What Is The Origin Of Veterans Day?

Armistice Day Parade in Omaha, Nebraska in November 1938.
Credit: Library of Congress, John Vachon, photographer

From Live Science:

Veterans day can be traced back to the end of World War I.

The Allied powers a signed a cease-fire agreement with Germany at Rethondes, France on Nov. 11, 1918, bringing the great war to a close.

The Armistice (which means a suspension of hostilities by agreement) was celebrated in the streets. As documented by the Library of Congress, Massachusetts shoe laster James Hughes described the scene in Boston: "There was a lot of excitement when we heard about the Armistice…some of them old fellas was walkin' on the streets with open Bibles in their hands. All the shops were shut down. I never seen the people so crazy…confetti was a-flying in all directions…I'll never forget it."

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1 Of Every 50 People On Earth Now Belong To Facebook

From Dallas Morning News:

That's right. Facebook says it now has 120 million members. By my reckoning, that's 2% of the world's 6 billion people.

If you think that's astonishing, consider that there's still plenty of low hanging fruit for Facebook to pluck. I know plenty of tech savvy people, many of them under 30, who have yet to sign up. Inevitably, these people will give in.

Where will it end? Can Facebook sign up twice that many people? Can it sign up 500 million people? Can it sign up Victor, who may be the world's only tech blogger who has managed to resist Facebook this long?

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Incredible Deep-Sea Discoveries Announced

From Live Science:

An astounding batch of new deep-sea discoveries, from strange shark behavior to gigantic bacteria, was announced today by an international group of 2,000 scientists from 82 nations.

The Census of Marine Life is a 10-year project to determine what's down there. Among the new findings:

A large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean. Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large icesheet grew, nature created a "thermohaline expressway," a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content. Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved; some octopuses, for example, losing their defensive ink sacs — pointless at perpetually dark depths.

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Is Stupid Making Us Google?

From The New Atlantis:

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass’s skin in Balzac’s novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that “users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

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Is It Time To Chuck The Internet And Start Over?

Image © Regents of the University of California Berkeley

From Discover News:

Expanding today's overcrowded Web is like building a skyscraper on a pile of styrofoam.

The Internet is a fast-growing 40-year-old city in desperate need of renovation. In 2008 1.5 billion people worldwide used the likes of BitTorrent, IM, Facebook, e-mail, Google, and Skype via communications protocols originally intended for mere hundreds. The wear is not only showing but worsening: Upkeep and patchwork programming continue to make running networks expensive, and cybercrime is flourishing. In response, teams of computer scientists are gathering to form a Manhattan Project of sorts to rethink the Internet.

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2,000-Year-Old Gold Earring Found In Jerusalem

Archaeologists say they found a 2,000-year-old gold earring made around the time of Christ, between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

From U.S.A. Today:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israel Antiquities Authority says archeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old gold earring beneath a parking lot next to the walls of Jerusalem's old city.

The authority says the earring is inlaid with pearls and emeralds and was made sometime between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

In a statement released Monday the authority said the piece is "astonishingly well-preserved." It was discovered during excavation of the ruins of a building from the Byzantine period, dating from around the fifth century, A.D.

The authority says the earring appears to have been crafted using a technique similar to that depicted in portraits from Roman-era Egypt.

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Apollo 8 Crew Remembers Historic Mission Live On NASA TV

From SpaceRef.com:

WASHINGTON -- Almost 40 years after NASA executed the bold decision to send the first human flight of the gigantic Saturn V rocket to the moon, the crew of Apollo 8 will reunite as part of a special public program produced in cooperation with the Newseum in Washington.

The program features Apollo 8 crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. It will be broadcast live from the Newseum on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 1:30 p.m. EST. The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.

The event is part of the Newseum's commemoration of NASA's 50th anniversary and is open to visitors. Seating in the Newseum's Knight TV Studio is limited and seats will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional overflow seating will be available throughout the Newseum.

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Vigorous New Space Exploration Plan To Be Proposed

From Space.com:

Look for the Planetary Society to hold a National Press Club briefing in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 13, outlining "a vigorous new space exploration plan" – one designed "to achieve more, cost less, and engage the world."

The plan draws from town hall meetings, as well as a two-day workshop held in February at Stanford University that put NASA's Vision for Space Exploration not only under a microscope but also on-notice.

The soon-to-be-issued roadmap was blueprinted "with an eye to the world's current economic situation," according to the Planetary Society, and touches on:

* the driving goal for human spaceflight;
* the future of the lunar program;
* renewed commitment to Earth observations from space;
* and possible new human mission objectives.

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Phoenix Lander Finishes Its Work On Mars

From Red Orbit:

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft's work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.

"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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Mini Heart Attack Best Treated Like The Big One

From Science News:

Patients admitted to hospitals with mild symptoms may benefit from getting to a catheterization lab promptly

NEW ORLEANS — People who show up at a hospital with mild heart attack symptoms, but only ambiguous scores on medical tests, might still warrant emergency treatment, according to research presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

The new study, reported November 10 at the AHA’s annual Scientific Sessions meeting, suggests that getting some of these marginal patients into a heart catheterization lab within 24 hours causes no harm and sharply lessens their risk of having the problem recur over the following six months.

People with chest pains arriving in an emergency room get attention right away — for good reason. After ruling out those who are having acid reflux pain or an anxiety attack, doctors use an electrocardiogram (EKG) to assess the person’s heart function and a blood analysis to reveal any damage to the heart muscle.

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Plants: The Fuel Of The Future?

Christopher Somerville directs the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California-Berkeley, where scientists are developing technologies that convert plant cellulose into fuel. Richard Harris/NPR

From NPR:

Morning Edition, November 10, 2008 · The recent run-up in gasoline prices was a not-too-subtle reminder that there's a limited amount of oil on Earth. Someday soon, we're going to need a new source of fuel.

Part of the answer could be fuels made from the plant material cellulose. Researchers at the new Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California-Berkeley are working on a recipe for this biofuel.

From Plant To The Pump

The institute is trying to make at least part of the economy run on fuel from vegetation. It has taken over a lab building once used to answer the purely scientific question of how plants convert carbon dioxide into chemical energy. Now, Christopher Somerville and his colleagues hope to exploit that chemical energy by converting cellulose into fuel.

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Asking ‘Why Do Species Go Extinct?’

‘I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?’ - Stuart L. Pimm Alex di Suvero for The New York Times

From New York Times:

For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world.

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Pimped-Up T-Cells Seek Out And Destroy HIV

Thanks to a custom-designed receptor, this killer T-cell slays HIV-infected cells far better than normal T-cells do (Image: Andrew Sewell/University of Oxford)

From New Scientist:

Researchers have harnessed evolution to create souped-up immune cells able to recognise HIV far better than the regular "killer" T-cells our body produces.

The pimped up T-cell boasts a molecular receptor evolved in the lab to give the body the edge against a virus that has so far flummoxed our immune systems.

"When the body gets infected with HIV, the immune system doesn't know what the virus is going to do - but we do," says Andrew Sewell, an immunologist at Cardiff University, UK, who led the study.

One reason HIV has been able to skirt our immune systems, drugs and vaccines is the virus's chameleon-like behaviour - thanks to a genome that mutates with ease, HIV can quickly change guise to evade an attack.

But some parts of HIV are so vital to its functioning that changes result in dead or severely compromised viruses. Sewell's team targeted a part of one such protein, which holds the virus together.

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TimeTo Test Time

Could GEO600 have detected the fundamental fuzziness of time?Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)/Leibniz University Hannover

From Nature News:

A new theory suggests that the essential fuzziness of time may be the limiting factor for a German gravitational-wave detector.

Poets have long believed the passage of time to be unavoidable, inexorable and generally melancholic. Quantum mechanics says it is fuzzy, ticking along at minimum intervals within which the notion of time is meaningless. And Craig Hogan claims he can 'see' it — in the thus far unexplained noise of a gravitational-wave detector. "It's potentially the most transformative thing I've ever worked on," says Hogan, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It's actually a possibility that we can access experimentally the minimum interval of time, which we thought was out of reach."

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China's Hungry Pandas Face Tougher Winter

A panda eats special food prepared as result of shortage of bamboos earthquake on a nearby mountain is seen in the background at China Conservative and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong, China.
Alexander F. Yuan / AP

From The MSNBC:

More sick and hungry giant pandas may seek food at lower altitudes
BEIJING - More sick and hungry giant pandas than in past winters may seek food at lower altitudes in China's earthquake-affected areas, straining facilities at the local panda research center, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

The devastating May 12 Sichuan earthquake caused landslides and destroyed some of the wild pandas' habitat, reducing supplies of their main source of food, bamboo, in the range of to 8,200-10,500 feet where they normally live.

"They came down the mountains so early this year and that's why we predict there will be a worse situation for the wild pandas this winter," said Zhang Guiquan, assistant director of the Wolong Nature Reserve Administration.

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Using The Powers Of Hypnosis To Heal Body And Mind

From The International Herald Tribune:

My husband, Richard, smoked cigarettes for 50 years, having failed several attempts to quit on his own. When a friend told him in August 1994 that hypnosis had enabled her to quit, he decided to give it a try.

"It didn't work; I wasn't hypnotized," he declared after his one and only session. But it did work; since that day, he has not taken one puff of a cigarette.

Gloria Kanter of Boynton Beach, Florida, thought her attempt in 1985 to use hypnosis to overcome her fear of flying had failed. "When the therapist brought me out, I said it didn't work," she recalled in an interview. "I told her, 'I heard everything you said."'

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Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth

The universe may not have started off with a bang after all.
Pat Rawlings/SAIC

From Scientific American:

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects

* Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.
* According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.
* If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

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When It Comes To Sea Level Changing Glaciers, New NASA Technique Measures Up

The mass changes of the Gulf of Alaska glaciers are computed from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) inter-satellite rate data from April 2003 through September 2007. Using space-borne gravity measurements to assess glacier mass balance NASA scientists determine mass variations along the Gulf of Alaska. Areas of deep blue like the areas around Glacier Bay and the Yakutat Icefield represent significant mass loss where inland areas of dark gray represent slight mass gains. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2008) — A NASA-led research team has used satellite data to make the most precise measurements to date of changes in the mass of mountain glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, a region expected to be a significant contributor to global sea level rise over the next 50-100 years.

Geophysicist Scott Luthcke of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues knew from well-documented research that changes in the cryosphere – glaciers, ice caps, and other parts of the globe covered year-round by ice -- are a key source of most global sea level rise. Melting ice will also bring changes to freshwater resources and wildlife habitat. Knowing that such ice-covered areas are difficult to observe consistently, the team worked to develop a satellite-based method that could accurately quantify glacial mass changes across seasons and years, and even discern whether individual glacier regions are growing or shrinking.

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Internet Attacks Grow More Potent

From The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world’s largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

In these attacks, computer networks are hijacked to form so-called botnets that spray random packets of data in huge streams over the Internet. The deluge of data is meant to bring down Web sites and entire corporate networks. Known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks, such cyberweapons are now routinely used during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia in 2007 during a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. Such attacks are also being used in blackmail schemes and political conflicts, as well as for general malicious mischief.

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Life Spans In The U.S.

When U.S. life expectancy change is divided into six groups by county, patterns emerge. In group 1, life expectancy increased more than the national sex-specific mean (nssm); in group 2, life expectancy increased but did not differ from nssm; in group 3, life expectancy increased but significantly less than nssm; in group 4, change was statistically indistinguishable from zero and nssm; in group 5, there was no change but less increase than nssm; and in group 6, life expectancy declined. Southern women were most likely to lose life expectancy. Graphic courtesy of PLoS Medicine.

Reversal Of Fortune -- American Scientist

County-by-county comparison of death rates finds that lifespans dropped in some U.S. counties

As scientists from all disciplines know, where you look influences what you find.

By examining death rates county-by-county, public health researchers found that life spans, especially among women, fell in some United States counties. The numbers were small but such a reversal of fortune was, well, shocking.

"We started looking at disparity questions. This became arguably a bigger finding and a more depressing finding," said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ezzati, whose research results appeared in PLoS Medicine, is among scholars dicing and splicing mortality data to create more precise pictures of lifespan trends in the United States. The nation is not known as the life-expectancy leader in the developed world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks the life expectancy of women in the U.S. 27th globally

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