Gamma-Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?

Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses, as seen in the above artist's rendering. An April 2009 paper suggests that a gamma-ray burst aimed at Earth may have caused a mass extinction event 440 million years ago, and that a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again. Illustration courtesy NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

From National Geographic:

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study.

Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses.

The new computer model shows that a gamma-ray burst aimed at Earth could deplete the ozone layer, cause acid rain, and initiate a round of global cooling from as far as 6,500 light-years away.

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'Eureka Machine' Puts Scientists In The Shade By Working Out Laws Of Nature

From The Gaurdian:

The machine, which took only a few hours to come up with Newton's laws of motion, marks a turning point in the way science is done

Scientists have created a "Eureka machine" that can work out the laws of nature by observing the world around it – a development that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new scientific truths.

The machine took only hours to come up with the basic laws of motion, a task that occupied Sir Isaac Newton for years after he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree.

Scientists at Cornell University in New York have already pointed the machine at baffling problems in biology and plan to use it to tackle questions in cosmology and social behaviour.

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Wind Turbines Could More Than Meet U.S. Electricity Needs, Report Says

From The L.A. Times:

The Interior Department report, which looks at the potential of wind turbines off the U.S. coast, is part of the government's process to chart a course for offshore energy development.

Reporting from Arlington, Va. -- Wind turbines off U.S. coastlines could potentially supply more than enough electricity to meet the nation's current demand, the Interior Department reported Thursday.

Simply harnessing the wind in relatively shallow waters -- the most accessible and technically feasible sites for offshore turbines -- could produce at least 20% of the power demand for most coastal states, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, unveiling a report by the Minerals Management Service that details the potential for oil, gas and renewable development on the outer continental shelf.

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How Herpes Re-Rears Its Ugly Head

Activity of the VP16 gene (light blue) and the presence of other viral proteins (light purple) in these mouse nerve cells are signs of the herpes virus waking from its latent form. The cells appear dark purple where both markers overlap. Credit: N. Sawtell

From Science News:

Researchers identify key protein that reactivates virus under stress.

A single viral protein enables dormant herpes virus to wake up, suggests a study appearing online March 26 in PLoS Pathogens. The protein, called VP16, acts as the gatekeeper for the damaging, infective activity of the virus, new results in mice show.

Figuring out what causes an inactive, latent state to become a highly infectious state is “very, very important for understanding this virus,” says study coauthor Nancy Sawtell of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio. The results may lead to a better way to control herpes simplex virus type 1, a virus carried by more than 70 percent of the human population, Sawtell says.

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Sleep May Help Clear Brain For New Learning

Washington University scientists used genetically modified fruit flies to track the creation of new brain synapses, junctures where two brain cells communicate. They found that two scenarios that give the fruit fly's brain a workout caused new synapses to arise. To their surprise, all of the new synapses originated from a group of 16 cells in the fly brain's internal timekeeping mechanism. The cells are highlighted in the encircled area above. (Credit: Image courtesy of Washington University School of Medicine)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2009) — A new theory about sleep's benefits for the brain gets a boost from fruit flies in the journal Science. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found evidence that sleep, already recognized as a promoter of long-term memories, also helps clear room in the brain for new learning.

The critical question: How many synapses, or junctures where nerve cells communicate with each other, are modified by sleep? Neurologists believe creation of new synapses is one key way the brain encodes memories and learning, but this cannot continue unabated and may be where sleep comes in.

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Chocolate Helps With ... Math?

Photo from The San Francisco Sentinel

From Live Science:

Chocolate, which we write about a lot here, is no cure-all. But in small amounts, dark chocolate has many benefits: It can help keep the heart healthy and even provide some anti-cancer benefits. It can also, in moderation, work like aspirin.

Now scientists say it helps with math. Sort of.

In the new study reported in the British media, participants given large amounts of flavanols, which are compounds found in chocolate, did better when asked to count backwards in groups of three from a random number between 800 and 999. Flavanols increase blood flow to the brain, scientists say.

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Murdoch Calls Google, Yahoo Copyright Thieves — Is He Right?

From Wired News:

Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp. and The Wall Street Journal, says Google and Yahoo are giant copyright scofflaws that steal the news.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright ... not steal, but take," Murdoch says. "Not just them, but Yahoo."

But whether search-engine news aggregation is theft or a protected fair use under copyright law is unclear, even as Google and Yahoo profit tremendously from linking to news. So maybe Murdoch is right.

Murdoch made his comments late Thursday during an address at the Cable Show, an industry event held in Washington. He seemingly was blaming the web, and search engines, for the news media's ills.

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How Long Would it Take Piranhas To Eat A Person?

Feeding Frenzy: A school of piranhas could strip your flesh in five minutes.
Adek Berry/Getty Images

From PopSci.com:

Is the fish's deadly rep justified?

After a trip to the Amazon jungle, President Teddy Roosevelt famously reported seeing a pack of piranhas devour a cow in a few minutes. It must have been a very large school of fish—-or a very small cow. According to Ray Owczarzak, assistant curator of fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it would probably take 300 to 500 piranhas five minutes to strip the flesh off a 180-pound human. But would this attack even happen?

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New Cosmic Map Reveals Colossal Structures

The new survey mapped the positions of more than 100,000 galaxies. The black strips are areas the survey did not cover because matter in our own galaxy blocked the view (Illustration: Chris Fluke/Swinburne University of Technology)

From The New Scientist:

Enormous cosmic voids and giant concentrations of matter have been observed in a new galaxy survey, one of the biggest completed so far. One of the voids is so large that it is difficult to explain where it came from.

Called the Six Degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS), the project scanned 41% of the sky, measuring positions and distances for 110,000 galaxies within 2 billion light years of Earth.

No previous survey has covered as much of the sky at such a distance. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which is based in the northern hemisphere, has probed about twice as far but covers only 23% of the sky.

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Virus-Built Battery Could Power Cars, Electronic Devices

Angela Belcher holds a display of the virus-built battery she helped engineer. The battery -- the silver-colored disc -- is being used to power an LED. (Credit: Photo by Donna Coveney)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2009) — For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery.

The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team.

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Beverage Consumption A Bigger Factor In Weight, Study Shows

When it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be more important
than what you eat. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 2, 2009) — When it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be more important than what you eat, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Researchers examined the relationship between beverage consumption among adults and weight change and found that weight loss was positively associated with a reduction in liquid calorie consumption and liquid calorie intake had a stronger impact on weight than solid calorie intake.

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Dogs Do Look Like Owners

From Live Science:

People can guess pretty successfully what breed of dog a person might own just by looking at the owner, a new study finds.

A group of 70 people who do not own dogs were asked to match photos of 41 dog owners to three possible breeds — Labrador, poodle or Staffordshire bull terrier. They matched the owners to the dogs more than half the time. Yet given three choices, they should have been right only about a third of the time.

"This suggests that certain breeds of dogs are associated with particular kinds of people," said study leader Lance Workman, a psychologist at Bath Spa University in the UK.

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Building A Brain On A Silicon Chip

Image: A smart chip: Scientists in Europe are using conventional chip production techniques to create circuits that mimic the structure and function of the human brain. This early prototype has just 384 neurons and 100,000 synapses, but the latest version contains 200,000 neurons and 50 million synapses. Credit: Karlheinz Meier

From Technology Review:

A chip developed by European scientists simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain.

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.

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Plan B For Energy: 8 Revolutionary Energy Sources

From Scientific American:

If efficiency improvements and incremental advances in today's technologies fail to halt global warming, could revolutionary new carbon-free energy sources save the day? Don't count on it—but don't count it out, either

To keep this world tolerable for life as we like it, humanity must complete a marathon of technological change whose finish line lies far over the horizon. Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala of Princeton University have compared the feat to a multigenerational relay race. They outline a strategy to win the first 50-year leg by reining back carbon dioxide emissions from a century of unbridled acceleration. Existing technologies, applied both wisely and promptly, should carry us to this first milestone without trampling the global economy. That is a sound plan A.

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Robot Achieves Scientific First

A robot called ADAM can hypothesize, conduct experiments, and plan next steps without human input, researcher Ross King (left) and colleagues announced in April 2009. ADAM is the first—but maybe not the last—robot to make a new scientific discovery. Photograph courtesy Arthur Dafis, Aberystwyth University

From Financial Post:

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.

Professor Ross King, the chief creator of Adam, said robots would not supplant human researchers but make their work more productive and interesting.

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More News On This Robot First

Robot scientist 'Adam' solves genetic problems -- Times Online
First Robot Scientist Makes Gene Discovery -- National Geographic
Self-directed robot scientist makes discovery -- MSNBC
Robot Scientist Becomes First Machine To Discover New Scientific Knowledge -- Science Daily
Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself -- Wired Science
Robot scientist makes discoveries with no human help -- New Scientist
Job Swap: This Robot Is the Scientist -- Live Science

UFO Hoax Was A Social Experiment

Joe Rudy releases a burning flare along side the smoke trail left by a vanished balloon while Chris Russo kneels down to get the next flare ready. Credit: Chris Russo & Joe Rudy via Skeptic.com.

From Live Science:

Strange lights appeared over Morris County, New Jersey, on Jan. 5 this year. The bright red lights were first noticed in the night sky by an eleven-year-old girl, who pointed out three lights grouped together, and another pair some distance away.

The lights moved silently and slowly, then disappeared one by one.

The girl's father, a pilot, said he was baffled: "I've been in aviation for 20 years and never seen anything like it." Police fielded calls from alarmed residents, and the supposed UFO made national news.

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Source Of Major Health Benefits In Olive Oil Revealed

Scientists have pinned down the constituent of olive oil that gives greatest protection from heart attack and stroke. (Credit: iStockphoto/Leslie Banks)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 2, 2009) — Scientists have pinned down the constituent of olive oil that gives greatest protection from heart attack and stroke. In a study of the major antioxidants in olive oil, Portuguese researchers showed that one, DHPEA-EDA, protects red blood cells from damage more than any other part of olive oil.

"These findings provide the scientific basis for the clear health benefits that have been seen in people who have olive oil in their diet," says lead researcher Fatima Paiva-Martins, who works at the University of Porto.

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Who Gets The Girl? Funny Men Have The Last Laugh...

Photo: Who gets the girl? Funny men like David Walliams, seen with model Lauren Budd, are luckier in love

From The Daily Mail:

It has long been noted that women love a man who can make them laugh - just look at 'sex thimble' Dudley Moore or serial dater David Walliams.

And now scientists believe they know why.

Being funny apparently makes men seem more intelligent, trustworthy - and a better bet for a relationship.

Psychologist Kristofor McCarty said: 'A quick browse of lonely hearts ads will confirm that women look for a good sense of humour in a potential partner - our research may explain why this is the case.'

Mr McCarty drew his conclusions after a study where he asked 45 women to rate the personalities behind a selection of 'lonely hearts' adverts.

Some of these were funny, others were entirely factual.

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Fruit Flies Earn No Respect, Except Among Scientists

These humble fruit flies, clinging to a matchstick, may be kitchenpests, but they contribute enormously to biological and medical science. New South Wales Department of Primary Industries/MCT

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — That annoying kitchen pest, the fruit fly, occupies an honored place in science and medicine, despite slurs from politicians such as Sen. John McCain and his 2008 sidekick, Sarah Palin.

Scientists have been studying these dinky insects for more than a century, but they say that they're still turning up valuable new information in more than 1,000 laboratories all over the world.

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Astronomers Find Hidden Exoplanet in Hubble's Dustbin

From Wired Science:

An exoplanet hidden in the Hubble Space Telescope's archival images has been revealed by data miners using a new technique for spotting the satellites of distant stars.

In search of more information about a known exoplanet orbiting the star HR8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, astronomers turned to the catalog of images Hubble has been amassing for more than 15 years. Using an algorithm that can block the bright light of observed stars allowing the much fainter exoplanets circling them to be seen, the team spotted the planet in an image from 1998.

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