Psychic 'Mind-Reading' Computer Will Show Your Thoughts On Screen

From The Daily Mail:

A mind-reading machine that can produce pictures of what a person is seeing or remembering has been developed by scientists.

The device studies patterns of brainwave activity and turns them into a moving image on a computer screen.

While the idea of a telepathy machine might sound like something from science fiction, the scientists say it could one day be used to solve crimes.

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European Water Mission Lifts Off

From The BBC:

A European satellite is set to provide major new insights into how water is cycled around the Earth.

The Smos spacecraft will make the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.

The data will have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods.

A Russian Rokot launcher carrying Smos lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia at 0450 (0150 GMT) on Monday.

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Long-Range Taser Raises Fears Of Shock And Injury

A new, long-range Taser weapon could be launched from standard 40-millimetre grenade launchers (Image: SGT April L. Johnson/US DoD)

From New Scientist:

INCREASING the distance between yourself and a potentially dangerous assailant is always a good idea - even if your ultimate aim is to render them insensible. That appears to be the thinking behind a Pentagon project, now in its final stages, to perfect a projectile capable of delivering an electric shock to incapacitate a person tens of metres away. It will be fired from a standard 40-millimetre grenade launcher.

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My Comment: A useful weapon if your goal is to incapacitate and capture a certain target.

Lions Had A Taste For Human Flesh

Hungry for Humans. In 1898, two man-eating lions terrorized railway workers, claiming 35 lives. The remains of the two lions are now on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

The nightly attacks by two man-eating lions terrified railway workers and brought construction to a halt in one of east Africa's most notorious onslaughts more than a hundred years ago. But the death toll, scientists now say, wasn't as high as previously thought.

Over nine months the two voracious hunters claimed 35 lives -- no small figure, but much less than some accounts of as many as 135 victims.

It was 1898, when laborers from India and local natives building the Uganda Railroad across Kenya became the prey for the pair, a case that has been the subject of numerous accounts and at least three movies.

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Inside One Of The World's Largest Data Centers

From CNET:

CHICAGO--On the outside, Microsoft's massive new data center resembles the other buildings in the industrial area.

Even the inside of the building doesn't look like that much. The ground floor looks like a large indoor parking lot filled with a few parked trailers.

It's what's inside those trailers, though, that is the key to Microsoft's cloud-computing efforts. Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud-based operating system--Windows Azure.

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Web Could Run Out Of Addresses Next Year, Warn Web Experts

We could run out of web addresses in the next two years, unless businesses and government organisations heed the advice of the European Commission Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Businesses urgently need to upgrade to IPv6, a new version of the internet's addressing protocol that will hugely increase the number of available addresses.

A survey, conducted by the European Commission, found that few companies are prepared for the switch from the current naming protocol, IPv4, to the new regime, IPv6. Web experts have warned that we could run out of internet addresses within the next two years unless more companies migrate to the new platform.

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This Is One Cool Video Of A Saw And A Finger

Electric Dreams

On the small screen Amazon's Kindle is one of 40 electronic readers using E-Ink technology. (Photograph by Tim Llewellyn)

From Boston.com:

One Cambridge company has built its success on Kindle. But can it stave off competitors and make good on its vision of revolutionizing everything from credit cards to clothing?

The hottest technology company in the Boston area sits in a low-slung 100-year-old converted factory in the West Cambridge Industrial Park, not far from the Concord Avenue rotary. Inside its modest lobby hangs a 2-by-4-foot display. Messages scroll across it: “Welcome to E-Ink . . . the time is now 2:58 p.m. ’’ It’s 30 minutes slow.

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Blue Energy Seems Feasible And Offers Considerable Benefits

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 2, 2009) — Generating energy on a large scale by mixing salt and fresh water is both technically possible and practical. The worldwide potential for this clean form of energy -- 'blue energy' or 'blue electricity' -- is enormous. However, it will be necessary to work actively on several essential technological developments and to invest heavily in large-scale trials.

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CSN Editor: For more info on Blue Energy, go here.

'Breaking' Curveballs Are Just an Illusion

Zhong-Lin Lu, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at USC, who along with USC alumni Emily Knight and Robert Ennis, and Arthur Shapiro, associate professor of psychology at American University, developed a simple visual demo that suggests a curveball's break is, at least in part, a trick of the eye. Credit: USC

From Live Science:

The answer to the question of whose curveball breaks harder — that of the Yankees' A.J. Burnett or the Phillies' Cole Hamels — may be neither. Zhong-Lin Lu, professor of cognitive neuroscience at USC, along with colleagues from USC and American University, developed a simple visual demo that suggests a curveball's break is, at least in part, a trick of the eye. Their demo won the Best Visual Illusion of the Year prize at the Vision Sciences meeting earlier this year. Try it here. A related press release is here. The curveball's effect is due to batters being forced to switch between peripheral vision and central vision during a swing. For more on the research, see Lu's Web page. For more on Lu, read his responses to the ScienceLives 10 Questions below.

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'Fear Detector' Being Developed That Will Be Able To Sniff Out Terrorists

Photo: Security: Checkpoints could one day use 'fear detectors' if a research project is successful.

From The Daily Mail:

A device that smells human fear is being developed by British scientists and could soon be sniffing out anxious terrorists.

The technology relies on recognising a pheromone - or scent signal - produced in sweat when a person is scared.

Researchers hope the 'fear detector' will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good.

Terrorists with murder in mind, drug smugglers, or criminals on the run are likely to be very fearful of being discovered.

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Getting Beyond Petroleum Won't Be Easy

Nearly 1,500 cars are added to Beijing’s roads daily. Credit: Xiayang Liu/Corbis

From Technology Review:

Transportation defines our civilization. Where we live and work, the structure of our cities, the flow of global commerce--all have been shaped by transportation technologies. But modern transportation's reliance on fossil fuels cannot be sustained. Passenger planes, trains, and automobiles were responsible for nearly four billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2005--about 14 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted globally that year. If we continue to rely almost exclusively on petroleum to power these vehicles, they will be responsible for 11 billion to 18 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2050. That's because developing nations--which are home to 82 percent of the world's population and will be responsible for 98 percent of population growth in coming years--are on the verge of mass motorization. Auto ownership in the developing world is growing at a rate of 30 percent per year (see "Cleaner Vehicles by the Million").

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Stealth-Mode Wind Turbines

Photo: Stealth mode: This turbine was fitted with a "stealth" blade last month. Credit: QinetiQ

From Technology Review:

Coatings and composites ease the air-traffic worries dogging wind power.

Last month Danish wind turbine company Vestas and U.K. defense contractor QinetiQ demonstrated the first "stealth" wind-turbine blade--their solution to the aviation radar interference problem holding up the installation of gigawatts-worth of proposed wind farms worldwide. Vestas composites specialist Steve Appleton says the firm is eager to test a complete stealth turbine and begin limited production by the end of 2010. "Clearly this technology, if proven fully and then adopted by Vestas, would give us a competitive advantage," says Appleton.

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File-Sharers Are Big Spenders Too

From The BBC:

People who download music illegally also spend an average of £77 a year buying it legitimately, a survey has found.

Those who claimed not to use peer-to-peer filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay spent a yearly average of just £44.

Almost one in 10 of those questioned aged between 16 and 50 said they downloaded music illegally.

However, eight out of 10 of that group also bought CDs, vinyl and as MP3s.

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Equatorial Volcano Shows Signs Of Imminent Eruption

From Watts Up With That?

Colombia volcano rumbles back to life. The volcano is about 1.2 degrees north of the Equator.

BOGOTA, Colombia — Officials in southern Colombia have issued a code orange alert for the newly-active Galeras volcano which they said could erupt in a matter of days or weeks, according to the state-run Geological and Mining Institute.

Authorities said they are continuing to monitor the nearby Huila volcano, also on orange alert, where sizeable volcanic activity also has been detected in recent weeks.

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ICANN OKs International Domains: The Pros And Cons

From PC World:

ICANN's approval of non-Latin character domains undoubtedly is a game-changing decision in the history of the World Wide Web. With scheduled to start popping up in the middle of next year, many people are debating if this digital support for more distinctly international sites balances with potential security threats and fragmentation of the Internet.

Here are a few pros and cons to consider as we move away from the traditional ASCII based-Web.

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Where Do Ghosts Come From?

There's something scarily magnetic about Muncaster Castle (Image: Lee Stamper)

From New Scientist:

AS MEDIEVAL CASTLE bedrooms go, this one looks the part. Disturbing Flemish tapestries share the walls with stern portraits. On close inspection, the ornate fireplace's iron firedogs turn out to have devils' heads. This place is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Tom Skelton, a 16th-century jester said to have committed murder. The malevolent face of "Tom Fool" stares from a dimly lit oil painting just outside the bedroom.

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Air Force Uses Airborne Lasers to Create High-Speed Data Links

Airborne Laser Link Air Force phone home Brian Rhea, Director, Corporate Communications, AOptix Technologies

From Popular Science:

Researchers have tested the laser links at distances of almost 22 miles during flight.

Manned Air Force jets and drones could soon send high quality video and audio by using ultra-high bandwidth lasers, transmitting critical battlefield data faster than ever. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has conducted experiments that transmit data without interference across almost 22 miles, both in the air and on the ground.

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Nanoparticle Coating Prevents Freezing Rain Buildup

An aluminum plate glazed with Gao's superhydrophobic coating (left) repelling the supercooled water. For the uncoated plate (right), the water freezes on contact and ice accumulates. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Pittsburgh)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 30, 2009) — Preventing the havoc wrought when freezing rain collects on roads, power lines, and aircrafts could be only a few nanometers away. A University of Pittsburgh-led team demonstrates in the Nov. 3 edition of "Langmuir" a nanoparticle-based coating developed in the lab of Di Gao, a chemical and petroleum engineering professor in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering, that thwarts the buildup of ice on solid surfaces and can be easily applied.

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Recipe for Mass Extinction: Add Algae and Stir Controversy

A new hypothesis claims toxins from algae played a major role in all five mass extinctions. Shown here, an algal bloom of blue-green algae. Credit: Fond du Lac County Wisconsin

From Live Science:

Mass extinctions that wiped entire species off the face of the Earth in a relative blink of the eye are often blamed on catastrophic occurrences, such as an asteroid crash or large volcanic eruption. But a new hypothesis points to a different culprit: lowly algae.

In the past 540 million years, five massive extinctions are thought to have killed off, in each case, some 50 percent to 90 percent of animal species. A new study suggests that toxins from algae played a major role in all five extinctions, including the most recent and most well-known – the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The idea was presented at the annual Geological Society of America meeting Oct. 19.

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How Laptops Took Over The World

Laptops on sale in California. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

The rise of portable computing has forced companies to rethink how they let staff work – and is shifting the balance of power in the IT industry.

In January 2003, Steve Jobs announced to a slightly surprised Macworld audience that "this is going to be the year of the notebook for Apple". There was a clear ambition to push up the sales of portables – on which margins tend to be better than on desktops.

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Profile Of A 'Spam King'

Sanford Wallace is better known as 'Spamford' or the 'Spam King' on the internet

From the Telegraph:

Facebook has been awarded $711 million in damages after successfully suing Sanford Wallace for sending mail and making posts without the permission of the site or its users. But just who is the so-called 'Spam King'?

Sanford Wallace is better known as "Spamford" on the web. The Las Vegas-based "Spam King" accessed Facebook members' accounts without their permission, and sent out fake Wall posts and spam messages from the compromised accounts.

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The Unromantic Truth About Why We Kiss - To SpreadGgerms

Pucker up: Kissing the same person for about six months provides optimum protection from potentially deadly germs, says Dr Colin Hendrie

From The Daily Mail:

It is an international symbol of love and romance. But the kiss may have evolved for reasons that are far more practical - and less alluring.

British scientists believe it developed to spread germs.

They say that the uniquely human habit allows a bug that is dangerous in pregnancy to be passed from man to woman to give her time to build up immunity.

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Is Hydrogen The Future? This Car Goes 0 To 60 In 12 Seconds.

From Christian Science Monitor:

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that hydrogen-fueled cars will not be pratical for a decade. But researchers at Hyundai-Kia Motors in South Korea say they're on course to make them in six years.

Yongin, South Korea - When the US government cut funding for hydrogen-fueled cars last May, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said such vehicles will not be practical for another decade or two.

Lim Tae-won thinks he can prove Secretary Chu wrong.

Dr. Lim runs the team at Hyundai-Kia Motors that is developing hydrogen fuel cell technology. And they are on course, he says, to mass produce hydrogen cars in six years.

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Sleep Deprivation Cut Mental Function

From Future Pundit:

The brain downshifts to simpler ways of processing information when lacking sleep.

Westchester, Ill. —A study in the Nov.1 issue of the journal Sleep shows that sleep deprivation causes some people to shift from a more automatic, implicit process of information categorization (information-integration) to a more controlled, explicit process (rule-based). This use of rule-based strategies in a task in which information-integration strategies are optimal can lead to potentially devastating errors when quick and accurate categorization is fundamental to survival.

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Autopia Planes, Trains, Automobiles And The Future of Transportation Little X-Plane Pushes Bottom Edge Of The Envelope

From Autopia:

Flight test programs at Edwards Air Force Base and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center usually are off-limits to outsiders, but we got a peek at one of its coolest programs, the X-48B, when the Air Force recently threw open the gates for an open house.

The X-48B is the latest in a long line of experimental X-planes, and the joint venture between NASA and Boeing’s Phantom Works is unlike most that came before. The blended wing-body aircraft isn’t some sort of sierra hotel fighter jet, it doesn’t have a pilot on board and it’s not even full-size. Despite being an

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Why Three Buses Come At Once, And How To Avoid It

Bused up. Commuters can help keep transport moving (Image: Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

Anyone who has waited for a bus knows the routine: you wait far longer than you should, then three come along at once. The problem, called "platooning", plagues buses, trains and even elevators.

Now systems complexity researchers Carlos Gershenson and Luis Pineda of the National Autonomous University of Mexico have devised a mathematical model that shows how the problem might be prevented: transport managers need to get a little meaner about boarding times, and passengers should realise that jumping on the first train or bus that arrives won't always help them reach a destination faster.

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California Searchers Scour for Survivors of Midair Crash

From Popular Mechanics:

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Aircraft and ships are scouring the ocean off San Diego for any signs of survivors of a nighttime collision of a Coast Guard C-130 airplane and a Marine Corps attack helicopter.

A crew of seven was aboard the airplane and two were aboard the helicopter when the aircraft collided Thursday night 50 miles west of the San Diego County coast and 15 miles east of San Clemente Island, a Navy training site.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Levi Read says the search is focused on the area of a debris field.

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Zoooooom via University of Utah

From Popular Science:

One of the most difficult aspects of science is conceptualizing some of the unbelievably large, (and unimaginably small) numbers that routinely pop up. The Universe is 5.5 x 10^23 miles across. A human hair is about 7 x 10^-4 inches across. Hard to imagine how things like cells, proteins and atoms all relate to one another. Now, at least for the very small things, the University of Utah has developed a fun little Flash graphic to make sense of all of it.

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Clinical Immortality And Space Settlement

Galactic space lines may not be as far fetched as they sound. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

From The Space Review:

There was a recent article in the New York Times, “Three Score and Ten”, which was inspired by a Lancet paper that predicted the median life expectancy for babies born in America in 2007 is greater than or equal to 104. In 3000 BC, it was 24 and stayed there almost until the industrial revolution. In 1850, it was 38. In 1909, it was 50. In 1959, it was 67. Current demographics indicate it’s only 78. The extra 26 years that Lancet predicts comes from anticipated future improvements in reducing death rates (morbidity).

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Scientists Discover Influenza's Achilles Heel: Antioxidants

This digitally-colorized negative-stained transmission electron micograph (TEM) depicted a number of influenza A virions. (Credit: CDC/F. A. Murphy)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2009) — As the nation copes with a shortage of vaccines for H1N1 influenza, a team of Alabama researchers have raised hopes that they have found an Achilles' heel for all strains of the flu -- antioxidants.

In an article appearing in the November 2009 print issue of the FASEB Journal, they show that antioxidants -- the same substances found in plant-based foods -- might hold the key in preventing the flu virus from wreaking havoc on our lungs.

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Rest Easy: Retirement (and Money) Can Improve Sleep

Insomnia is the most common sleep complaint at any age. It affects almost half of adults 60 and older, according to the National Institutes of Health. Credit: © Marcin Kempski |Dreamstime.com"

From Live Science:

It's no secret the stress of work can keep you up at nights. Now research shows that retirement can spur less fitful sleep, at least for people who are financially stable.

The prevalence of sleep disturbances among 14,714 study participants in France — all of whom had pensions that continued to pay 80 percent of their salaries — fell from 24.2 percent in the last year before retirement to 17.8 percent in the first year after retiring.

The finding may not apply to retirees who lack financial stability, however.

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Second Chance For Large Hadron Collider To Deliver Universe's Secrets

The view from the central axis of the Large Hadron Collider. Photograph: CERN

From The Guardian:

One year after £30m meltdown, 'God Machine' is ready to run again in Switzerland.

At first glance, the piece of metal in Steve Myers's hands could be taken for a harmonica or a pen. Only on closer inspection can you make out its true nature. Myers, director of accelerators at the Cern particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, is clutching a section of copper piping from which a flat electrical cable is protruding.

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YouTube Cashes In On One Billion Weekly Views

From The Telegraph:

YouTube is now making money from one billion video views per week.

The Google-owned video sharing site has more than tripled the amount of views it is now able to monetise, since the same period last year.

Google would not reveal how many individual clips make up the one billion views, nor would it disclose how much revenue those views are generating.

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Pictured: The Fridge-Sized Computer That Sent The Very First Email 40 Years Ago

The computer from which 40 years ago the first message was sent on the internet, between the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford University

From The Daily Mail:

The very first message to be sent between two computers - a breakthrough that helped usher in the internet and Mail Online - was sent exactly 40 years ago.

And to mark the occasion, celebrities, computer experts and entrepreneurs joined the man behind that first message for a bit of a party.

UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock said: 'It's the 40th year since the infant internet first spoke.'

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Russia Becomes The World's Taxicab To Space

Photo: Canadian circus billionaire Guy Laliberté flashes a V-sign after he returned Oct. 11 from a trip to space as a tourist in a Russian Soyuz capsule. Sergei Remezoz/ Reuters

From Christian Science Monitor:

Though its program is nothing like it once was, the country uses its fleet of rockets to ferry tourists and satellites into orbit.

Moscow - For better or mirth, it has become one of those indelible images from space: Canadian circus billionaire Guy Laliberté floating around the International Space Station wearing a red clown nose.

The stunt earlier this month by the founder of Cirque du Soleil, who once performed as a fire breather, was intended to provide a moment of levity for his wife and children during a video linkup. But it also served a more serious purpose: to draw attention to the crusade for which he paid $35 million to journey into orbit – the need for clean water on Earth.

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Culture (Not Just Genes) Drives Evolution

Genetic Geography. Cultural differences have manifested themselves in the DNA of distinct, regional populations, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The above illustration shows a DNA sequence beside a helix model. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

Culture, not just genes, can drive evolutionary outcomes, according to a study released Wednesday that compares individualist and group-oriented societies across the globe.

Bridging a rarely-crossed border between natural and social sciences, the study looks at the interplay across 29 countries of two sets of data, one genetic and the other cultural.

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Creative Is Latest To Tackle E-book Readers

From CNET:

The question is, who isn't getting in on the e-book reader action these days? Less than two weeks after we met Barnes & Nobles' Nook and just a few days after hearing of tire maker Bridgestone's plans for a flexible e-reader, our friends at Crave UK alerted us that Creative may be hopping on the e-reader bandwagon as well.

Creative fan site EpiZenter.net (so named for Creative's family of popular Zen MP3 players) reports that the company showed off a working model of its first e-book reader, tentatively named the MediaBook, at its annual general meeting Thursday in Singapore. The device reportedly has a touch screen, text-to-speech function, and an SD memory card slot. It will run on Creative's Zii System-On-Chip technology and will be Internet-enabled.

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English Wine Gets Help From Space

The system can help to optimise harvests, and hopefully wine quality

From BBC:

A number of English vineyards have signed up to make use of a satellite imaging service to boost harvests.

The satellite measures a vineyard's reflectivity in a number of colours in the visible and infrared.

The Oenoview system, first launched in France last year, analyses the images to determine vine leaf density, soil water content and grape bunch sizes.

The English Wine Producers trade group said that wines made using the system could be available as early as 2011.

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Heaven Can Wait

Patients recount near-death experiences in drawings

From Newsweek:

A new book promises incontrovertible proof of the afterlife. That's cold comfort to those of us left behind.

On a spring day last year, three months after the death of my younger son, Max, I opened my front door and saw a butterfly resting on the steps—an Eastern tiger swallowtail, I later determined, a species native to the Northeast but not one I remembered seeing before in the middle of Brooklyn. The date stuck in my mind because, as it happens, it was also my birthday. The butterfly, with its otherworldly beauty and silence, is, of course, a common metaphor for the soul. Its emergence from entombment as a chrysalis may have inspired ideas about human resurrection.

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Regeneration Can Be Achieved After Chronic Spinal Cord Injury

Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 31, 2009) — Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that regeneration of central nervous system axons can be achieved in rats even when treatment delayed is more than a year after the original spinal cord injury.

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Oldest Known Spider Webs Discovered

This light micrograph shows spider web threads coated with sticky droplets (left panel) and threads with helical twists (right panel) that were preserved inside amber for about 140 million years. Credit: Martin Brasier.

From Live Science:

Silken spider webs dating back some 140 million years have been discovered preserved in amber, scientists announce today.

The viscous tree sap flowed over the spider webs before hardening and preserving the contents, which were discovered in Sussex, England. Other bits sealed up in the amber included plant matter, insect droppings and ancient microbes.

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Earhart's Final Resting Place Believed Found

Amelia Earhart appears above in her flight gear in this undated photo. Legendary aviator Amelia Earhart mostly likely died on an tropical island in the southwestern Pacific. AP

From Discovery News:

Oct. 23, 2009 -- Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart most likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery.

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Researchers Ask How Best To Engineer The Planet

From CNET:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A group of academics on Friday considered the ultimate engineering challenge: building machines to stabilize the earth's climate.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology convened a symposium here to discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of geoengineering, also called climate engineering. Everything from shooting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere to "artificial trees" is being seriously studied, despite trepidation among researchers and opposition from others.

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Ariane Puts Satellites In Orbit

Photo: The sixth Ariane flight of 2009

From The BBC:

Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has launched another two telecommunications satellites into orbit.

Ariane sent the payloads into space from its Kourou base in French Guiana.

The 5,700-kg NSS-12 satellite is owned by SES World Skies and will deliver TV broadcasts to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.

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Fructose Causes High Blood Pressure?

From Future Pundit:

Beware a diet high in fructose.

A diet high in fructose increases the risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension), according to a paper being presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, California. The findings suggest that cutting back on processed foods and beverages that contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may help prevent hypertension.

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A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task

Serge Bloch

From The New York Times:

If you’ve ever had a problem with rodents and woken up to find that mice had chewed their way through the Cheerios, the Famous Amos, three packages of Ramen noodles, and even that carton of baker’s yeast you had bought in a fit of “Ladies of the Canyon” wistfulness, you will appreciate just how freakish is the strain of laboratory mouse that lacks all motivation to eat.

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Rocket Men

Aly Song / Reuters-Landov

From Newsweek:

Politicians won't get us back into the space race, but novelists just might.

Six months ago, President Obama asked a team of academics, astronauts, and aerospace executives to give him options for the future of the space program. Those options, as described in the Augustine Committee's just-released final report, must have sent a little thrill up our Spock-loving nerd in chief's leg: setting up a lunar base, flying to a Martian moon, etc. There's just one catch: NASA doesn't have the resources it needs to pursue these plans. Exciting proposals for voyages to alien moons aside, the report's attention to dollars and cents makes it a cosmic buzzkill.

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Physicist Makes New High-resolution Panorama Of Milky Way

Full sky panorama of the Milky Way.

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 29, 2009) — Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

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Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special

From Live Science:

Humans are unusual animals by any stretch of the imagination, ones that have changed the face of the world around us. What makes us so special when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? Some things we take completely for granted might surprise you.

- Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

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Prairie Pioneer Seeks To Reinvent The Way We Farm

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, at his farm in Salina, Kan. Richard Harris

From NPR:

We tend to think Earth can provide us with an endless bounty of food. But farming practices in most parts of the world can't work forever. Soil is constantly washing away, and what's left is gradually losing the nutrients it needs to sustain our crops.

In the prairies of Kansas lives Wes Jackson, a man who has spent his long and rich career trying to invent a new kind of agriculture — one that will last indefinitely.

Read more ....

Best View Yet Of Apollo Landing Site

The new LRO image. Click it to enlarge

From Scientific American:

A NASA spaceprobe has sent back the clearest photo yet of an Apollo landing site - including even the US flag. It clearly shows the descent stage of Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger, nearly 37 years after it touched down in December 1972 in the Taurus Littrow valley. The new LRO image. Click it to enlarge For the first time even its legs are visible, thanks to the detail possible with the orbiting digital camera.

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ANIMAL ROBOTS: Marine Machines Made in Nature's Image

From National Geographic:

October 26, 2009--If it looks like a fish and swims like a fish, it could be a robot--such as the University of Bath's Gymnobot (pictured), inspired by an Amazonian knifefish.

Researchers worldwide are developing robots that look and act like aquatic creatures. That's because biomimetic gadgets--bots that take inspiration from nature--are often more efficient than their clunkier counterparts.

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America’s Electronic Waste Is Polluting the Globe

From Discover Magazine:

It seems that every day brings a new electronic gadget to the market, whether it’s a smart phone, an electronic reader, a laptop the size and weight of a magazine, or a television the size of a wall. But each advance adds to the world’s electronic waste, which is the fastest-growing component of solid waste. Much of the electronic refuse ends up in developing countries, where workers strip down the gadgets to get at the copper and other valuable metals inside, often exposing themselves to toxins in the process. Now, scientists are calling for federal regulations in the United States to stem the tide.

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