Six Mind-Blowing Ideas

From Cosmic Log/MSNBC:

Is "life as we don't know it" closer than we think? Are microbes behind the world's biggest extinctions? Is most of our morality bound up in hidden "dark morals"? Blow your mind with six flights of scientific fancy from the Origins Symposium, presented by Arizona State University.

The weekend forum, organized to inaugurate ASU's Origins Initiative, focused on the beginnings of life, the universe and everything - including consciousness and culture. Among the luminaries in attendance were biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Steven Pinker, anthropologist Donald Johanson and a basketball team's worth of Nobel laureates. (On Saturday I almost got lost as I wandered around The Boulders resort with two of the nicest Nobelists you ever did meet, Frank Wilczek and John Mather.)

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7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs

From Wired Science:

You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility.

Nuclear weapons aren't only good for leveling cities, they've also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production — and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit.

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The Top 10 Telescopes of All Time

From PopSci.com:

A look back at the 400-year-old art of assisted sky-gazing.

Humans have been looking to the heavens for as long as we have had stories to tell about them. But the way we look up has come quite far in the past 400 years, since Galileo Galilei first pointed a spyglass to the sky.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the telescope, Popular Science looks back on the top 10 observatories on Earth and beyond.

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Edge of Space Found

Photo From Near Space Sciences

From Live Science:

Hold on to your hats, or in this case, your helmets: Scientists have finally pinpointed the so-called edge of space — the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

With data from a new instrument developed by scientists at the University of Calgary, scientists confirmed that space begins 73 miles (118 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

A lot remains very fuzzy, however, as the boundary is surrounded by a host of misconceptions and confusing, conflicting definitions.

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Twin Spacecraft To Explore Gravitational 'Parking Lots' That May Hold Secret Of Moon's Origin

Artist's concept of the STEREO spacecraft. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2009) — Two places on opposite sides of Earth may hold the secret to how the moon was born. NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft are about to enter these zones, known as the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, each centered about 93 million miles away along Earth's orbit.

As rare as free parking in New York City, L4 and L5 are among the special points in our solar system around which spacecraft and other objects can loiter. They are where the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or the sun balances the forces from the object's orbital motion. Such points closer to Earth are sometimes used as spaceship "parking lots", like the L1 point a million miles away in the direction of the sun. They are officially called Libration points or Lagrangian points after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an Italian-French mathematician who helped discover them.

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When Life As We Know It Became Possible On Earth

From The Independent:

The mystery of how our planet's atmosphere became rich in oxygen has finally been solved.

It was one of the most important changes to have happened to the Earth's atmosphere and it was the reason why today we can breathe life-giving oxygen. And yet the Great Oxidation Event has remained a mystery – until now.

Without oxygen, life on Earth would not exist as we know it. It has provided the supercharged air that has fuelled an explosion in the diversity and size of all living organisms, from the smallest shrimp to the biggest dinosaur.

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Time To Think Hydropower

Hoover Dam, also sometimes known as Boulder Dam, is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada. (Image from Wikimedia)

From The Scientific American:

Imagine what our economy would be like if almost half of our electricity came from renewable energy resources. No fuel price shocks, no foreign control, no worries about climate change—just clean, abundant, affordable electricity.

Before World War II, Americans actually lived that way, thanks to hydropower. The massive public works projects undertaken during the Great Depression built a fleet of huge facilities on some of the country’s biggest waterways. Job creation, electrification and inexpensive power modernized the rural South and helped to industrialize the West.

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Do Aliens Share Our Genetic Code?

Was Jabba the Hutt made from the same genetic building blocks as life on Earth?
(Image: Jonathan Hordle / Rex)

From New Scientist:

What similarities will alien life forms have to living things here on Earth? We won't know until we find some, but now there is evidence that at least the basic building blocks will be the same.

All terrestrial life forms share the same 20 amino acids. Biochemists have managed to synthesise 10 of them in experiments that simulate lifeless prebiotic environments, using proxies for lightning, ionising radiation from space, or hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary energy. Amino acids are also found inside meteorites formed before Earth was born.

Paul Higgs and Ralph Pudritz at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, point out that all these experiments produced a subset of the same 10 amino acids and calculate that these 10 require the least amount of energy to form.

This, they argue, suggests that if alien life exists it probably has the same 10 amino acids at its core.

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Science's Most Powerful Computer Tackles First Questions

Jaguar is the second most powerful computer ever built and the fastest dedicated to science (Image: National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

From New Scientist:

In cult sci-fi tale Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most powerful computer in the universe was charged with finding the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In the real world, a newly built supercomputer that is the most powerful ever dedicated to science will be tackling questions about climate change, supernovas, and the structure of water.

The projects were chosen in a peer-reviewed process designed to get the computer producing useful science even during the period when its performance is still being fine-tuned by engineers.

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New Link Between The Evolution Of Complex Life Forms On Earth And Nickel And Methane Gas

Image: Banded iron formations like this from northern Michigan contain evidence of a drop in dissolved nickel in ancient oceans. (Credit: Image courtesy of Carnegie Institution)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) — The Earth's original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the "Great Oxidation Event." The cause of this event has puzzled scientists, but researchers writing in Nature have found indications in ancient sedimentary rocks that it may have been linked to a drop in the level of dissolved nickel in seawater.

"The Great Oxidation Event is what irreversibly changed surface environments on Earth and ultimately made advanced life possible," says research team member Dominic Papineau of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory. "It was a major turning point in the evolution of our planet, and we are getting closer to understanding how it occurred."

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10 Surprising Sex Statistics

From Live Science:

Whether it's penis size, papillomavirus risk, or profligate pregnancies, it's good to know the numbers. Check out these stats to see if you are well within the sexual mean -- or if you're off the charts.

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Microsoft Genius Who Became First Two-Time Space Tourist Returns To Earth

American billionaire Charles Simonyi landed safely back to earth today
after completing his second visit into space.

From The Daily Mail:

U.S. billionaire Charles Simonyi who became the first tourist to roar into space twice, touched back down in earth today.

Simonyi landed near Dzhezkazgan, in central Kazakhstan after paying a total of $60million to visit the International Space Station.

Simonyi's capsule also carried American astronaut Mike Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov.

The Microsoft genius was sent into space 13 days ago aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft and docked on the station 48 hours later.

The spacecraft blasted into the leaden skies from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to much fanfare.

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Efficient Power At Any Wind Speed

Vail Resorts said Tuesday that it would buy credits for wind power like that generated by the turbines at the Gray County Wind Farm in Kansas. Orlin Wagner/Associated Press

From Scientific American:

One of wind power’s drawbacks is its variability: sometimes the breeze is weak; other times it is strong. To convert the rotation of wind turbines into electricity efficiently, however, generators require a single turning speed. Faster or slower than this “sweet spot” and efficiency falls off fast. To compensate, engineers design turbine hardware to have adjustable blade angles to shed surplus wind energy or to capture more. Wind turbines often also employ a transmission to gear the shaft speed up or down to the sweet spot. But both mechanisms add weight, complexity and cost.

ExRo Technologies in Vancouver is commercializing what should be a better idea: a generator that operates efficiently over a wide speed range. Retrofitted wind turbines could produce as much as 50 percent more power over time, CEO John McDonald states.

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The Best Computer Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future

Microsoft’s Surface is an example of a multitouch screen. Photo by: Microsoft

From Technology Review:

Say goodbye to the mouse and hello to augmented reality, voice recognition, and geospatial tracking.

Computer scientists from around the world will gather in Boston this week at Computer-Human Interaction 2009 to discuss the latest developments in computer interfaces. To coincide with the event, we present a roundup of the coolest computer interfaces past, present, and future.

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New Way To Split Water Into Hydrogen And Oxygen Developed

3-D rendering of H2O molecules. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2009) — The design of efficient systems for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, driven by sunlight is among the most important challenges facing science today, underpinning the long term potential of hydrogen as a clean, sustainable fuel. But man-made systems that exist today are very inefficient and often require additional use of sacrificial chemical agents. In this context, it is important to establish new mechanisms by which water splitting can take place.

Now, a unique approach developed by Prof. David Milstein and colleagues of the Weizmann Institute’s Organic Chemistry Department, provides important steps in overcoming this challenge. During this work, the team demonstrated a new mode of bond generation between oxygen atoms and even defined the mechanism by which it takes place. In fact, it is the generation of oxygen gas by the formation of a bond between two oxygen atoms originating from water molecules that proves to be the bottleneck in the water splitting process. Their results have recently been published in Science.

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France Moves To Crack Down On Internet Piracy

From New York Times:

BERLIN — French lawmakers are poised to approve a law to create the world’s first surveillance system for Internet piracy, one that would force Internet service providers in some cases to disconnect customers accused of making illegal downloads.

The proposal, called the “Création et Internet” and known informally as the “three strikes” directive, has been passed in preliminary votes by the Parliament and is expected to be approved in both houses Thursday. It has the support from the governing party of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Dramatic Image Shows Volcano's Lightning

Redoubt was still steaming at dawn on Saturday, April 4, 2009. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey

From Live Science:

For the first time, scientists have been able to “see” and trace lightning inside a plume of ash spewing from an actively erupting volcano.

When Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano began rumbling back to life in January, a team of researchers scrambled to set up a system called a Lightning Mapping Array that would be able to peer through the dust and gas of any eruption that occurred to the lightning storm happening within. Lightning is known to flash in the tumultuous clouds belched out during volcanic eruptions.

The lightning produced when Redoubt finally erupted on March 22 was "prolific," said physicist Paul Krehbiel of New Mexico Tech.

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AP Newsbreak: Obama Looks At Climate Engineering

A Regular Montreal Snowstorm

From Breitbart/AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

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My Comment: I live in Montreal, Canada. For the past few years we have been breaking cold records .... and now I am reading how the U.S. government wants to make it COLDER!!!!!

Sigh ..... If anyone lives where I live you will realize what I know ..... These guys are NUTS!

Meat Now, Sex Later For Ivorian Chimps

Isha, an adult female wild chimpanzee, holding a piece of meat (the foot of a black and white colobus monkey) that she received from an adult male chimpanzee (Image: Cristina M. Gomes)

From New Scientist:

Chimpanzees trade precious scraps of meat for sex, new research shows. A two-year study of wild chimps finds that males boost their chances of having sex with a female by offering her meat.

But don't call them prostitutes. "It's not like 'I give you meat and a few hours later you're going to copulate with me,'" says Cristina Gomes, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

She and colleague Christophe Boesch instead uncovered more nuanced and long-term exchanges.

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Implantable Telescope For The Eye

Photo: Fighting blindness: A miniature telescope (show above) implanted into the eye improves vision in people with macular degeneration. The four-millimeter-long implant contains two wide-angle glass lenses, which magnify images onto the retina. Credit: VisionCare

From Technology Review:

A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart.

"This is one of the few options for people with end-stage macular degeneration," says Kathryn Colby, an eye surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, in Boston, who helped develop the surgical procedure used to implant the device.

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