From Popular Mechanics:
In war, teamwork is everything, even if you're a robot. Just as human soldiers and airmen support each other, teams of robots will likely roam future battlefields, helping each other on missions.
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Friday, February 26, 2010
Band of Bots: Two Military Robots Team Up To Cover Land and Air
From Popular Mechanics:
In war, teamwork is everything, even if you're a robot. Just as human soldiers and airmen support each other, teams of robots will likely roam future battlefields, helping each other on missions.
Read more ....
Chinese Scientists Would Feel "Blind" If Google Pulled Out
From Popular Science:
Scientists don't want to see Google go bai bai.
Most Chinese citizens may still rely on homegrown Baidu for their Internet search needs, but Google's threatened pullout apparently worries the vast majority of Chinese scientists surveyed by the journal Nature. "If I lose Google, it will [be] just like a man without his eyes," one respondent said.
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Google Hit With Antitrust Complaints In Europe
Photo: The European Union Commission is located in Brussels, Belgium. Photo courtesy Wikimedia.From Epicenter:
The European Commission has acknowledged receipt of three antitrust complaints against Google. It did not identify the companies and said it had not started a formal investigation.
“The Commission can confirm that it has received three complaints against Google which it is examining. The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being,” an unidentified E.U. executive said in a statement on Wednesday.
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New All-In-One Space Weather Tool From NASA
From Watts Up With That?:
The press release doesn’t contain any pictures, and really doesn’t do this new web tool justice, so I’ve added some screencaps. In a nutshell, the new iSWA site lets you arrange graphical packages of solar images and plots oncsreen for simultaneous evaluation. Stuff that had been scattered over several solar related websites is now in one interface. Pretty cool. – Anthony
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Thursday, February 25, 2010
Physicists Discover Odd Fluctuating Magnetic Waves
Brown University physicist Vesna Mitrovic and colleagues have discovered magnetic waves that fluctuate when exposed to certain conditions in a superconducting material. The find may help scientists understand more fully the relationship between magnetism and superconductivity. (Credit: Lauren Brennan/Brown University)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 24, 2010) — At the quantum level, the forces of magnetism and superconductivity exist in an uneasy relationship. Superconducting materials repel a magnetic field, so to create a superconducting current, the magnetic forces must be strong enough to overcome the natural repulsion and penetrate the body of the superconductor. But there's a limit: Apply too much magnetic force, and the superconductor's capability is destroyed.
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Heaviest Element Officially Named Copernicium
From Live Science:The heaviest element yet known is now officially named "Copernicium," after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
Copernicum has the atomic number 112 — this number denotes the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom. It is 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element officially recognized by international union for chemistry IUPAC.
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Wireless Speed Freaks Set To Leave Wi-Fi Standing
Wi-Fi is so pedestrian. Gi-Fi anyone? (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)From New Scientist:
WI-FI as we know it is reaching the limits of its usefulness. It just can't keep up with our appetite for services, such as new video formats, that gobble up bandwidth. So what's next in the world of blisteringly fast home-based wireless technologies?
For clues to where Wi-Fi is going, it helps to delve into the soup of standards that will shape the future of wireless communications.
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Larger Threat Is Seen In Google Case
Bill Echikson, a spokesman for Google, called a judge's ruling against executives “astonishing.” Paolo Bona/ReutersFrom The New York Times:
ROME — Three Google executives were convicted of violating Italian privacy laws on Wednesday, the first case to hold the company’s executives criminally responsible for the content posted on its system.
The verdict, though subject to appeal, could have sweeping implications worldwide for Internet freedom: It suggests that Google is not simply a tool for its users, as it contends, but is effectively no different from any other media company, like newspapers or television, that provides content and could be regulated.
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One In 10 Teenagers Fall Victim To Cyberbullies, Research Finds
One in 10 children has fallen victim to cyberbullies, research shows Photo: GETTY From The Telegraph:
One in 10 teenagers has been a victim of cyberbullies, according to university research.
The internet means that they can be targeted round-the-clock, researchers warned.
Experts claim that cyberbullying can be more damaging than conventional teasing because perpetrators can remain anonymous and therefore make more hurtful claims.
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Why Millions Of Consumers Are Breaking The Law When They Use Their iPod
Photo: Law breaker? Millions of consumers transfer albums to MP3 playersFrom The Daily Mail:
Copying your favourite CD on to your iPod has become a routine part of modern life for music lovers.
But millions of consumers are unaware they are breaking the law every time they transfer an album or a DVD to their MP3 player or home computer – despite having purchased both legitimately.
Now, the threat of prosecution could be lifted after a customer body called for copyright laws to be updated for the technological age.
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Autonomous Submarine 'Bot Plans Experiments, Navigates Without Human Help
One of MBARIs Automatic Underwater Vehicles Gulper is a high-tech update to this earlier-generation sister research vessel, which was used for seafloor mapping. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute From Popular Science:
Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are done spending valuable time heading out to sea on routine monitoring missions, and they have the autonomous underwater robot to prove it. A team of marine researchers there has developed what they are calling the Gulper automatic underwater vehicle (AUV) that operates autonomously far out to sea, planning its own experiments and negotiating ocean depths without human input.
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Is The Bloom Energy Server Cost, Scale Prohibitive?
From Channel Web:
The unveiling of the Bloom Energy Server, a power generating device that lets home and business users meet their own electricity needs with clean energy while taking them off of the power grid, was met with great fanfare this week.
But solution providers say the $700,000 to $800,000 price tag along with its ability to generate 100 kilowatts of electricity could make it a difficult sell.
"The price point I believe is going to be the difficult thing," said Darryl Parker, CEO of Parker Web Services, a North Carolina solution provider.
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America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples In New Estimate
From Wired Science:
The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources.
Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.
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The Great Filament
From Watts Up With That?
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is tracking an enormous magnetic filament on the sun. It stretches more than one million kilometers from end to end, which makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. For the seventh day in a row, an enormous magnetic filament is hanging suspended above the surface of the sun’s southern hemisphere. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has a great view. How long can it last? Solar filaments are unpredictable. If this one collapses and hits the stellar surface, the impact could produce a powerful Hyder flare.
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Amazing Facts And Figures About The Evolution Of Hard Disk Drives
Above: Three decades of shrinkage.From Pingdom:
It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1 TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000 GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.
This article looks back at how hard disk drives have evolved since they first burst onto the scene in 1956. We’ll examine the radical changes over time for three different aspects of HDDs: Size, storage space, and price.
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Genetic Link Between Misery and Death Discovered; Novel Strategy Probes 'Genetic Haystack'
Interaction between nerves (red) and tumor cells (blue) in an ovary provides one way by which stress biochemistry signals can be distributed to sites of disease in the body. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 25, 2010) — In ongoing work to identify how genes interact with social environments to impact human health, UCLA researchers have discovered what they describe as a biochemical link between misery and death. In addition, they found a specific genetic variation in some individuals that seems to disconnect that link, rendering them more biologically resilient in the face of adversity.
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Brain's 'Fairness' Spot Found
Humans tend not to like unequal situations, and now scientists have found the first evidence that this behavior is reflected in the human brain. Here, an fMRI scan of a human brain showing activity in the striatum and prefrontal cortex, regions of the brain thought to be involved in how people evaluate rewards. Credit: Elizabeth Tricomi, Rutgers University.From Live Science:
At some point in our lives, we've all cried "It's not fair!" In fact, it's human nature for us to dislike unequal situations, and we often try to avoid or remedy them. Now, scientists have identified the first evidence of this behavior's neurological underpinnings in the human brain.
The results show that the brain's reward center responds to unequal situations involving money in a way that indicates people prefer a level playing field, and may suggest why we care about the circumstances of others in the first place.
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Hearts Actually Can Break
From New York Times:
Dorothy Lee and her husband of 40 years were driving home from a Bible study group one wintry night when their car suddenly hit the curb. Mrs. Lee looked at her husband, who was driving, and saw his head bob a couple of times and fall on his chest.
In the ensuing minutes, Mrs. Lee recalls, she managed to avoid a crash while stopping the car, called 911 on her cellphone and tried to revive her husband before an ambulance arrived. But at the hospital, soon after learning her husband had died of a heart attack, Mrs. Lee's heart appeared to give out as well. She experienced sudden sharp pains in her chest, felt faint and went unconscious.
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From Ocean To Ozone: Earth's Nine Life-Support Systems
(Click Image To Enlarge)We have already overstepped three of nine planetary boundaries and are at grave risk of transgressing several others.
From New Scientist:
UP TO now, the Earth has been very kind to us. Most of our achievements in the past 10,000 years - farming, culture, cities, industrialisation and the raising of our numbers from a million or so to almost 7 billion - happened during an unusually benign period when Earth's natural regulatory systems kept everything from the climate to the supply of fresh water inside narrow, comfortable boundaries.
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EU Launches Antitrust Inquiry Into Google 'Dominance'
The internet search engine has dismissed the complaints. (Reuters/Robert Galbraith)From Times Online:
The European Commission has launched a preliminary antitrust inquiry into Google after three companies complained that the US giant's dominant search engine penalises potential competitors and keeps advertising prices artificially high.
The European Commission has written to Google to find out how its search functions work, following allegations from the UK price comparison site Foundem, an online French guide to legal services, ejustice.fr and the Germany-based shopping portal Ciao, owned by Microsoft.
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Enceladus: Nasa Spacecraft Records Dramatic Pictures Of Saturn's Moon 'Spitting'
This mosaic was created from two high-resolution images that were captured by the narrow-angle camera. Photo: NASA/JPL/SSI From The Telegraph:
Dramatic pictures captured by a Nasa spacecraft of Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, “spitting” out water have left scientists astounded.
The space agency’s Cassini spacecraft fly-by has captured new evidence that Saturn's sixth-largest moon is “bursting at the seams”.
The pictures, taken about 1,000 miles from the moon's surface, a forest of more than 30 individual icy plumes of water – including 20 that have never been recorded – can be seen erupting, or “spitting”, from fractures around its southern pole surface.
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Met Office To Re-Examine 150 Years Of Temperature Data In The Wake Of The Climategate Scandal
Division: An iceberg breaks off in the Antarctic. Some experts say sights like this prove the world is heating up but others believe it was hotter in medieval timesFrom The Daily Mail:
Temperature records dating back more than 150 years are to be re-examined by the Met Office because public belief in global warming has plummeted.
The re-analysis, which was approved at a conference in Turkey this week, comes after the climate change email scandal which dealt a severe blow to the credibility of environmental science.
The Met Office says that the review is 'timely' and insists it does not expect to come to a different conclusion about the progress of climate change.
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Six Tricks That Alien Trackers Could Use
Earth's cities are visible at night from space because of their artificial lights, so populated exoplanets might give off light pollution of their own. But finding it might not be easy. Even if all the world's electricity were used to produce light, it would still be thousands of times fainter than a glint of sunlight reflected off the Earth's surface. (Image: NASA/GSFC)From New Scientist:
So far, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has focused on listening for radio signals deliberately sent our way. But even if alien civilisations are not trying to get our attention, their activities could produce detectable signs. Here are a few things we might detect, most of which are discussed in a recent paper by Richard Carrigan of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
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NSF Puts Up $25 Million To Research Biological Machines
The Crossroads of Biology and Engineering MIT From Popular Science:
What would you do with $25 million? If you answered "create a center to research the development of programmable, highly sophisticated biological machines," we regret to inform you the National Science Foundation and MIT have beaten you to the punch. The Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Center (EBICS), will not only advance research in the emerging experimental discipline of engineered biological systems, but will lay an extensive educational groundwork for research in the field going forward.
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Brain 'Hears' Sound Of Silence
Although more research needs to be done, the work carried out by Wehr and his team could lead to new treatments for impaired hearing. Getty ImagesFrom Discovery News:
While we think of silence as the absence of sound, the brain detects it nonetheless.
THE GIST:
* The brain responds not only to sound but also to silence, according to a new study.
* Different pathways in the brain respond to the onset and the offset of sounds.
* Better knowing how the brain organizes and groups sounds could lead to more effective hearing therapies and devices.
While we characterize silence as the absence of sound, the brain hears it as loud and clear as any other noise.
In fact, according to a recent study from the University of Oregon, some areas of the brain respond solely to sound termination. Rather than sound stimuli traveling through the same brain pathways from start to finish as previously thought, neuron activity in rats has shown that onset and offset of sounds take separate routes.
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Grizzly Bears Move Into Polar Bear Habitat In Manitoba, Canada
This is a grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos), photographed in Wapusk National Park, Manitoba, Canada, on August 9, 2008. (Credit: Linda Gormezano)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 23, 2010) — Biologists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and City College of the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat -- and into the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary data was recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist and shows that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.
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Gulp! Long-Necked Dinosaurs Didn't Bother Chewing
Sauropod dinosaurs like this newly discovered Abydosaurus had heads that were just one two-hundredth of the total body volume. That small size might explain why they didn't chew their food, the researchers say. Credit: Michael Skrepnick.From Live Science:
A mom's wise words about chewing your food likely got lost on a giant, long-necked dinosaur that lived about 105 million years ago in North America. That's according to analyses of four skulls from a newly identified dinosaur species.
"They didn't chew their food; they just grabbed it and swallowed it," said study team member Brooks Britt, a paleontologist at Brigham Young University.
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Plastic Rubbish Blights Atlantic Ocean
From The BBC:
Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.
The region is said to compare with the well-documented "great Pacific garbage patch".
Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been "largely ignored" in the Atlantic.
She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.
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More About Cheney's Heart Attack. How Many Can One Person Have?
From The L.A. Times:The news that former Vice President Dick Cheney suffered his fifth heart attack Monday and was admitted to a hospital, where apparently he is recovering nicely, naturally raises the question of how many heart attacks one person can have.
Five heart attacks may seem like a lot, but it really isn't, experts said. Physicians have become better at diagnosing very small heart attacks that might have passed by unobserved in the past, and improvements in therapy have made large, killer heart attacks less common.
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Experts Warn Of Catastrophy From Cyberattacks
Photo: Vice Admiral Michael McConnell, who works for Booz Allen Hamilton and used to be director of national security and intelligence for the U.S. government. (Credit: U.S. Senate)Experts Warn Of Catastrophy From Cyberattacks -- CNET
Computer-based network attacks are slowly bleeding U.S. businesses of revenue and market advantage, while the government faces the prospect of losing in an all-out cyberwar, experts told Senators in a hearing on Tuesday.
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Can Twitter Make Money?
Twitter and the Real-Time Web: On the real-time Web, information is created and consumed instantly, often through blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The phenomenon exploded last year, as the surging use of URL-shortening services indicates; Web addresses must be shrunk in order for links to fit inside 140-character tweets. Twitter attracted new users and expanded its reach, but it still carries a lot of babble. Twitter has experienced exponential user growth in three years. But the rate slowed at the end of 2009. Credit: Tommy McCall From Technology Review:
Twitter plans to become the leader in instant news--and make itself into a sustainable business in the process.
At the microblogging company Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, in the sixth-floor conference room, founder Evan Williams was declining to tell me anything about the company's strategies to earn revenues when, suddenly, his cofounder Biz Stone blurted, "Whoa!" It was 10:10 a.m. on January 7, and it would prove to be the latest Twitter Moment, showing how far the service has moved beyond its early status as an amplifier of personal minutiae and confession. A minor earthquake had just struck: a magnitude 4.1 temblor centered 45 miles to the southeast. Throughout the Bay Area, thousands of Twitter users seized their smart phones or PCs to peck out 140-character-or-less tweets--updates in the form of text messages, Web-based instant messages, or posts on Twitter's website. Quake-related tidbits coursed through the company's servers at the rate of 296 per minute, according to tracking done by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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Sight Savers: New Weapons Trained On Blindness
From New Scientist:
It starts with a barely perceptible blurring of vision from time to time - the sort of thing you might chalk up to getting older. But when you get it checked out, there is disturbing news: you have a disease called age-related macular degeneration, or AMD.
It can progress slowly or quickly, but there is no cure. Your hopes for an idyllic retirement - reading all those books, driving to new places, or just enjoying a carefree independence - are now clouded by uncertainty.
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DARPA Orders Smart Robotic Terminator Hands For A Better Tomorrow
Terminator's Arm My CPU is a neural net processor; a learning computer. From Popular Science:
Pentagon mad scientists at DARPA have continued on their quest to create killer robots by announcing a new plan for "robotic autonomous manipulators" that can emulate human hands. And by killer, we of course mean awesome. National Defense reports that the DARPA program aims to create inexpensive robotic hands that can perhaps also replace existing prosthetics for amputees.
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Life-Like Evolution In A Test Tube
With colleague Tracey Lincoln, Gerald Joyce (picured) has created an artificial genetic system that can undergo self-sustained replication and evolution. Credit: Scripps Research InstituteFrom Cosmos:
SAN DIEGO: Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules.
For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes - that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.
What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely.
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Small Dogs Originated In The Middle East
A single gene is responsible for the size of dogs -- big and small. Getty ImagesFrom Discovery News:
These miniature mutts were the descendants of gray wolves, which also happen to be smaller than many other wolves.
* Small dogs originated in the Middle East 12,000 years ago, according to a new study.
* These dogs are related to the Middle Eastern gray wolf, which shares a particular version of the size gene.
* Reduction in body size is a common feature of domestication and has been observed in other animals.
Small dogs the world over can all trace their ancestry back to the Middle East, where the first diminutive canines emerged more than 12,000 years ago.
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Technology That Makes The Heart Grow Fonder
If you can't be with the one you love, log onto Facebook. Or Skype. Or Second Life. From MSNBC:
Today's faraway lovers prefer e-mail, text to an old-fashioned phone call
My college roommate hung on to her hometown boyfriend longer than most. I remember creeping in to the apartment late at night and tripping painfully over the phone cord that snaked from the living room into her bedroom. And if I listened hard, I could hear the inane murmurings that only a long-distance relationship can produce:
“You hang up first … you didn’t hang up! I’m not going to hang up. Are you still there? I love you too!”
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Geologists Look For Answers In Antarctica: Did Ice Exist At Equator Some 300 Million Years Ago?
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 24, 2010) — Focusing on a controversial hypothesis that ice existed at the equator some 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Period, two University of Oklahoma researchers originated a project in search of clues to Earth's climate system.
"The Paleozoic Period was a rare time in history," says Gerilyn Soreghan, OU professor of geology. "Broadly speaking, it was the last time our planet experienced the type of climate system we have today and in the recent past." Soreghan believes comparing more modern systems in a range of different climates might help support her hypothesis.
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Parents Choosing More Unusual Baby Names Now
From Live Science:
Celebrities aren't the only ones giving their babies unusual names. Compared with decades ago, parents are choosing less common names for kids, which could suggest an emphasis on uniqueness and individualism, according to new research.
Essentially, today's kids (and later adults) will stand out from classmates. For instance, in the 1950s, the average first-grade class of 30 children would have had at least one boy named James (top name in 1950), while in 2013, six classes will be necessary to find only one Jacob, even though that was the most common boys' name in 2007.
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Shuttle Sparks Panic In Central America
From Information Week:
Endeavour's sonic boom over El Salvador sent residents into the streets and put local authorities on high alert.
The shuttle Endeavour made an unexpected course change during its landing approach to Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Sunday.
The maneuver allowed the craft to circumvent bad weather plaguing its normal route across the southern U.S., but it also sent unwary residents of Central America into the streets in panic.
Endeavour's sonic boom over El Salvador caused a stir not unlike what occurred in the wake of Orson Welles' infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast.
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Sat-Nav Systems Under Growing Threat From 'Jammers'
Photo: Society will only get ever more dependent on sat-nav systemsFrom The BBC:
Technology that depends on satellite-navigation signals is increasingly threatened by attack from widely available equipment, experts say.
While "jamming" sat-nav equipment with noise signals is on the rise, more sophisticated methods allow hackers even to program what receivers display.
At risk are not only sat-nav users, but also critical national infrastructure.
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How Rest Helps Memory: Sleepy Heads
From The Economist:Researchers say a nap prepares the brain to learn.
MAD dogs and Englishmen, so the song has it, go out in the midday sun. And the business practices of England’s lineal descendant, America, will have you in the office from nine in the morning to five in the evening, if not longer. Much of the world, though, prefers to take a siesta. And research presented to the AAAS meeting in San Diego suggests it may be right to do so. It has already been established that those who siesta are less likely to die of heart disease. Now, Matthew Walker and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that they probably have better memory, too. An afternoon nap, Dr Walker has discovered, sets the brain up for learning.
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Yahoo Turns On The Twitter Firehose
From CNET:Yahoo has agreed to purchase access to the Twitter firehose, adding real-time Twitter content to both search results and Yahoo profiles. The company has been featuring Twitter content in search results for some time but plans to augment those results now that it will receive content directly from Twitter rather than having to pull it from the service through public APIs, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.
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Primitive Humans Conquered Sea, Surprising Finds Suggest
Surprisingly old hand axes have been found on the Greek island of Crete, at center in this composite of satellite images. Blue Marble image courtesy NASAFrom National Geographic:
Prehistoric axes found on a Greek island suggest that seafaring existed in the Mediterranean more than a hundred thousand years earlier than thought.
Two years ago a team of U.S. and Greek archaeologists were combing a gorge on the island of Crete (map) in Greece, hoping to find tiny stone tools employed by seafaring people who had plied nearby waters some 11,000 years ago.
Instead, in the midst of the search, Providence College archaeologist Thomas Strasser and his team came across a whopping surprise—a sturdy 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) hand ax.
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The Present And Future Of Unmanned Drone Aircraft: An Illustrated Field Guide
The Avenger: General Atomics Aeronautical SystemsFrom Popular Science:
Inside the wild kingdom of the world’s newest and most spectacular species of unmanned aircraft, from swarming insect ’bots that can storm a burning building to a seven-ton weaponized spyplane invisible to radar
New breeds of winged beasts are lurking in the skies. Bearing names like Reaper, Vulture and Demon, they look nothing like their feathered brethren. Better known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, these strange and wily birds are quietly infiltrating vast swaths of airspace, from battlefields to backyards.
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Thousands Of Authors Opt Out Of Google Book Settlement
From The Guardian:Some 6,500 writers, from Thomas Pynchon to Jeffrey Archer, have opted out of Google's controversial plan to digitise millions of books.
Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Bernières and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed.
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Coral Reefs Will Dissolve Within 100 Years In Acidic Seas, Say Marine Experts
The Great Barrier Reef off Australia's coast (above) is known for its abundance of marine life.From The Daily Mail:
The world's most stunning coral reefs will have dissolved within 100 years, a new study claims.
Scientists say rising levels of acid in the seas and warmer ocean temperatures are wiping out the spectacular reefs enjoyed by millions of divers, tourists and wildlife lovers.
The destruction would also be a disaster for tropical fish and marine life which use coral reefs as nurseries and feeding grounds.
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Does Coffee Kill The Benefits Of Vitamins?
From Live Science:
Any beverage or food containing caffeine such as coffee, tea, chocolate and some sodas can inhibit the absorption of vitamins and minerals and increase their excretion from the body.
This raises a more important question: What are the benefits of vitamins?
It’s very important to talk with your doctor before you take any vitamin and mineral pills, especially if you take prescription medicines, have any health problems or are elderly. Taking too much of a vitamin or mineral can cause problems with some medical tests or interfere with drugs you’re taking.
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Where Did Insects Come From? New Study Establishes Relationships Among All Arthropods
This animal, Speleonectes tulumensis, is from a group of rare, blind, cave-dwelling crustaceans called "remipedes." The new analysis in Nature shows that the remipedes are the crustaceans most closely related to the insects. Remipedes and insects together are now shown to be a sister group to all the other crustacea including the crabs, shrimps, and lobsters. (Credit: Simon Richards)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 22, 2010) — Since the dawn of the biological sciences, humankind has struggled to comprehend the relationships among the major groups of "jointed-legged" animals -- the arthropods. Now, a team of researchers, including Dr. Joel Martin and Dr. Regina Wetzer from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), has finished a completely new analysis of the evolutionary relationships among the arthropods, answering many questions that defied previous attempts to unravel how these creatures were connected.
Their study is scheduled for publication in the journal Nature on Feb. 24.
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The Future Of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless And (Almost) Free
Cash in the clouds—neither paper nor plastic.Illustration: Aegir Hallmundur; Benjamin Franklin: Corbis
From Wired Magazine:
A simple typo gave Michael Ivey the idea for his company. One day in the fall of 2008, Ivey’s wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet — which would have sent the note as a direct message, a private note just for Ivey — she hit p. It could have been an embarrassing snafu, but instead it sparked a brainstorm. That’s how you should pay people, Ivey publicly replied. Ivey’s friends quickly jumped into the conversation, enthusiastically endorsing the idea. Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadn’t hit on something: What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount?
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We Are Happiest At 74, Says New Report
From The Telegraph:Seventy-four year-olds are the most contented people in the population, according to new research.
Fewer responsibilities, financial worries and more time to yourself leads to contentment previously unknown in earlier life.
According to the report from the teenage years until 40 happiness declines. It levels off until 46 and then starts to increase until peaking at 74.
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Coral Reefs Form On 'Ancient Template'
The honeycomb reef shape dominates the region.From The BBC:
Red Sea coral reefs get their complex shape from an ancient 'seabed template', say scientists.
Their distinctive appearance can be seen clearly in satellite images of the region and has its origin in seabed erosion thousands of years ago.
The scientists say the corals have simply adopted and accentuated the pattern created in once-exposed rock moulded by heavy rains.
They presented the findings at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, US.
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New Space Engines May Trade Fuel For Photons
From Popular Mechanics:
Interplanetary travel may soon be powered by propulsion systems lifted from sci-fi novels, as researchers reach for faster, lighter space engines.
Chemical combustion engines are an unbeatable technology for escaping Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull. In space, however, these rockets are inefficient—they burn through huge quantities of fuel while generating more thrust than necessary. That’s why researchers are increasingly turning to nonchemical propulsion systems, which could drastically lighten spacecraft while achieving higher speeds. Some of the ideas being researched, like antimatter engines, depend on established physics but go far beyond current technology. “Someone’s got to think beyond the obvious,” says Marc Millis, a propulsion physicist at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. “You have enough other people in the world doing the next obvious thing. By reaching beyond that, you can discover the breakthroughs other folks aren’t even looking for, and change everything.”
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Breakthrough in All-Optical Processing Could Bring Terabit Data Speeds
Toward Faster Signal Processing Georgia Tech professor Seth Marder, center, and his colleagues have worked for several years to optimize the right molecules with a unique set of properties that could open the door to blazing fast all-optical processing speeds. Rob Felt From Popular Science:
Do you think your connection speed is fast? Do you tout your torrent bit rate? Perhaps your rig is swift, but there's no reason it couldn't be many times faster. The only thing standing in the way is some creative materials science, and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may have just found the key to converting everything from individual computers to data networks into blazing-fast, all-optical transmission devices.
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