How Scientifically Accurate Is Watchmen?

WHY SO BLUE? Dr. Manhattan's color and (some of) his powers can be explained by quantum mechanics, thanks to your (self-proclaimed) "friendly neighborhood physics professor," Jim Kakalios. WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT

From Scientific American:

The anticipated film Watchmen, based on the 1980s DC Comics 12-part comic book series (later adapted as a graphic novel), hits theaters tomorrow. Die-hard fans of the original publication may fret over its faithfulness to the series, but studio execs also worried about their movie's faithfulness to science. To set their minds at ease, they placed a call to Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota.

Kakalios, 50, began advising the film's makers in the summer of 2007 on everything from the quantum mechanics of Dr. Manhattan (one of the superheroes of the story) down to the details in the laboratories. "They wanted to know what was around the corner at the end of the long corridor, even if the audience wasn't going to see it," he says.

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Could Technology Repair Earth’s Climate?

Color dark-field micrograph of green algae, which absorbs carbon dioxide.
(RoLand Birke/NEWSCOM)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

EarthTalk: Scientists study ways to pull greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere, but the idea is controversial.

Q: What are some of the leading proposed technological fixes for staving off global warming, and how feasible are they?
– James Harris, Columbus, Ohio

A: While most of the world fixates on how to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere, scientists and engineers worldwide are working on various geoengineering technologies – many of which are highly theoretical – to mitigate global warming and its effects. Many scientists oppose using new technology to fix problems created by old technology, but others view it as a quick and relatively inexpensive way to help solve our most vexing environmental problem.

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Boston Globe Asks: Where’s The Global Warming?

From Watts Up With That?

For those too young to remember (such as Jim Hansen’s coal protesters in Washington this past week), Clara Peller, pictured above, started a national catchphrase with “Where’s the beef?” that even made it into the 1984 presidential campaign. Today, the Boston Globe asks: where’s the global warming?

Watch the original commercial that started the catchphrase. It seems applicable today. - Anthony

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Geeks May Be Chic, But Negative Nerd Stereotype Still Exists, Professor Says

Lori Kendall, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, says despite the increased popularity of geek culture and the ubiquity of computers, the geek’s close cousin, the nerd, still suffers from a negative stereotype in popular culture. Kendall holds a familiar tool of the nerd: a slide rule. (Credit: Photo by L. Brian Stauffer)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2009) — Despite the increased popularity of geek culture – movies based on comic books, videogames, virtual worlds – and the ubiquity of computers, the geek’s close cousin, the nerd, still suffers from a negative stereotype in popular culture.

This may help explain why women and minorities are increasingly shying away from careers in information technology, says Lori Kendall, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The popular stereotype of the nerd as the sartorially challenged, anti-social white male hasn’t faded from our collective cultural consciousness, and is more prevalent than ever as a stock character in television shows, movies and advertisements.

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NASA: Wednesday Night Shuttle Launch Is Official

The STS-119 Shuttle Discovery crew members gather on Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in January 2009 before beginning their emergency egress training. After four launch delays, NASA says it now believes the space shuttle Discovery could be sent on a mission to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) by mid-March. (AFP/NASA-HO)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – It's official: NASA has finally settled on a Wednesday night launch for space shuttle Discovery.

The flight to the international space station was originally set for mid-February, but was delayed four times because of concern over critical shuttle valves. On Friday, senior NASA managers meeting at Kennedy Space Center put the valve issue to rest for Discovery and cleared the shuttle for flight.

Seven astronauts will ride Discovery into orbit, taking with them one final set of solar wings for the space station.

Launch director Mike Leinbach said spirits are much higher now than they were when the flight kept being put off.

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Bad Marriages Strain Women's Hearts, But Not Men's

From Live Science:

An unhappy marriage can weigh heavily on anyone's heart, but apparently women may suffer the most ill health effects related to heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Women who felt depressed in strained marriages faced a boosted risk of hypertension, waistline obesity, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low levels of "good cholesterol" HDL – five factors of metabolic syndrome. Male spouses who felt similarly down in the dumps did not see similar risks.

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My Comment: As a male .... I disagree.

Drug Blocks Two Of World's Deadliest Emerging Viruses

Image: Hendra virus has a growing family tree. Pic courtesy CSIRO.

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2009) — Two highly lethal viruses that have emerged in recent outbreaks are susceptible to chloroquine, an established drug used to prevent and treat malaria, according to a new basic science study by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Journal of Virology.*

The two henipaviruses that are the subject of the study -- Hendra Virus (HeV) and Nipah Virus (NiV) -- emerged during the 1990s in Australia and Southeast Asia. Harbored by fruit bats, they cause potentially fatal encephalitis and respiratory disease in humans, with a devastating 75 percent fatality rate. More recently, NiV outbreaks in Bangladesh involving human-to-human transmission have focused attention on NiV as a global health concern.

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Horse Domestication Traced To Ancient Central Asian Culture

A horse's tooth found at an ancient settlement in Kazakhstan displays parallel bands of wear (at left) typically produced by bits held in the mouths of bridled animals, researchers say. Credit: Science/AAAS

From Science News:

Bone and chemical analyses indicate horses were harnessed and even milked more than 5,000 years ago in central Asia

Central Asia’s vast grasslands hosted a prehistoric revolution in transportation, communication and warfare, thanks to the humble horse. Remains from Kazakhstan’s more than 5,000-year-old Botai culture have yielded the earliest direct evidence for domestication of these versatile beasts, scientists report.

The Botai people were hunter-gatherers who lived in large settlements for months or years. Their culture lasted from 5,600 to 5,100 years ago. Researchers have long suspected that the Botai rode domesticated horses while hunting for wild horses to eat but did not domesticate other animals or cultivate crops.

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Daylight Saving Time Facts

Electric Time Company employee Walter Rodriguez cleans the face of an 84-inch (213-centimeter) Wegman clock at the firm's plant in Medfield, Massachusetts, on October 30, 2008. For most people in the United States, daylight saving time begins in the wee hours of March 8, 2009, with clocks turned forward one hour. Photograph courtesy AP Photo/Elise Amendola

From The National Geographic:

Daylight saving time in most of the United States starts this year in the early hours of March 8. The "spring forward" marks the second time the country has observed the switch in March rather than April since changes to the system were adopted in 2007.

Contrary to popular belief, no federal rule mandates that states or territories observe daylight saving time.

Most U.S. residents set their clocks one hour forward in spring and one hour back in fall. But people in Hawaii and most of Arizona—along with the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands—will do nothing. Those locales never deviate from standard time within their particular time zones.

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The World's Hardest-Working Telescope

Dinoj Surendran, Microsoft Research, and Mark Subbarao, Adler
Planetarium/KICP/University of Chicago

From Discover:

By precisely mapping a volume of space 5 billion light-years in diameter, the Sloan telescope is answering some of the universe's biggest questions.

Located 9,200 feet above sea level, atop the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope cannot match the incredibly sharp vision of the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits above Earth’s blurring atmosphere. And, at a modest 2.5 meters (8 feet) across, the Sloan telescope’s main mirror cannot see the incredibly dim objects that the 10-meter (33-foot) Keck telescopes in Hawaii can. What the Sloan telescope does have in spades is a voracious appetite for sky—an appetite that is producing some of the most amazing discoveries in astronomy.

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'Vampire' Discovered In Mass Grave

To stop the "vampires" supposedly chewing shrouds and spreading disease, grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of plague victims (Image: Matteo Borrini)

From New Scientist:

A SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in contemporary documents.

Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth (see right) while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice (see second image here).

At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by "vampires" which, rather than drinking people's blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says.

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First Successful Attempt To Breed Night Blooming And Day Blooming Flower

Electric Indigo is a cross between the Egyptian White Water Lily that blooms at night and a blue Australian lily Nympaea Barre Hellquist that flowers during the day

From The Telegraph:

The world's first cross between a day-blooming and night-blooming flower has been produced at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.

The new hybrid called Electric Indigo is a cross between the Egyptian White Water Lily that blooms at night and a blue Australian lily Nympaea Barre Hellquist that flowers during the day.

The new water lily with bright blue petals is the first successful attempt at breeding day blooming and night blooming species since attempts began in 1852.

Lilies bloom during the night to take advantage of insects that will only come out night and pollinate the plant.

Propagator Carlos Magdalena, a horticulturalist who works at the gardens' tropical nursery, took pollen from the white night bloomer and placed it on the stigma of the day bloomer.

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Shall We Dance? Astronomers Spot Two Black Holes Performing Cosmic Minuet

An artist's conception of the two supermassive black holes that orbit each other every 100 years. The findings were published in the journal Nature

From The Daily Mail:

Two colossal black holes appear to be orbiting one another in sort of a cosmic minuet at the centre of a faraway galaxy formed when two separate galaxies collided, U.S. astronomers said.

These two so-called supermassive black holes, which are celestial objects with enormous gravitational pull, are locked in orbit about 5 billion light years away from Earth, the scientists said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, or the distance light travels in a year.

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Lake Superior Is Freezing Over

From Watts Up With That?

Lake Superior last froze over in 2003. It has now, again, frozen over. The frequency of freeze overs has historically been around once every 20 years. Now, in the last decade, we have seen two freeze overs.

The picture below is a beautiful satellite photo of Lake Superior from yesterday. With the well below freezing temperatures seen over the region Thursday night (-20 F), any isolated open water could have frozen.

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Kepler Blasts Off In Search Of Earth-Like Planets

In a timed exposure, spectators watch from Cocoa Beach as the Kepler satellite launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. March 6. Malcolm Denemark / Associated Press

From The L.A. Times:

The $590-million mission, jointly managed by JPL and NASA, will examine a star-rich stretch of sky for a planet where water could exist in liquid form.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth's twin, a Goldilocks planet where it's neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.

The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest-field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time.

The launch vehicle headed downrange, gathering speed as its three stages ignited, one after the other, passing over the Caribbean island of Antigua and tracking stations in Australia before climbing into orbit.

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More News On The Kepler Telescope

After Launch, Kepler Prepares To Carry Out Its Mission -- Red Orbit
Nasa launches Earth hunter probe -- BBC
CU leads historic voyage to find other Earths -- AP
Guide To Exoplanets -- MSNBC
Kepler Mission Sets Out to Find Planets Using CCD Cameras -- Daily Tech

Naked Mole Rats May Hold Clues To Successful Aging

A naked mole rat in a toilet paper roll.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2009) — Naked mole rats resemble pink, wrinkly, saber-toothed sausages and would never win a beauty contest, even among other rodents. But these natives of East Africa are the champs for longevity among rodents, living nine times longer than similar-sized mice. Not only do they have an extraordinarily long lifespan, but they maintain good health for most of it and show remarkable resistance to cancer.

Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio are studying mechanisms that enable the prolonged good health and slowed aging of naked mole rats in their large colony at the university’s Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies. In the March 3 print edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists report on another unusual feature of the animals — tissues of the naked mole rat are remarkably efficient at discarding damaged proteins and thereby maintaining stable, high-quality proteins.

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Wine and Beer May be Good for Your Bones

From Live Science:

A glass of wine or a bottle or two of beer a day may strengthen the bones of older men and women, but drinking more than that could actually weaken bones, according to new research from the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston.

The research, on men and post-menopausal women over 60 years of age, found that regular moderate alcohol intake was associated with greater bone mineral density (BMD).

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Facebook To Launch Redesigned Home Page - News Feed Going “Live” Next Wednesday (Updated With Screenshots)

(Click The Above Image To Enlarge)

From Inside Facebook:

Today, Facebook announced that the News Feed, which has long been the most powerful way for users to discover updates from their friend on the site, is going “Live.” In addition, users will be able to filter the changes, most prominently according to friend lists.

The new home page consists of 4 primary elements: the Stream, Publisher, Filters, and Highlights.

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The Lost World Beneath The Antarctic Ice

Scientists start explorations in the two-mile-thick ice sheet
above Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica. Press Handout

From The Independent:

British scientists search for life forms hidden more than 400,000 years ago beneath Antarctic ice.

British scientists are about to mount one of the boldest-ever missions, to search for life forms that have survived for possibly millions of years in a frozen "lost world" beneath an ancient ice sheet.

This week, a team of Antarctic scientists has been given the go-ahead to drill through a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that has sealed a sub-glacial lake from the rest of the biosphere for at least as long as Homo sapiens has walked the Earth.

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Q&A: Mitchell Baker On The Future Of Firefox

Browsing The Future -- Newsweek

Mozilla's Firefox gave Microsoft a run for its money. What's next?

At least 18 percent of you already know what Firefox is, because you're using it to read this interview. (Or so says the statistics engine behind Newsweek.com, which tracks things like that.) For the unfamiliar, Firefox is a free Web browser that is built by coders around the world whose open-source work is organized by the Mozilla Corp. and its nonprofit parent, the Mozilla Foundation. Introduced in 2004 as an alternative to Microsoft's ubiquitous, but buggy, Internet Explorer, Firefox has been a force for innovation in the browser category, with improvements such as tabbed browsing and plug-ins that work on any operating system. Commissions from search engines appear to keep Mozilla awash in revenue for now ($75 million in 2007; the foundation has not released 2008 data), although the vast majority of that comes from a company, Google, that now has its own competing browser, Chrome. Mozilla's plans for 2009 include a new version of Firefox, which will focus on user-interface polish; an overhaul of Thunderbird, its e-mail client; and taking Firefox mobile. Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chairwoman, spoke to NEWSWEEK's Nick Summers and Barrett Sheridan about the challenges of making a browser for mobile phones, adapting to a socially networked universe and what she really thinks of Chrome and Internet Explorer. Excerpts:

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