Bacteria, Not Flu, Cause Of 1918 Pandemic

The 1918 flu pandemic is estimated to have caused the death of between 50 million and 100 million people in approximately 18 months (Source: US National Archives)

From ABC News/Reuters:

Strep infections and not influenza may have killed most people during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which suggests predictions about a new pandemic could be exaggerated, say US researchers.

The findings suggest that amassing antibiotics to fight bacterial infections may be as important as stockpiling antiviral drugs to battle flu, they say.

Professor Keith Klugman of Emory University, Atlanta and colleagues report their findings in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The team looked at information available about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed between 50 million and 100 million people globally in the space of about 18 months.

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Mummies Found In Newly Discovered Tomb In Egypt

In this photo released Monday, Feb. 9, 2009 by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, the remains of a newly-discovered Egyptian mummy and sarcophagus are seen in a tomb at Saqqara, south of Cairo, in Egypt, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009. A storeroom housing about two dozen ancient Egyptian mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb during the latest round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara south of Cairo, archaeologists said Monday. (AP Photo/Supreme Council of Antiquities)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAIRO – A storeroom housing about two dozen ancient Egyptian mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb during the latest round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara south of Cairo, archaeologists said Monday.

The tomb was located at the bottom of a 36-foot deep shaft, said Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass. Twenty-two mummies were found in niches along the tomb's walls, he said.

Eight sarcophagi were also found in the tomb. Archaeologists so far have opened only one of the sarcophagi — and found a mummy inside of it, said Hawass' assistant Abdel Hakim Karar. Mummies are believed to be inside the other seven, he said.

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Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains

From Wired News:

Paying attention isn't a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we're living.

In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.

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New Google Earth Tools Let Us Explore The Land Use Changes Around Climate Stations Over Time

The yellow dot is the location of the USHCN MMTS thermometer, and the white arrows arrows in the more recent view point to some things that have changed around the sensor over a six year period from 1999 to 2005. You can view the individual larger images also: Aurora in 1999 and Aurora in 2005

From Watts Up With That?

This past week Google introduced the latest iteration of their popular earth visualization program - Google Earth Version 5.0

In it was something I had been hoping for for months: a way to display historical aerial imagery and thus land use change around a climate monitoring station in an interactive timeline timeline.

The best part: it’s easy, and its’ free.

for example, here is my first effort, a simple two frame blink comparator showing changes around the USHCN station MMTS sensor at the water treatment plant in Aurora, IL, a suburb of Chicago:

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Newborn Brain Cells 'Time-Stamp' Memories

Image from Impact Lab

From E! Science News:

LA JOLLA, CA—"Remember when…?" is how many a wistful trip down memory lane begins. But just how the brain keeps tabs on what happened and when is still a matter of speculation. A computational model developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies now suggests that newborn brain cells—generated by the thousands each day—add a time-related code, which is unique to memories formed around the same time. "By labeling contemporary events as similar, new neurons allow us to recall events from a certain period," speculates Fred H. Gage, Ph.D., a professor in the Laboratory for Genetics, who led the study published in the Jan. 29, 2009, issue of the journal Neuron. Unlike the kind of time stamp found on digital photographs, however, the neuronal time code only provides relative time.

Ironically, Gage and his team had not set out to explain how the brain stores temporal information. Instead they were interested in why adult brains continually spawn new brain cells in the dentate gyrus, the entryway to the hippocampus. The hippocampus, a small seahorse-shaped area of the brain, distributes memory to appropriate storage sections in the brain after readying the information for efficient recall.

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Motivating Minds -- Why People Procrastinate

From The Economist:

People procrastinate when asked to think in the abstract

TO SOME there is nothing so urgent that it cannot be postponed in favour of a cup of tea. Such procrastination is a mystery to psychologists, who wonder why people would sabotage themselves in this way. A team of researchers led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz, in Germany, reckon they have found a piece of the puzzle. People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms.

Dr McCrea and his colleagues conducted three separate studies. First they recruited 34 students who were offered €2.50 ($3.30) for completing a questionnaire within the subsequent three weeks. Half of the students were then sent an email asking them to write a couple of sentences on how they might go about various activities, such as opening a bank account or keeping a diary. The others were asked to write about why someone might want to open a bank account or keep a diary.

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Meet The First Commercial Rocketship Pilots.

Rick Searfoss, former space shuttle commander, now XCOR’s chief test pilot, has helped make the desert town of Mojave the world capital of civilian manned rocket vehicle flight. (Chad Slattery)

From Air And Space Smithsonian Magazine:

In the old days it was straightforward enough. The planet had two corps of astronauts, Soviet and U.S., and to join one, you had to be a military test pilot. But now the rules have changed. You don’t have to be an American or a Russian anymore, and you don’t even have to be a government employee.

In 2004, Burt Rutan and his small company in Mojave, California, Scaled Composites, broke the government monopoly on human spaceflight. The company built SpaceShipOne using the same carbon fiber molding techniques used by airplane homebuilders everywhere, at the ridiculously paltry cost of $25 million. At the controls on its first flight into space sat not a steely-eyed missile man forged in the cold war but a 63-year-old high school dropout from South Africa. “I’m just a guy,” Mike Melvill exulted after SpaceShipOne’s inaugural flight into space. “An old guy!” The implication was inescapable. If he could drive a spaceship, so could anyone.

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Space Telescope To Boost Hunt For Alien Earths

Kepler Telescope (Image from Nasa)

From The New Scientist:

HOW common are alien Earths - small, rocky planets orbiting at the right distance to be not so hot that water boils and not so cold that it stays frozen? Till now clues have been hard to come by, because surveys have not been sensitive enough to find many such planets.

That should soon change thanks to the Kepler space telescope, which NASA is expecting to launch on 5 March. Its unique positioning in the solar system and unprecedented sensitivity mean that for the first time we will be able to see Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone" of their stars - the region where the temperature on the planet should be right for liquid water to exist at its surface.

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Inner Workings Of Photosynthesis Revealed By Powerful New Laser Technique

The laser light source used in this study was developed in the Physics Department at Imperial College and the technology transferred to RAL. It is capable of producing ultra-short pulses of light of very high intensity which are made up of a broad range of colours. (Credit: Image courtesy of Imperial College London)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2009) — Instant pictures showing how the sun's energy moves inside plants have been taken for the first time, according to research out February 6 in Physical Review Letters.

The images unravel some of the inner workings of the most efficient solar energy process on earth - photosynthesis. Inside a photosynthetic protein, the sun's energy is efficiently guided across the molecule to drive a chemical reaction that stores energy as food and takes in carbon dioxide. Scientists would very much like to harness this process as they search for new energy solutions to replace fossil fuels. To do this, they need to understand this energy transport process in more detail.

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3-D Enthusiasm Is Anything But Flat

Welcome to my world: K.C. Blake is director of business development at the L.A.-based Entertainment Technology Center, where the Home 3D Experience Lab is housed.
(Stephanie Diani/Special to The Christian Science Monitor)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Like high-def television before it, 3-D technology is ahead of its content, and consumers are hungry.

South Central Los Angeles

In a converted warehouse near one of Los Angeles’s toughest neighborhoods, a coterie of professional “techno-speculators” is playing around with what a growing number of entertainment industry folks hope the future of the small screen will be, namely 3-D.

This is the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California, where the Home 3D Experience Lab, ETC’s newest brainchild, is currently housed in a bare-bones room. The 3-D lab just opened this past week and isn’t complete yet, meaning the team is still assembling all the various iterations of 3-D as it will be experienced in consumers’ homes. But the fundamentals are in place – glasses, screens, and playback devices – says Bryan Gonzalez, the lab’s technical project specialist.

“For the state of the art in 3-D for the home environment, this is where the industry leaders can gather to discuss where it’s going,” says executive director David Wertheimer. The nonprofit research center is funded by content and technology companies, including nearly all the major film studios.

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Step Made Toward Invisible Electronics

The new helmet for the F35 fighter. It's also the Heads Up Display, or HUD. Meaning the pilot will get the data he needs to fly and flight the aircraft - displayed on the inside of his visor. (Photo from The Donovan)

From Live Science:

Researchers have made an advance toward a long-sought goal of building "invisible electronics" and transparent displays.

The work could eventually lead to better heads-up displays for pilots or even windshield displays and cars, as well as electronic paper that could deliver all the contents of a magazine or a newspaper on one, ever-changing, portable and perhaps even disposable sheet. Another goal: wearable electronic clothing displays.

The scientists, led by Chongwu Zhou and colleagues at UCLA developed tiny, transparent electronic circuits they say are more powerful than similar devices developed in recent years.

The work was detailed in the Jan. 27 issue of ACS Nano, a monthly journal.

In the new study, Chongwu Zhou and colleagues point out that although scientists have previously developed nano-sized transparent circuits, previous versions are limited to a handful of materials that are transparent semiconductors.

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Kissing Feels So Pleasurable Due To Hormone Surge, Find Scientists

From The Telegraph:

The reason that kissing feels so pleasurable is that sparks a surge of hormones in our brains, according to new research.

Couples who share a passionate kiss this Valentine's Day will enjoy sensations of relaxation and excitement because of a complex series of chemical processes, as well as their love for their partners.

The study showed that women need more than just a kiss to experience the same chemical high as men - with additional features such as a romantic atmosphere of dimmed lights and mood music also required.

Wendy Hill, professor of psychology at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania began the research to find out why the mundane physical activity of rubbing lips can elicit such a gratifying emotional response.

Her team tested the levels of two hormones, cortisol and oxytocin, in 15 couples before and after holding hands and kissing.

They found that kissing reduced the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in both sexes. But levels of oxytocin, a hormone linked to social bonding that they expected to be boosted by kissing, only rose among the men.

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New Science Could Defeat Food Crises

Wheat Fields (Image from Cutting Edge News)

From The Guardian:

Breakthroughs in microscopic engineering could boost shelf life of food and increase crop yields.

A controversial scientific revolution that could give packaged foods a dramatically longer shelf life and boost crop growth has "real potential" to help feed a fast-growing world, according to environment secretary Hilary Benn.

New developments in nanotechnology, engineering carried out at a microscopic level, could lead to plastic packaging designed to stop food and drink spoiling by killing bacteria or preventing oxygen getting through the container.

The technology could also be used to enrich food with supplements and preserve vitamins that would otherwise be destroyed as food aged. Farmers could also use it to ensure the slow release of fertilisers at the right time for crops, and to detect threats from pests or pollutants. The technology is, however, highly controversial, with green campaigners arguing that its effects on human health are unknown.

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The Look Of Love? Women Are Attracted To Men With Big Pupils, Says Study

Was Jennifer Aniston's character Beth in the film He's Just Not That Into You attracted to her boyfriend Neil, played by Ben Affleck, because of his big pupils?

From The Daily Mail:

Researchers have discovered what women are really thinking when they look into a man’s eyes – and it is all about the size of their...pupils.

Women become attracted to men with large pupils just as they are approaching their most fertile time of the month, the study at Edinburgh University found.

Scientists suggest that it may be because it indicates that the man is sexually interested in them and available for mating. Pupil size made no significant difference for the rest of the menstrual cycle.

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Global Warming Studies Often Depend On Average Citizens

Photo: From Care Global Warming.

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — It has to do with brown-headed cowbirds and clear-cut forests, lilacs and wildfires, vineyards in the Rhine Valley, marmots, dandelions, tadpoles, cherry trees around the Tidal Basin in Washington and musty old records stuffed in shoe boxes in people's closets and stacked on museum shelves.

As scientists track global warming, they're using sometimes centuries-old data to assess its impact on plants, animals, insects, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Increasingly, they're discovering that it can take only one seemingly insignificant change to disrupt an entire ecosystem.

"People talk about a 1- or 2-degree rise in temperature and it's inconsequential to us. Who cares?" said Greg Jones, an environmental studies professor at Southern Oregon University who's been studying wine grapes. "But in an ecosystem it can have dramatic effects."

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America’s Wind Corridor

New trade: A Clipper crew assembles the hub of a wind turbine in an Iowa factory
that formerly built printing presses. (Mark Clayton)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

From Minnesota to Texas, wind power sweeps new jobs into old-tech towns.

Cedar Rapids and Estherville, Iowa

Hundreds of workers lost their jobs after the Rockwell-Goss printing press factory closed here in Cedar Rapids in 2001. The hulking empty shell sat idle on the outskirts of the city for four years.

But that was before wind power blew into town, bringing thousands of clean-tech manufacturing jobs to Iowa and the Midwest.

In many cases, the new industry is setting up shop in defunct heavy manufacturing plants, bringing new economic life and vitality to old settings.

Bob Loyd, who once oversaw crews manufacturing the last printing presses to leave the old Rockwell-Goss factory, now manages workers assembling the newest generation of giant wind turbines in the same building.

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Curing Baldness Could Be A Step To Organ Regeneration

Deep roots. For a hair follicle to begin a new phase of growth, an elusive group of cells called the hair germ (bright red) must be activated. This progression of images shows that the hair germ begins proliferating (green) before other cells do, suggesting a two-step mechanism.

From The Next Big Future:

Research from Rockefeller University reveals that a structure at the base of each strand of hair, the hair follicle, uses a two-step mechanism to activate its stem cells and order them to divide. The mechanism provides insights into how repositories of stem cells may be organized in other body tissues for the purpose of supporting organ regeneration.

So understanding and fixing the stem cells and the replenishment of stem cells in hair follicles could lead to a baldness cure and also to human regeneration of organs.

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Large Hadron Collider To Be Re-Started Later This Year

At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider could recreate conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. Above is one of the collider's massive particle detectors, called the Compact Muon Solenoid. Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

From The Telegraph:

Scientists are expected to make a decision within days on when the Large Hadron Collider, the broken "Big Bang" machine, will be re-started.

The LHC suffered a catastrophic malfunction soon after being switched on last September amid a fanfare of publicity.

Officials and scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the £4billion device, have been in talks this week about when to re-start it.

They have also discussed what caused the LHC to grind to a halt and how to prevent similar incidents happening in the future.

CERN have now said that they hope the machine will be up and running in time to deliver the first batch of data for experts to begin experiments by the end of the year.

A final decision on the exact date to switch it back on is expected following a meeting on Monday.

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Nearly A Billion People Go Hungry Every Day – Can GM Crops Help Feed Them?

A protester vandalises a GM crop trial. Qualms about GM food may be a luxury Africa can ill afford. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

From The Guardian:

Leading scientists met last night to debate whether genetically modified crops can feed the world's hungry. The issue, it seems, is as divisive as ever

The Science Museum in London is running an exhibition until the end of May called Future Foods. It attempts to give a balanced view of the pros and cons of genetically modified crops, which are back on the agenda in the light of fears over a major food crisis. It does a good job too.

As part of the exhibition, the museum organised a debate at the Dana Centre to give the public a chance to debate GM crops and the food crisis with some key scientists. I chaired the event and picked up on a few issues I thought might be worth sharing.

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Study: How Money Can Buy Happiness

From Live Science:

You've heard many times that money can't buy happiness. That probably never stopped you from shopping. But a new study suggests you might want to spend more on doing things and less on stuff.

Buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them, researchers announced today at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

A meal out or tickets to the theater result in increased well-being because they satisfy higher order needs, specifically the need for social connectedness and vitality — a feeling of being alive, the researchers say.

"These findings support an extension of basic need theory, where purchases that increase psychological need satisfaction will produce the greatest well-being," said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.

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