Ten Nuclear Stations To Be Built In the UK In Bid To Prevent Energy Shortage

From Times Online:

Ten nuclear power stations are to be built in Britain at a cost of up to £50 billion as the Government tries to prevent the threat of regular power cuts by the middle of the coming decade.

The nuclear industry welcomed the plans, but critics said that ministers had acted too late to avoid an energy crunch caused by the closure of ageing coal-fired stations.

Although the sites were known to be in line for development, the announcement signals the Government’s increasing ambition for nuclear power.

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It's Time Fruit Juice Loses Its Wholesome Image, Some Experts Say

From L.A. Times:

Compared with soda, juice carries more calories and as much sugar. There's also evidence that high consumption increases the risk of obesity, especially among kids.

To many people, it's a health food. To others, it's simply soda in disguise.

That virtuous glass of juice is feeling the squeeze as doctors, scientists and public health authorities step up their efforts to reduce the nation's girth.

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Widespread Chronic Pain

From Future Pundit:

John Tierney of the New York Times draws attention to the high prevalence of chronic pain.

Chronic pain affects more than 70 million Americans, which makes it more widespread than heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. It costs the economy more than $100 billion per year. So why don’t more doctors and researchers take it seriously?

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Vanished Persian Army Said Found In Desert

Photo: Hundreds of bleached bones and skulls found in the desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert may be the remains of the long lost Cambyses' army, according to Italian researchers. Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni

From MSNBC:

50,000 soldiers believed buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

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Stone Age Humans Crossed Sahara In The Rain

It used to be wetter (Image: Sergio Pitamitz/Getty)

From New Scientist:

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa.

The Sahara would have been a formidable barrier during the Stone Age, making it hard to understand how humans made it to Europe from eastern Africa, where the earliest remains of our hominin ancestors are found.

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Drunken Fruit Flies Help Scientists Find Potential Drug Target For Alcoholism

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) breeding in a test tube.
(Credit: iStockphoto/Joe Pogliano)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 7, 2009) — A group of drunken fruit flies have helped researchers from North Carolina State and Boston universities identify entire networks of genes -- also present in humans -- that play a key role in alcohol drinking behavior.

This discovery, published in the October 2009 print issue of the journal Genetics, provides a crucial explanation of why some people seem to tolerate alcohol better than others, as well as a potential target for drugs aimed at preventing or eliminating alcoholism. In addition, this discovery sheds new light on many of the negative side effects of drinking, such as liver damage.

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Posting Pics Online? What Your Photos Say About You

Our non-verbal cues tell a lot about our personalities, particularly when the subject has a more natural pose (right) rather than a neutral one (left). Here, in this spontaneous photo, the subject shows a less energetic stance. Credit: Laura Naumann.

From Live Science:

Those photos you post on Facebook could paint an accurate picture of your personality, new research on first impressions suggests.

And perhaps as expected, the more candid a shot the more nuances of your personality show through.

"In an age dominated by social media where personal photographs are ubiquitous, it becomes important to understand the ways personality is communicated via our appearance," said study researcher Laura Naumann of Sonoma State University. "The appearance one portrays in his or her photographs has important implications for their professional and social life."

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The Sea Change That's Challenging Biology's Central Dogma

Image: National Institute of General Medical Sciences

From Discover Magazine:

For decades, RNA was seen as a simple slave to DNA. Newer research shows it has an active and critical role in every disease from Alzheimer's to cancer.

One of the great revolutions in modern science rests on the elongated backside of a grotesque, mutant worm. Inexpensive and easy to manipulate in the lab, Caenorhabditis elegans develops from egg to adult in three days and produces a few hundred offspring three days after that. Virtually all of the worms are hermaphrodites, containing both male and female sex organs and capable of making sperm and eggs, so each creature can fertilize itself. And because the worm is transparent and the adult has only 959 cells, development of every stage from egg to adult can be observed under the microscope and documented with near perfect detail while the worm is alive, an achievement accomplished in the 1970s by Sidney Brenner, a University of Cambridge researcher and legend in the field.

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Spanish Military Tests Swarm Intelligence On Video Game Battlefield

Battlefield Swarm Say, from here the soldiers look like ants ... Strategic Simulations, Inc./University of Granada

From Popular Science:

The Spanish army is using ant colony algorithms to plot the best paths through future battlefields.

Moving through real-life battlefields inevitably proves trickier than playing a game of Minesweeper, but Spanish researchers and army officers have converted the video game Panzer General into a simulator that can test troop maneuver algorithms based on ant colony behavior.

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U.S. Congress Considers Geoengineering

From Technology Review:

Plans to purposefully re-engineer the world's climate got their first serious committee hearing yesterday.

The idea that we might be able to "geoengineer" the planet to purposefully change the climate has clearly moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Momentum has been building in recent years: an essay in an academic journal by a Nobel Prize winning scientist in 2006, articles in the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, a largely private gathering of researchers at Harvard.

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Cough Into Your Mobile Phone For Instant Diagnosis

But will it ask you to turn your head to one side as well? Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY

From The Telegraph:

Your mobile phone may soon be able to diagnose respiratory illnesses in seconds when you cough into it.

Software being developed by American and Australian scientists will hopefully allow patients simply to cough into their phone, and it will tell them whether they have cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases.

Whether a cough is dry or wet, or “productive” or “non-productive” (referring to the presence of mucus on the lungs), can give a doctor information about what is causing that cough, for example whether it is caused by a bacterial or a viral infection.

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Windows 7 Versus Apple: The Great Computer Software Battle

Battling for your business: Should you go for Apple software for your computer or wait for Google?

From The Daily Mail:

There's no escaping it: Windows Vista was a disaster. Launched in 2007, Microsoft's follow-up to the massively successful Windows XP software, which powers the vast majority of the world's computers, met with lukewarm reviews and terrible customer satisfaction ratings.

It was simply too demanding of the computers it ran on – and the people who used it. Which is why Microsoft is going to great lengths to prove its new operating system, Windows 7, isn't just better than Vista – it's also simpler.

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Nasa And Esa Sign Mars Agreement

The Red Planet experiences periodic global duststorms

From BBC:

The US and European space agencies have signed the "letter of intent" that ties together their Mars programmes.

The agreement, which was penned in Washington DC, gives the green light to scientists and engineers to begin the joint planning of Red Planet missions.

The union will start with a European-led orbiter in 2016, and continue with surface rovers in 2018, and then perhaps a network of landers in 2018.

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Extraterrestrial Rafting: Hunting Off-World Sea Life

Sniffing out life on Titan (Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/SPL)

From New Scientist:

IF LIFE is to be found beyond our home planet, then our closest encounters with it may come in the dark abyss of some extraterrestrial sea. For Earth is certainly not the only ocean-girdled world in our solar system. As many as five moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thought to hide seas beneath their icy crusts.

To find out more about these worlds and their hidden oceans, two ambitious voyages are now taking shape. About a decade from now, if all goes to plan, the first mission will send a pair of probes to explore Jupiter's satellites. They will concentrate on giant Ganymede and pale Europa, gauging the depths of the oceans that almost certainly lie within them.

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October 2009 3rd Coldest for US In 115 Years, What About The Upcoming Winter?

From Watts Up With That?:

NCDC has compiled the October temperatures and it ended up the 3rd coldest in 115 years. As we have shown it was cold over almost all the lower 48. Indeed only Florida came in above normal. There is no [NOAA/NCDC] press release out yet but it should be interesting.

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Super-fast Quantum Computer Gets Ever Closer: Quantum Particles Pinned Down

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 9, 2009) — Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Nanosciences at Delft University of Technology, have succeeded in getting hold of the environment of a quantum particle. This allows them to exercise greater control over a single electron, and brings the team of researchers, led by Vidi winner and FOM workgroup leader Lieven Vandersypen, a step closer still to the super-fast quantum computer.

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Human Origins: Our Crazy Family Tree

The first specimen of Paranthropus boisei, also called Nutcracker Man, was reported by Mary and Louis Leakey in 1959 from a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.

From Live Science:

As the only remaining primate built to stride the world on two legs, it would be easy to assume that our extinct relatives were much like us, if perhaps hairier with smaller brains.

But fossils reveal evolution could take our relatives in bizarre directions, involving skulls resembling nutcrackers and miniature bodies resembling the hobbits of Lord of The Rings.

"These fossils tell us that human evolution was a long process of experimentation, not the outcome of a long process of fine-tuning leading just to us," said paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

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Laser-Powered Robot Climbs To Victory In The Space-Elevator Contest

Image: Space Elevator Games. The LaserMotive vehicle gets weighed in.

From Discover Magazine:

A laser-powered robot took a climb up a cable in the Mohave Desert in Wednesday, and pushed ahead the sci-fi inspired notion of a space elevator capable of lifting astronauts, cargo, and even tourists up into orbit. The robot, built by LaserMotive of Seattle, whizzed up 2,953 feet (nearly 1 kilometer) in about four minutes, which qualifies the team for at least $900,000 of the $2 million in prizes offered in the NASA-backed Space Elevator Games.

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Will Drilling Into A Volcano Trigger An Eruption That Destroys Naples?

Debate Erupts in Geology Circles Geologist will drill seven boreholes in the caldera at Campi Flegrie in around Naples, Italy, in an attempt to better predict volcanic disasters like the one that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79. Critics say the drilling could trigger that very volcanic disaster. Wiki Commons

From Popular Science:

Scientific research has helped humankind avoid or mitigate many of nature’s best attempts to send us to a violent end, but what do researchers do when the pursuit of research could trigger the very disaster from which science is trying to protect us? That’s the question facing geologists in Naples, Italy that will begin sinking seven four-kilometer bore holes into the Campi Flegrei caldera, the site of a “supercolossal” volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago.

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Searching For Real-Time Search

From Technology Review:

Google's CEO says it's still an unsolved problem.

News breaks faster on Twitter than just about anywhere else, and Google wants in on that speed. The search giant's recent deal to include Twitter updates in its search results is a key part of the company's strategy for improving its core product. In a visit to Cambridge, MA, last week, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said that the biggest changes coming to its algorithms have to do with efforts, like the Twitter deal, to integrate real-time search.

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Children Playing Multiple Sports Suffer Fewer Injuries

Multiple sports good for you Photo: BARRY BLAND/BARCROFT MEDIA

From The Telegraph:

Playing more than one sport should protect you from injury, claim scientists.

Researchers have found that it is a good idea to break up your normal training routine with a different sport as it avoids repetitive strain injuries and increases the strength of joints and muscles.

They believe that especially in similar speed sports such as basketball and football it can greatly reduce injuries.

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Tiny 'Sticking Plaster' Nanoparticles For Broken Nerves Could Provide Spinal Cord Treatment

A new 'sticking plaster' technique could repair damaged spinal cords, helping people to walk again

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists last night raised hopes that microscopic nanoparticles could be injected into the spines of paralysed people to help them walk again.

They have conducted experiments on rats which show that the tiny particles can act as a 'sticking plaster' to repair broken nerves.

When the microscopic spheres, known as micelles, were injected into the tails of paralysed rats, they regained the use of all their limbs.

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Early Life Stress 'Changes' Genes

Photo: Mice that are abandoned as pups have behavioural problems later on

From BBC News:

A study in mice has hinted at the impact that early life trauma and stress can have on genes, and how they can result in behavioural problems.

Scientists described the long-term effects of stress on baby mice in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Stressed mice produced hormones that "changed" their genes, affecting their behaviour throughout their lives.

This work could provide clues to how stress and trauma in early life can lead to later problems.

The study was led by Christopher Murgatroyd, a scientist from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany.

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Signature Of Antimatter Detected In Lightning

Antimatter lightningDuring two recent lightning storms, the Fermi telescope found evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on Earth.Axel Rouvin/Flickr

From Science News:

Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on Earth.

Washington — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

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Skype Founders Wrestle Back $400m Share Of Company

Former eBay chief Meg Whitman engineered the purchase of Skype from Niklas Zennstrom and his partner, Janus Friis in 2005

From The Guardian:

• Creators receive 14% of stock in $2bn sale
• Deal ends long running dispute over company's future

The founders of Skype have regained a significant stake in the internet company after settling a contentious legal dispute that had threatened to derail its $2bn sale.

The deal, which was announced today, will give Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis a 14% stake in the internet telephony service they originally sold to auction website eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn.

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Middle-Aged Wolves Retire From the Hunt

Middle-aged and older wolves tend to leave the hunting to their younger counterparts, according to a new study. Wolves usually lose their hunting prowess at age 3, about halfway through their lives. Getty Images

From Discovery:

It takes wolves a year or two to learn how to hunt, but their ferociousness doesn't last long.

According to a new study, most wolves lose their prowess by age 3, just halfway through their lives. After that, they have to rely on younger members of the pack to catch the majority of their meals.

The discovery adds to growing evidence that aging affects animals much like it affects people. The findings might also change the way scientists think about the health of both wolf packs and the elk they prey on.

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Male Sabertoothed Cats Were Pussycats Compared To Macho Lions

Painting of Smilodon from the American Museum of Natural History. (Credit: Charles R. Knight, 1905 / Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 6, 2009) — Despite their fearsome fangs, male sabertoothed cats may have been less aggressive than many of their feline cousins, says a new study of male-female size differences in extinct big cats.

Commonly called the sabertoothed tiger, Smilodon fatalis was a large predatory cat that roamed North and South America about 1.6 million to 10,000 years ago, when there was also a prehistoric cat called the American lion. A study appearing in the November 5 issue of the Journal of Zoology examined size differences between sexes of these fearsome felines using subtle clues from bones and teeth.

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Why Did Our Species Survive The Neanderthals? -- A Commentary

Mirror mirror on the wall: who has the reddest hair of all? Despite the comical artwork, serious science suggests some Neanderthals were ginger - but the genes behind it are different from those of modern redheads. Credit: Michael Hofreiter and Kurt Fiusterweier/MPG EVA

From New Scientist:

ONCE upon a time, a race of cavemen ruled Europe and Asia, then mysteriously vanished, leaving little but bones and stone tools behind.

The history of the Neanderthals isn't a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph.

Take their disappearance, which a team led by Finlayson has pinpointed to the rock of Gibraltar, between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal bones in Belgium in 1829, anthropologists have proposed any number of explanations for their extinction.

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Hunting For Tuna: The Environmental Peril Grows

Tuna are unloaded at a wharf in Port Lincoln, South Australia. The town has the highest number of millionaires per capita in the country. Photo: AAP

From Time Magazine:

Nearly every day at dawn, John Heitz falls a little bit in love. Leaning over a 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin tuna, the 55-year-old American, whose business is exporting fish, circles his forefinger around its deep eye socket. "Look how clear these eyes are." He traces the puncture where the fish was hooked, and the markings under its pectoral fin where it struggled on the line. "Sometimes," Heitz says, "I see a good tuna, and it looks better to me than a woman."

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The Next Two US Recessions

From The Futurist:

Here at The Futurist, we maintain a track record of predicting bubbles, busts, and recessions long before they happen. For example, the housing bubble was identified in April 2006, back when a person could be socially excommunicated for claiming that houses may not rise in value forever. After that, I have identified when the current recession started, months before most economists, and have even predicted when the present recession will end, and at what level job losses would end at. This track record will now lead me to set my sights on the next two troubles on the horizon, which will be the causes of the next two potential recessions.

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Nitrogen Cycle Added To Climate Model

From Future Pundit:

What is missing from climate models?

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Oct. 9, 2009 -- For the first time, climate scientists from across the country have successfully incorporated the nitrogen cycle into global simulations for climate change, questioning previous assumptions regarding carbon feedback and potentially helping to refine model forecasts about global warming.

My own reaction: amazement. We are in the year 2009 and only now the nitrogen cycle gets added to climate models? What other important factors are not yet in climate models? Does anyone know? I'm looking for a knowledgeable reply, not a rant. What is the state of climate models? What are the prospects for more accurate models 5, 10, 20 years from now?

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Hot Spot Hot Rod: The Internet Invades The Automobile

MPG OR MBPS?: Car companies are going to win customers in the future based on the networked services they offer drivers and passengers and how well these services are delivered, in addition to offering vehicles powered by a number of alternatives (fuel, battery or both). © NG CONNECT PROGRAM

From Scientific American:

A group of companies led by Alcatel-Lucent demonstrate the power of next-generation wireless broadband technologies by rolling out a Prius with 4G connectivity.

With U.S. commuters spending an estimated 500 million hours per week in their vehicles, carmakers, software companies and content providers are trying to figure out how to take advantage of new high-speed wireless network technologies to help drivers have better Internet access during this often idle time.

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Will a Shortage of Nuclear Isotopes Mean Less Effective Medical Tests?

Mo-99 One plan is to retrofit the University of Missouri Research Reactor to make Mo-99, but that won’t be completed until 2012. Courtesy University of Missouri

From Popular Science:

The Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario doesn’t sell a watt of electricity. Never has. But when it sprang a leak and shut down this spring, it threw a multibillion-dollar industry into crisis. Before it broke, the reactor produced nearly two thirds of the U.S. supply of molybdenum-99, or Mo-99, the isotope behind 16 million critical diagnostic medical tests each year. In July, things got worse: The Dutch reactor that supplied the remaining third shut down for a month of repair work.

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Japan Uses Controverisal Nuke Fuel

Photo: Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s nuclear plant is seen in Kashiwazaki, northeastern Japan, July 17, 2007. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

From CBS News:

(AP) Japan used weapons-grade plutonium to fuel a nuclear power plant Thursday for the first time as part of efforts to boost its atomic energy program.

Kyushu Electric Power Co. said workers fired up the No. 3 reactor at its Genkai plant in the southern prefecture of Saga using MOX fuel - a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide.

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Genes Show When A Woman's Biological Clock Will Stop

Is time running out? (Image: Altrendo Images/Stockbyte/Getty)

From New Scientist:

IT IS a dilemma facing a growing number of young women: can I delay having a baby until my career is more established? A genetic test that could make this decision less of a gamble might be on offer by next year, thanks to the discovery of a gene that seems to predict the rate at which a woman's egg supply diminishes.

No one is yet sure how useful the test will be. But the aim is to tell a woman in her early 20s whether she is at high risk of early menopause. If she is, monitoring her egg supply will confirm whether her fertility is in early decline. Armed with this information she could then decide whether to start a family sooner or later, or freeze some eggs to increase her chances of conceiving later on.

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From Space To Soil, Farmers Enlist Satellites For More Bountiful Harvests

A Better View of Soil NASA Earth Observatory

From Popular Science:

There was a time when a farmer simply tasted a clump of dirt to tell the fecundity of the soil. Now, a wide range of chemical analysis help instruct farmers on the optimal mix of fertilizer, pesticide and water. However, tests on soil samples are expensive and time consuming, and few farmers can afford to waste either time or money. And that's where the satellite imaging comes in.

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Space Hotel Reportedly On Track For 2012 Opening, Already Has Paying Guests

Space Hotel 2012 Will these space pods fly on time? Galactic Suite

From Popular Science:

A company aiming to open the first space hotel already has 43 paying customers at $4.4 million a pop.

Anyone with a cool $4 million and change might consider doing what 43 other people have done, and sign up for an orbital space vacation in 2012 with Galactic Suite Space Resort. The Barcelona-based company plans to open the first space hotel if all goes according to plan.

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Killer Dolphins Baffle Marine Experts

From The Telegraph:

It's hard to visualise but the intelligent and ever-friendly dolphin can also be a determined killer.

• Orca whales hunt eider ducks for practice
• 'Tougher laws' to protect friendly dolphins
• Shark pictures show amazing killing display

New evidence has been compiled by marine scientists that prove the normally placid dolphin is capable of brutal attacks both on innocent fellow marine mammals and, more disturbingly, on its own kind.

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Study: Internet Users Aren't Isolated (Thank Facebook)

From PCWorld:

Internet users are not as isolated as sociologists thought, but we've known that all along. Rather than isolating Americans, a new study finds the Internet broadens our social circle, and Facebook gets particular credit.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that "Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People's use of the mobile phone and the Internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks."

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Early Scents Really Do Get 'Etched' In The Brain

Common experience tells us that particular scents of childhood can leave quite an impression, for better or for worse. Now, researchers reporting the results of a brain imaging study show that first scents really do enjoy a "privileged" status in the brain. (Credit: iStockphoto/Olga Solovei)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 6, 2009) — Common experience tells us that particular scents of childhood can leave quite an impression, for better or for worse. Now, researchers reporting the results of a brain imaging study online on November 5th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, show that first scents really do enjoy a "privileged" status in the brain.

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Horror Movies: Why People Love Them

From Live Science:

This time of year, screens big and small entertain our basest instincts with horrifying gore, monsters, insanity and the supernatural. Although considered a mostly niche genre, horror films enjoy an avid following and rake in plenty of bucks at the box office.

Yet, as horror buffs come down from their Halloween rush, many are ready to do it again. Being scared out of their wits, it seems, is fun. Audiences get another chance this weekend as the "based-on-true-events" alien-abduction thriller "The Fourth Kind" (Universal) opens nationwide.

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Masturbation In The Animal Kingdom.

From Slate.com:

Isn't it wonderful when science and religion come together? My Slate colleague William Saletan points out that a recent paper has laid the groundwork for a pro-life defense of onanism. According to obstetrician David Greening, a rigorous program of daily masturbation can actually improve sperm quality in men with fertility problems. (Samples collected at the end of the program showed less DNA damage and higher sperm motility than samples from control subjects.) Since masturbation can help you have babies, Saletan argues, it must also serve the "procreative and unitive purposes" described in the Catechism.

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Report: Cyber Attacks Caused Power Outages in Brazil

From Threat Level:

Electrical blackouts impacting millions of people in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 were caused by hackers targeting control systems, according to the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes.

In a show set to air Sunday night, CBS blames a two-day outage in Espirito Santo in 2007 on a hack attack. The blackout affected three million people. Another, smaller blackout north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005 was also triggered by computer intruders, the network claims.

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My Comment: I am sure there are now more safeguards to prevent such occurrences from happening, but it is an excellent example to use in revealing how easy it is to put down a power grid.

Electric SUVs: A Smaller Footprint For Big Vehicles

(Dan Vasconcellos)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Converting existing gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs into hybrid and electric vehicles gains traction.

Tom Reid likes his ride big – a 2000 Ford Explorer SUV with plenty of interior room and all the amenities. None of those prissy little hybrid vehicles will do for him.

But after gas hit $4 a gallon last year, Mr. Reid had a big fuel bill, too – and an epiphany: convert his gas guzzler to an all-electric vehicle.

So he did. Now Reid’s bright idea has become a sideline business for his shop, HTC Racing, which produces specialized protective coating for automotive and other metal parts in Whitman, Mass. He offers kits to convert any 1995-2004 gas-sucking Ford Explorer into a cheap-to-keep, no fuel, little maintenance all-electric SUV. Cost: $15,000.

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Vision Of The Future: Custom Corneas

Super Sight: The same technology used in the Hubble telescope could offer LASIK patients better sight. Ophthalmologists can use this technology to perform "custom" surgery to correspond to the patient's lifestyle. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

NASA technology that allows the Hubble telescope to focus on distant stars now offers LASIK eye surgery patients customized options for fine-tuned night vision, superior image contrast and sight even beyond 20/20.

Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2001, wavefront technology is the newest LASIK innovation that ophthalmologists are using not only to correct eyesight, but also to peer into the physical structure of patients' eyes and locate the exact sources of their vision problems.

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How Much Power Does The Human Brain Require To Operate?

Neurogrid 65,536 artificial neurons packed onto just
one of Neurogrid's chips Rodrigo Alvarez 2009

From Popular Science:

Simulating the brain with traditional chips would require impractical megawatts of power. One scientist has an alternative.

According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That's the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain's low energy requirements of just 20 watts--barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

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Drinking Eight Cups Of Tea A Day 'Reduces Heart Attack And Stroke Risk'

Regular tea drinking could help lead to "reduced mortality, a lower risk of
heart attack and lower cholesterol." Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Drinking up to eight cups of tea a day offers "significant health benefits", including a lower risk of heart attack and stroke, according to research.

Caffeinated drinks including tea, coffee and cocoa have a positive effect on mental function, increasing alertness, wellbeing and short-term memory, according to the study.

Dr Carrie Ruxton, a dietician who conducted a review of 47 published studies, found that an intake of 400mg of caffeine a day – or eight cups of tea – delivered "key benefits in terms of mental function and heart health" without any adverse consequences.

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The Future Of Nuclear Power

From MIT:

Introduction

An interdisciplinary MIT faculty group decided to study the future of nuclear power because of a belief that this technology is an important option for the United States and the world to meet future energy needs without emitting carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants. Other options include increased efficiency, renewables, and carbon sequestration, and all may be needed for a successful greenhouse gas management strategy. This study, addressed to government, industry, and academic leaders, discusses the interrelated technical, economic, environmental, and political challenges facing a significant increase in global nuclear power utilization over the next half century and what might be done to overcome those challenges.

This study was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and by MIT's Office of the Provost and Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.

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Simply Astronomical – The Square Kilometre Array

Low-frequency receiving tiles will be surrounded by high-frequency receiving dishes
(Image: SKA Project Office/Xilostudios)

From NOVA:

ustralia is playing a leading part in plans to build the world’s largest radio telescope.

Australia is in the running to host a giant new radio telescope, the astronomical equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider which has been called the biggest science experiment in history.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope will be too complex and costly (A$2.9 billion) to be built by any one country. Instead an international consortium of 19 countries has been formed to plan and build it. In October 2006, the consortium announced that two countries had been short listed to host the SKA – Australia and South Africa.

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Heads Up! Space Station Flyby Sunday Evening

From The Baltimore Sun:

The International Space Station is back in our evening skies, and on Sunday evening the big contraption will be flying up the East Coast and almost directly over Baltimore. (And even more directly over Ocean City.)

The weather forecast is quite promising for this pass, and the station will appear especially bright, even in badly light-polluted urban settings. It's also a convenient early-evening pass, so sky watchers will have no excuse not to step outside with the kids and get a look at your (and their) tax dollars at play.

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