Will 2010 Be The Breakout Year For E-Book Readers?

Mike Erickson, of Webster Groves, checks out a Sony Reader an e-book at Best Buy, Friday aternoon. "I'm just waiting to see what other kinds of books will be available." Erickson said. Erickson is at the Best Buy in Brentwood. (Dawn Majors/P-D)

From Stltoday:

When Sheila Effan found a Kindle electronic reader among her gifts last Christmas, one of her first thoughts was whether she'd miss the smell and feel of real paper. She got her answer five months later.

That's when a friend lent her a paperback. She lugged it around for a couple of days before tiring of the burden.

"I got annoyed with it. So I just downloaded it to my Kindle," Effan said. "I thought I would miss books. But I don't."

Oh, how the folks behind Amazon.com's Kindle, Sony's Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook love the sound of that.

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Climate Change Does Not Always Lead to Conflict

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 17, 2009) — The climate change that took place in Mesopotamia around 2000 BC did not lead to war, but in fact led to the development of a new shared identity. Although increasing drought often leads to competition and conflict, there seems to be no evidence of this in northern Mesopotamia according to Dutch researcher Arne Wossink.

Wossink studied how the farmers and nomads in northern Mesopotamia -- currently the border area between Turkey, Syria and Iraq -- responded to the changes in climate that took place between 3000 and 1600 BC. He expected to find considerable evidence of competition: as food and water became scarcer the natural result could well be conflict. He discovered, however, that the farmers developed much closer bonds with the semi-nomadic cattle farmers.

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Earth's Upper Atmosphere Cooling Dramatically

New research shows that the outermost layer of the atmosphere will lose 3 percent of its density over the coming decade, a sign of the far-reaching impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. As the density declines, orbiting satellites experience less drag. Credit: ©UCAR.

From Live Science:

SAN FRANCISCO — When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere cools dramatically, new observations find.

The results could help scientists better understand the swelling and shrinking of our planet's atmosphere, a phenomenon that affects the orbits of satellites and space junk.

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McDonald's Free Wi-Fi Part Of Growing Trend

From Computerworld:

Everybody wants free Wi-Fi, and McDonald's Corp. is responding to that demand with Wednesday's announcement that more than 11,000 of its U.S. restaurants will have free Wi-Fi in January.

"We've had Wi-Fi working in our restaurants for five years under the pay-to-play model, but now is the time, with the ubiquity of Wi-Fi devices -- including handhelds and laptops -- to extend that offer," McDonald's USA CIO David Grooms said in an interview today.

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A Global 'Planetary Skin' Network Will Monitor Earth's Resources

Planetary Skin Satellites join forces with drones and
surface sensors to monitor the Earth NASA/Cisco

From Popular Science:

NASA and Cisco officially launch a $100 million effort to integrate ground, sea, air and space sensors.

Every day, farmers and legislators make billions of small- and large-scale decisions that affect the Earth's resources, and typically rely on thousands of fragmented sources of data. Now NASA has joined tech firm Cisco in creating a $100 million "Planetary Skin" that would integrate all the Earth data from satellites, aerial drones and ground sensors, and put it in the hands of any decisionmakers who need it.

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Inconvenient Truth For Al Gore As He's Caught Exaggerating The Threat Of Global Warming... Again

Spin row: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore makes his controversial speech during a presentation of a report on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, at the Bella centre of Copenhagen yesterday

From The Daily Mail:

Green crusader Al Gore was at the centre of a new spin row last night after he was caught out for a second time exaggerating the threat of global warming.

In a keynote speech at the Copenhagen talks, the former U.S. vice-president claimed the North Pole could be completely free of ice by the middle of the next decade.

He claimed a study showed a ‘75 per cent chance’ that the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer months within five to seven years.

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Michelangelos Make Smart Lovers

From The Science Blog:

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Is that really Bob? You've seen him hundreds of mornings for the last 10 years at local coffee shops. Since he started dating Sara, he looks you in the eye -- and smiles. Sara takes every opportunity to let coffee shop cronies know that Bob is her guy and to gush about how funny he is. And he is. Who knew?

Think of Sara like Michelangelo chipping away at a block of marble to release the ideal figure slumbering within.

A new international review of seven papers on "the Michelangelo phenomenon" shows that when close partners affirm and support each other's ideal selves, they and the relationship benefit greatly.

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More Powerful Superconducting Magnets will Make More Powerful Particle Colliders

From The Next Big Future:

The completed long quadrupole shell magnet (LQS01) in the Building 77A assembly area of Berkeley Lab's Engineering Division.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has just started producing collisions, but scientists and engineers have already made significant progress in preparing for future upgrades beyond the collider’s nominal design performance, including a 10-fold increase in collision rates by the end of the next decade and, eventually, higher-energy beams.

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Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door

From Wired Science:

Meet GJ 1214b, the most Earth-like planet ever found outside our solar system.

It’s not exactly Earth’s twin: It’s about six times bigger, a whole lot hotter and made mostly of water. But compared to the giant gas balls that account for nearly every other extrasolar planet ever found, it’s pretty darn close. And through a fortunate happenstance of cosmic geometry, astronomers will be able to study GJ 1214b in great detail.

“If you want to describe in one sentence what this planet is, it’s a big, hot ocean,” said Harvard University astronomer David Charbonneau. “We can even study its atmosphere. This planet will occupy us for years. That’s part of what’s so exciting about it.”

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Dying Star Previews Our Own Sun's Fate

Artist's impression of Chi Cygni. As the red giant star runs out of fuel, it pulses in and out, beating like a giant heart and ejecting shells of material. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

From Cosmos:

CAMBRIDGE: New images of the surface of a distant, dying star offer a preview of the ultimate fate of our own Sun, French scientists say.

"This work opens a window onto the fate of our Sun five billion years from now, when it will near the end of its life," said lead author Sylvestre Lacour of the Observatoire de Paris.

About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system.

Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart.

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New Displays For E-Readers: Read All About It

Photo: Getty Images

From The Economist:

Display technology: Readers of electronic books must choose between long battery life or vibrant, living colour. Could they have both?

THE sudden surge in the popularity of e-readers—slate-like devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, on which electronic books can be read—has been one of the big surprises of 2009. Recessions are often a good time to launch new products, as old certainties are questioned and consumer tastes shift. The iPod made its debut in 2001 in the depths of America’s recession, and e-readers may prove to be a similar success story this time. But today’s e-readers, like that first iPod, are technologically quite simple. Most of them have a monochromatic screen to display text and black-and-white pictures, and none can handle video.

Even so, around 5m e-readers will be sold worldwide in 2009, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm, and a further 12m in 2010. The Kindle is by far the most popular e-reader, but there are many others.

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Tremors Between Slip Events: More Evidence of Great Quake Danger to Seattle

Seattle skyline with Mount Rainier in the background. (Credit: iStockphoto/Natalia Bratslavsky)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 16, 2009) — For most of a decade, scientists have documented unfelt and slow-moving seismic events, called episodic tremor and slip, showing up in regular cycles under the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They last three weeks on average and release as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake.

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Robotic Planes Capture Detailed Images Of Remote Antarctic

After three stokes of bad luck, the group launches the unmanned aerial vehicle in mission No. 4, a 15-hour trip to Terra Nova Bay and back. Credit:Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science.

From Live Science:

SAN FRANCISCO — Unmanned planes flying over one of the most forbidding regions of Antarctica have captured the first close-up images of the area, where the cold, dense seawater that drives the ocean's circulation is formed.

These unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are proving a boon to scientists who study the frozen regions at Earth's poles, many parts of which simply aren't reachable to humans.

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Scientists Decode Entire Genetic Code Of Cancer

Cracking the Cancer Code A cluster of breast cancer cells, with blue ones marking actively growing cells and yellow marking dying cells. Could scientists crack their code next? Wellcome Trust

From Popular Science:

And cigarette smokers get a free mutation in every pack.

In a major step toward understanding cancer, one of the biggest problems bedeviling modern medicine, scientists have now cracked the genetic code for two of the most common cancers. This marks just the beginning of an international effort to catalog all the genes that go wrong among the many types of human cancer, the BBC reports.

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Susan Boyle's I Dreamed A Dream Audition Tops List Of Most Watched YouTube Video This Year With 120m Hits

From The Daily Mail:

Britain's Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle was the star of the most-watched clip on video website YouTube this year, figures showed today.

The Scottish singer's rendition of I Dreamed A Dream on the television show was watched more than 120 million times by viewers across the world.

She netted more than three times the number of internet hits achieved by the second most-watched video of 2009.

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The Publishing Disruption

From The Futurist:

What a unique thing a book is. Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume. Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency. Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper possessions.

Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monasteries knew how to read. There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century. Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate.

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Russians Confirm That UK Climate Scientists Manipulated Data To Exaggerate Global Warming

From The Telegraph:

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)

A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.

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Calls To Debate 'Fertility Outsourcing'

Most countries do not permit commercial surrogacy, say experts (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

In a world where rich countries look for cheap labour in poor ones, bioethicists, lawyers and women's health advocates are raising questions about the outsourcing of baby-making - especially to countries like India.

Australian sociologist Associate Professor Catherine Waldby of the University of Sydney told a recent conference in Brisbane that India was undercutting the US as a preferred source of surrogate mothers for couples from developed countries.

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30,000 Flee Philippine volcano

Lava flows down the slopes of the Mayon volcano in the Philippines

From CNN:

(CNN) -- More than 30,000 people have fled their homes ahead of an expected eruption of the Mayon volcano in the central Philippines, the Red Cross said Wednesday.

Philippine authorities have said a large-scale eruption of the 2,464-meter (8,077-foot) peak is imminent, and have begun trying to evacuate about 50,000 people living around the nation's most active volcano.

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Scientists Crack 'Entire Genetic Code' Of Cancer

From BBC:

Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers - skin and lung - a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.

Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, says the Wellcome Trust team.

Scientists around the globe are now working to catalogue all the genes that go wrong in many types of human cancer.

The UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth.

China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas.

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15% Of Teens 'Sexting' On Cells, Study Says

From San Francisco Chronicle:

About 15 percent of American teenagers have received nude or sexually suggestive photos on their cell phones, and that percentage doubles as teens get older, according to a study released Tuesday about the tech-fueled trend called "sexting."

Boys are as likely as girls to send sexts, while teens who pay for their own cell phone bills are more likely to text salacious shots, according to the study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project of Washington.

The study does show the vast majority of teens aren't sexting, with 4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds admitting to sexting photos or videos of themselves.

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Who Needs The Grid?

From The Atlantic:

In the boardroom at Bloom Energy, a single picture hangs on the wall: a satellite image of the world at night. Clusters of bright lights mark the industrial centers, and thin white lines trace connecting passageways such as the U.S. Interstate System and the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In between, huge swaths lie in shadow.

Standing almost reverently before the image, K. R. Sridhar, the CEO of Bloom, points to the dark areas—places where electricity isn’t accessible or reliable. “This is my motivation for everything,” he says. To improve the lot of the more than 2 billion people living in those dark areas, he says, you have to get them reliable, affordable energy. And if you don’t want to doom the environment in the process, you have to make that energy very clean.

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Scientists Decode Memory-Forming Brain Cell Conversations

Artist's rendering of neurons. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 16, 2009) — The conversations neurons have as they form and recall memories have been decoded by Medical College of Georgia scientists.

The breakthrough in recognizing in real time the formation and recollection of a memory opens the door to objective, thorough memory studies and eventually better therapies, said Dr. Joe Tsien, neuroscientist and co-director of MCG's Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute. He is corresponding author on the study published Dec. 16 in PLoS ONE.

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Time-Lapse Photos Show Dramatic Erosion of Alaska Coast

A new study indicates part of the northern Alaska coastline is eroding by up to 45 feet annually due to declining sea ice, warming seawater and increased wave activity. Credit: Robert S. Anderson, University of Colorado.

From Live Science:

SAN FRANCISCO — Time-lapse photography of crumbling Alaskan coastlines is helping scientists understand the "triple whammy" of forces eroding the local landscape: declining sea ice, warming ocean waters and more poundings by waves.

The erosion rates from these forces are greater than anything seen along the world's coastlines, with the coast midway between Alaska's Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay falling into the ocean in the inland direction by up to one-third the length of a football field annually, scientists have found.

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New Underwater Explorers Go Where Scientists Can't

From Popular Mechanics:

Last week, an unmanned robot completed a 3300-mile trek across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. The 134-pound robot, a glider named the Scarlet Knight, spent months at sea, gathering data on ocean temperature and salinity between the water's surface down to 600 feet below. The Scarlet Knight is just one of many new technologies scientists are turning to in order to research oceans, rivers and lakes—areas that are impractical, and in some cases impossible, for researchers to access themselves. By employing everything from robots to, yes, tadpoles, scientists hope to learn more about how climate change and pollution are affecting the earth's water. Here is some of the newest tech aiding scientists.

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Who Should Be the First Band To Play in Space?

Spandau Ballet

From Popular Science:

This morning an odd story surfaced and began orbiting the Web: Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic signed '80s rock heartthrobs (now aging '80s rock heartthrobs) Spandau Ballet to be the first band to rock out in space. Citing a press release of dubious origin, several blogs and even the UK's Daily Mail reported the story, even naming possible songs the group would play during a five-minute weightless set.

But we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. The Internet has hoodwinked us once again.

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The Beckoning Silence: Why Half Of The World's Languages Are in Serious Danger Of Dying Out

Language hotspots are areas with extreme linguistic diversity, containing many highly endangered and underdocumented languages

From The Independent:

Of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to die out by the end of this century. Now, one man is trying to keep those voices alive by reigniting local pride in heritage and identity.

High up, perched among the remote hilltops of eastern Nepal, sits a shaman, resting on his haunches in long grass. He is dressed simply, in a dark waistcoat and traditional kurta tunic with a Nepalese cap sitting snugly on his head. To his left and right, two men hold recording devices several feet from his face, listening patiently to his precious words. His tongue elicits sounds alien to all but a few people in the world, unfamiliar even to those who inhabit his country. His eyes flicker with all the intensity of a man reciting for the first time to a western audience his tribe's version of the Book of Genesis, its myth of origins.

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How A Glass Or Two Of Champagne Really Does Lift The Heart

From The Guardian:

Fizz made with black grapes shares benefits of red wine for heart and blood circulation, scientists find.

Scientists are delivering some unexpected cheer this Christmas. They have found that a couple of glasses of champagne a day are good for your heart and blood circulation.

Nor, they believe, are the benefits limited to expensive fizz: cheaper alternatives such as cava and prosecco may offer similar effects.

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From Future Pundit:

10000 to 7600 year old woolly mammoth DNA was found frozen in Alaska tundra. So this begs the obvious question: Is the DNA good enough to sequence and use some day to bring back the woolly mammoth?

The work of U of A Earth and Atmospheric Sciences professor Duane Froese and his colleagues counters an important extinction theory, based on radiocarbon dating of bones and teeth. That analysis concluded that more than half of the large mammals in North America (the 'megafauna') disappeared about 13,000 years ago.

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I, Robot: Buy Your Own Android Double For Christmas

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro developed his own robot doppelganger in 2007

From The Daily Mail:

Stuck for gift ideas this Christmas? How about an android moulded in the exact likeness of your loved one? Well that is exactly what's on offer at a chain of department stores in Japan.

The mechanical doppelgangers will be on offer at Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson retailers for the princely sum of 20.1million yen or £139,000.

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Baby Black Holes Implicated In Universe's Mightiest Rays

Baby black holes occur when two types of dead star merge
(Image: Denver Museum of Nature & Science)

From New Scientist:

Baby black holes are puny compared with their humongous cousins at the centres of galaxies, but their birth may spew out the universe's mightiest particles.

Subatomic particles are routinely detected smashing into Earth's atmosphere at incredibly high energies, but the origin of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) remains a mystery. Some have argued that energy released by the collapse of a massive single star to form a black hole might produce the UHECRs, but the rate of such events is too low.

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Lost Giants: Did Mammoths Vanish Before, During And After Humans Arrived?

Image: PREHISTORIC MYSTERY: Mastodons feeding on black ash trees. The disappearance of such megafauna has perplexed scientists. COURTESY OF BARRY ROAL CARLSEN, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

From Scientific American:

Three studies seem to disagree as to when mammoths, saber-toothed cats and other North American megafauna disappeared.

Before humans arrived, the Americas were home to woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other behemoths, an array of megafauna more impressive than even Africa boasts today. Researchers have advanced several theories to explain what did them in and when the event occurred. A series of discoveries announced in the past four weeks, at first glance apparently contradictory, adds fresh details to the mystery of this mass extinction.

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Drinking Cups Of Tea And Coffee 'Can Prevent Diabetes'

From The BBC:

Tea and coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a large body of evidence shows.

And the protection may not be down to caffeine since decaf coffee has the greatest effect, say researchers in Archives of Internal Medicine.

They looked at 18 separate studies involving nearly 500,000 people.

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'Rock-Breathing' Bacteria Could Generate Electricity And Clean Up Oil Spills

A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of East Anglia)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 15, 2009) — A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity.

Recently published by the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers have demonstrated for the first time the mechanism by which some bacteria survive by 'breathing rocks'.

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Americans Are Info-Junkies

Despite having access to computers and other electronic distractions, Americans on average spend about 60 percent of their information consumption time watching TV or listening to radio. Credit: UCSD

From Live Science:

Americans are known for gorging on food, but we're also gluttons of another sort: A new study finds that the average American consumes more than 34 gigabytes of video, music and words a day—and that's only on our free time.

One byte of information is equivalent to one letter of text. One gigabyte is equal to roughly 8 minutes of high definition video. Thirty-four gigabytes of data would fit on about 7 DVD disks or 1.5 Blu-ray disks.

A mix of old and new media contribute to our daily information diet, the study finds, including TV, radio, books, the Internet, movies, text messages and video games.

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Bad Bottles Of Wine Can Be Used For Energy

Got a Bad Bottle? Not to worry, researchers can still salvage some
electricity from a vintage that's going bad. Jairo

From Popular Science:

A bad bottle can throw a wrench in your dinner party, but researchers in the U.S. and India say it could also lower your energy bills. Using the leftover vinegar and sugar in improperly fermented wine, those scientists are devising novel methods to turn wastewater from vineyards into electricity and hydrogen, cleaning the water in the process.

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Octopuses Use Coconut Shells To Make Portable Lairs

From The Telegraph:

Octopuses collect coconuts from the sea bed and use them as portable shelters, scientists have found in the latest example of animals using tools.

Researchers watched as the eight legged creatures, not much bigger than the coconuts themselves, collected shell halves, stacked them two together, and transported them awkwardly under their bodies over distances of up to 20 metres.

Then when they arrived at their destination the octopuses in Indonesia used the two halves like shields to construct a makeshift shelter.

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Real Loneliness Can Do Serious Damage

Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

From The Guardian:

Neuroscientist John Cacioppo says social pain is akin to physical pain. So what can be done to make it better?

'Tis the season to be lonely. Half a million pensioners will spend Christmas Day alone, while nearly three in five people over 55 will be wishing they could see more of their family. This isn't just a seasonal or British phenomenon. At any given time, around one in five Americans – 60 million people – feel so isolated that it makes them seriously unhappy.

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Boeing 787 Dreamliner Finally Takes To The Skies In First Test Flight - Two Years Later Than Originally Planned

Employees cheer as the Dreamliner takes off for the first time

From The Daily Mail:

Boeing Co made the first successful test flight of its 787 Dreamliner today, almost two and a half years after the new, fuel-efficient plane was supposed to fly.

The lightweight carbon and titanium plane, promising to save airlines million of dollars in fuel and maintenance costs, has been hampered by a shortage of bolts, faulty design and a two-month strike.

But today Boeing sent the plane on a four-hour flight from Paine Field in Everett, Washington, at 10am local time, to test it as it flew around the local area.

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Rise And Fall Of A Dinosaur Hunter

Nate Murphy doing what he did best - unearthing dinosaurs
(Image: James Woodcock/Billings Gazette)

From New Scientist:

ANYONE who met Nate Murphy would think he had lived and breathed dinosaurs all his life. He's the sort of man who stands out in a crowd: stocky, outgoing and invariably wearing a straw hat and shorts. He never claimed to be a dinosaur scientist, just a regular guy with a love for fossils and a knack for finding them.

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Will The U.S. Military Do Right By The Dugong?

From Scientific American:

Would a plan to build a 2.5-mile-long airfield in Okinawa, Japan, doom a rare manateelike species to extinction? That's the assertion of more than 400 environmental organizations (pdf), which recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to cancel the plans to expand Camp Schwab, a U.S. Marine Corps base on Okinawa island.

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Company Aims to Make Jet Fuel from Coal

An artist’s rendition of the proposed facility. Rentech

From The New York Times:

Some of the world’s largest airlines — including American, US Airways, Delta and Lufthansa — have signed a memorandum of understanding to buy 500,000 barrels per month of jet fuel made from coal and petroleum coke, a refinery waste product.

The development will be announced this morning by Rentech, the Los Angeles, Calif.-based company that plans to make the fuel at a plant in Mississippi.

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People Who Look Young For Their Age 'Live Longer'

Photo: Fresh-faced actor Leonardo Di Caprio might expect a long life.

From BBC News:

People blessed with youthful faces are more likely to live to a ripe old age than those who look more than their years, work shows.

Danish scientists say appearance alone can predict survival, after they studied 387 pairs of twins.

The researchers asked nurses, trainee teachers and peers to guess the age of the twins from mug shots.

Those rated younger-looking tended to outlive their older-looking sibling, the British Medical Journal reports.

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More Pores Could Ease Global Warming

By boosting the number of pores in leaves, scientists hope to one day absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos/AFP:

TOKYO: Japanese researchers last week said they had found a way to make plant leaves absorb more carbon dioxide - an innovation that may help ease global warming and boost food production.

The Kyoto University team found that soaking germinated seeds in a protein solution raised the number of pores, or stomas, on the leaves that inhale CO2 and release oxygen, said chief researcher Ikuko Hara-Nishimura.

"A larger number means there are more intake windows for carbon dioxide, contributing to lowering the density of the gas," she said.

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Black Carbon Deposits On Himalayan Ice Threaten Earth's 'Third Pole'

To better understand the role that black soot has on glaciers, researchers trekked high into the Himalayas to collect ice cores that contain a record of soot deposition that spans back to the 1950s. (Credit: Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 15, 2009) — Black soot deposited on Tibetan glaciers has contributed significantly to the retreat of the world's largest non-polar ice masses, according to new research by scientists from NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Soot absorbs incoming solar radiation and can speed glacial melting when deposited on snow in sufficient quantities.

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Why Humans Outlive Apes

Chimps and apes are genetically so similar to humans - and their human-like gestures do remind us how close we are on the family tree - that scientists have long been puzzled why they don't live as long as we do. Diet-related evolutionary changes may explain it. Image credit: stockexpert.

From Live Science:

Genetic changes that apparently allow humans to live longer than any other primate may be rooted in a more carnivorous diet.

These changes may also promote brain development and make us less vulnerable to diseases of aging, such as cancer, heart disease and dementia.

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How James Cameron's Innovative New 3D Tech Created Avatar

Director James Cameron holding an antique stereoscope. (Photographed By Joe Pugliese, Sept. 19, 2009, at Fox Studios in Los Angeles, Calif.)

From Popular Mechanics:

Director James Cameron is known for his innovations in movie technology and ambitions to make CG look and feel real. His next film, Avatar, will put his reputation to the test. Can Cameron make blue, alien creature look real on the big screen? With all the attention focused on the film, anything short of perfection may not be good enough. Here is how Cameron plans to make movie history with a host of new technologies and years of development.

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A Stroll Around Pompeii, Courtesy Of Google’s Street View

From Discovery News:

If you can't be one of the 2.5 million tourists who wander through the streets of Pompeii every year, you now have another option: Google's Street View.

The 360-degree panoramic street-level service debuted last week in the ancient Roman town that was buried in Mount Vesuvius' catastrophic eruption in 79 A.D.

Statues, temples, amphitheaters, as well as close-up views of houses, bakeries and baths are now visible on the search engine's free mapping service.

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Discovery Of New Planets Raises Hopes Of Other Life In Universe

Astronomers have discovered four new planets Photo: NASA/AP

From The Telegraph:

Astronomers have discovered four new planets orbiting two stars similar to Earth's sun, raising hopes that other life may exist in the universe.

However, the stars are 28 and 84 light years away – placing them far beyond the reach of existing spacecraft.

The first three planets orbit the star 61 Virginis and can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation of Virgo.

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Ocean Acidification Will Threaten Our Food Supply, UK Environment Secretary To Warn

Thousands of Glassfishes swim on the edge of the coral reef near Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. Marine species are at risk of extinction due to rising acidity levels in the oceans

From The Daily Mail:

Humanity's food supply will be threatened by the acidification of our oceans unless climate change is tackled, Hilary Benn is to warn as the UN climate summit today.

The UK environment secretary will say acidification provides a 'powerful incentive' to cut carbon emissions.

The comments follow a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has warned acidification will cause the mass extinction of marine species unless immediate action is taken.

Read more ....

Nanocrystals Create An Insulator Better Than Pure Vacuum

Better Vacuum Thermos Ain't no party like a lunar tea party: an Apollo astronaut holds a thermos for collecting lunar regolith NASA

From Popular Science:

Photonic crystal insulation could have exciting applications.

Vacuum's emptiness doesn't just pose a problem for space travelers -- a vacuum lining is also one of the best known insulators on Earth, and may help keep those holiday drinks and soups warm in your thermos. Now scientists have found that layering photonic crystals within the vacuum lining can even prevent heat loss from invisible infrared radiation.

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Google Demonstrates Quantum Computer Image Search

D-Wave chips could make searching much faster
(Image: Copyright © 2005 – 2008 D-Wave Systems Inc.)

From New Scientist:

Google's web services may be considered cutting edge, but they run in warehouses filled with conventional computers. Now the search giant has revealed it is investigating the use of quantum computers to run its next generation of faster applications.

Writing on Google's research blog this week, Hartmut Neven, head of its image recognition team, reveals that the Californian firm has for three years been quietly developing a quantum computer that can identify particular objects in a database of stills or video.

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How Global Warming Could Change The Winemaking Map

Photo: Members of the Vignerons Indépendants wine growers associated clinked their bottles to express concerns over the consequences of inaction on climate change. Alexandra Fleurantin / Greenpeace France

From Time Magazine:

Many Bordeaux winemakers are declaring 2009 the best vintage in 60 years, but Yvon Minvielle of Château Lagarette isn't celebrating. Like many vintners across France, Minvielle is feeling uneasy after another unusually warm summer and early grape harvest. "They say everything is going great in Bordeaux, but take a closer look," he says. Heat-stressed vines ripened at unequal rates this year, and only skillful picking spread over a full month allowed Minvielle to gather a mature crop.

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Buy A Custom Robot That Looks Just Like You (PHOTO)

From The Huffington Post:

If you're wondering what to put on your wishlist for the holidays, here's a gift idea you might not have considered: your robot twin -- a robotic double that looks, and talks, just like you.

Japanese department store Sogo & Seibu has announced that they are selling two, customizable robots that can be tweaked to look exactly like you (or the person of the buyer's choosing).

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