Cool Science News

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Computers Offer A Faster Way To Cure Humanity's Ills

From The Guardian:

Scientific research and medical breakthroughs increasingly depend on huge computer power.

HOW DO YOU predict whether a given patient is likely to die from a heart attack? Conventional medical wisdom would base a risk assessment on factors such as the person's age, whether they were smokers and/or diabetic plus the results of cardiac ultrasound and various blood tests. It may be that a better predictor is a computer program that analyses the patient's electrocardiogram looking for subtle features within the data provided by the instrument.

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Apple's iPhone Is Most Popular Phone In US - Study

From Apple Insider:

With 4 percent of all mobile device subscribers in the U.S., a new study has found that Apple's iPhone was the single most popular handset model in the country in 2009.

The iPhone edged out Research in Motion's BlackBerry 8300 series, which came in second place with 3.7 percent, according to new data released this week by Nielsen. The rankings measured the top 10 mobile phones in use in the U.S. from January to October 2009.

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The E-Book, The E-Reader, And The Future Of Reading

Members of a suburban Boston book group. Mary Knox Merrill / Staff

From The Christian Science Monitor:

As stone tablets gave way the codex, the future of reading is digital – but will the e-reader and the e-book change the nature of how we read?

Jeremy Manore, an 18-year-old from central New Jersey, subscribes to several magazines and reads books constantly – John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among his favorite writers. When he came home from his elite Massachusetts boarding school for Thanksgiving, Jeremy brought three books to read, his mother, Sandy Manore, says. But he wasn’t carting heavy volumes in a backpack.

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Thinking Out Loud Helps Solve Problems

From The Telegraph:

Thinking out loud really does help you to solve problems faster, scientists have discovered.

People who talk out loud to think through their maths problems are able to solve them faster and have more chance of getting the right answer, the research has found.

In a finding that flies in the face of the old-fashioned theory of studying in silence, classrooms should be full of the noise of students tackling their problems out loud.

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Scrubby Oak Lauded As Oldest Known Living Organism

Mike Cipra, a desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, examines a burned Joshua tree that shows signs of growth earlier this month. Scientists say the effects of global warming could make Joshuas extinct within a century. Kurt Miller / The Press-Enterprise

From The Independent:

It began life during the last ice age, long before man turned to agriculture and built the first cities in the fertile crescent of the Middle East. It was already thousands of years old when the Egyptians built their pyramids and the ancient Britons erected Stonehenge.

The Jurupa Oak tree first sprouted into life when much of the world was still covered in glaciers. It has stood on its windswept hillside in southern California for at least 13,000 years, making it the oldest known living organism, according to a study published today.

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Mind-Reading Brain Implant Could Allow Paralysed To Turn Their Thoughts Into Instant Speech

The patient had a stroke in the brain, which stopped neural signals from travelling through the body. The electrode bypassed these channels and sent the thought signals to an FM receiver outside the body to a speech synthesizer via a neural decoder

From The Daily Mail:

A revolutionary new device that reads a person's thoughts and turns them into speech could soon change the lives of paralysed patients around the world.

The Neuralynx System is being developed by a team of scientists led by Professor Frank Guenther at Boston University.

Users will simply have to think of what they want to say and a voice synthesizer will translate the thoughts into speech almost immediately.

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Supernova Remnants Reveal How The Star Exploded

Supernovas that come from thermonuclear explosion on white dwarfs (known as Type Ia) produce very symmetric remnants. Another type, created when a very massive star collapses, results in more asymmetrically shaped remnants. (Credit: NASA/CXC/UCSC/L. Lopez et al.)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 21, 2009) — At a very early age, children learn how to classify objects according to their shape. Now, new research suggests studying the shape of the aftermath of supernovas may allow astronomers to do the same.

A new study of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on supernova remnants -- the debris from exploded stars -- shows that the symmetry of the remnants, or lack thereof, reveals how the star exploded. This is an important discovery because it shows that the remnants retain information about how the star exploded even though hundreds or thousands of years have passed.

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Surprising Truths About Santa's Reindeer

Reindeer and caribou are two names for the same species called Rangifer tarandus, with reindeer generally referring to the domesticated variety that pull sleds. Credit: Stockxpert.

From Live Science:

Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen were no doubt keeping an eye on the recent climate conference in Copenhagen. Reindeer numbers have dropped nearly 60 percent in the last three decades due to climate change and habitat disturbance caused by humans, a study earlier this year found.

The decline of reindeer is a hot topic to more than just Santa and millions of children around the world.

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War Games: Military Use Of Consumer Technology

Courtesy Vcom 3D

From The Economist:

Consumer products and video-gaming technology are boosting the performance and reducing the price of military equipment.

VIDEO games have become increasingly realistic, especially those involving armed combat. America’s armed forces have even used video games as recruitment and training tools. But the desire to play games is not the reason why the United States Air Force recently issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles. It intends to link them up to build a supercomputer that will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system. It will be used for research, including the development of high-definition imaging systems for radar, and will cost around one-tenth as much as a conventional supercomputer. The air force has already built a smaller computer from a cluster of 336 PS3s.

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Dogs Better Than Human Walking Companions

From Future Pundit:

No surprise here. Oh, and cats aren't getting you any exercise.

Is it better to walk a human or to walk a dog?

New research from the University of Missouri has found that people who walk dogs are more consistent about regular exercise and show more improvement in fitness than people who walk with a human companion. In a 12-week study of 54 older adults at an assisted living home, 35 people were assigned to a walking program for five days a week, while the remaining 19 served as a control group. Among the walkers, 23 selected a friend or spouse to serve as a regular walking partner along a trail laid out near the home. Another 12 participants took a bus daily to a local animal shelter where they were assigned a dog to walk.

Click thru to read the details. Suffice to say, dogs rule.

Engage The X Drive: Ten Ways To Traverse Deep Space

The VASIMR ion engine could - if powered by an onboard nuclear reactor - take astronauts to Mars in just 39 days (Illustration: Ad Astra Rocket Company)

From New Scientist:

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to reach outer space. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made it to the surface of the moon. And that is as far as any of us has ventured.

Apart from the mundane problems of budgets and political will, the major roadblock is that our dominant space-flight technology – chemically fuelled rockets – just isn't up to the distances involved. We can send robot probes to the outer planets, but they take years to get there.

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Europe's Mars Missions Get Final Go-Ahead

From The BBC:

Member-states of the European Space Agency (Esa) have given final approval to revised plans to explore Mars.

There have been protracted discussions on what Europe could do at the Red Planet and how much it might cost.

The Council of Esa has given the green light to a two-mission endeavour that would see the launch of an orbiter in 2016 and a rover in 2018.

The exploration projects will be undertaken in partnership with the US space agency (Nasa).

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Nathan Myhrvold's Anti Global Warming Scheme

From Associated Content:

Nathan Myhrvold is a former technology officer for Microsoft who has found his own company, Intellectual Ventures, which is involved in a number of technology development programs, including new forms of energy generation.

Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world's economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves Nathan Myhrvold's Anti Global Warming Scheme running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun's heat just enough to counteract the effects of global warming. The estimated cost would be about two hundred and fifty million dollars.

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The Air Force's Next-Gen Bomber

The B-2 It's bad, but the brass wants something badder. The next-generation of bombers will conduct extensive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, as well as carry directed-energy and other non-kinetic weapons.

Air Force's Next-Gen Bomber Will Be More Spy Plane Than Strike Aircraft -- Popular Science

It turns out the Air Force's next-gen bomber really isn't much of a bomber at all. While the next iteration of stealth bombers is still but a sketch on the drawing board, the DoD and top Air Force command know what the wars of the next century will call for: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as the ability to deploy non-kinetic weapons to disrupt enemy operations, all while reserving the ability to drop the occasional ordinance -- and do it all at the same time with a single, stealthy super-weapon.

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17 Movies We're Geeked Out For in 2010

From Popular Mechanics:

If you thought 2009 was a great year for movies, look out for 2010: From high-tech spy thrillers to mind-melters to VFX masterpieces, the upcoming season is filled with flicks for geeks. Here are the movies we're most looking forward to.

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Over 50% Of The USA Is Now Covered In Snow

UPDATE: The East coast snowstorm seen from space

From Watts Up With That?:

The Mid-Atlantic states were completely white on Sunday, December 20, 2009, in the wake of a record-breaking snow storm. The storm deposited between 12 and 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. on December 19, according to the National Weather Service. For many locations, the snowfall totals broke records for the most snow to fall in a single December day.

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Monday, December 21, 2009

Black Holes In Star Clusters Stir Up Time And Space

An artist's representation of the burst of gravitational waves resulting from the collision of a colliding pair of black holes. (Credit: LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) / NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 21, 2009) — Within a decade scientists could be able to detect the merger of tens of pairs of black holes every year, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Bonn's Argelander-Institut fuer Astronomie, who publish their findings in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Dinosaur Packed Venom In Fangs

Caption: The dinosaur Sinornithosaurus (left) might have used venom delivered with its teeth to help it hunt birds. Credit: Robert DePalma.

From Live Science:

Using snake-like fangs, saber-toothed dinosaur relatives of velociraptors likely subdued their prey with venom, scientists now suggest.

Paleontologists analyzed the skulls of Sinornithosaurus, whose name means "Chinese bird lizard." This narrow-snouted raptor was the fifth and most bird-like dinosaur species ever to be discovered, and lived roughly 125 million years ago in the warm, moist forests of northeastern China during the late Cretaceous.

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Crowd-Sourcing Comes Of Age In The DARPA Network Challenge

Photo: M.I.T. MEDIA LAB'S RED BALLOON CHALLENGE: From left to right: Anmol Madan, Galen Pickard, Riley Crane, Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, Wei Pan and Manuel Cebrian.
© MIT

Inflated Expectations: Crowd-Sourcing Comes of Age in the DARPA Network Challenge -- Scientific American

The M.I.T. and Georgia Tech teams proved most successful in using social networks to pinpoint the locations of 10 red weather balloons scattered throughout the U.S.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Network Challenge earlier this month demonstrated that social networks, more than being platforms for self-promotion, can be also be highly effective tools for rapidly gathering and disseminating very precise information. With the help of Facebook, Twitter and a homemade Web site, a winning team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) was able to within nine hours identify the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 of DARPA's red weather balloons, which were lofted 30.5 meters into the air at locations scattered throughout the U.S.

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Australian Government Plans Internet Censorship

From New Scientist:

Australians will soon find their internet access routed through a government-run filter designed to block access to a secret blacklist of sites, including those that disseminate child pornography.

Google slammed the move as "heavy-handed" and one Australian politician called it a "move towards censorship".

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Czech Zoo Sends Rare Northern White Rhinos To Kenya

From the BBC:

Four rare Northern White rhinos have been flown from a Czech zoo to Kenya, in a desperate attempt to save the species from extinction.

Animal experts hope the rhinos - two males and two females - will breed in their natural habitat in Africa.

Only eight Northern White rhinos are known to survive worldwide, all of them in captivity: six in the Czech Republic and two in the US.

The last four living in the wild in Africa have not been seen since 2006.

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7-Eleven Hack From Russia Led to ATM Looting in New York

From Threat Level:

Flashback, early 2008: Citibank officials are witnessing a huge spike in fraudulent withdrawals from New York area ATMs — $180,000 is stolen from cash machines on the Upper East Side in just three days. After a stakeout, police arrest one man walking out of a bank with thousands of dollars in cash and 12 reprogrammed cards. A lucky traffic stop catches two more plunderers who’d driven in from Michigan. Another pair are arrested after trying to mug an undercover FBI agent on the street for a magstripe encoder. In the end, there are 10 arrests and at least $2 million dollars stolen.

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Exxon, DNA Pioneer Join On Algae Biofuels

Image: Algae as biomass for biofuel are become more attractive to investors and developers.

From CNN:

(CNN) -- ExxonMobil is teaming up with the biotech research company run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter to produce algae-based biofuels.

The world's second largest company announced on Tuesday that it will invest at least $300 million in biotechnology research with Venter's Synthetic Genomics Inc to help develop biofuels made from algae, as it looks to diversify its energy portfolio.

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Winter Solstice 2009: What It's All About

A statue greets the 2003 winter solstice sunrise in San Juan Bautista, California. Newscom/FIle

From Christian Science Monitor:

Winter solstice 2009 falls Monday, marking the shortest day in the year for the Northern Hemisphere.

Ah, another winter solstice come and gone.

At 5:47 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (that's 12:47 p.m. Eastern Standard Time) Monday, the Northern Hemisphere marked the mid-point of another year, as measured by the sun's highest position each day above the horizon. It marked the day with the fewest hours of sunlight this year.

Yes, this is showing a Northern Hemisphere bias. South of the equator, the day marks the most hours of sunlight of the year. So enjoy the austral summer, those of you below the equator. The rest of us? We'll be rooting for longer, warmer days.

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World's Oldest Known DNA Discovered

DNA from 419-million-year-old bacteria may have belonged to the descendants of
the world's first life forms (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

It won't make Jurassic Park a reality, but scientists have discovered 419 million-year-old DNA intact inside ancient salt deposits.

The genetic material, the oldest ever found, belongs to salt-loving bacteria whose ancestors may have been among the first life forms on Earth.

Scientists have previously recovered similar genetic material from the Michigan Basin, the same region where the latest discovery was made. But the DNA was so similar to that of modern microbes that many scientists believed the samples had been contaminated.

Not so this time around.

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Obama Pledges Billions For Rural Broadband

President Obama has pledged billions to extend America's rural broadband access.
Photo: AFP

From The Telegraph:

President Barack Obama has pledged £2 billion in loans and grants to fund the expansion of America’s broadband network to help better serve rural areas and urban communities.

The details of the spending plan were announced last week by Joe Biden, the vice president, and will see an initial $183 million invested in broadband projects in 17 states.

The funding is also expected to create “tens of thousands of jobs”. However, Mr Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein could not say precisely how many jobs will emerge, according to a Reuters’ report.

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Rethinking Artificial Intelligence

From R&D:

The field of artificial-intelligence research (AI), founded more than 50 years ago, seems to many researchers to have spent much of that time wandering in the wilderness, swapping hugely ambitious goals for a relatively modest set of actual accomplishments. Now, some of the pioneers of the field, joined by later generations of thinkers, are gearing up for a massive “do-over” of the whole idea.

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Computer Algorithm Identifies Authentic Van Gogh

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 21, 2009) — Igor Berezhnoy of Tilburg University in the Netherlands has developed computer algorithms to support art historians and other art experts in their visual assessment of paintings. His digital technology is capable of distinguishing a forgery from an authentic Van Gogh based on the painter's characteristic brush work and use of colour.

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The Real Reason Cell Phone Use Is Banned On Airlines

From Live Science:

Airline passengers who sneak in cell phone calls, play with gaming devices or listen to their mp3 players during takeoff or landing probably won't cause a plane crash, but they may risk a confrontation with flight attendants. Federal agencies and airlines typically err on the side of caution — even though researchers and aircraft companies have found almost no direct evidence of cell phones or other electronic devices interfering with aircraft systems.

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21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade

Yellowstone's Plumbing Exposed

Image: Seismic imaging was used by University of Utah scientists to construct this 3-D picture of the Yellowstone hotspot plume of hot and molten rock that feeds the shallower magma chamber (not shown) beneath Yellowstone National Park, outlined in green at the surface, or top of the illustration. The Yellowstone caldera, or giant volcanic crater, is outlined in red. State boundaries are shown in black. The park, caldera and state boundaries also are projected to the bottom of the picture to better illustrate the plume's tilt. Researchers believe "blobs" of hot rock float off the top of the plume, then rise to recharge the magma chamber located 3.7 miles to 10 miles beneath the surface at Yellowstone. The illustration also shows a region of warm rock extending southwest from near the top of the plume. It represents the eastern Snake River Plain, where the Yellowstone hotspot triggered numerous cataclysmic caldera eruptions before the plume started feeding Yellowstone 2.05 million years ago.

From E! Science News:

The most detailed seismic images yet published of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano shows a plume of hot and molten rock rising at an angle from the northwest at a depth of at least 410 miles, contradicting claims that there is no deep plume, only shallow hot rock moving like slowly boiling soup. A related University of Utah study used gravity measurements to indicate the banana-shaped magma chamber of hot and molten rock a few miles beneath Yellowstone is 20 percent larger than previously believed, so a future cataclysmic eruption could be even larger than thought.

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Spitzer’s Cold Look At Space

From American Scientist:

To get a clear view of infrared emissions from celestial objects, the Spitzer Space Telescope has been cryogenically cooled—and what sights it has seen.

In astrophysical observations, more is more—imaging across multiple wavelengths leads to richer information. One electromagnetic band in which most celestial bodies radiate is the infrared: Objects ranging in location from the chilly fringes of our Solar System to the dust-enshrouded nuclei of distant galaxies radiate entirely or predominantly in this band. Thus, astrophysicists require good visualization of these wavelengths. The problem, however, is that Earth is a very hostile environment for infrared exploration of space, as the atmosphere also emits in the infrared spectrum and additionally absorbs much of the incoming signal. Even heat produced by a telescope itself can degrade its own clarity.

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The Physics Of Space Battles

Joseph Shoer is a Ph.D. candidate in aerospace engineering, studying how modular spacecraft could be assembled, and hoping that they will be the telescopes and human exploration vehicles of the future, and not for crushing the dreams of Martian colonists.

From Gizmodo:

I had a discussion recently with friends about the various depictions of space combat in science fiction movies, TV shows, and books. We have the fighter-plane engagements of Star Wars, the subdued, two-dimensional naval combat in Star Trek, the Newtonian planes of Battlestar Galactica, the staggeringly furious energy exchanges of the combat wasps in Peter Hamilton's books, and the use of antimatter rocket engines themselves as weapons in other sci-fi. But suppose we get out there, go terraform Mars, and the Martian colonists actually revolt. Or suppose we encounter hostile aliens. How would space combat actually go?

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Pictured: Fiery Bubbles Of Molten Lava Fill The Ocean In First Ever Images Of Deep-Sea Volcanic Eruption

Blast: A plume of sulphur and molten lava erupts from the West Mata Volcano nearly 4,000 feet beneath the Pacific Ocean, south of Samoa

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have witnessed the eruption of a deep-sea volcano for the first time ever, capturing on video the fiery bubbles of molten lava as they exploded 4,000 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Researchers are calling it a major geological discovery after a submersible robot witnessed the eruption during an underwater expedition in May near Samoa.

The high-definition videos were revealed yesterday at a geophysics conference in San Francisco.

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Beware Humans Bearing Gifts -- A Commentary

Christmas can be an anxiety-inducing experience for many (Image: Gareth Cattermole/Getty)

From New Scientist:

THERE'S a Latin proverb, per angusta ad augusta, which translates as "through trial to triumph". Literally speaking, "angusta" refers to a narrow passageway. It gives us the English word "anxious", signalling a place that presses against you, where the walls are tight, and you might be too big to get through. Anxiety is the feeling that you might not make it out the other side.

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Darker Liquor Makes You Sicker

Overall, bourbon drinkers reported feeling worse than vodka drinkers, rating higher on scales that measure the severity of hangover malaise. Getty Images

From Discover News:

Before heading out to that holiday party this weekend, consider carefully how you pick your poison.

A new study may help drinkers pick their poison. In a head-to-head comparison, bourbon gave drinkers a more severe hangover than vodka, report Damaris Rohsenow of Brown University and colleagues in an upcoming issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

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Video: Simulation Renders Entire Known Universe

From Popular Science:

Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it's Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium's new video, The Known Universe. The video starts in Tibet and zooms out through time and space until it shows well, the entire known universe.

Read more ....

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Cannabis Damages Young Brains More Than Originally Thought, Study Finds

Daily consumption of cannabis in teens can cause depression and anxiety, and have an irreversible long-term effect on the brain. (Credit: iStockphoto/Rasmus Rasmussen)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 20, 2009) — Canadian teenagers are among the largest consumers of cannabis worldwide. The damaging effects of this illicit drug on young brains are worse than originally thought, according to new research by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a psychiatric researcher from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. The new study, published in Neurobiology of Disease, suggests that daily consumption of cannabis in teens can cause depression and anxiety, and have an irreversible long-term effect on the brain.

Read more ....

Three Station Fliers Set Off On Flight To Lab Complex

The Soyuz TMA-17 spacecraft blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan
(Credit: NASA)

From CNET News:

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three fresh crew members bound for the International Space Station blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Monday local time, lighting up a cold, pre-dawn sky with a torrent of flame visible for miles around.

With Soyuz commander Oleg Kotov, a station veteran, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, a shuttle veteran, and rookie astronaut Timothy Creamer strapped into the Soyuz TMA-17 capsule, the rocket roared to life at 4:52 p.m. EST Sunday (3:52 a.m. Monday local time) and quickly climbed away from the same pad used by Yuri Gagarin at the dawn of the space age.

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Autism Numbers Are Rising. The Question is Why? Read more

Sven Hagolani / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

One in 110 American children are considered to fall somewhere along the autism spectrum, according to the latest report released by the federal government. The new figure, which was released initially in October, comes from the most comprehensive set of data yet on the developmental health of eight-year-olds.

Increasing the previous federal estimate of 1 in 150, the new data suggest that 1% of children now exhibit some symptoms of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a collection of neurological conditions whose symptoms may range from mild social impairment to more serious communication, language and cognitive deficits. The estimate also represents a stunning 57% increase in prevalence since 2002, when health officials first began a nationwide effort to quantify the risk of autism in childhood.

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Chink Found In Armor Of Perfect Cloak

Changing courseNew research predicts the telltale radiation (orange) emitted by an electron as it moves along a trajectory (dotted line) through a perfect spherical cloak. Credit: B. Zhang and B.-I. Wu/PRL upcoming

From Science News:

Charged particles could reveal hidden object's location, new idea suggests.

Tiny charged particles could reveal the location of a perfect invisibility cloak. Such a cloak — which exists only in theory at the moment — would render an object invisible by gently deflecting photons around it. But charged particles wouldn’t be fooled: they would interact with the cloak in a telltale way, giving up the cloak’s location, researchers report in a paper to appear in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.

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Distance Vision Is All A Blur To More Of Us

From L.A. Times:

A study finds that 17% more Americans have myopia than 30 years ago. Close-up computer work could be a reason.

For an increasing number of Americans, life's a blur.

That's according to a population-based study published Monday showing that rates of myopia -- difficulty seeing distant objects -- are soaring. The trend is matched in many other countries, causing eye doctors to wonder what could be causing the decline in human vision.

Some suspect both an increase in our close-up work time (think computer use) and a decrease in time spent outdoors.

Read more ....

'Google Phone Set For Launch': Videos Emerge Of New Nexus One Mobile Dubbed 'iPhone-Killer'

This picture of the Nexus One was one of many that have
appeared on Twitter over the weekend

From The Daily Mail:

Two videos have emerged of Google's first ever phone called Nexus One.

The mobile is still unofficial but reports suggest it will be launched in the New Year in a bid to take on Apple iPhone.

A technology website has released two short teaser clips of the phone in action. The first video showed the animation on the start up screen, incorporating the colours of Google's logo. The second appeared to show an animated wallpaper.

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Why Your Boss Is Incompetent

It's not their fault that they are incompetent (Image: David Seed/Taxi/Getty)

From New Scientist:

IN THIS season of goodwill, spare a thought for that much-maligned bunch, the men and women at the top of the management tree. Yes, the murky machinations of the banking bosses might have needlessly plunged millions into penury. Yes, the actions of our political leaders might seem to be informed more by dubious wheeler-dealing than by Socratic wisdom. And yes, the high-ups in your own company might well be the self-important time-wasters you've always held them for.

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Obama To Ramp Up Human Space Program

From Discovery News:

Science magazine is reporting tonight that President Obama has made his decision about the future of the U.S. human space flight program, with a plan to turn over space taxi services to the International Space Station to commercial companies and to direct NASA to spend its money and resources developing a heavy-lift booster for human missions to the moon, asteroids and the moons of Mars.

Citing unnamed sources, the magazine reports that Obama will ask for a $1 billion boost in NASA’s 2011 budget to jumpstart the new launcher and to expand the agency's Earth-monitoring science satellites.

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About Wikipedia’s Handling Of Controversial Topics…Like Climate Science

From Fabius Maximus:

Summary: This is a hat trick. About effective propaganda. And climate science. And more evidence that Wikipedia cannot be relied upon as an information source regarding controversial matters — or any work of importance. (It’s always useful as a first place to look and source of links.)

Contents

“Wikipedia Is A Stunning Example Of How The Propaganda Machine Works“, Lawrence Solomon, National Review (reposted by CBS), 8 July 2008
“Wikipedia’s climate doctor“, Lawrence Solomon, National Post, 19 December 2009 – “How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.”

Update: an email reply by Wikipedia Editor Pierre Grés to Dennis Kuzara’s complaint about bias of Wikipedia Administrator William Connolley, posted at Watts Up With That, 19 December 2009 (see the actual Wikipedia file on this here):

“In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.”

We’ll learn much about Wikipedia’s honesty by what happens now to the dozens of articles seriously distorted or outright suppressed by Connolley. Is this a structural problem with Wikipedia, or just a bad apple in the barrel?

Sophisticated New Computer Models Predict Details Of Insurgent Attacks

How Do The World's Most War-Torn Countries Always Seem To Have A Toyota Dealership?
Foreign Policy

From Popular Science:

Chaos, confusion, and uncertainty have pervaded battle since Homer first described the din of clashing hoplites. But new developments in computer modeling look to pierce the fog of modern war by predicting the time and location of insurgent attacks. More comprehensive than the SCARE IED cache location program, these models claim to have predicted everything from the number of casualties in an attack to the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah.

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Climategate: How The Cabal Controlled Wikipedia

From The National Post:

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

Read more ....

Hubble's Festive View Of A Grand Star-Forming Region

The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. (Credit: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 20, 2009) — Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood.

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New Device Provides Internet And Phone Service In Disasters

From Live Science:

Losing an Internet connection or phone service can prove incredibly annoying for most people, but in an emergency, it can spell disaster.

During the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, frantic calls jammed cell phone networks, and firefighters, police and ambulances could not even talk to one another by radio. Since then, European researchers have tried to develop a technology that allows emergency responders to still use phone or Internet in the most chaotic situations.

Their solution: a souped-up router that allows a specially equipped command vehicle to find the best Internet access through any available wireless networks, or even satellite connections.

Read more ....

Avatar Mirrors Emotions With Motion Capture

From Wired:

Go behind the scenes of 'Avatar' with James Cameron, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana to see the new technology used to capture actors' facial expressions in striking detail.

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Grunts From The Front: From Roman Tablets To Army Blogs

From The Independent:

Humans have always fought each other, but the written narrative of warfare begins about 6,000 years ago with documents detailing a conflict between Elam and Sumer (modern-day Iran and Iraq). Since then military history has been dominated by the official story of leaders and their strategic political and military decisions. Wars have rarely been narrated by the ordinary foot soldier, pilot or sailor.

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My Comment: Plus ca change .... plus c'est le meme chose. The more things change .... the more that they stay the same.

Banned Gouais Blanc Grape Is The Long-Lost Mother Of Champagne

From Times Online:

The Gouais blanc grape, disparaged for centuries as an inferior wine ingredient fit only for peasants, has been revealed as the mother of many of today’s finest and most sought-after varieties.

A genetic study has shown that Gouais blanc is the chief ancestor of modern grapes such as Chardonnay, the grape used to make Chablis and a component of Champagne, and Gamay noir, which is most famous as the mainstay of Beaujolais.

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The Skull Bone Is Different To The Hip Bone

From The Telegraph:

Fundamental differences between skull and limb bones have been identified by British scientists in a discovery they hope will lead to treatments and even a cure for osteoperosis.

Bones in the arms and legs become weak and brittle in old age often because they are not engaged in as much exercise and bearing of weight as they are in youth.

However skull bone, which bears almost no weight throughout life, remains hard and particularly resistant to breaking.

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