Black Hole Found In Milky Way

From BBC:

There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them.

According to Dr Robert Massy, of the Royal Astronomical Society, the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.

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NASA Delays Mars Science Laboratory Launch To 2011

In a rare astronomical occurrence, called planetary conjunction, planets Venus (top l.), and Jupiter (top r.), were seen with a crescent moon. The three orbs created a momentary smiley face in the sky over Asia on Monday. Bullit Marquez/AP

From Christian Science Monitor:

For folks looking forward to the launch of another ground-breaking Mars mission next year, you’ll have to wait. Top officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced today that they have pushed back the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory by two years.

In the process, the agency’s green-eye-shade crew will have to come up with an extra $400 million for the project. That’s the delay’s cost on a mission whose price tag already is estimated at $1.88 billion before all is said and done.

The delay is the second in a year, with the project currently running about two months behind schedule.

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Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide on Extrasolar Planet

From Wired Science:

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of the solar system, a significant step in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Though the planet is more similar to Jupiter than Earth and is too hot to harbor life, the ability to identify organic compounds on other planets is key to being able to find other habitable worlds, and potentially life.

"The carbon dioxide is kind of the main focus of the excitement, because that is a molecule that under the right circumstances could have a connection to biological activity as it does on Earth," astronomer Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a press release. "The very fact that we're able to detect it, and estimate its abundance, is significant for the long-term effort of characterizing planets both to find out what they're made of and to find out if they could be a possible host for life."

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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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