Brain Has "Moving" Parts

From Scientific American:

A study in the journal Science reveals that the brain region responsible for the intention to move the body also experiences the movement--but a distinct brain region controls the actual movement. Karen Hopkin reports.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

For every action, there’s a reaction. And for many movements we make, there’s an intention: we think about moving, and we move. Now a study published in the May 8th issue of the journal Science suggests that the experience of moving is all in your mind. Because the part of the brain that’s active when you intend to move is the same part that lets you feel like you did.

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Out Of Africa, The Tribe That Populated The World... Thanks To Climate Change

Olduvai Gorge in the Rift Valley, Tanzania, is often referred to as the cradle of humankind

From The Daily Mail:

Human life outside Africa can be traced to a tribe of 200 people who crossed the Red Sea after climate change made their journey possible.

Falling sea levels allowed the small band to venture across to Arabia 70,000 years ago, a BBC2 documentary claims.

Their descendants then continued the journey that culminated in the colonisation of the world.

Presenter Dr Alice Roberts said it appeared that modern man had a climate change - and luck - to thank for his success.

She said: 'People ask why did man migrate out of Africa at that point? Had they developed a new way of life or particular abilities and attributes?

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Solar Cycle Will Be Weakest Since 1928, Forecasters Say

The sun is thought to have reached the lowest point in its activity in December 2008, but the new solar cycle has gotten off to a slow start. This week, however, two active regions (bright regions in upper-left corner) - whose knotty magnetic fields often coincide with eruptions and flares - appeared on the far side of the sun. One of NASA's twin STEREO probes snapped this image on Thursday (Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

From New Scientist:

The sun's new solar cycle, which is thought to have begun in December 2008, will be the weakest since 1928. That is the nearly unanimous prediction of a panel of international experts, some of whom maintain that the sun will be more active than normal.

But even a mildly active sun could still generate its fair share of extreme storms that could knock out power grids and space satellites.

Solar activity waxes and wanes every 11 years. Cycles can vary widely in intensity, and there is no foolproof way to predict how the sun will behave in any given cycle.

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World’s Oldest Manufactured Beads Are Older Than Previously Thought

Archaeologists have uncovered some of the world's earliest shell ornaments. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 7, 2009) — A team of archaeologists has uncovered some of the world’s earliest shell ornaments in a limestone cave in Eastern Morocco. The researchers have found 47 examples of Nassarius marine shells, most of them perforated and including examples covered in red ochre, at the Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt.

The fingernail-size shells, already known from 82,000-year-old Aterian deposits in the cave, have now been found in even earlier layers. While the team is still awaiting exact dates for these layers, they believe this discovery makes them arguably the earliest shell ornaments in prehistory.

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Increased Food Intake Alone Explains Rise In Obesity In United States, Study Finds

New research finds that the rise in obesity in the United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased energy intake. (Credit: iStockphoto/Michael Krinke)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — New research that uses an innovative approach to study, for the first time, the relative contributions of food and exercise habits to the development of the obesity epidemic has concluded that the rise in obesity in the United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased energy intake.

How much of the obesity epidemic has been caused by excess calorie intake and how much by reductions in physical activity has been long debated and while experts agree that making it easier for people to eat less and exercise more are both important for combating it, they debate where the public health focus should be.

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5 Scientific Reasons Mom Deserves Mother's Day

From Live Science:

If you haven't yet planned the brunch or picked out the flowers or at least mailed the card, then consider what follows the only motivation you should need. In short, mothers have it tough.

Changes in American culture have liberated women in many ways. Mom is now free to do all the chores moms have been doing for generations — such as wiping snot off kids' noses, cleaning the house and handling all the family's finances and social plans — and now she can work a day job or feel guilty for not having one, too.

Mom deals with all this, studies show, with less help and as much pain and stress as ever. Consider:

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NASA Clears Atlantis For Monday Launch To Hubble

STS-125 Commander Scott Altman waves to photographers before boarding one of the Shuttle Training Aircraft early Saturday May 9, 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven astronauts are making final preparation for their 12-day mission on the space shuttle Atlantis that includes the fifth and final servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – After months of delay, NASA cleared space shuttle Atlantis for a Monday launch to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Mission managers concluded Saturday that Atlantis is ready to take off on the long-awaited Hubble repair mission, the fifth and final one. Shuttle Endeavour is also in good shape at the other launch pad; it's on standby in case Atlantis is damaged during the flight and its seven astronauts need to be rescued.

Weather forecasters gave good odds for launching Atlantis: 80 percent. What's more, things were looking more encouraging at the emergency landing site in Spain, where only a slight chance of rain is expected Monday. Liftoff time is just after 2 p.m.

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Volcanic Shutdown May Have Led To 'Snowball Earth'

Photo: Early in our planet's history, volcanoes stopped spewing out lava for around 250 million years (Image: Denis Hallinan / Alamy)

From New Scientist:

A 250-million-year shutdown of volcanic activity which is thought to have occurred early in Earth's history may be what turned the planet into a glacier-covered snowball. It could also have helped give rise to our oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Previous studies have noted that very little volcanic material has been dated to between 2.45 and 2.2 billion years ago, but it was widely assumed the gap would vanish as more samples were dated. Now an analysis of thousands of zircon minerals collected from all seven continents indicates that the gap may be real after all. Zircons provide a record of past volcanic activity, as the date they were formed can be calculated from the radioactive isotopes they contain.

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Climate Change: The Elements Conspire Against The Warmists

From The Telegraph:

An international team of scientists has used the latest electro-magnetic induction equipment to discover that the Arctic ice is in fact "twice as thick" as they had expected, says Christopher Booker.

As the clock ticks down towards December's historic UN Copenhagen conference on climate change, the frenzied efforts of the warmists to panic us over all that vanishing Arctic and Antarctic ice are degenerating into farce.

That great authority Ban Ki-moon, the UN's Secretary-General, solemnly tells us that the polar ice caps are "melting far faster than was expected just two years ago". Yet the latest satellite information from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (passed on by the Watts Up With That blog) shows that, after the third slowest melt of April Arctic ice in 30 years, the world's polar sea ice is in fact slightly above its average extent for early May since satellite records began in 1979.

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Dwarf Galaxies 'Not Ruled By Dark Side'

From Ninemsm:

Some basic principles of physics and astronomy have been cast into doubt by new research involving scientists in Australia and Europe.

The researchers, including Dr Helmut Jerjen of the Australian National University, studied dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

They found the galaxies were not uniformly spread around, as predicted by the so-called dark matter theory.

"They are forming some sort of disc in the sky," Dr Jerjen said.

The dark matter theory explains some major problems in cosmology by postulating that most of the matter in the universe is invisible.

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Looking For The Beginning Of Time

Replacing the Instrument: Astronauts carefully remove the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) to make room for the Cosmic Origins Seismograph (COS). NASA

From Popsci.com:

The latest -- and final -- upgrade to Hubble will study the origins of the universe.

When astronauts pay a final visit to the Hubble Space Telescope next week, one upgrade in particular will illuminate the darkness like never before -- and it involves taking out the corrective lenses that let Hubble see clearly for the past decade and a half.

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a fridge-sized instrument that will be installed in place of Hubble's original corrective optics set, will help astronomers learn more about the large-scale structure of the universe. Scientists hope it will help explain how stars and galaxies evolved; how the building blocks of life, like carbon and iron, came to be; how matter is distributed in the universe; and, well, what the matter is.

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The Inspiring Boom in "Super-Earths"

Workers at Astrotech's Hazardous Processing Facility in Titusville, Florida, mount the Kepler spacecraft on a stand for fueling. Image courtesy of NASA/TM Jacobs

From Discover Magazine:

At last we are finding rocky planets like our own. But some are pretty weird: The smallest may have a mineral-vapor atmosphere that condenses as lava rain or rock snow.

A recently discovered planet with the unpoetic name Corot-7b, orbiting a yellow-orange star 450 light-years away, is the smallest confirmed super-Earth—a dense, compact planet unlike the many gas giants spotted elsewhere in our galaxy. This find hints that the universe may teem with rocky worlds, including some that may genuinely resemble ours in size and temperature.

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Green 'i-house' Is Giant Leap From Trailer Park

In this Oct. 28, 2008 image released by Clayton Homes Inc., the new "i-house" is shown. The solar-powered, energy efficient prefab house features decks on the ground level and on the roof of the detached "flex room." (AP Photo/Clayton Homes)

From U.S. News And World Report:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—From its bamboo floors to its rooftop deck, Clayton Homes' new industrial-chic "i-house" is about as far removed from a mobile home as an iPod from a record player.

Architects at the country's largest manufactured home company embraced the basic rectangular form of what began as housing on wheels and gave it a postmodern turn with a distinctive v-shaped roofline, energy efficiency and luxury appointments.

Stylistically, the "i-house" might be more at home in the pages of a cutting-edge architectural magazine like Dwell — an inspirational source — than among the Cape Cods and ranchers in the suburbs.

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African Tribe Populated Rest Of The World

From The Telegraph:

The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.

Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world.

Genetic analysis of modern day human populations in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and South America have revealed that they are all descended from these common ancestors.

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Major Breakthroughs Towards Cellulostic Biofuel

From The Next Big Future:

Mascoma Corporation today announced that the company has made major research advances in consolidated bioprocessing, or CBP, a low-cost processing strategy for production of biofuels from cellulosic biomass. CBP avoids the need for the costly production of cellulase enzymes by using engineered microorganisms that produce cellulases and ethanol at high yield in a single step.

"This is a true breakthrough that takes us much, much closer to billions of gallons of low cost cellulosic biofuels," said Michigan State University's Dr. Bruce Dale, who is also Editor of the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefineries. "Many had thought that CBP was years or even decades away, but the future just arrived. Mascoma has permanently changed the biofuels landscape from here on."

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Pre-Exercise Heart Rate Spike Predicts Heart Attack Risk

From Live Science:

Many people exercise to improve the health of their hearts. Now, researchers have found a link between your heart rate just before and during exercise and your chances of a future heart attack.

Just the thought of exercise raises your heart rate. The new study shows that how much it goes up is related to the odds of you eventually dying of a heart attack.

More than 300,000 people die each year from sudden cardiac arrest in the U.S., often with no known risk factors. Being able to find early warning signs has been the goal of researchers like Professor Xavier Jouven, of the Hopital Européen Georges Pompidou in Paris.

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'Star Trek' Warp Speed? Physicists Have New Idea That Could Make It So

Could traveling at warp speed to distant star systems ever become a reality?
(Credit: iStockphoto/Heidi Kristensen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — With the new movie ‘Star Trek’ opening in theaters across the nation, one thing movie goers will undoubtedly see is the Starship Enterprise racing across the galaxy at the speed of light. But can traveling at warp speed ever become a reality?

Two Baylor University physicists believe they have an idea that can turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to science, and their idea does not break any laws of physics.

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Warm Weather May Not Halt Swine Flu

Cases of severe pneumonia in April 2009 compared to the previous three years, and February of this year. The disproportionate numbers in the age range 15-49 is the signature of a pandemic virus (Image: Mexican Health Ministry)

From New Scientist:

New data from Mexico and case numbers so far suggest that if the spread of H1N1 "swine flu" continues elsewhere as it has in the Americas, the virus could infect more than a billion people by July.

The data also suggests that the virus may not be slowed by summer temperatures in temperate countries. However, it spreads slowly enough to respond to the "social distancing" measures used in Mexico.

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Little Search Engines That Could

From Christian Science Monitor:

Four alternatives to Google for finding answers online.

All hail Google, the undisputed king of search. It’s hard to imagine other sites toppling the online giant – and few have the hubris to try.

Jimmy Wales, the mind behind Wikipedia, announced in late March that he was pulling the plug on Wikia Search, his attempt at a user-generated search engine. The project couldn’t attract enough users and money.

But Google isn’t perfect. While some call it simple, quick, and effective, others describe the site as incomplete, dull, and a lowest common denominator.

Here are four search alternatives to cut through the Web and find what you’re looking for.

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Secret To Bumblebee Flight Revealed: Insects Defy gravity through brute force

Photo: Bumblebees stay aloft using brute force unlike the elegant flight of other insects

From The Daily Mail:

For almost a century, baffled scientists have wondered how bumblebees stay in the air. Now a new study has shown they defy the laws of gravity by using brute force.

Unlike the elegant, efficient flight of butterflies and dragonflies, they furiously flap their wings fuelled by energy-rich nectar, says the Oxford University team.

‘Bumblebee flight is surprisingly inefficient. Aerodynamically speaking it’s as if the insect is “split in half”', said Dr Richard Bomfrey, of the Department of Zoology.

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