Ancient Teeth Hint That Right-handedness Is Nothing New

From New Scientist:

Ancient bones suggest "lefties" have been coping with a right-handed world for more than half a million years. A study of Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor of Neanderthals, seems to show that the ancient humans were predominately right-handed.

"Finding that a hominin species as old as Homo heidelbergensis is already right-handed helps to trace back the chain of modernity concerning hand laterality," says Marina Mosquera, a paleoanthropologist at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain, who was involved in the study.

Humans are the only animal believed to show a strong preference for performing tasks with one hand or the other. Determining when right-handedness first evolved could shed light on traits linked to lateralised brains, such as language and technology, Mosquera says. Efforts to solve this mystery have looked to ancient human skulls and marks left on tools.

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Molecular Link Between Sleep And Weight Gain

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 23, 2009) — There appears to be a link between sleep and weight control, with some studies indicating that sleep disruption can increase weight gain and others that diet affects sleep. Victor Uebele and colleagues, at Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, have now provided further evidence to support this association by showing that T-type calcium channels regulate body weight maintenance and sleep in mice.

These data suggest that sleep and circadian treatment approaches may be of benefit in the fight against obesity.

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Race Fans Are Riskier Drivers

Kyle Petty (#42) and Dale Jarrett (#18) lead the pack as the 1993 Daytona 500, NASCAR's flagship event, gets underway. (Photo from How Stuff Works)

From Live Science:

After you finish watching the Indy 500 this Sunday, you may want to have your designated driver take you home. Not only should he be sober, but he also should have no interest in motor sports.

According to Australian researchers, being a race fan makes you more likely to not only speed in your own car but also to see little wrong with it.

Several factors have been found to influence a driver's attitude towards speeding and aggressive driving, including age, gender and what psychologists call "sensation seeking propensity." This thrill-seeking behavior may also be a result of a driver's environment.

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Bolden Is Tapped to Run NASA

Photo: Former astronaut Charles Bolden Jr., shown at Beihang University in 2005, would be the first African-American to run NASA. His past ties to two big contractors for the agency have sparked opposition to the pick. SIPA/Newscom

From The Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama picked former astronaut and retired Marine Corps Gen. Charles Bolden Jr. to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but controversy over his background and NASA's future direction could complicate his job.

Gen. Bolden's nomination caps months of political maneuvering, which has left some major agency decisions in limbo. It also has become a flash point for a broad debate over how NASA should conduct future human space-exploration programs.

Gen. Bolden was a NASA official in the early 1990s and more recently worked for two major NASA contractors. His critics contend he's too closely tied to existing NASA programs.

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Boys Have Sweeter Tooth Than Girls

Children's love of sweetness starts to wane as they hit their teens Photo: John Kernick

From The Telegraph:

Girls have a finer sense of taste than boys - but boys have a sweeter tooth, a new food study has found.

On average boys need 10 per cent more sourness and 20 per cent more sweetness in their grub to recognise how tasty it is.

However, boys prefer wild and extreme tastes compared to the muted flavours favoured by girls, the figures revealed.

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No More Shuttles, No In-Space Fixes

Astronauts Michael Good, left, and Mike Massimino participate in the mission's fourth spacewalk to repair the Hubble Space Telescope May 17, 2009 in Space. The space shuttle Atlantis' mission is to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope in order to extend its working life. NASA via Getty Pictures

From MSNBC:

NASA's future spacecraft won't have built-in ability to repair work

When the space shuttle Atlantis lands — planned for Saturday — it will cap off a mission to Hubble and mark the end of the servicing era.

The astronauts' fifth overhaul of the Hubble Space Telescope was the last planned mission to repair the telescope, or any satellite for that matter. And if NASA retires the space shuttle fleet in 2010 as planned, the agency will lose the ability to visit orbiting spacecraft and repair them in space.

"This is the last scheduled servicing mission of Hubble with the space shuttle, and what I think it's demonstrated is the extreme utility of having people working in space and accomplishing things that are different than what was expected," said astronaut John Grunsfeld, who has helped fix Hubble on three different missions, from space Wednesday.

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Body Burners: The Forensics Of Fire

From New Scientist:

THE fire started with a match held under a cotton blanket close to the man's waist. Within 2 minutes, the flames had spread across the single bed he was lying on and were consuming his cotton sweatshirt and trousers.

Around a dozen onlookers were at the scene - including police, fire investigators and death investigators - yet all they did was watch. That was, after all, their job. The "victim" had in fact died some time ago, having previously donated his remains to medical research.

His body had reached a unique team led by Elayne Pope, a forensic scientist at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. Her group spends its time setting fire to corpses in a range of different circumstances, to work out exactly how the human body burns. They seem to be the only group carrying out such systematic studies in this area, and are certainly the only ones publishing their work.

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Queuing Up For Dinner: Dolphins Enjoy Sardine Feeding Frenzy

Working as a team common dolphins head towards a bait ball in Port St. Johns, South Africa.

From The Daily Mail:

Like workers in a canteen the dolphins line up patiently as they look forward to a rather large and tasty lunch.

The aquatic mammals head to the South African coastline each year for the Sardine Run - an underwater migration where millions of fish head eastwards from their cool spawning waters near Cape Town in search of zooplankton.

The dolphins, alongside sword fish and sharks ambush them from below, while gannets and gulls hover above the waves waiting for their chance to pick up a morsel from above.

It is one of nature's greatest phenomena which takes place in June each year. Underwater photographer Alexander Safonov is looking forward to experiencing the awesome sight again after he captured it on camera in 2008.

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The Impact of Computing : 78% More per Year, v2.0

(Click to Enlarge)

From The Futurist:

Anyone who follows technology is familar with Moore's Law and its many variations, and has come to expect the price of computing power to halve every 18 months. But many people don't see the true long-term impact of this beyond the need to upgrade their computer every three or four years. To not internalize this more deeply is to miss investment opportunities, grossly mispredict the future, and be utterly unprepared for massive, sweeping changes to human society. Hence, it is time to update the first version of this all-important article that was written on February 21, 2006.

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Blue Whales Returning To Former Waters Off Alaska

This undated photo provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows blue whales in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary in California. Scientists say the whales that use to cruise the Pacific Ocean from California to Alaska until commercial whalers nearly wiped out, could be re-establishing an old migration route from California to Alaska. Photo AP

From USA Today:

ANCHORAGE — Blue whales are returning to Alaska in search of food and could be re-establishing an old migration route several decades after they were nearly wiped out by commercial whalers, scientists say.

The endangered whales, possibly the largest animals ever to live on Earth, have yet to recover from the worldwide slaughter that eliminated 99% of their number, according to the American Cetacean Society. The hunting peaked in 1931 with more than 29,000 animals killed in one season.

The animals used to cruise from Mexico and Southern California to Alaska, but they had mostly vanished from Alaskan waters.

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World's Observatories Watching 'Cool' Star

Photographed by the Hubble Telescope, the bright star inside this nebula (gas cloud) is a very young white dwarf. (Credit: Courtesy of Space Telescope Institute/NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 20, 2009) — The Whole Earth Telescope (WET), a worldwide network of observatories coordinated by the University of Delaware, is synchronizing its lenses to provide round-the-clock coverage of a cooling star. As the star dims in the twilight of its life, scientists hope it will shed light on the workings of our own planet and other mysteries of the galaxy.

The dying star, a white dwarf identified as WDJ1524-0030, located in the constellation Ophiuchus in the southern sky, is losing its brightness as it cools, its nuclear fuel spent. It will be monitored continuously from May 15 to June 11 by WET, a global partnership of telescopes which was formed in 1986.

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Innards of H1N1 Virus Resemble 'Flu Sausage'

From Live Science:

On March 28, one month before news of the swine flu outbreak headlined worldwide, a nine-year-old girl in Imperial County, California, ran a fever of 104.3°F. She had not rolled up her sleeve for this year’s flu vaccine, but that day she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue for a cotton swab that scooped up mucous samples from her throat. Her mucus arrived at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego where technicians tested it and classified the virus in it as “unsubtypable” influenza A – it was something new.

She recovered.

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Cold And Wet: The Latest Theory About Mars

Rhythmic bedding in sedimentary bedrock within Becquerel crater on Mars is suggested by the patterns in this image from Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released last December. Reuters

From The Independent:

Mars may have once been both cold and wet, researchers said today, suggesting a freezing Martian landscape could still have produced water needed to sustain life.

There has been debate over the issue because with some researchers believing water likely formed many features of the planet's landscape and others pointing to evidence indicating that early Mars was cold with temperatures well below the freezing point of water.

Using a computer model, Alberto Fairen of Universidad Autonoma in Madrid and colleagues showed that both could have been possible because fluids containing dissolved minerals would have remained liquid at temperatures well below 273 degrees Kelvin - the freezing point of pure water.

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The New Generation DVD That Can Hold All Of Your Movies On Just One Disc

Different dimensions: Scientists are creating a DVD disc that can hold thousands of hours of film - but it could take up to 10 years before it goes on sale

From The Daily Mail:

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data.

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Who Is Responsible For Averting An Asteroid Strike?

This NASA slide depicts the catastrophic collision of a massive comet or asteroid with earth 250 million years ago, which appears to be the reason 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land vertebrates abruptly died out. (NASA/Newscom/File)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Column: It's time to set aside political quibbles and form an international plan.

Asteroid hunters have good news – and a challenge – for the rest of us.After an extensive search for asteroids a kilometer or more across, engineer Steve Chesley says that “we can now say with confidence that no asteroids large enough to cause such a global calamity [as killing off the dinosaurs] are headed our way.”

But if one of them – or even a smaller, city-destroying rock – were detected on a collision course, would the world community be prepared to handle it? A conference of legal experts that discussed this question at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln last month answered it with a resounding “No.”

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How Old School Effects Brought Schwarzenegger's T-800 Back From 1983

From Popular Mechanics:

How the new Terminator Salvation movie used 25-year old props to recreate the T-800. Warning, spoilers ahead.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger's face appears onscreen in Terminator Salvation, it's precisely as it should be: wide, menacing and trapped in 1983. If the first three Terminator films were a flipbook portrait of an action star entering middle age, the fourth installment resets the iconic actor's cinematic clock with a climactic fight scene that blends the latest digital effects with a prosthetic prop that's been shelved for a quarter-century. The result is the resurrection of the killer robot that launched a franchise—and a feat of time travel that's worth the price of admission.

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New 'Broadband' Cloaking Technology Simple To Manufacture

This image shows the design of a new type of invisibility cloak that is simpler than previous designs and works for all colors of the visible spectrum, making it possible to cloak larger objects than before and possibly leading to practical applications in "transformation optics." (Credit: Purdue University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2009) — Researchers have created a new type of invisibility cloak that is simpler than previous designs and works for all colors of the visible spectrum, making it possible to cloak larger objects than before and possibly leading to practical applications in "transformation optics."

Whereas previous cloaking designs have used exotic "metamaterials," which require complex nanofabrication, the new design is a far simpler device based on a "tapered optical waveguide," said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue University's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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Sports Drinks Trumped By Cereal and Milk

From Live Science:

Wheaties may very well be the breakfast of champions, according to a new study that finds that eating an unassuming bowl of any whole-grain cereal with milk is superior to chugging a designer sports drink after a workout to replenish muscle fuel and protein.

The study, published last week in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, demonstrates how sports drinks are largely unnecessary for recreational athletes.

Don't expect milk and cereal to replace sports drinks anytime soon, though. Mass marketing of these sweet sweat drinks ensures they will remain the beverage of choice for the Ironman wannabe in all of us.

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NOAA Sees Average 2009 Atlantic Hurricane Season

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season will be fairly average with as many as seven hurricanes expected to form, U.S. government forecasters predicted on Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast nine to 14 named storms this season, with four to seven developing into hurricanes. One to three could be major ones of Category 3 or higher with winds above 110 miles per hour (177 km per hour), the agency said in its annual forecast.

Last year was one of the most active seasons on record, with 16 tropical storms and eight hurricanes.

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In Chile, The Birds Are Dying, And No One Knows Why

Photo: Millions of dead sardines washed up on a beach in southern Chile. The cause of their death is under investigation. PATRICIO OLIVARES/FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

From The Miami Herald:

A series of environmental disasters in Chile have puzzled scientists. Some are blaming global warming.

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Chilean scientists are investigating three mysterious ecological disasters that have caused the deaths of hundreds of penguins, millions of sardines and about 2,000 baby flamingos in the past few months.

The events started to unfold in March, when the remains of about 1,200 penguins were found on a remote beach in southern Chile. Then came the sardines -- tons of them -- dead and washed up on a nearby stretch of coastline. The stench forced nearby schools to close, and the army was called in to shovel piles of rotting fish off the sand.

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