Einstein’s General Theory Of Relativity: Celebrating The 20th Century's Most Important Experiment

The story as reported in the 22nd November 1919 edition of the 'Illustrated London News'. (Credit: Image courtesy of Royal Astronomical Society)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2009) — In 1919, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) launched an expedition to the West African island of Príncipe, to observe a total solar eclipse and prove or disprove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Now, in a new RAS-funded expedition for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009), scientists are back.

Astronomers Professor Pedro Ferreira from the University of Oxford and Dr Richard Massey from the University of Edinburgh, along with Oxford anthropologist Dr Gisa Weszkalnys, are paying homage to the original expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington and celebrating the 90th anniversary of one of the key discoveries of the 20th century.

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Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years

From Live Science:

You may have more Facebook friends as the years go by, but when it comes to your close friends, you lose about half and replace them with new ones after about seven years, new social research suggests.

As a result, the size of your social network stays about the same.

People might like to think they have control over whom they choose as friends, but social networks could also be influenced by the context in which we meet one another. Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst of Utrecht University in the Netherlands was interested in finding out exactly how much our networks are shaped by social context or by personal preference.

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Is This The Future Of Food? Japanese Plant Factories Churn Out Immaculate Vegetables 24 Hours A Day

Sterile: The plants are grown in a perfectly controlled environment,
uncontaminated by dirt, insects or fresh air

From The Daily Mail:

They look more like the brightly lit shelves of a chemists shop than the rows of a vegetable garden.

But according to their creators, these perfect looking vegetables could be the future of food.

In a perfectly controlled and totally sterile environment - uncontaminated by dirt, insects or fresh air - Japanese scientists are developing a new way of growing vegetables.

Called plant factories, these anonymous looking warehouses have sprung up across the country and can churn out immaculate looking lettuces and green leaves 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit

From Wired News:

Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It's a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you've just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special.

Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn't notice and wouldn't care anyway. He's as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a tinfoil hat. It goes on for a solid 20 seconds.

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WHO Official Says World Edging Towards Pandemic

A picture shoes an airport thermal camera system monitoring the body heat of passengers arriving from abroad is displayed at Sofia airport in this April 29, 2009 file photo. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov/Files

From Reuters:

GENEVA (Reuters) - The spread of H1N1 flu in Australia, Britain, Chile, Japan and Spain has nudged the world closer to a pandemic, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

The newly-discovered strain had caused more infections than seasonal influenza at the start of Chile's flu season, raising concern about how it would spread in the southern hemisphere, according to Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's acting assistant director-general.

The virus has mainly affected people aged below 60 and caused 117 deaths worldwide, including some otherwise healthy people, he said. For now, the WHO's pandemic scale remained at the second-highest level but the threshold may soon be crossed.

"Globally we believe that we are at Phase 5 but we are getting closer to Phase 6," Fukuda told journalists. "The future impact of this infection has yet to unfold."

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Chocolate-Flavoured Milk Speeds Up Recovery As Well As Expensive Sports Drinks

Chocolate milkshake, which is low-fat milk flavoured with cocoa and sugar, has the advantage of additional nutrients not found in most traditional sports drinks Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Football players would be better off drinking chocolate milkshake after a game than expensive recovery drinks, claim scientists.

Researchers found that chocolate milkshake's "natural" muscle recovery benefits match or may even surpass a specially designed carbohydrate sports drink.

They discovered that muscle damage was actually lower in those players that drank the milk after training than those that drank the commercial energy drinks.

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Air France Mystery: Was Lightning to Blame?

{Photograph by Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

An Air France Airbus A330, carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, entered an area of strong turbulence and disappeared. The CEO of AirFrance confirms that the airplane most likely crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Some, including company officials, have speculated that the plane was struck down by lightning, a claim that is not at all outrageous. According to experts, most commercial aircraft are struck by lightning at some point in their lives. But can lightning down a plane? We spoke to the experts about the likelihood of lightning being the culprit in this tragic downing.

Aviation experts agree that it is highly unlikely that lightning alone caused the crash of Air France Flight 447 earlier today. The 2005 Airbus A330-200 twinjet with 228 aboard disappeared on a flight from Rio to Paris shortly after the aircraft sent out automated signals indicated it had suffered a catastrophic electrical failure and a sudden loss of cabin pressure while flying through an area of severe thunderstorms. Late this afternoon the Brazilian Air Force was reporting that the aircraft likely crashed in an area approximately 60 miles south of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal. Air France spokesman Francois Brousse this morning stoked mounting speculation when he said "it is possible" the plane was hit by lightning.

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DNA Test To Discover Tutankhamun's Parentage

A replica of the death mask of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Egyptian researchers are using DNA tests to discover the lineage of pharaoh king Tutankhamun, whose ancestry remains a mystery to Egyptologists, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday. (AFP/DDP/Lennart Preiss)

From Yahoo News/AFP:

CAIRO (AFP) – Egyptian researchers are using DNA tests to discover the lineage of pharaoh king Tutankhamun, whose ancestry remains a mystery to Egyptologists, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.

The young king, whose mummy was found in a gold and turquoise sarcophagus by English archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, ruled Egypt between 1333 and 1324 BC.

His ancestry has been as much a source of speculation as his abrupt end.

"Until now, we don't know who his father was. Was it Akhenaten or Amenhotep III," Hawass told reporters at a press conference.

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The Essential Guide to Stem Cells

Myelin Maker?: In July, scientists at Geron Corporation will kick start a clinical trial to heal injured spinal cords with stem cells, in the hope that new cells will create myelin, which insulates nerve fibers in the spinal cord

From Popsci.com:

Everything you need to know about the hottest topic in 
medicine, from big-league breakthroughs and new therapies to emerging health risks and the patients willing to take them.

For more than a decade, researchers have touted stem cells as the most promising advance in medicine since antibiotics. And this winter, when President Obama lifted the Bush administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, talking heads buzzed that his decision could bring scientists that much closer to cures — not just treatments — for conditions like heart failure, spinal-cord injuries and Alzheimer's disease. Biologists around the world toasted their new prospects with champagne. "Lifting the ban will free us up to use additional cell lines," says Jack Kessler, director of the Feinberg Neuroscience Institute at Northwestern University. "It's very important for science."

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Combined Stem Cell-Gene Therapy Approach Cures Human Genetic Disease In Vitro

Shown in green are genetically-corrected fibroblasts from Fanconi anemia patients are reprogrammed to generate induced pluripotent stem cells, which, in turn, can be differentiated into disease-free hematopoietic progenitors, capable of producing blood cells in vitro. (Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Juan-Carlos Belmonte, Salk Institute for Biological Studies)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 1, 2009) — A study led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has catapulted the field of regenerative medicine significantly forward, proving in principle that a human genetic disease can be cured using a combination of gene therapy and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology. The study is a major milestone on the path from the laboratory to the clinic.

"It's been ten years since human stem cells were first cultured in a Petri dish," says the study's leader Juan-Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Ph.D., a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory and director of the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona (CMRB), Spain. "The hope in the field has always been that we'll be able to correct a disease genetically and then make iPS cells that differentiate into the type of tissue where the disease is manifested and bring it to clinic."

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Bing It: Microsoft To Launch New Search Engine But Doesn't Bank On Beating Google

From The Daily Mail:

Microsoft has unveiled a new search engine in a bid to lure Web surfers away from Google and other search sites.

It is hoped that new site, 'Bing', will be more successful than the company's two most recent incarnations: Live Search and MSN Search.

Microsoft claims the new search engine will offer an improvement in the number of users who actually find answers to their search questions.

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Why Is The Earth Moving Away From The Sun?

Photo: The sun and Earth are moving apart by about 15 cm per year - the culprit may be tides raised on the sun by our home planet (Image: NASA)

From New Scientist:

Skywatchers have been trying to gauge the sun-Earth distance for thousands of years. In the third century BC, Aristarchus of Samos, notable as the first to argue for a heliocentric solar system, estimated the sun to be 20 times farther away than the moon. It wasn't his best work, as the real factor is more like 400.

By the late 20th century, astronomers had a much better grip on this fundamental cosmic metric – what came to be called the astronomical unit. In fact, thanks to radar beams pinging off various solar-system bodies and to tracking of interplanetary spacecraft, the sun-Earth distance has been pegged with remarkable accuracy. The current value stands at 149,597,870.696 kilometres.

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Robots Rolling Towards Farm Revolution

A 3D laser ranging view of a Pennsylvania apple orchard can not only allow a mobile robot to pace its rows, but also captures detail of every tree, its foliage and fruit. This image was produced using techniques developed by Daniel Munoz, Martial Hebert and Nicolas Vandapel (Image: Nicolas Vandapel)

From The New Scientist:

From ploughs to seed drills to tractors, evolving technology has brought about radical changes to agriculture over the years. Now the sector is poised for another shift as robotic farmhands gear up to make agriculture greener and more efficient.

Three things now make mobile agricultural robots a real possibility in the near future, says Tony Stentz, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University's robotics institute.

Firstly, mobile robots have now proved able to cope with complex outdoor environmentsMovie Camera; secondly, the price of production has fallen; and, finally, society should now see robot labourers as a benefit not a curse.

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U.N.’s ‘Global Warming=300,000 Deaths A Year’ Report – Kofi Annan Implies: “Close Enough For Government Work”

From Watts Up With That?

Many of you have probably heard by now of the UN. Report saying that “global warming is killing 300,000 people a year”. There’s a Times Online Story (h/t to Gary Boden) about it today that has some startling admissions. Here are some excerpts:

Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today.

A report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, says that the effects of climate change are growing in such a way that it will have a serious impact on 600 million people, almost ten per cent of the world’s population, within 20 years. Almost all of these will be in developing countries.

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Slide Show: Top 10 Earth- and People-Friendly Buildings

GISH APARTMENTS--SAN JOSE, CALIF.: A building's environmental impact doesn't have to stop at its threshold. That's why the Gish Apartments are steps from a local light rail and have a convenience store downstairs, so residents don't have to jump in their cars to pick up that gallon of milk or get to work.

To turn a San Jose brownfield into mixed housing for low-income and special-needs families, First Community Housing, a local affordable housing organization, turned to locally based OJK Architecture and Planning to create the 35-unit structure. Although some of the building materials—such as double-glazed windows and rooftop solar panels—were pricier to purchase at the outset, they're already being offset by cheaper operational costs. BERNARD ANDRE PHOTOGRAPHY

From Scientific America:

The American Institute of Architects pick their top examples of building projects that marry form and function for both human and environmental needs

Can a building be as easy on the environment as it is on the eyes? Without a doubt, says The American Institute of Architects (AIA), a professional association based in Washington, D.C. To prove it, for the past 12 years, the organization and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have awarded the top 10 green projects across the globe.

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How Oxidative Stress May Help Prolong Life

Trey Ideker, Ph.D. is a researcher at University of California, San Diego.
(Credit: UC San Diego)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 30, 2009) — Oxidative stress has been linked to aging, cancer and other diseases in humans. Paradoxically, researchers have suggested that small exposure to oxidative conditions may actually offer protection from acute doses. Now, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have discovered the gene responsible for this effect.

Their study, published in PLoS Genetics on May 29, explains the underlying mechanism of the process that prevents cellular damage by reactive oxygen species (ROS).

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Scientists Reveal the Secret to Hockey's Wrist Shot

From Live Science:

It takes less than a second, but the wrist shot in hockey is one of the hardest skills in sports to master. Just ask the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Detroit Red Wings who will face each other starting this weekend in the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup Finals. Both teams know the value of the "quick wrister" and the scoring chances it creates. Now, a team of Canadian (of course) researchers believe they have isolated the key components of a successful wrist shot using 3-D motion capture analysis.

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My Comment: Never could master the wrist shot .... ended up playing goal tender in my teenage years.

An Update On What’s Happening With Fusion Research.

From Classical Values:

Nature News is reporting that the ITER fusion experiment is in big trouble. Very big trouble. It is way over budget, way behind time, and the experimental efforts are being scaled back.

ITER -- a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source -- will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped, Nature has learned.

Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first. The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen (see Nature 453, 829; 2008). But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.

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Is America's Space Administration Over-the-Hill? Next-Gen NASA

From Popular Mechanics:

It has been 40 years since NASA first placed man on the moon. Not only was the space agency still young, but most of its employees were fresh out of college. Today, less than 20 percent of NASA's employees are under the age of 40, leading one report to call the agency "mono-generational." This leads to a disturbing question: As the baby boomers retire, who will get astronauts back to the lunar surface?

Thick sideburns, clean-cut but full heads of hair and fresh-looking faces framed by chunky, black glasses. That was NASA of the 1960s. Considering all the flag-waving young celebrants, the photos of Mission Control just after Apollo 11 safely parachuted into the Pacific on July 24, 1969, could be mistaken for a Fourth of July frat party. You can't help but think they look a bit young to be sending men to the moon. Compared to NASA today, they were.

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Unusual Neuron Could ExplainTthe Smartest Species

Killer Whales: NOAA/Robert Pittman

From Popsci.com:

People have it, elephants have it, even killer whales have it

A neuroscientist carves up brains to investigate the presence of unique brain cells found only in humans, primates, elephants and a handful of marine mammals -- species that are characterized by large brains, a long childhood spent learning from their elders, and sophisticated social interaction, reports Smithsonian.

In his Caltech lab, John Allman slices off the thinnest slivers of an elephant's brain, looking for the presence of von Economo neurons -- and possibly a glimpse into the evolution of human behavior.

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