What Happens If You Eat Dog Food?

From Live Science:

If you just eat a little bit of dog food, probably nothing will happen. But you don't really know that for sure because dog food is not subjected to the same health and safety regulations that human food is required to have.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for setting human food safety guidelines to prevent sickness due to contaminated or improperly handled products. In addition, the FDA is responsible for ensuring that food product labels are accurate in terms of ingredient listing and nutritional content.

Dog food does not have these same strict rules that human food has. Although most dog food contains the same basic components that are in people food — protein, carbohydrates and fats — the proportions of these ingredients are different than in human food and can be harmful if ingested in significant quantities or for prolonged periods of time. The same is true if you feed a dog the wrong proportion of these nutrients by giving it an unbalanced human diet.

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Nanotechnology Sparks Fears For The Future

From Times Online:

Nanomaterials are likely to kill people in the future just as asbestos did unless extensive safety checks are put in place, a Royal Commission report has said.

The team of experts assessing the likely impacts of the emerging technology are worried that when nanomaterials escape into the environment they will damage people and wildlife but that it will be years before the effects are seen.

Past generations have brought into general usage materials such as asbestos, leaded petrol, CFCs and cigarettes without adequately considering the potential damage and the commission fears nanomaterials will prove similarly dangerous.

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Lebanon Finds 2,900 Year Old Phoenician Remains

Archaeologists work on earthenware potteries found at an excavation site in the port city of Tyre, southern Lebanon November 12, 2008. (Haidar Hawila/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanese and Spanish archaeologists have discovered 2,900-year-old earthenware pottery that ancient Phoenicians used to store the bones of their dead after burning the corpses.

They said more than 100 jars were discovered at a Phoenician site in the southern coastal city of Tire. Phoenicians are known to have thrived from 1500 B.C. to 300 B.C and they were also headquartered in the coastal area of present-day Syria.

"The big jars are like individual tombs. The smaller jars are left empty, but symbolically represent that a soul is stored in them," Ali Badawi, the archaeologist in charge in Tire, told Reuters Wednesday.

Badawi and a Spanish team from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona have been excavating at the Phoenician site for years. The site was first discovered in 1997 but archaeologists have only been able to dig up 50 square meters per year.

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Sunlight Has More Powerful Influence On Ocean Circulation And Climate Than North American Ice Sheets

From Watts Up With That?

From Physorg.com: A study reported in today’s issue of Nature disputes a longstanding picture of how ice sheets influence ocean circulation during glacial periods.

The distribution of sunlight, rather than the size of North American ice sheets, is the key variable in changes in the North Atlantic deep-water formation during the last four glacial cycles, according to the article. The new study goes back 425,000 years, according to Lorraine Lisiecki, first author and assistant professor in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lisiecki and her co-authors studied 24 separate locations in the Atlantic by analyzing information from ocean sediment cores. By observing the properties of the shells of tiny marine organisms, called foraminifera, found in these cores, they were able to deduce information about the North Atlantic deep water formation. Scientists can discern historical ocean temperature and circulation patterns through the analysis of the chemical composition of these marine animals.

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Telescope Views Glowing Stellar Nurseries

Colour composite image of RCW120. It reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps where new stars are then formed. (Credit: ESO/APEX/DSS2/SuperCosmos)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — Illustrating the power of submillimetre-wavelength astronomy, an APEX telescope image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birthplaces of new stars. Submillimetre light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the universe, such as these cold, dense clouds.

The region, called RCW120, is about 4200 light years from Earth, towards the constellation of Scorpius. A hot, massive star in its centre is emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which ionises the surrounding gas, stripping the electrons from hydrogen atoms and producing the characteristic red glow of so-called H-alpha emission.

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Origin Of Bad Hair Discovered

Those wiry extensions scattered about our bodies and concentrated on the head evolved from our reptilian and avian ancestors. Credit: dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Having a bad hair day? You're excused. After all, hair has its origins in stuff that used to make just claws. Research now suggests that hair of all kinds extends much further back into evolutionary time, with birds and reptiles having genes for hair proteins.

Scientists previously had thought hair was just a mammalian thing, with its evolution cropping up after the mammalian lineage split from the reptilian lineage. The first mammals arose on Earth about 210 million years ago. Humans, birds and reptiles have a common ancestor that goes back some 300 million years, said researcher Leopold Eckhart of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

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Southern Ocean Close To Acid Tipping Point

Researchers are concerned that the Southern Ocean could become
too acidic by 2030 (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

Australian researchers have discovered that the tipping point for ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought.

Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and CSIRO looked at seasonal changes in pH and the concentration of an important chemical compound, carbonate, in the Southern Ocean.

The results, published in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, show that these seasonal changes will actually amplify the effects of human carbon dioxide emissions on ocean acidity, speeding up the process of ocean acidification by 30 years.

Dr Ben McNeil, senior research fellow at the UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre, says the ocean is an enormous sink for CO2, but unfortunately this comes at a cost.

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A Look Inside Virgin Galactic's Flight Training

From Popsci:

Would-be astronauts train for the world’s first suborbital space tourism flight

As early as next year, if you are one of a lucky few, you may find yourself strapped in a six-passenger rocket some 50,000 feet above the Earth’s surface, bracing yourself as it disengages from the specially designed jet plane mothership, and shoots cannon-like 60 miles up into suborbital space at three times the speed of sound. If all goes well, you'll then get to unbuckle and float in zero gravity for a full fifteen minutes, spying on the earth’s curvature, all of North America and the Pacific Ocean.

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Chinese Menus, Medicine Threatening Wildlife

Pictured is one of three lion cubs born in captivity at the zoo in Cali. November 6, 2008.
Reuters Jaime Saldarriaga (Colombia)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters) – Wild animals are climbing back onto Chinese plates after the deadly SARS virus made some diners wary, and booming demand for traditional medicine is also threatening some plants, environmentalists said on Wednesday.

Nearly half of urbanites had consumed wildlife in the past 12 months, either as food or medicine, with rich and well educated Chinese most likely to tuck into a wild snake or turtle, a survey of urbanites in six cities found.

They enjoyed eating wildlife because they saw it as "unpolluted," "special" and with extra nourishing and health powers, according to a study commissioned by Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

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NASA Begins Countdown For Space Shuttle Launch

Crew members of the space shuttle Endeavour on Mission STS-126 arrive to prepare for launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida November 11, 2008.
(Scott Audette/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- Countdown clocks at the Kennedy Space Center began ticking down on Tuesday toward Friday's launch of space shuttle Endeavour on a mission to outfit the International Space Station for an expanded live-aboard crew.

Liftoff is targeted for 7:55 p.m. EST (0055 Saturday GMT). At a news conference on Tuesday, managers said the shuttle was in good shape for launch.

"We haven't had a launch for a while so we're really excited to be back in the saddle," said NASA's Jeff Spaulding, a manager overseeing preparations for shuttle Endeavour's flight.

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Search Engine With Roots In Genomics Unlocks Deep Web

From Wired/Epicenter:

A research-focused search engine founded by Human Genome Project scientists is claiming to go where even Google doesn't tread: the deep web.

DeepDyve is designed to search the 99 percent (they say, citing a study from UC Berkeley) of hits not picked up by other search engines, which return pages based largely on interpretations of popularity and work only if a page is findable. Content hidden behind paywalls or that is not linked to enough sites to gain page rank remains obscure, but often contains the source material required for serious research.

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Quarter Of Atlantic Sharks And Rays Face Extinction

The spiny dogfish is highly prized for its meat. Photograph: Getty

From The Guardian:

New figures show 26% of all sharks, rays and related species in the north-east Atlantic are threatened with extinction

More than a quarter of sharks and rays in the north-east Atlantic face extinction from overfishing, conservationists warned today.

A "red list" report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that 26% of all sharks, rays and related species in the regional waters are threatened with extinction. Seven per cent are classed as critically endangered, while a fifth are regarded as "near-threatened".

The total number of at-risk species may well be higher because scientists lack of sufficient information to assess the populations of more than a quarter (27%) of them, the report adds. Many are slow-breeding fish that are especially vulnerable to fisheries.

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Darwin's Beagle To Sail Again

Vessel of knowledge: The original HMS Beagle on which Charles Darwin sailed. A replica is being built to research the effects of plankton on the world's oceans

From The Daily Mail:

It was the ship that carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands nearly 180 years ago, enabling him to make his breakthrough on the theory of evolution.

Now another HMS Beagle will depart on a new voyage of scientific discovery - this time with the help of sat-nav, engines and guidance from space.

The Beagle Trust plans to build a £5 million replica of the 19th-century vessel and use it to research the effects of plankton on the world's oceans.

It will be guided to algae blooms across the globe with the help of Nasa astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The charity has finalised its plans and is currently raising funds for its project, scheduled to begin construction within months.

'We are making a lot of progress, and I'm confident we will begin building next year, then set sail in 2010,' said project director Peter McGrath.

The original HMS Beagle took scientist and naturalist Darwin around the world between 1831 and 1836.

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Why Veins Could Replace Fingerprints And Retinas As Most Secure Form Of ID

Hitachi's finger vein authentication system represents a decade's worth of development and improvement and the technology has already been included in computers, ATMs and used for cardless payment authorization. Every finger has a vein configuration that is unique to it, much in the same way that every fingerprint is unique, and those veins are able to be read by near-Infrared light coupled with image sensors.

From Times Online:

Forget fingerprinting. Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers.

Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person's identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin.

Easydentic Group, a European leader in the biometric industry based in France, has announced that it will be using Hitachi's finger vein security in a range of door access systems for the UK and European markets.

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Will the Opening of the Northwest Passage Transform Global Shipping Anytime Soon?

Photo From The Washington Post

From National Geographic:

With the melting of Arctic Ocean ice, the fabled waterway between Europe and Asia has been open to shipping the past two summers--or has it?

It is said that the Inuit have many words for snow, but when it comes to the Northwest Passage only one type of frozen water matters: multiyear ice. It can slice through the hull of a ship like a knife through butter and it persists in the passage's waters despite unprecedented warming in the Arctic Ocean, thwarting shippers in search of a shortcut between Europe and Asia.

The fabled Northwest Passage has made headlines ever since it thawed last year for the first time. For three centuries the quest for an expedited route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans rivaled today's space race, with European superpowers vying for the prize. Hundreds of sailors and countless expeditions ventured into Canada's Arctic waters, including such naval luminaries as Sir Francis Drake, Captain James Cook and the ill-fated Henry Hudson, who left his name—and lost his life—on the Canadian bay that marks its entrance.

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Where Do Science Supermachines Go When They Die?

From The New Scientist:

LIKE a man hoping to find a second-hand sports car at a knockdown price, Lon Morgan used to regularly peruse the for-sale ads in Commerce Business Daily. Then one day in 1995, Morgan saw exactly what he had been looking for and submitted a bid. Three weeks later, Morgan and his company International Isotopes were the proud owners of parts from the world's biggest atom smasher for the princely sum of $4.5 million.

Morgan had bought part of the defunct Superconducting Super Collider, a behemoth of a machine designed to search for the much vaunted Higgs boson, aka the God particle, which is supposed to give all other particles their mass. When funding for the 87-kilometre-round SSC was slashed in 1993 a cool $2 billion had already been spent. Now the huge tunnels in Waxahachie, Texas, sat dark and empty. Since the parts for the accelerator had never actually been assembled into a working machine, they sat crated up in a warehouse, awaiting their new owner and their new destiny.

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Fast Food Made Up Mostly of Corn

If you are what you eat, most Americans are an ear of corn (above), a November 2008 study suggests. A chemical analysis of popular fast food menus reveals that some form of the grain appears in most items. Photograph by Joe Schershel/NGS

From The National Geographic:

If you are what you eat, most Americans are an ear of corn, new research suggests.

A chemical analysis of popular fast foods reveals that some form of the grain appears as a main ingredient in most items—especially beef.

The researchers examined the molecular makeup of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and french fries purchased from three fast food chains in six U.S. cities.

"Out of the hundreds of meals that we bought, there were only 12 servings of anything that did not go straight back to a corn source," said study lead author Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Corn's dominance in the nation's fast food is well known, "but the [chemical analysis] really bring it home in a way that hasn't been brought home before," said Craig Cox, Midwest vice president for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

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Now: The Rest Of The Genome

Thomas R. Gingeras of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a leader of Encode, an effort to determine the function of every piece of DNA in the human genome. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

From The International Herald Tribune:

Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word "gene." Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. "It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back," she said.

But Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. "It cannot work that way," Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

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If You Love Wind Power (And Solar Power), You’d Better At Least Like Transmission.

Sales bookings last year for Bob Chew and his company SolarWrights were $5.9 million, more than double the year before. He expects to hit $20 million this year.

From New York Times/Science :

If you love wind power (and solar power), you’d better at least like transmission. This was originally recited to me as kind of an energy-wonk joke. But it’s no laughing matter, as my colleague Matt Wald points out in an article today on new evidence that the country’s grid is already stretched to the limit and unlikely to be able to handle bigger, intermittent pulses of electricity from wind turbines and big solar-power arrays.

Here’s the lede:

WASHINGTON — Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, an industry report says. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. The corporation is the industry body authorized by the federal government to enforce reliability rules for the interlocking system of electrical power generation and transmission.

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An Atomic Solution To The Energy Crisis

Image from Clean Technica

From Fabius Maximus:

Great progress has been made over the decades since America built its last atomic power plant. These solutions arrive just in time to provide clean and relatively inexpensive energy as we convent from liquid fuels (oil, natural gas) after Peak Oil — sometime in the next ten years or so.

This is a brief update about the prospects for atomic power. For more information about new energy sources, see the FM reference page about Energy.

Small Nuclear Power Reactors

The World Nuclear Association has some excellent materials about small nukes, the cutting edge of the next atomic revolution. The following are excerpts from a July 2008 report.

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