Top 100 Innovations of 2008

From Popsci:

The 100 fastest, biggest, safest, greenest and most powerful innovations of the year

For decades, we've fantasized about watching paper-thin TVs, soaring hundreds of feet with personal jetpacks, riding in cars that drive themselves, and re-growing organs.

The 21st annual Best of What's New celebrates all of those dreams coming true. Now we've collected them all into one single slideshow. Launch it here to learn about these achievements and 96 other breakthroughs that, whether long awaited or completely unexpected, are equally amazing.

Please click here to launch the list.

What Is Truth Serum?

From Scientific American:

Indian officials plan to inject captured Mumbai terrorist with the "truth serum," sodium pentothal, but history tells us that the technique isn't up to the task

The baby-faced gunman of Mumbai, Azam Amir Kasab, now in the custody of Indian police, is the sole surviving attacker in the three-day rampage that began on the night of November 26 and left more than 170 people dead and scores of others injured.

After the attacks, Indian officials immediately began pointing fingers at longtime rival, Pakistan, as the source of the 10 militants—a charge that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari disputed last night on CNN. During police interrogations, Kasab himself claimed to hail from the Punjab region of Pakistan and to have trained with the Pakistan-based extremist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

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Global Cancer Deaths to Double by 2030

Breast Cancer Cell (Photo from Alernative Treatments)

From WebMD:

Dec. 9, 2008 -- Cancer deaths are projected to more than double worldwide over the next two decades, largely from a dramatic increase in cancer incidence in low- and middle-income countries driven by tobacco use and increasingly Westernized lifestyles.

A new report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) explores the global burden of cancer, which is poised to become the leading cause of death worldwide by 2010.

The report predicts that:

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Never Say Die

William Finch, 96, gets ready to play Badminton in Greenville, N.C. At right, 97-year-old June McCann enjoys a game of Bocce ball. Photos: Michael Edwards for Newsweek

From Newsweek:

Step aside, quacks. The search for longer life is a real science now.

By the time it reaches the age of 18 days, the average roundworm is old, flabby, sluggish and wrinkled. By 20 days, the creature will likely be dead—unless, that is, it's one of Cynthia Kenyon's worms. Kenyon, director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, has tinkered with two genes that turn simple worms into mini-Methuselahs, with life spans of up to 144 days. "You can beat them up in ways that would kill a normal worm—exposing them to high heat, radiation and infectious microbes—and still they don't die," she says. "Instead, they're moving and looking like young worms. It's like a miracle—except it's science."

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Pavlov's Neurons: Brain Cells That Are A Key To Learning Discovered

Researchers have found individual neurons in the amygdalas of rat brains that are activated when the animals are given an associative learning task. (Credit: iStockphoto/Kiyoshi Takahase Segundo)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2008) — More than a century after Ivan Pavlov's dog was conditioned to salivate when it heard the sound of a tone prior to receiving food, scientists have found neurons that are critical to how people and animals learn from experience.

Using a new imaging technique called Arc catFISH, researchers from the University of Washington have visualized individual neurons in the amygdalas of rat brains that are activated when the animals are given an associative learning task.

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No Batteries Required: Future Devices Could Power Themselves

Photo From Green Optimistic

From Live Science:

A dying battery on a cell phone or iPod is usually a simple inconvenience, but it can potentially ruin lives. Research now shows that high-tech devices will be able to power themselves in the future by converting pressure waves into energy. No recharge needed.

The findings, detailed in this fall in the journal Physical Review B, could have potentially profound effects for low-powered electronic devices such as laptops, personal communicators and a host of other computer-related devices used by everyone from the average consumer to law enforcement officers and even soldiers in the battlefield.

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Honeybee CSI: Why Dead Bodies Can’t Be Found

Healthy hives (top) have worker bees covering most combs, but in hives with colony collapse disorder (bottom), a lot of bees leave the hive and don’t return.Credit: Custom Life Science Images

From Science News:

Virus could explain one symptom of colony collapse

There’s bad news for diehards still arguing that honeybees are getting abducted by aliens.

Beehives across North America continue to lose their workers for reasons not yet understood, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. But new tests suggest how a virus nicknamed IAPV might be to blame for one of the more puzzling aspects of the disorder—the impression that substantial numbers of bees vanish into thin air.

In tests on hives in a greenhouse, bees infected with IAPV (short for Israeli acute paralytic virus) rarely died in the hive. Sick bees expired throughout the greenhouse, including near the greenhouse wall, Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University in University Park reported November 18 in Reno, Nev., at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

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New Malaria Vaccine More Than 50 Percent Effective

(Photo from Foreign Policy Passport)

From Foreign Policy Passport:

Results of the latest malaria vaccine trials will be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, and from the looks of it, the news is good -- fantastic, in fact. "We are closer than every before to having a malaria vaccine for use by children in Africa, says Christian Lucq, director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

First, some background: The new trials use a vaccine candidate known as RTSS, the most clinically advanced malaria vaccine in development. The two tests took place in Kenya and Tanzania, and included 340 and 894 children, respectively. After vaccination, children were visited in their homes to follow up on their health and most importantly, their contraction (or not) of malaria.

Here are some highlights from the results:

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Making Vinegar At Home

Maple Vinegar: Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot

From Popsci:

Turn sour old wine into a beautiful holiday gift -- thanks to science.

Vinegar is one of those ingredients that people don't think of as often as they should. It is mostly just seen in salad dressings and pickles, which is a shame, because there is a whole world of flavor there just waiting to be tapped into. There are often times, especially during the holidays, when there is leftover wine after a festive dinner. Many of us will cork the bottle, with or without various safeguards to preserve the contents, and set it aside for the next day. Occasionally the bottles are forgotten, and when you finally open them again you find that the wine has evolved into something quite a bit different from what you were expecting. In these moments the change is often viewed with disappointment, as a delicate beverage has transformed into something sharper and edgier. Frankly, though, a smart cook will see the change as an opportunity. Good wine makes good vinegar and good vinegar is a stellar cooking ingredient.

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Why Do Men Buy Sex?

Photo: iStockphoto

From Scientific Magazine:

* In the U.S., police officers detained about 78,000 people in 2007 for prostitution-related crimes, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Only about 10 percent of these arrests are of the sex patrons, who almost exclusively are men.
* A considerable proportion of men worldwide buy sex from female prostitutes, with most estimates of lifetime prevalence ranging from 7 to 39 percent, depending on the country and study. Many experts argue that it is a male appetite—and not the choices of prostitutes—that fundamentally drives the sex trade.
* Men’s motives for buying sex are hotly contested among researchers. Some believe the practice serves as a salve for common psychological afflictions, such as an unfulfilled craving for sex or romance. Others, meanwhile, paint a dimmer portrait of johns, believing they are driven by chauvinistic motives, such as a desire to dominate and control women.

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Large Hadron Collider Repairs To Cost £14million

Extensive work will be needed to fix the Large Hadron Collider after a problem thought to be related to a faulty electrical connection Photo: GETTY IMAGES

From The Telegraph:

Repairs to the Large Hadron Collider, dubbed the biggest experiment in history, will cost almost £14m and take until at least next summer to be completed.

A faulty electrical connection between magnets was likely to blame for a large helium leak which caused the £4.4m LHC to be shut down in September.

At first the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) thought it would only be out of action until last month but the damage was worse than expected.

Now it is hoped repairs will be completed by May or early June with the machine restarted at the end of June or later.

James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, said: "If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer.

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Early Snowfalls In Europe Hit Historic Levels

From Watts Up With That?:

Early snowfalls in Europe hit Historic Levels
Posted Wednesday 3rd December 2008, 2:15 pm by Dunx

* 20 year record snowfall in Dolomites enough to last all season
* Some Swiss train services cancelled due to excess snow
* Still more heavy snow in the Pyrenees
* More snow for Scotland

www.Skiinfo.com is following still more heavy snowfalls across Europe over the past 48 hours, with much more snow in other parts of Europe and many areas of North America too.

The snowfall has been so great that it has closed roads, brought down power lines and even led to the cancellation of some Swiss rail services this week.

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Is Einstein The Last Great Genius?

From Live Science:

Major breakthroughs in science have historically been the province of individuals, not institutes. Galileo and Copernicus, Edison and Einstein, toiling away in lonely labs or pondering the cosmos in private studies.

But in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding.

And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.

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Dogs Can Feel Envy, Study Suggests

Dogs can feel envy, a December 2008 study suggests. In experiments with 43 dogs, an Austrian research team showed that dogs reacted to inequity. One dog watched another dog receive a reward for a trick. When the watcher dog performed the same trick and was not rewarded, that dog refused to do the trick again. Photograph by William Albert Allard/NGS

From National Geographic:

The first scientific study to find envy in non-primates affirms what many already know: dogs can get jealous.

"Everybody who has a dog at home probably [suspects] that dogs can be very jealous of other dogs and also of people," said lead author Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria.

In experiments with 43 dogs, Range's team showed that the canines reacted to inequity.

The team had one dog watch another dog receive a reward for doing a trick. When the watching dog performed the same trick and was not rewarded, that dog refused to do the trick again, Range said.

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Will Solar Power Ever Be As Cheap As Coal?

Wafer handlers: Senior photovoltaic engineer Adam Lorenz works on some solar wafers. The company he works for, 1366 Technologies, aims to convert sunshine into power as cheaply as coal-burning power plants do. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Some predict that within five years, it could rival fossil-fuel energy.

Lexington, Mass.

“Solar power is the energy of the future – and always will be.”

That tired joke, which has dogged solar-generated electricity for decades due to its high cost, could be retired far sooner than many think.

While solar contributes less than 1 percent of the energy generated in the United States today, its costs are turning sharply downward.

Whether using mirrors that focus desert sunlight to harvest heat and spin turbines or rooftop photovoltaic panels that turn sunshine directly into current, solar is on track to deliver electricity to residential users at a cost on par with natural gas and perhaps even coal within the next four to seven years, industry experts say.

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Carbon Dioxide Helped Ancient Earth Escape Deathly Deep Freeze

Researchers speculate that during the Cryogenian Period, about 840 to 635 million years ago, advancing ice was stalled by the interaction of the physical climate system and the carbon cycle of the ocean, with carbon dioxide playing a key role in insulating the planet. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2008) — The planet’s present day greenhouse scourge, carbon dioxide, may have played a vital role in helping ancient Earth to escape from complete glaciation, say scientists in a paper published online today.

In their review for Nature Geoscience, UK scientists claim that the Earth never froze over completely during the Cryogenian Period, about 840 to 635 million years ago.

This is contrary to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, which envisages a fully frozen Earth that was locked in ice for many millions of years as a result of a runaway chain reaction that caused the planet to cool.

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My Comment: I live half of the time up north in the Laurentians of Quebec. It is -22C. outside right now. Hmmmm .... more carbon dioxide please.

The Energy Debates: Solar Farms

From Ontario Solar Farms

From Live Science:

The Facts

The amount of energy from the sun that falls on Earth is staggering. Averaged over the entire surface of the planet, roughly each square yard collects nearly as much energy each year as you’d get from burning a barrel of oil. Solar farms seek to harness this energy for megawatts of power.

There are two ways solar power is used to generate electricity. Solar thermal plants — also known as concentrating solar power systems — focus sunlight with mirrors, heating water and producing steam that drives electric turbines, while photovoltaic cells directly convert sunlight to electricity.

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Making Computers Based On The Human Brain

Nigel Buchanan

From Business Week:

How the biology of gray matter is having an increasing influence on computer design

When Lloyd Watts was growing up in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had a knack for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and plunking out the melodies on the family piano. But he wondered, wouldn't it be great to have a machine that could "listen" to songs and immediately transcribe them into musical notation? Watts never built the gizmo, but his decades-long quest to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain.

Microchips designed by Audience, the Silicon Valley company Watts launched, are now being used by mobile handset makers in Asia to improve dramatically the quality of conversations in noisy places. Even a truck passing right by someone using the technology won't be heard at the other end of the phone line. The chip is modeled on functions of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. "We have reverse-engineered this piece of the brain," declares Watts.

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Unhappy People Watch TV, Happy People Read/Socialize, Says Study

From E! Science News:

A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research. Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time-use studies and a continuing series of social attitude surveys, the Maryland researchers report that spending time watching television may contribute to viewers' happiness in the moment, with less positive effects in the long run.

"TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does," says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author and a pioneer in time-use studies. "It's more passive and may provide escape - especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to u

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The Science Of The Future Of War

(Photo from Infowars)

From Blog Science:

TODAY'S MOST BRUTAL WARS are also the most primal. They are fought with machetes in West Africa, with fire and rape and fear in Darfur, and with suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices in Israel, Iraq, and elsewhere. But as horrifying as these conflicts are, they are not the greatest threat to our survival as a species. We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species’s existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species. From hands and teeth tearing at isolated individuals, to coordinated raids with clubs and bows and arrows, to pitched battles, prolonged sieges, and on into the age of firearms, the impulse has remained the same but as the efficiency of our weapons has increased, the consequences have grown ever more extreme.

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My Comment: A long essay .... but a fascinating one to read. Grab a cup of coffee, and take your time reading it.