How Arlington National Cemetery Came To Be

From The Smithsonian:

The fight over Robert E. Lee's beloved home—seized by the U.S. government during the Civil War—went on for decades

One afternoon in May 1861, a young Union Army officer went rushing into the mansion that commanded the hills across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. "You must pack up all you value immediately and send it off in the morning," Lt. Orton Williams told Mary Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee, who was away mobilizing Virginia's military forces as the country hurtled toward the bloodiest war in its history.

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Time Travel Through The Brain

From Technology Review:

Over the last 100 years, the way we visualize and understand the complexity of the brain has evolved.

Over the 100-year history of modern neuroscience, the way we think about the brain has evolved with the sophistication of the techniques available to study it. Improvements in microscope design and manufacture, together with the development of cell-staining techniques, afforded neuroscientists their first glimpse at the specialized cells that make up the nervous system. Microscopes with more magnifying power enabled them to probe nerve cells in greater detail, revealing distinct compartments. Newer techniques expose the connections between nerve cells, revealing the complex organization of the brain.

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Awesome Pictures Of Saturn

From 20 degrees above the ring plane, Cassini's wide angle camera shot 75 exposures in succession for this mosaic showing Saturn, its rings, and a few of its moons a day and a half after exact Saturn equinox, when the sun's disk was exactly overhead at the planet's equator. The images were taken on Aug. 12, 2009, at a distance of approximately 847,000 km (526,000 mi) from Saturn. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Saturn At Equinox -- Boston.com

Checking in with NASA's Cassini spacecraft, our current emissary to Saturn, some 1.5 billion kilometers (932 million miles) distant from Earth, we find it recently gathering images of the Saturnian system at equinox. During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn's rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images. Cassini continues to orbit Saturn, part of its extended Equinox Mission, funded through through September 2010. A proposal for a further extension is under consideration, one that would keep Cassini in orbit until 2017, ending with a spectacular series of orbits inside the rings followed by a suicide plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. (previously: 1, 2, 3). (23 photos total)

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Science Proves That Women Will Look Like Their Mothers When They Get Older

Generations ... Joy Whiting, daughter Amanda Masters and granddaughter Minnie.
Source: The Daily Telegraph

From The Daily Telegraph:

IT'S a question many women ask ... will they look like their mothers when they get older. Now science has provided the answer ... they will.

Plastic surgeons have used new technology to study the ageing process.

For the first time, surgeons in the US used 3D photographic images to quantify the differences in 29 pairs of mothers and daughters who were perceived as similar.

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Solar Superpower: Should Europe Run On Sahara Sun?

More energy than we could ever possibly need, but how can we tap into it?
(Image: Chris Anderson/Aurora/Plainpicture)

From New Scientist:

EVERY two weeks, the sun pours more energy onto the surface of our planet than we use from all sources in an entire year. It is an inexhaustible powerhouse that has remained largely untapped for human energy needs. That may soon change in a big way. If a consortium of German companies has its way, construction of the biggest solar project ever devised could soon begin in the Sahara desert. When completed, it would harvest energy from the sun shining over Africa and transform it into clean, green electricity for delivery to European homes and businesses.

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Augmented Reality Goggles Make Marine Mechanics More Efficient

AR Goggles Seeing the world differently through augmented reality, and becoming more efficient to boot Steven Feiner and Steven Henderson

From Popular Science:

Jarheads work almost 50 percent faster wearing heads-up display goggles that replace technical manuals.

New augmented reality goggles are helping Marine mechanics perform maintenance on vehicles in about half the usual time. The futuristic headgear displays precise instructions on top of real-world settings, and shows how to complete certain tasks, such as wiring up an ignition coil.

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My Comment: Something tells me that this headgear must cost a fortune.

Bumper Brains -- A Commentary

Credit: Andrew Lee/COSMOS

From Cosmos Magazine:

Science can help us stretch the limits of the human mind: but should we embrace brain enhancement, despite the risks?

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA in San Diego, researcher Mark Tuszynski and his colleagues have been studying the use of genetically modified neurons in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. In 2001, the scientists implanted neurons carrying extra copies of a gene that codes for nerve growth factor, or NGF, into the brains of patients.

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Mantis Shrimp Eyes Could Show Way To Better DVD And CD players

A mantis shrimp takes a peep from it's burrow in the Sulu sea.
(Credit: iStockphoto/Richard Ng)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 26, 2009) — The remarkable eyes of a marine crustacean could inspire the next generation of DVD and CD players, according to a new study from the University of Bristol published today in Nature Photonics.

The mantis shrimps in the study are found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and have the most complex vision systems known to science. They can see in twelve colours (humans see in only three) and can distinguish between different forms of polarized light.

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Investigator Checks Out Haunted House For Sale

A haunted house in Cuchillo, New Mexico, being sold on eBay. Credit: Benjamin Radford

From Live Science:

There is no shortage of people seeking to turn ghosts into gold and spooks into silver. Hundreds of amateur ghost-hunting groups across the country offer tours of local haunts, allegedly spirit-infested hotels, mansions, cemeteries, and so on.

Ghosts generate a lot of green.

One of the most enterprising ghost entrepreneurs is an artist named Josh Bond, who lives in the tiny New Mexican town of Cuchillo. Bond is offering a genuine haunted house for sale — on eBay.

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New Processor Will Feature 100 Cores

From Gadget Lab:

Forget dual-core and quad-core processors: A semiconductor company promises to pack 100 cores into a processor that can be used in applications that require hefty computing punch, like video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking. By comparison, Intel’s latest chips are expected to have just eight cores.

“This is a general purpose chip that can run off-the-shelf programs almost unmodified,” says Anant Agarwal, chief technical officer of Tilera, the company that is making the 100-core chip. “And we can do that while offering at least four times the compute performance of an Intel Nehalem-Ex, while burning a third of the power as a Nehalem.”

The 100-core processor, fabricated using 40-nanometer technology, is expected to be available early next year.

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Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips On How To Learn

CAN TWO WRONGS MAKE A RIGHT?: Not knowing the answer can be a good thing.
Magdalena Tworkowska

From Scientific American:

New research makes the case for hard tests, and suggests an unusual technique that anyone can use to learn.

For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.

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Best & Worst Destinations Rated, 2009

Photograph by Andrew H. Brown, National Geographic Stock

From National Geographic:

Still waters in Norang Fjord, shown in an undated picture, reflect the "well-preserved Norwegian rural life" that helped the region take top honors in the sixth annual "Destinations Rated" scorecard compiled by the National Geographic Society's Center for Sustainable Destinations.

The center convened an independent panel of 437 experts in fields from historic preservation and sustainable tourism to travel writing and archaeology to assess 133 iconic places around the world.

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End Of An Era For Early Websites

From BBC News:

A service that gave many people their first taste of building and owning a web page is set to close.

Yahoo-owned GeoCities once boasted millions of users and was the third most popular destination on the web.

The free site has since fallen out of fashion with users, who have switched to social networks.

Yahoo, which acquired the site for $3.57bn (£2.17bn) in 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom, said sites would no longer be accessible from 26th October.

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Video: Army’s Robot-Man Walks Like the Real Thing

From The Danger Room:

The makers of the eerily lifelike robotic mule have a new creation: a machine that walks around like a real human being. Boston Dynamics is building the “Petman” prototype for the U.S. Army, to test out protective clothing.

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LHC Reawakens, Sending Proton Beams Running At The Speed of Light

Recovery: Repairwork in an above-ground warehouse on the French-Swiss border Cern's damaged magnets underwent repairs at a nearby above-ground site. This man is working on the end of a dipole magnet, which contains six conductors, each of which carried 8,000 amps but were capable of conducting up to 13,000. In superconducting magnets like this one, the internal materials are kept at some of the lowest temperatures imaginable, decreasing resistance and allowing them to generate electricity with virtually no loss of heat. Courtesy Cern

From Popular Science:

Over the weekend, Cern ran particle beams through the Large Hadron Collider for the first time since it was shut down last September. After a helium leak caused magnets to overheat, operations at the LHC were suspended for cleanup and repairs. After tests on October 23 and 25, scientists hope to have the LHC running again in full by November.

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What Dangers Lurk in WWII-Era Nuclear Dumps?

Marker for the first nuclear test at Los Alamos

From Discover Magazine:

Here’s one direct and obvious effect of the economic stimulus package passed in February: The toxic sites where scientists ushered in the nuclear age are getting cleaned up. In Los Alamos, New Mexico, a dump that contains refuse of the Manhattan Project and that was sealed up decades ago is finally being explored, thanks to $212 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

But experts aren’t sure what they’ll find inside the dump. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II [The New York Times]. It may also contain explosive chemicals that could have become more dangerous over the years of burial.

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My Comment: Long after the war has ended, it's left overs are still affecting us.

A Few Coffees A Day Keeps Liver Disease At Bay

Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos Magazine/AFP:

WASHINGTON DC: Researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute have found another good reason to go to the local espresso bar: several cups of coffee a day could halt the progression of liver disease.

Sufferers of chronic hepatitis C and advanced liver disease, who drank three or more cups of coffee per day, slashed their risk of the disease progressing by 53% compared to patients who drank no coffee, the study led by medical scientist Neal Freedman showed.

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Controversial Study Suggests Vast Magma Pool Under Washington State

From McClatchy News:

WASHINGTON -- A vast pool of molten rock in the continental crust that underlies southwestern Washington state could supply magma to three active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains -- Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier and Mount Adams -- according to a new study that's causing a stir among scientists.

The study, published Sunday in the magazine Nature Geoscience, concluded that the magma pool among the three mountains could be the "most widespread magma-bearing area of continental crust discovered so far."

Other scientists dismiss the existence of an underground vat of magma covering potentially hundreds of square miles as "farfetched" and "highly unlikely." Rather than magma heated to 1,300 to 1,400 degrees, some think it could be water.

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Biofuel Displacing Food Crops May Have Bigger Carbon Impact Than Thought

MBL senior scientist Jerry Melillo and his colleagues have found that carbon emissions from land-use change caused by the displacement of food crops and pastures by a global biofuels program may be twice as much as emissions from lands directly devoted to biofuels production. (Credit: Chris Neill, MBL)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 25, 2009) — A report examining the impact of a global biofuels program on greenhouse gas emissions during the 21st century has found that carbon loss stemming from the displacement of food crops and pastures for biofuels crops may be twice as much as the CO2 emissions from land dedicated to biofuels production. The study, led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Jerry Melillo, also predicts that increased fertilizer use for biofuels production will cause nitrous oxide emissions (N2O) to become more important than carbon losses, in terms of warming potential, by the end of the century.

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Fraud, Errors And Misconceptions In Medical Research

From Live Science:

Three years after being charged for fraud, misusing state funds and violating bioethics laws, disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk was convicted today on fraud charges, according to Reuters (The Washington Post said he was cleared of fraud but convicted on other charges).

Whichever, the court determined he has repented and so handed down a 2-year suspended sentence, according to media reports.

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Yahoo Mail Outages Plague Some Users

From CNET:

Yahoo Mail users reported some problems Monday morning, with the service inaccessible for some and spotty for others.

Techcrunch noticed a Twitter spike in reports of problems with Yahoo Mail, and another company called Downrightnow also reported problems accessing the service over the last several hours. Several CNET employees reported that they were able to access their in-boxes, but mine is unavailable. Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo's home page appeared to be working fine.

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Ten Years After Napster, Music Industry Still Faces the (Free) Music

From Epicenter:

A full decade after Napster taught the world to share, the music industry’s resistance to new business models continues to obstruct some of the very services that could preserve it, albeit in a smaller, more efficient form.

The future of music over the next ten years depends on finding the right mix between “free” and “paid,” luring fans away from file sharing networks by offering them services that are faster, easier, and more convenient without asking them to subsidize the industry’s return to CD era profits.

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Does Economics Violate The Laws Of Physics?

ECONOMIC GROWTH: Does constant economic growth contradict the laws of physics?
© iStockphoto.com

From Scientific American:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today's dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?

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Comets Didn't Wipe Out Sabertooths, Early Americans?

North America's Great Lakes (pictured in an aerial shot on May 4, 2002) were created during glacial retreats and advances over millions of years—including the brief cold snap called the Younger Dryas, which occurred about 12,900 years ago. What caused the cold snap, though, has proved controversial: Recent research has weakened a theory that a giant comet caused the drop in temperatures and wiped out much of North America's wildlife, scientists said in October 2009. Photograph courtesy Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

From National Geographic:

A comet impact didn't set off a 1,300-year cold snap that wiped out most life in North America about 12,900 years ago, scientists say.

Though no one disputes the frigid period, more and more researchers have been unable to confirm a 2007 finding that says a collision triggered the change, known as the Younger Dryas.

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S Korea Clone Scientist Convicted

Photo: Hwang Woo-suk was a hero in South Korea until the revelations of fraud.

From BBC:

A South Korean court has convicted the disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk of embezzlement over his stem cell research.

He was given a two-year sentence suspended for three years.

The 56-year-old scientist's work had raised hopes of finding cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's.

But his research was declared bogus in 2005, and he was put on trial the following year for embezzlement and accepting money under false pretences.

Hwang's research made him a South Korean hero until revelations that it was false shocked the nation.

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Who Killed All Those Honeybees? We Did

iStockphoto

From Discovery:

The great bee die-off is not such a mystery after all: Industrial agriculture has stressed our pollinators to the breaking point.

It was mid-July, and Sam Comfort was teetering at the top of a 20-foot ladder, desperately trying to extract a cluster of furious honeybees from a squirrel house in rural Dutchess County, New York. Four stingers had already landed on his face, leaving welts along the fringe of his thick brown beard. That morning, the owner of the squirrel house had read an article in the local paper about Comfort’s interest in collecting feral honey­bees, so he called and invited him over. Commercial bee colonies, faced with massive mortality rates, are not faring so well these days, and unmanaged hives like this one could be their salvation. Comfort hurried over, eager to capture the hive’s queen and bring her home for monitoring and, if she fares well, breeding.

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For the First Time, Geneticists Diagnose Disease Through Whole-Genome Analysis

DNA Helix ynse

From Popular Science:

For the first time, researchers have made a clinical diagnosis by sequencing the entire protein-coding parts of a person's genome.

"We have shown that one can use whole genome sequencing to make clinically meaningful diagnoses- it is technically feasible . . . and can provide new clinical insight that directs treatment," Richard Lifton, a geneticist at Yale who spearheaded the research, told Popsci.com.

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How Galileo And His Spyglass Turned The World On Its Head

The humble wooden contraption with which Galileo made the astronomical discoveries that would transform science Photo: Florence, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza

From The Telegraph:

Today it would hardly pass muster as a child's plaything, but the telescope Galileo used 400 years ago this week to peer into the heavens overturned the foundations of knowledge, changing our perception of the universe and our place in it.

Galileo's "optick tube" had a meagre 9x magnification and was not even conceived for astronomy.

Indeed, when the gadget was first demonstrated, Venetian senators were so smitten with its military potential that they doubled Galileo's salary and awarded him a life tenure in the city-state's most prestigious university.

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Time-Keeping Brain Neurons Discovered

Keeping track of time is one of the brain's most important tasks. As the brain processes the flood of sights and sounds it encounters, it must also remember when each event occurred. But how does that happen? How does your brain recall that you brushed your teeth before you took a shower, and not the other way around? (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 23, 2009) — Keeping track of time is one of the brain's most important tasks. As the brain processes the flood of sights and sounds it encounters, it must also remember when each event occurred. But how does that happen? How does your brain recall that you brushed your teeth before you took a shower, and not the other way around?

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Cleanliness May Foster Morality

From Live Science:

A simple spritz of a fresh-smelling window cleaner made people more fair and generous in a new study.

The researchers figure cleanliness fosters morality.

They conducted fairness tests, with subjects completing tasks in a room that was either unscented or one that was sprayed with a common citrus-scented window cleaner.

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Mum's the Word for NASA's Secret Space Plane X-37B

Artist concept of the X-37 advanced technology flight demonstrator
re-entering Earth's atmosphere. NASA

From FOX News:

You would think that an unpiloted space plane built to rocket spaceward from Florida atop an Atlas booster, circle the planet for an extended time, then land on autopilot on a California runway would be big news. But for the U.S. Air Force X-37B project — seemingly, mum's the word.

There is an air of vagueness regarding next year's Atlas Evolved Expendable launch of the unpiloted, reusable military space plane. The X-37B will be cocooned within the Atlas rocket's launch shroud — a ride that's far from cheap.

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Where Will The Next Five Big Earthquakes Be?

Joseph Sohm / Visions of America / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Earthquakes have always been part of Los Angeles' past — and its future. In 1994 a 6.7-magnitude quake hit the Northridge area of the city, badly damaging freeways, killing more than 70 people and causing $20 billion in damages. But those numbers could be dwarfed by a major quake in the future. The geologic record indicates that huge quakes occur roughly every 150 years in the region — Los Angeles lies along the southern end of the San Andreas Fault — and the last big quake, which registered a magnitude 7.9, happened in 1857. Los Angeles has done a lot to beef up its building codes and emergency response in the 15 years since the Northridge quake and may be better prepared than any other major American city, but the city's sheer size ensures the next Big One will be bloody.

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Europe's Earliest Road Atlas – From 1675

Auctioneer Charles Ashton with the first national road atlas
which is going under the hammer Photo: MASONS

From The Telegraph:

The first road atlas of its kind in western Europe, a 17th century book showing a highway network in England and Wales of just 73 roads, is to be sold at auction for up to £9,000.

The route atlas, published in 1675, includes 100 double pages of black and white maps laid out in continuous strips depicting the major roads and crossroads across England and Wales.

The work by John Ogilby – Britannia Volume the First, or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales – also marks the first time in England that an atlas was prepared on a uniform scale, at one inch to a mile.

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Are Men Smarter Than Women? Global Trivial Pursuit Experiment Reignites Battle Of The Sexes

Men vs women: Who will top the trivia tree?
Answer questions correctly to earn points for your team

From The Daily Mail:

As competitive families around the world will attest, a nice leisurely game of Trivial Pursuit at Christmas can quickly descend into a heated contest.

Now Hasbro, the company behind the popular board game, has pitted men against women in an experiment to see just who is smart in the ultimate battle of the sexes.

'Trivial Pursuit wanted to conduct an experiment to see if trivia can answer the age-old question,' said Senior Brand Manager Hayden West.

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NASA’s Ares 1-X Rocket Is Looking Good For Tuesday Launch

NASA: Next generation. NASA's slender white Ares 1-X towers some 327 feet above its launch pad, with the space shuttle Atlantis in the distance being prepared for a November launch. When (or if) completed, the Ares 1 and its Orion crew capsule will become NASA's newest taxi to low-Earth orbit. (NASA)

From Christian Science Monitor:

NASA’s Ares 1-X rocket is standing tall on the pad, waiting for what NASA managers hope will be its 2 minutes of fame.

That’s about how long Ares 1-X will remain in the sky during its up-and-down test flight, currently scheduled for Oct. 27. The launch is set for 8 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, so grab a cup of your favorite hot beverage, pull up a chair, and see what happens to the first new rocket NASA’s order up in nearly 30 years.

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Carefully Cleaning Up The Garbage At Los Alamos

Technical Area 21 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, during a brief morning rain and hail storm. Mark Holm for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

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Spencer: AGW Has Most Of The Characteristics Of An “Urban Legend”

Urban legend? Gators don't really live in the sewer.

From Watts Up With That?

About.com describes an “urban legend” as an apocryphal (of questionable authenticity), secondhand story, told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific…series of events….it’s likely to be framed as a cautionary tale. Whether factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of evidence, however, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources.

I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

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Okay, How BIG Is Antarctica?

Okay, how BIG is Antarctica? Do you have a mental picture? No? Well, here it is, courtesy NASA.

NASA Ares Rocket Development To Take Too Long

From Future Pundit:

An article in New Scientist about the NASA Ares rocket program reports that a White House advisory panel chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine recommends against further development of the Ares rocket because it will take too long to develop.

The rocket is set to make its first test flight on 27 October. But the committee believes the rocket will not be ready to loft crew to orbit until 2017, two years after the ISS is scheduled to be abandoned and hurled into the Pacific Ocean, Augustine said. Extending use of the space station to 2020 would not make much difference, since this would eat up funds available for Ares I and delay its first flight to 2018 or 2019, added committee member Edward Crawley of MIT.

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Color Differences Within And Between Species Have Common Genetic Origin

Body hair difference is more pronounced between chimpanzees and humans than within our own species. Biologists have puzzled over the same genes cause both types of variation, not just with respect to people, chimps and body hair, but for all sorts of traits that differ within and between species. New research shows that, at least for body color in fruit flies, the two kinds of variation have a common genetic basis. (Credit: iStockphoto/Warwick Lister-Kaye)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 25, 2009) — Spend a little time people-watching at the beach and you're bound to notice differences in the amount, thickness and color of people's body hair. Then head to the zoo and compare people to chimps, our closest living relatives.

The body hair difference is even more pronounced between the two species than within our own species.

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Evidence Alexander The Great Wasn't First At Alexandria

Detail from the Alexander mosaic. From the House of the Faun, Pompeii, c. 80 B.C. Credit: National Archaeologic Museum, Naples, Italy

From Live Science:

Alexander the Great has long been credited with being the first to settle the area along Egypt's coast that became the great port city of Alexandria. But in recent years, evidence has been mounting that other groups of people were there first.

The latest clues that settlements existed in the area for several hundred years before Alexander the Great come from microscopic bits of pollen and charcoal in ancient sediment layers.

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Solar Snafu: The Contractor Finally Installs The Panels, But Goofs

From Scientific American:

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

The first message I got from my wife last week was happy news indeed: “Solar guys are working on our roof!” As readers of this blog know, we’d started the process of installing solar panels back in February, and we had no idea what were getting ourselves into. The red tape for the state and utility subsidies took through the end of May. Then we had to get our roof restored, which added a couple of months. In early July, I told myself, the wait was over. How wrong I was.

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Seven Questions That Keep Physicists Up At Night

From New Scientist:

It's not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night?"

The discussion was part of "Quantum to Cosmos", a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.

While most panelists professed to sleep very soundly, here are seven key conundrums that emerged during the session, which can be viewed here.

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Blood Test Offers More Accurate Picture of Health

From Technology Review:

A Seattle company is developing rapid tests for thousands of proteins.

With $30 million in recent financing, a Seattle-based company has launched operations to develop and market inexpensive tests for thousands of blood proteins, offering a comprehensive picture of the health of all the body's organs. The Seattle startup, called Integrated Diagnostics, is developing cheap diagnostics that work in minutes and could be used to detect diseases at early, more treatable stages. The company's technology has been in development for the past nine years in labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. The company hopes to provide tests for early diagnosis of neurological disorders and other diseases.

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Evan Williams On Twitter's Vision For The Future

'Search is a huge thing for us, I think about it a lot,' says Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive of Twitter Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Twitter's co-founder, Evan Williams, talks exclusively to the Daily Telegraph about the future of online search and his plans for improving the micro-blogging platform.

Imagine a world where you were given answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s the future of search according to the chief executive of Twitter, the site every tech company wants a piece of.

Evan Williams doesn’t often give interviews. He usually leaves that to Biz Stone, his colleague and Twitter’s co-founder. I found this out the hard way as I chased him down the stairs at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

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Russia Considers New Internet Filtering Technology

From The Net Effect/Foreign Policy:

According to this article published on a Russian news-site Inbox.ru, Russia has moved one inch closer to the China-style system of filtering the Web. Russia's Ministry of Communications has urged ISPs to start filtering "negative" Internet content in places that provide public access to the Internet (think cafes, libraries, etc). Such filters have already been planned to be installed in Russian schools.

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The Light Bulb That Lasts 25 Years: It's Environmentally Friendly And As Bright As The Old Ones... But It Will Cost You £30

Photo: Bright idea: The Pharox light bulb lasts 25 years or longer if used for four hours a day

From The Daily Mail:

It could be the breakthrough that finally has consumers warming to the energy-saving light bulb.

A version that brightens up instantly, costs just 88p a year to run and lasts up to 25 years has gone on sale in Britain for the first time.

The only catch is that the new LED bulb will cost £30.

Manufacturers claim the Pharox is the first low-energy bulb to give off the same light quality and brightness as a conventional 60-watt traditional bulb.

They say that, despite its initial cost, each bulb will pay for itself in just three years.

After that, each one used could shave around £9 a year off a typical household electricity bill.

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Wake-Up Call As Population Of Africa Tops 1bn

From The Scotsman:

ONE day this year, in all probability, the billionth African will have been born, a milestone that will benefit the poorest continent only if it can get its act together and unify its piecemeal markets.

Nobody knows when or where in its 53 countries the child arrived to push Africa's population into ten figures. The United Nations estimates that in mid-2008 there were 987 million people, and in mid-2009, 1,010m.

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The Perfect Cram Drug? Scientists Identify Single Enzyme To Fix The Memory Of A Tired Brain

It's Cool, I'll Just Write It On My Arm Including all known Lanthanides and Actinides? via Densemstuco

From Popular Science:

We've all been there, late at night and early in the morning, forcing any and every last morsel of knowledge into our weak and exhausted brains. But when the test flops down on our desk, we just stare blankly at the forbidding blue book page. All that knowledge, gone. Either it didn't stick, or it has hid in some inaccessible crevasse deep in the brain.

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Biologically Active 'Scaffold' May Help Humans Replace Lost Or Missing Bone

Composite drug-releasing fibers used as basic elements of scaffolding for tissue and bone regeneration. (Credit: AFTAU)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 24, 2009) — Mother Nature has provided the lizard with a unique ability to regrow body tissue that is damaged or torn ― if its tail is pulled off, it grows right back. She has not been quite so generous with human beings. But we might be able to come close, thanks to new research from Tel Aviv University.

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Bigger Creatures Have Bigger Blood Cells

Largest and smallest species of eyelid geckos appear here in proportion, though somewhat smaller than life size. Credit: Zuzana Starostová & Lukáš Kratochvíl

From Live Science:

When it comes to metabolism, size matters—cell size, that is, according to a recent study.

Small animals have faster metabolisms relative to their body size than do large animals. According to the so-called metabolic theory of ecology, that scaling is responsible for many patterns in nature—from the average lifespan of a single species to the population dynamics of an entire ecosystem. Although scientists generally agree on the theory's fundamentals, they disagree on the reasons for the scaling. One camp thinks metabolic rate is driven by cell size; another thinks it corresponds to the size and geometry of physiological supply networks, such as the circulatory system.

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