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

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France-Size Shark Sanctuary Created -- A First

The world's first shark sanctuary will protect the declining fish in waters off the tiny island republic of Palau (above, a gray reef shark in Palau), the country's president announced on September 25, 2009. Photograph by Tim Laman/NGS

From National Geographic:

The world's first shark sanctuary will protect the declining fish in waters off the tiny island republic of Palau, the country's president said today.

Johnson Toriboing announced the creation of a shark haven without commercial fishing during an address before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

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Cyber Security Experts Learn From Ant Tactics

From The Telegraph:

Scientists have worked out a new way to defend computers from cyber attackers - by studying ants.

Watching how they behaved when a colony was under threat, gave programmers inspiration for a new weapon against infections known as worms and viruses.

Ants use "swarming intelligence" to deter intruders. When one ant detects a threat, he is soon joined by many others to overwhelm their opponent.

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Will Amazon Open The Kindle To Developers?

From CNET:

We're heading into the holiday buying season, which means the introduction of new gadgets and the media's annual anointment of the season's hottest tech toy. Plenty of pundits think electronic book readers will sell briskly this year, which got us thinking: Will Amazon update its Kindle e-book reader in time for the holidays?

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British Museum's Aztec Artefacts 'As Evil As Nazi Lampshades Made From Human Skin'

Showstopper: A turquoise mask which probably represents the sun god Tonatiuh

From The Daily Mail:

Ten minutes into the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition, devoted to the last Aztec ruler before the Spanish Conquest, you come across a statue of an eagle with a cavity in its back. The cavity, you will discover, was designed to hold the hearts of the victims of human sacrifices.

This detail, for me, obliterates any observation about whether the sculpture is otherwise well crafted. Similarly, I don't care whether a Nazi lampshade fashioned from human skin is beautifully made or not. And the same concern blocks out a lot of one's interest in this exhibition.

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Peruvian Glacial Retreats Linked To European Events Of Little Ice Age

University of New Hampshire master's student Jean Taggart '09, coauthor of a new study published in this week's Science, takes samples from a glacial moraine in southern Peru. (Credit: Joe Licciardi)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — A new study that reports precise ages for glacial moraines in southern Peru links climate swings in the tropics to those of Europe and North America during the Little Ice Age approximately 150 to 350 years ago. The study, published this week in the journal Science, "brings us one step closer to understanding global-scale patterns of glacier activity and climate during the Little Ice Age," says lead author Joe Licciardi, associate professor of Earth sciences at the University of New Hampshire. "The more we know about our recent climate past, the better we can understand our modern and future climate."

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Children Who Get Spanked Have Lower IQs

From Live Science:

Spanking can get kids to behave in a hurry, but new research suggests it can do more harm than good to their noggins. The study, involving hundreds of U.S. children, showed the more a child was spanked the lower his or her IQ compared with others.

"All parents want smart children," said study researcher Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire. "This research shows that avoiding spanking and correcting misbehavior in other ways can help that happen."

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Photon 'Machine Gun' Could Power Quantum Computers

Entangled photons can now be controlled (Image: Dan Talson/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

THERE is a simple rule of computing that holds true even in the weird quantum world: increase the number of units of information available and you boost computing power. Raising the number of quantum bits, or qubits, carries an even greater reward – every additional qubit doubles the computing power.

But raising the number of qubits has proven tricky because of the difficulty of reliably producing entangled particles. Now a team has designed a system that should fire out barrages of entangled photons with machine-gun regularity.

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10 Wonders To Visit Before They Disappear

Credit: Ralph Clevenger/Corbis

From Cosmos:

As global warming sets in, some of the world's wonders may not wait around for you to experience them. Here are the top 10 places you need to visit before the climate changes.

EXPERIENCING is believing. It's one thing to marvel at a documentary about the Great Barrier Reef, and quite another to immerse yourself in the silent beauty and colourful diversity of the world's largest reef system.

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The Tech Behind Surrogates's All-Robot World

Director Jonathan Mostow with a surrogate used in the film to show buyers the mechanics of their potential proxies.

From Popular Mechanics:

PM's Digital Hollywood sits down with Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow to discuss the unexpected challenges of filming a world where everyone looks like a perfect robot. Plus, a chronology of movie androids.

When robot stand-ins populate the world in a movie—as they do in Touchstone Picture’s Surrogates, out Sept. 25—­every character in the frame has to look perfect. And that turned into a headache for director Jonathan Mostow. “Usually you hire background actors off the street,” he says. “We were flying in models.”

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Self-Regulated Morphine Delivery For Wounded Warfighters

Safer Pain Relief Wounded soldiers could soon administer their
own morphine without watchful medics U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

DARPA-funded nanotech drug automatically regulates its morphine dose on the battlefield

Medics still use morphine to relieve the pain of wounded soldiers on the modern battlefield, but have to watch out for morphine reducing breathing and blood pressure to dangerous levels. That may all change with a DARPA-backed combination drug that has successfully limited morphine delivery when it detects low blood oxygen levels.

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Mars Probe Watches Water-Ice Fade

Water-ice is seen to fade over time in this 12m crater within Arcadia Planitia

From The BBC:

Large deposits of nearly pure water-ice may lurk just below the Martian surface, much nearer the equator than previously thought, suggest new images.

The pictures acquired by a Nasa orbiter show white material exposed by fresh meteorite impacts fading over time - behaviour expected of ice on Mars.

An onboard instrument also detected the tell-tale chemical signature of water.

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Satellite Images Of The Second Iranian Nuclear Site

The overall view of the Iranian site. The mountain under which the site is built is to the lower right of the image. (Credit: GeoEye satellite image/IHS Jane's analysis)

GeoEye Gives Look At Iranian Nuclear Site -- Deep Tech/CNET

Satellite imagery company GeoEye has released a photo of what it says is the controversial and underground Iranian uranium enrichment site that came to light last week.

The photo, taken Saturday, shows the facility at a military site about 20 miles north-northeast of Qum and 100 miles southwest of Tehran, GeoEye said. An analysis of the photo by IHS Jane's, a defense intelligence consulting firm, said the facility has a primary and several auxiliary entrances, ventilation shafts, a surface-to-air missile site, and quarry and construction equipment.

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My Comment: The imaging is very clear. We also must give them credit for making it public as quickly as they did.

UK Warned As Plague Of Bee-Eating Hornets Spreads North In France

The Asian predatory hornet, Vespa velutina. Photograph: Jean Haxaire/AFP

From The Guardian:

For five years they have wreaked havoc in the fields of south-western France, scaring locals with their venomous stings and ravaging the bee population to feed their rapacious appetites. Now, according to French beekeepers, Asian predatory hornets have been sighted in Paris for the first time, raising the prospect of a nationwide invasion which entomologists fear could eventually reach Britain.

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Fresh Doubts Over Hitler's Death After Tests On Bullet Hole Skull Reveal It Belonged To A Woman

Revealed: The skull with a bullet hole, kept in a Russian archive, is a woman's

From The Daily Mail:

Adolf Hitler may not have shot himself dead and perhaps did not even die in his bunker, it emerged yesterday.

A skull fragment believed for decades to be the Nazi leader’s has turned out to be that of a woman under 40 after DNA analysis.

Scientists and historians had long thought it to be conclusive proof that Hitler shot himself in the head after taking a cyanide pill on 30 April 1945 rather than face the ignominy of capture.

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My Comment: I love a mystery like this one.

To Explain Longevity Gap, Look Past Health System

Image: Victor Koen

From New York Times:

If you’re not rich and you get sick, in which industrialized country are you likely to get the best treatment?

The conventional answer to this question has been: anywhere but the United States. With its many uninsured citizens and its relatively low life expectancy, the United States has been relegated to the bottom of international health scorecards.

But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis.

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Spot Discovered On Dwarf Planet Haumea Shows Up Red And Rich With Organics

Artist's rendition of Haumea and its dark red spot.
(Credit: Image courtesy of Europlanet Media Centre)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2009) — A dark red area discovered on the dwarf planet Haumea appears to be richer in minerals and organic compounds than the surrounding icy surface.

The discovery will be presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam by Dr Pedro Lacerda on Wednesday 16 September.

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The Challenge Of Making Real 'Surrogate' Skin

Image from Tech Digest

From Live Science:

The new movie "Surrogates," starring Bruce Willis, depicts a world in which people live through "surries", highly realistic humanoid robots. But without realistic skin, robots will never have that humanlike personal touch, and will not have the degree of social acceptance that robots would need to have to share the world with the rest of us.

A recent paper details research into this area. In "Towards Humanlike Social Touch for Sociable Robotics," John Cabibihan and his fellow scientists detailed the reasons for testing and developing realistic skin for social robots.

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Population: Overconsumption Is The Real Problem -- A Commentary

Human consumption plans are part of the problem (Image: Alex Wong/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

THERE is a pervading myth that efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will be to no avail unless we "do something" about population growth. Even seasoned analysts talk about the threat of "exponential" population growth. But there is no exponential growth. In most of the world fertility rates are falling fast, and the countries where population growth continues are those that contribute least to our planetary predicament.

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Population: Technology Will Save Us -- A Commentary

Human resourcefulness and technological innovation may just help save the environment, argues Jesse Ausubel (Image: Marc Asnin/Redux)

From New Scientist:

Throughout history, technological innovation has saved us from being overwhelmed by overpopulation, and Jesse Ausubel tells Alison George why he is convinced that human resourcefulness can pull the fat out of the fire even now

You're known as a techno-optimist. Why have you got such faith in technology's power to save the environment?

I regard myself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist. But I do think that humanity is ingenious and enterprising. Throughout the ages people have doubted that their descendants could exist, with improving health and longevity, in the numbers and densities we do now. In the 19th century it was common to reason that horse manure or chimney smoke would bury or choke cities. Yet air quality in New York City and water quality in New York harbour are better than when I or my mother was a child. Over time people find, invent and spread solutions for many environmental problems.

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Population: Enough Of Us Now -- A Commentary

Cities contain many people, but it is not just numbers that put strain on resources, it is the way we consume also (Image: Duncan McKenzie/Getty)

From New Scientist:

GLOBAL population growth has slowed significantly, but it hasn't stopped. By 2050 there may be about 35 per cent more people on Earth than there are today. We are already seeing increasing shortages of food, water and other resources and growing numbers of hungry people.

Yet to embark on any discussion about limiting our numbers is to enter sensitive and controversial territory. Perhaps this is not surprising, as in the 1960s, when population growth became an issue of widespread concern, the discussions often had a racist undertone, in which the "well-off" focused on the exploding populations of "underdeveloped nations".

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4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive

Frank Vaplon saved his home from a California wildfire with mail-order firefighting equipment and plenty of preparation.

From Popular Mechanics:

Some disasters are simply not survivable. But most are, and research on human behavior suggests that the difference between life and death often comes down to the simple—yet surprisingly difficult—task of recognizing threats before they overwhelm you, then working through them as discrete challenges. The people who survive disasters tend to be better prepared and more capable of making smart decisions under pressure. Not everyone is born with these traits, but almost anyone can learn them. Here’s how to wire your brain for survival.

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Augmented Google Earth Gets Real-Time People, Cars, Clouds

Real-Time Cars in Google Earth courtesy Georgia Institute of Technology

From Popular Science:

Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape.

They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

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What Happens To A Hoard Of Old Gold?

More than 1,000 years old: A strip of gold with a biblical inscription in Latin. It reads: 'Rise up, o Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face'. Photo from The Daily Mail

From BBC News Magazine:

The Staffordshire hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold is being described as the most significant find in many years, but just what happens next?

Long queues are snaking around the block at a Birmingham museum where the items are now on view. But after the initial excitement dies down, what exactly will happen to the hundreds of pieces?

While much of the mud has been brushed off the 1,381 items, a proper investigation into the find will have to wait until a series of important procedures are completed.

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The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments

From Live Science:

A super soldier program produces Marvel superhero Wolverine in the movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," along with rivals Sabretooth and Weapon XI. Now Live Science looks back on real experiments that the U.S. government ran on soldiers and citizens to advance the science of war.

The military didn't replicate Wolverine's indestructible skeleton and retractable claws. Rather, they shot accident victims up with plutonium, tested nerve gas on sailors, and tried out ESP. While some of the tests seem outlandish in hindsight, the military continues to push the envelope in seeking new warfare techniques based on cutting-edge science and technology.

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My Comment: The comments section from this posting by Live Science deserve to be read also.

Real Science Sets Up Surrogates‘ Futuristic Robot Action

From Underwire:

HOLLYWOOD — Taken at face value, Bruce Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie. In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,” into the real world.

The remote-control androids, which look vaguely like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’ jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the lack of personal interaction in his life.

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Mass Extinction Event Spared Europe (Mostly)

Moment of Impact
An artist's illustration of the comet crashing into the Yucatan Peninsula. The comet impact that wiped out the dinosaurs had little effect on life in Europe, according to a new study of fossil evidence. NASA

From Discovery News:

When a comet crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, all hell broke loose. Scientists have guessed at the scene: a world enshrouded in ashen darkness leftover from the cosmic impact that left almost nothing -- including the dinosaurs -- standing.

But a new study shows that in western Europe at least, the effects were far less terrifying.

Fossil leaves from four million years after the impact show that plants and insects had made a full recovery.

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