Training To Climb An Everest Of Digital Data

From CNET:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--It is a rare criticism of elite American university students that they do not think big enough. But that is exactly the complaint from some of the largest technology companies and the federal government.

At the heart of this criticism is data. Researchers and workers in fields as diverse as bio-technology, astronomy and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information. Better telescopes and genome sequencers are as much to blame for this data glut as are faster computers and bigger hard drives.

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Pallas Is 'Peter Pan' Space Rock

From The BBC:

The Hubble telescope has provided new insight on 2 Pallas, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System.

The nearly 600km-wide rock is an example of an object that started out on the process of becoming a planet but never grew up into the real thing.

Researchers have published a 3D model of the grapefruit-shaped mini-world in Science magazine.

Hubble's data makes it possible to discern surface features, including what appears to be a big impact crater.

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YouTube: A Billion Views Served Daily

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Chad Hurley, chief executive and co-founder of YouTube, marked today's three-year anniversary of Google's acquisition with a blog post that proclaimed the popular video site is "serving well over a billion views a day" globally.

"This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you," he said.

YouTube says that about 70 percent of its traffic originates overseas, with the balance coming from within the United States.

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Feral Children: Are They Really Wild?

Photo: This grainy image is a mug shot of Colton Harris-Moore, a.k.a. the "Barefoot Burglar." Although Harris-Moore has been described as a "feral child," there have been other documented cases of truly "wild" children throughout history. AP Photo/Island County Sheriff's Office via the Everette Herald

From Discovery Magazine:

Living barefoot in the woods and hiding himself in the trees, 18-year-old fugitive Colton Harris-Moore, a.k.a. the "Barefoot Burglar," is making life miserable for the inhabitants of the islands north of Seattle, allegedly burglarizing homes, jacking boats, even stealing small airplanes and crash-landing them.

The teen has managed to elude police in Washington state for the past year and half.

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A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed?

Many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives (above, a computer-generated image of a young T. rex), have been misidentified as unique species, paleontologists said in October 2009. That means up to a third of all dinosaur species may have never existed, experts say. Photograph © NGC

From National Geographic:

Many dinosaurs may be facing a new kind of extinction—a controversial theory suggests as many as a third of all known dinosaur species never existed in the first place.

That's because young dinosaurs didn't look like Mini-Me versions of their parents, according to new analyses by paleontologists Mark Goodwin, University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner, of Montana State University.

Instead, like birds and some other living animals, the juveniles went through dramatic physical changes during adulthood.

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Physicists Measure Elusive 'Persistent Current' That Flows Forever

Image: Harris made the first definitive measurement of an electric current that flows continuously in tiny, but ordinary, metal rings. (Credit: Jack Harris/Yale University)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 12, 2009) — Physicists at Yale University have made the first definitive measurements of “persistent current,” a small but perpetual electric current that flows naturally through tiny rings of metal wire even without an external power source.

The team used nanoscale cantilevers, an entirely novel approach, to indirectly measure the current through changes in the magnetic force it produces as it flows through the ring. “They’re essentially little floppy diving boards with the rings sitting on top,” said team leader Jack Harris, associate professor of physics and applied physics at Yale. The findings appear in the October 9 issue of Science.

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Clever New Device Sees Through Walls

Researchers had a person walk around a square of 28 radio transceivers mounted on plastic pipes. The person creates shadows in the radio waves, resulting in the blob-like image (right). Credit: Sarang Joshi and Joey Wilson, University of Utah.

From Live Science:

A new contraption that essentially sees through walls using radio receivers to track moving objects could one day help police and others nab intruders and rescue hostages or fire victims.

Joey Wilson and Neal Patwari of the University of Utah used so-called radio tomographic imaging (RTI), which can detect and track moving people or other objects in an area surrounded by inexpensive radio transceivers that send and receive signals, they announced today.

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Vegetarian Spider Is First Of Its Kind

It isn't entirely clear why B. kiplingi is able to evade acacia ants, whose goal is to protect the shrub from attacks. Credit: Christopher Meehan

From Cosmos:

NEW YORK: A jumping spider found in Central America is the first known species to subsist primarily on plants, according to American scientists.

While many spiders eat nectar and a single species has been observed eating pollen in addition to insects, Bagheera kiplingi dines almost exclusively on 'Beltian bodies', protein- and lipid-rich structures located on the tips of acacia shrub leaves.

Out of about 41,000 known species it is the sole spider to maintain a nearly vegetarian diet.

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Solar Power Outshining Colorado's Gas Industry

From Time Magazine:

(DURANGO, Colo.) — The sun had just crested the distant ridge of the Rocky Mountains, but already it was producing enough power for the electric meter on the side of the Smiley Building to spin backward.

For the Shaw brothers, who converted the downtown arts building and community center into a miniature solar power plant two years ago, each reverse rotation subtracts from their monthly electric bill. It also means the building at that moment is producing more electricity from the sun than it needs.

"Backward is good," said John Shaw, who now runs Shaw Solar and Energy Conservation, a local solar installation company.

Good for whom?

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From Twitter To MySpace, Social Networks Are Now Run By Women Over 35

From Times Online:

Social-networking sites, like much of the internet, were once a playground for young men. They were drowning in obscure jargon, long rants and, of course, pornography. But nowadays, it is a growing brigade of thirty- and fortysomethings who are behind their extraordinary growth.

Famous users such as Sarah Brown are among those non-teenage women who are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and Twitter. New figures show that female users now dominate social-networking sites, and those aged 35 and over are among the fastest-growing demographic for many social networks.

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Rogue Satellites To Be Cleared From Earth's Orbit By German Robots

From The Guardian:

German-built robots are to be sent into Earth's orbit to repair 'dead satellites' or push them into outer space.

Robots that rescue failing satellites and push "dead" ones into outer space should be ready in four years, it has emerged. Experts described the development by German scientists as a crucial step in preventing a disaster in the Earth's crowded orbit.

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Pictured: The Independence Day-Shaped Cloud Hovering In The Skies Over Moscow

Luminous: The pale halo-shaped cloud was hovering over Moscow on Wednesday

From The Daily Mail:

In what could have been a scene from the film Independence Day, a luminous ring-shaped cloud could be seen hovering over the city of Moscow last week.

The pale gold 'halo' could be seen above the Russian capital city's Western District on Wednesday, and was captured on film by stunned Muscovites.

Meteorologists rejected any theories of the supernatural however, calling it an optical effect.

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Building A Second Sun: Take $10 Billion, Add Coconuts

From New Scientist:

THE balmy south of France has always been a magnet for sun worshippers. So it is perhaps fitting that here, not far from the Côte d'Azur, an international team of researchers is building a machine to recreate the sun. It will take tens of thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, plus a whole host of more unusual materials: beryllium, niobium, titanium and tungsten; frigid liquid nitrogen and helium. Oh, and a supply of burnt coconuts.

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Downed Facebook Accounts Still Haven't Returned

From CNET:

Something is really odd here.

As a reporter covering Facebook, I do get the occasional cranky complaints from members who, for one reason or another, are experiencing errors when they try to access their accounts. But it's never been anything like the past week, with a steady stream of e-mails continuing to come in from Facebook members who say they remain shut out of their accounts--despite assurance from Facebook that profiles have not been deleted and that the company is working on the problem.

"This is now seven days and counting," an e-mail sent on Saturday morning read. "It's beyond ridiculous and extremely frustrating."

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Tiny 'Nuclear Batteries' Unveiled

From The BBC:

Researchers have demonstrated a penny-sized "nuclear battery" that produces energy from the decay of radioisotopes.

As radioactive substances decay, they release charged particles that when properly harvested can create an electrical current.

Nuclear batteries have been in use for military and aerospace applications, but are typically far larger.

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Montreal Underground -- A Look Back In History

The Pointe-à-Callière Museum

From Archaeology Magazine:

This past August I traveled to Montreal for Archaeo (Archaeology) Month, which is celebrated throughout the province of Quebec. On my first day in Montreal, I met with Louise Pothier, project manager for the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History. The museum, better known as Pointe-à-Callière and affectionately referred to as the PAC Musée, is located in Old Montreal on the very spot of the city's birthplace on May 17, 1642, and opened exactly 350 years later on May 17, 1992.

PAC Musée is situated on a point of land where the Little Saint Pierre River once ran into the St. Lawrence River. Chevalier Louis Hector de Callière, the third governor of Montreal, built a home on the site in 1688. The museum is situated atop remains of the first French settlement here, Fort Ville Marie (1642-1674), and its permanent exhibition is titled, "Where Montreal was Born."

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My Comment: This probably does not interest 99% of the readership for this blog .... but as a Montrealer who visited this museum today .... it is so cool.

New Technology Detects Chemical Weapons In Seconds

Preparation of a solution of sensor nanoparticles. (Credit: Image courtesy of Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)

From Science Daily:

Scientists at Queen's University Belfast are developing new sensors to detect chemical agents and illegal drugs which will help in the fight against the threat of terrorist attacks.

The devices will use special gel pads to 'swipe' an individual or crime scene to gather a sample which is then analysed by a scanning instrument that can detect the presence of chemicals within seconds. This will allow better, faster decisions to be made in response to terrorist threats.

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Birth Rates Rise in Wealthiest Nations

From Live Science:

For decades, demographers have reported that the more developed a country is in terms of wealth, health, and living standards, the lower its citizens' fertility rate — so much so that most rich European and North American nations cannot sustain their populations without immigration. (The United States is a notable exception.) Eco-activists tend to welcome such news, foreseeing an end to overpopulation. But many economists and sociologists worry, because low fertility rates entail population aging, which often brings on socio-economic problems.

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Biggest News You’ve Never Heard: Earth Isn’t Warming

From Christian Science Monitor:

How do you reconcile the early snow in Minneapolis, ski resorts already opening in Nevada, and that August chill in North Dakota with expert warnings about a warming climate?

You don’t. Why? The Earth isn’t warming right now, is why. It may even be cooling down somewhat.

Five major climate centers around the world agree that average global temperatures have not risen in the past 11 years, according to the BBC. In fact, in eight of those years, global average temperatures dipped a tad.

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Laliberte Still Has His Head In The Stars

Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte smiles shortly after his landing with the members of the mission to the International space station, Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, not seen, near the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Yuri Kochetkov, Pool)

From CNews/Canadian Press:

MONTREAL - Back from his trip in space, Circus magnate Guy Laliberte said Sunday he'll soon be ready to follow up on the outcome of the two-hour extravaganza of poetry, science and dance that he orchestrated from orbit.

"As you know, I was on a personal mission which was to create an event to talk about the situation of water in the world," he said in an interview broadcast Sunday on NASA TV.

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LHC Test Could Lead to Hyperdrive Space Propulsion (Well, In Theory)

Muon Chambers The Atlas Experiment

From Popular Science:

Add one more thing to the list of mysteries, theories, and unsubstantiated ideas that will be confirmed/denied/debunked if CERN ever gets the Large Hadron Collider up and running: hyperdrive spacecraft propulsion.

In 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert published a paper noting a pretty amazing side effect to Einstein's relativity: a relativistic particle moving faster than about half the speed of light should be repelled by a stationary mass (or at least it would appear to be repelled, to an inertial observer watching from afar).

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The Era of Nanoparticle Drugs Begins With Erection Cream

Photo: Nanoparticles filled with nitric oxide
Courtesy of Albert Einstein College of Medicine

From Discover Magazine:

Tiny drug-carrying balls of sugar are delivering medicine in novel—and very useful—ways.

Over a thousand years ago, Mesopotamian artisans stumbled on a new way to add a special sheen to their ceramics: using microscopic pieces of metal. This "luster" was the first known use of nanoparticles—tiny objects that are less than 100 nanometers long in all three dimensions. In modern times, nanoparticles have emerged as a useful tool in medicine, with uses from providing the active ingredient in sunscreen (nano-scale particles of titanium dioxide), to stimulating blood vessel growth as an aid to healing, to delivering the key ingredients in artificial hearts (nanocrystalline zirconium oxide) and brain imaging (magnetic nanoparticles).

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7% Of U.S. H1N1 Patients in ICUs Died: Study

An electron microscope image shows an A H1N1 swine flu virus culture obtained from a California patient. (C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish/Centers for Disease Control/Reuters)

From CBC:

One quarter of Americans sick enough to be admitted to hospital with swine flu last spring wound up needing intensive care and seven per cent of them died, the first study of the early months of the global epidemic suggests. That's a little higher than with ordinary seasonal flu, several experts said.

What is striking and unusual is that children and teens accounted for nearly half of the hospitalization cases, including many who were previously healthy. The study did not give a breakdown of deaths by age.

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Rapidly Erupting Volcanoes Pose Major Risk

A huge cloud of ash spewed from the Chaiten volcano, some 1,300 km south of Santiago when it erupted in 2008. Credit: AFP

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Magma from a Chilean volcano shot through Earth's crust at around a metre per second, a speed highlighting the perils from so-called rhyolitic volcanoes, says a new study.

Volcanoes in this category provide some of Earth's most explosive events. They are characterised by a dome of hardened magma which covers their central vent and can blow with catastrophic force, often with scant warning.

They include Vesuvius, Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens - names that have gone down in history for inflicting loss of life and massive damage.

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Timing the Singularity

From The Futurist:

The Singularity. The event when the rate of technological change becomes human-surpassing, just as the advent of human civilization a few millenia ago surpassed the comprehension of non-human creatures. So when will this event happen?

There is a great deal of speculation on the 'what' of the Singularity, whether it will create a utopia for humans, cause the extinction of humans, or some outcome in between. Versions of optimism (Star Trek) and pessimism (The Matrix, Terminator) all become fashionable at some point. No one can predict this reliably, because the very definition of the singularity itself precludes such prediction. Given the accelerating nature of technological change, it is just as hard to predict the world of 2050 from 2009, as it would have been to predict 2009 from, say, 1200 AD. So our topic today is not going to be about the 'what', but rather the 'when' of the Singularity.

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Range Of Peak Oil Dates All Too Soon To Prepare?

From Future Pundit:

The range of dates over which Peak Oil is expected to happen does not provide enough time for governments to prepare policies mitigate the impacts.

The debate over exactly when we will reach "peak oil" is irrelevant. No matter what new oil fields we discover, global oil production will start declining in 2030 at the very latest.

That's the conclusion of the most comprehensive report to date on global oil production, published on 7 October by the UK Energy Research Centre.

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How To Get More Bicyclists On The Road

CYCLE TRACK, here along New York City's Ninth Avenue, keeps bicyclists physically separated from motor vehicle traffic. Such designs make riding safer and could boost the number of women cyclists. Monica Bradley

From Scientific American:

To boost urban bicycling, figure out what women want.

Getting people out of cars and onto bicycles, a much more sustainable form of transportation, has long vexed environmentally conscious city planners. Although bike lanes painted on streets and automobile-free “greenways” have increased ridership over the past few years, the share of people relying on bikes for transportation is still less than 2 percent, based on various studies. An emerging body of research suggests that a superior strategy to increase pedal pushing could be had by asking the perennial question: What do women want?

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U.S. Must Focus On Protecting Critical Computer Networks From Cyber Attack, Experts Urge

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 9, 2009) — Because it will be difficult to prevent cyber attacks on critical civilian and military computer networks by threatening to punish attackers, the United States must focus its efforts on defending these networks from cyber attack, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The study finds that the United States and other nations that rely on externally accessible computer networks—such as ones used for electric power, telephone service, banking, and military command and control—as a foundation for their military and economic power are subject to cyber attack.

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More Than a Storm Chaser

Texas Tech graduate student Sarah Dillingham checks for the green light on a StickNet deployed for a squall line that passed over Reese Technology Center in February 2009. Credit: BCM, Texas Tech University

From Live Science:

This summer, the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment 2 (VORTEX2) brought 80 scientists and crew members and dozens of research vehicles and platforms to the tornado-prone regions of the United States to conduct the most detailed studies to date of tornadoes. Sarah Dillingham was part of that effort, one of the members of Texas Tech’s Multiple Observations of Boundaries In the Local storm Environment (MOBILE) team, helping deploy StickNet mobile sensors in the paths of dangerous storms. VORTEX2 has wound down for the 2009 season, but will re-emerge in 2010. Dillingham offers her thoughts on her first yield of field research as she responds to the ScienceLives 10 Questions below.

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In Search of Chinese Science

The New Atlantis:

One of my schoolmasters was fond of saying that there are only two worthwhile forms of worldly immortality: to get a poem in the Oxford Book of English Verse, or to have a mathematical theorem named after you. The British scholar Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was no better than a passable amateur poet, judging by the handful of verses in Simon Winchester’s biography of him. He did have a scientific training, but it was in biochemistry, not math, so there is no Needham’s Theorem, nor even a Needham Conjecture. He does, though, enjoy the rare distinction of having a Question named for him. Not a mere question, but a Question, one that has generated endless discussion and many theories.

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The Boy Aged Two With Einstein's IQ: Why Little Oscar Is Britain's Youngest Boy To Be Accepted Into Mensa

Little smasher: Oscar Wrigley is the youngest ever member of Mensa,
aged two years and five months

From the Daily Mail:

While other two-year-olds are discovering the joy of playgrounds, Oscar Wrigley would rather be learning about wildlife or the history of Ancient Rome.

He has recently taken to conducting classical music as he listens in the back of the car and identifies the different instruments.

So his parents were not surprised when, at the ripe old age of two years, five months and 11 days, he became the youngest boy in Britain to be accepted by Mensa.

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What Happened To Global Warming?

From The BBC:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

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Chemists Win Nobel Prize For Atom-by-Atom Ribosome Map

The Ribosome

From Popular Science:

Rounding out the 2009 science Nobel Prizes are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath, who will receive the prize in chemistry for their work on an atomic-scale map of the ribosome.

Ribosomes are the cellular organelle responsible for assembling amino acids into proteins. If DNA is the blueprint, ribosomes are the construction workers. Ribosomes themselves are composed of a combination of RNA and specialized proteins.

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I Didn't Sin—It Was My Brain

From Discover:

Brain researchers have found the sources of many of our darkest thoughts, from envy to wrath.

Why does being bad feel so good? Pride, envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It might sound like just one more episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but this enduring formulation of the worst of human failures has inspired great art for thousands of years. In the 14th century Dante depicted ghoulish evildoers suffering for eternity in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Medieval muralists put the fear of God into churchgoers with lurid scenarios of demons and devils. More recently George Balanchine choreographed their dance.

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Unravelling The Secret Of Ageing

Australian researcher Elizabeth Blackburn, whose co-discovery of telomeres has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Credit: Elizabeth Finkel/COSMOS

From Cosmos:

More than 30 years after discovering an enzyme that prevents chromosomes from fraying, Elizabeth Blackburn is still unravelling the mystery of why our cells age.

Elizabeth Blackburn is not a household name. But the string of illustrious science awards she holds already suggest she is a hot favourite for a Nobel Prize. And that's exactly what happened - finally in 2009, more than 27 years after her initial research.

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Bodies In Sync

Photo: Two young bonobos exhibit the ape equivalent of the human laugh, a “play face,” which is accompanied by laugh-like panting sounds. Just as in humans, if one ape laughs others usually do as well, especially during wrestling and tickling games.
Frans de Waal

From Natural History Magazine:

Contagious laughter, yawns, and moods offer insight into empathy’s origins.

One morning, the principal’s voice sounded over the intercom of my high school with the shocking announcement that a popular teacher of French had just died in front of his class. Everyone fell silent. While the headmaster went on to explain that the teacher had suffered a heart attack, I couldn’t keep myself from a laughing fit. To this day, I feel embarrassed.

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Classical Chaos Occurs In The Quantum World, Scientists Find

This image shows the kind of pictures Jessen’s team produces with tomography. The top two spheres are from a selected experimental snapshot taken after 40 cycles of changing the direction of the axis of spin of a cesium atom, the quantum “spinning top.” The two spheres below are theoretical models that agree remarkably with the experimental results. (Credit: Image courtesy of Poul Jessen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — Chaotic behavior is the rule, not the exception, in the world we experience through our senses, the world governed by the laws of classical physics.

Even tiny, easily overlooked events can completely change the behavior of a complex system, to the point where there is no apparent order to most natural systems we deal with in everyday life.

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'First Bird' Not Very Bird-Like

The bones of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx had flattened and parallel bone cells, one of the signs that this bird grew slowly, more like non-avian dinosaurs, researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE. Credit: Gregory Erickson.

From Live Science:

A feathered beast that lived some 150 million years ago and which is considered the first bird likely grew more like its sluggish ancestors, the dinosaurs.

That's according to new analyses of tiny bone chips taken from Archaeopteryx and detailed this week in the journal PLoS ONE. The study researchers estimate a 970-day period from baby Archaeopteryx to an adult. For comparison, birds reach adult size in a matter of weeks.

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Just How Sensitive Is Earth's Climate to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide?

CLIMATE RECORD: The records preserved in stalagmites and ocean fossilsm, such as those harvested from mud cores drilled by the "Resolution" pictured here, suggest that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have an outsized effect on the Earth's climate. © Science / AAAS

From Scientific American:

Two new studies look far back in geologic time to determine how sensitive the global climate is to atmospheric CO2 levels.

Carbon dioxide levels climbing toward a doubling of the 280 parts per million (ppm) concentration found in the preindustrial atmosphere pose the question: What impact will this increased greenhouse gas load have on the climate? If relatively small changes in CO2 levels have big effects—meaning that we live in a more sensitive climate system—the planet could warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius on average with attendant results such as changed weather patterns and sea-level rise. A less sensitive climate system would mean average warming of less than 2 degrees C and, therefore, fewer ramifications from global warming.

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Word Has It That eReaders Will Open The Next Chapter

From Times Online:

Microsoft and Apple are about to follow the tablet trend.

TRAVELLING between airports has given analyst Jon Peddie lots of time to study tech trends. There was the rise of the mobile, laptops, the iPod, the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

Now Peddie, who runs California-based Jon Peddie Research, sees another change coming: the rise of the eReader.

Laptops are becoming less popular, he reckons, and even netbooks are fading. The new must-have is an eReader.

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The Evolving Face Of Social Networks

Illustration: Gennady Kurbat/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Laura Parker: What can evolutionary graph theory teach us about the spread of ideas on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?

It seems that everyone is excited about social networks. But not quite in the same way as Harvard graduate student Erez Lieberman, whose evolutionary graph theory is encouraging people to think about social networks in a different way: as an evolving population.

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Overrated Optimism: The Peril of Positive Thinking

Tom Stewart / CORBIS

From Time Magazine:

If you're craving a quick hit of optimism, reading a news magazine is probably not the best way to go about finding it. As the life coaches and motivational speakers have been trying to tell us for more than a decade now, a healthy, positive mental outlook requires strict abstinence from current events in all forms. Instead, you should patronize sites like Happynews.com, where the top international stories of the week include "Jobless Man Finds Buried Treasure" and "Adorable 'Teacup Pigs' Are Latest Hit with Brits."

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Super-Efficient BMW Concepts Are Simple and Clever

From Autopia/Wired:

BMW, the company that brought you Gina, that wild shape-shifting concept car made of cloth, went even further off the deep end with a pair of wacky concepts making their debut at the company museum in Munich.

The cars, dubbed “Simple” and “Clever” — acronyms that we’ll explain in a moment — are über-small, über-light three-wheelers that are supposed to show just how far down the efficiency road BMW can go. The Bavarians say Simple is “light in weight, low on energy” and Clever gives you “cooperative driving pleasure.”

We say, WTF?

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Volcanoes Wiped Out All Forests 250 Million Years Ago

Trees damaged by the effects of toxic acid rain in the highly polluted area known as the "Black Triangle" are seen in northern Czechoslovakia in 1991. A similar treeless landscape full of wood-eating fungi dominated Earth about 250 million years ago, when acid rain from a volcanic eruption killed off most life on Earth. Photograph by Tom Stoddart/Getty Images

From National Geographic:

Massive volcanic eruptions wiped out the world's forests about 250 million years ago, leaving the planet teeming with wood-eating fungi, according to a new study.

The finding confirms that even hardy trees didn't survive the Permian mass extinction, one of the most devastating losses of life Earth has ever known.

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The Green Case For Cities

From The Atlantic:

Nowhere has the greening message had a bigger impact than in the building industry. Green or sustainable architecture is all the rage—as well it should be, because buildings use a lot of energy. The construction and operation of residential and commercial buildings consume as much as 40 percent of the energy used in the United States today.

The calculation of a building’s total environmental impact must factor in everything from annual energy consumption to how and where building materials are manufactured and the handling of storm water. This requires some sort of rating system, and there are currently more than 40 of them in use around the world.

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NASA's Future of Space Exploration (In Pictures)

NASA's Space Shuttle has been the United States government's spacecraft for human spaceflight missions since the early 1980's, but the Space Shuttle program is scheduled to be retired in 2010. The space agency began eliminating manufacturing jobs in May 2009 with only nine Space Shuttle missions remaining. John Raoux/AP/FILE

Cool Science News Editor: These pictures are from the Christian Science Monitor. To see more, the link is here.

New Way to Tap Gas May Expand Global Supplies

Engineers and geologists are learning how to extract natural gas from layers of shale, a sediment. Matt Nager for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

OKLAHOMA CITY — A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.

Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.

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Major Step Forward In Cell Reprogramming, Researchers Report

Lee Rubin, director of translational medicine at HSCI and the other senior author on the research team, said that "our goals were to try to as discretely and specifically as possible guide the cells through the deprogramming process" from the adult state to the embryonic-like state. (Credit: Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2009) — A team of Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers has made a major advance toward producing induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, that are safe enough to use in treating diseases in patients.

“This demonstrates that we’re halfway home, and remarkably we got halfway home with just one chemical,” said Kevin Eggan, an HSCI principal faculty member who is the senior author of the paper being published online today by the journal Cell Stem Cell.

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Computers Faster Only For 75 More Years

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (ISNS) -- With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast -- except they can't. A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we'll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.

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Rand Study: It Ain’t The Big Macs That Make The Poor Fat

From Don Surber/Daily Mail:

The city of Los Angeles banned new or expansions to fast-food restaurants in low-income areas as the politicians blamed the food for obesity rather than the mouths.

The whole song and dance is that eating healthy is expensive. It is not. My mother made do raising 5 kids on barely above minimum wage pay.

A study by the Rand Corporation found that far from preying on the poor, fast-food outlets avoid those neighborhoods because of crime and well, the customers don’t have much money.

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Pandemic Payoff From 1918: A Weaker H1N1 Flu Today

Past vaccinations and previous infection by interrelated viruses may account for the mildness of the new H1N1 swine flu. Bettmann CORBIS

From Scientific American:

How the legacy of the vicious 1918 outbreak led to today's comparatively tame swine flu.

Although the swine flu outbreak of 2009 is still in full swing, this global influenza epidemic, the fourth in 100 years, is already teaching scientists valuable lessons about pandemics past, those that might have been and those that still might be. Evidence accumulated this summer indicates that the novel H1N1 swine flu virus was not entirely new to all human immune systems. Some researchers have even come to see the current outbreak as a flare-up in an ongoing pandemic era that started when the first H1N1 emerged in 1918.

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