How Fire Made Us Human -- A Commentary

Image: Two new books argue that taming fire and learning to cook were key in human evolution (Image: University of New Mexico Press)

From New Scientist:

THE inhabitants of the Admiralty Islands say that a divine serpent once asked some children to cook a fish. The children dried it in the sun and ate it raw. Seeing this, the serpent gave them fire and taught them to cook.

So it is with every culture: the way that humans acquired fire is enshrined in legend, usually involving either a heroic benefactor or a trickster. In Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was punished for it; according to the Apache, it was a cunning fox who captured it for us. Once acquired, fire became sacred. In ancient Rome, it was guarded in the temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, by the Vestal Virgins. In India's Hindu temples, Agnihotri (literally "fire-guarder") Brahmans are still keepers of the sacred flame.

Legends aside, no other animal controls fire. Most fear it. The use of fire sets humans apart. But what difference has it made?

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A Real Whopper: Black Hole Is Most Massive Known

(Image from Discovery.com)

From Yahoo News/Space.com:

PASADENA, CALIF. — The most massive black hole yet weighed lurks at the heart of the relatively nearby giant galaxy M87.

The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development.

"We did not expect it at all," said team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin.

The discovery was announced here today at the 214th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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Huge Cosmic Explosions Are Dark and Mysterious

From Yahoo News/Space:

PASADENA, CALIF. — Some of the most powerful explosions in the universe are invisible. But astronomers are a sneaky bunch. By monitoring X-rays and gamma rays, they're able to see what's going on.

Today astronomers said that a certain type of gamma-ray burst, the most energetic explosions in the universe, can light up areas of galaxies, but only in these more energetic wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, revealing intense star formation and death.

A survey of so-called "dark" gamma-ray bursts, which shine brightly in the gamma and X-ray parts of the spectrum but show barely a spark of visible light, found that these beacons can shed light on the dusty corners of galaxies where stars are born.

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Flexible Solar Power Shingles Transform Roofs From Wasted Space To Energy Source

PNNL, Vitex Systems and Battelle are working to adapt a film encapsulation process that would enable flexible solar panels like this. The flexible solar panels could be placed on rooftops like shingles and could replace today's boxy solar panels that are made with rigid glass or silicon and mounted on thick metal frames. (Credit: Photo courtesy of Vitex Systems, Inc.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 8, 2009) — A transparent thin film barrier used to protect flat panel TVs from moisture could become the basis for flexible solar panels that would be installed on roofs like shingles.

The flexible rooftop solar panels - called building-integrated photovoltaics, or BIPVs - could replace today's boxy solar panels that are made with rigid glass or silicon and mounted on thick metal frames. The flexible solar shingles would be less expensive to install than current panels and made to last 25 years.

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Large Mammal Migrations Are Disappearing

Tiang herd in the Southern sector of Boma National Park. Credit: P. Elkan, Wildlife Conservation Society/National Geographic

From Live Science:

Africa is home to spectacular migration events. Large mammals ranging from Grant's gazelles to blue wildebeests pound their hooves across vast tracts of land as the seasons change.

New research suggests, however, that migrations across the continent might be going extinct.

For the first time, scientists have compiled and analyzed data on all of the world's largest and definitive migrating land mammals. The researchers looked at the migration history for a group of ungulates, all of them hoofed mammals, weighing more than 44 pounds (20 kg). The data suggest that one-quarter of these mammals no longer migrate, and human development is responsible for the decline, said Grant Harris, co-author of the study.

In many cases, data on these animals is simply nonexistent.

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Nasa Rover Sinks Up To Wheel Hubs In Martian Dust... Now How To Get It Rolling Again?

The Spirit rover is stuck on the Home Plate - a plateau roughly 90m across within the Columbia Hills inside the Gusev crater

From The Daily Mail:

It's a familiar problem to drivers - you get stuck, your wheels are spinning and you need a tow rope to get you out.

But what happens when the stuck vehicle is the Spirit Rover on Mars nearly 36 million miles away?

Nasa's space exploration buggy ran into soft earth in May after crawling across the red planet for five years and sending back impressively detailed pictures from the surface.

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Free-Floating Black Hole May Solve Space 'Firefly' Mystery

The object responsible for the mysterious brightening seen in 2006 (right) is ordinarily too dim to detect (left) (Image: Barbary et al.)

From New Scientist:

A wandering black hole may have torn apart a star to create a strange object that brightened mysteriously and then faded from view in 2006, a new study suggests. But more than three years later, astronomers are still at a loss to explain all the features of the strange event.

The object, called SCP 06F6, was first spotted in the constellation Bootes in February 2006 in a search for supernovae by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object flared to its maximum brightness over about 100 days, a period much longer than most supernovae, which do so in just 20 days.

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Key To Blood Clotting Discovered

From The BBC:

Scientists have discovered a molecular mechanism that is key to regulating the way blood clots.

The team from Harvard University, writing in the journal Science, said the finding could help treat people who have blood-clotting disorders.

If blood clots too much, people can develop a potentially fatal thrombosis; too little and they can bleed to death.

UK experts said the research was important and could help develop new treatments for blood disorders.

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What's So Hot About Chili Peppers?

From The Smithsonian:

Seated in the bed of a pickup truck, Joshua Tewksbury cringes with every curve and pothole as we bounce along the edge of Amboró National Park in central Bolivia. After 2,000 miles on some of the worst roads in South America, the truck's suspension is failing. In the past hour, two leaf springs—metal bands that prevent the axle from crashing into the wheel well—jangled onto the road behind us. At any moment, Tewksbury's extraordinary hunting expedition could come to an abrupt end.

A wiry 40-year-old ecologist at the University of Washington, Tewksbury is risking his sacroiliac in this fly-infested forest looking for a wild chili with a juicy red berry and a tiny flower: Capsicum minutiflorum. He hopes it'll help answer the hottest question in botany: Why are chilies spicy?

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My Comment: The hotter the better .... that is my motto.

Obama's Climate Guru: Paint Your Roof White!

Houses with white roofs, like these in Greece, would be able to reflect light back through the atmosphere, according to Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy. ALAMY

From The Independent:

Some people believe that nuclear power is the answer to climate change, others have proposed green technologies such as wind or solar power, but Barack Obama's top man on global warming has suggested something far simpler – painting your roof white.

Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy and a Nobel prize-winning scientist, said yesterday that making roofs and pavements white or light-coloured would help to reduce global warming by both conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. It would, he said, be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

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5 Myths About Women's Bodies

From Live Science:

Historically research has focused on men, but in recent years, women have been getting increased attention. (Don't blame the delay on sexism; women's hormone fluctuations are, well, complicated and can confound basic findings.) Still, much misinformation about the female body circulates in mainstream consciousness.

-- Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience

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Geography And History Shape Genetic Differences In Humans

Global allele frequencies and haplotype patterns at three genes with signals of positive selection. (Credit: Coop G, Pickrell JK, Novembre J, Kudaravalli S, Li J, et al.. The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation. PLoS Genetics, 2009; 5 (6): e1000500 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000500)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 7, 2009) — New research indicates that natural selection may shape the human genome much more slowly than previously thought. Other factors -- the movements of humans within and among continents, the expansions and contractions of populations, and the vagaries of genetic chance – have heavily influenced the distribution of genetic variations in populations around the world.

The study, conducted by a team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the University of Chicago, the University of California and Stanford University, is published June 5 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

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Is Solar Power Dead In The Water?

From The Washington Post:

Congress's rush to embrace solar power is having some unintended consequences. It will turn over a large chunk of federal land to private energy companies, and it may involve withdrawing billions of gallons of water from sensitive desert habitat.

By 2015, Congress wants the Interior and Energy Departments to place, on federal land, renewable energy projects that can generate at least 10,000 megawatts of electricity. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has set off a frantic land grab as solar and wind energy companies rush to obtain permits for projects in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

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Berners-Lee: We No Longer Fully Understand The Web -- A Commentary

Image: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says its size and power over society have become so great that we no longer fully comprehend how it works (Image: Catrina Genovese / WireImage)

From New Scientist:

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve

Why did you decide to subject the web itself to scientific scrutiny?

Web science is already happening. People are studying the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law. Our Web Science Research Initiative aims to bring that research together. There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.

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How to Clean House: Top 10 Dirt-Dispelling Tips

(Photograph by Zach Desart)

From Popular Mechanics:

Chances are you own a shop vacuum, and maybe a pressure washer. These tools—plus a few more—will help you get started getting rid of the dirt on your house’s siding, shop floor, basement corners and fences and decks. Here is the ultimate guide to putting grime in its place.

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Bing Is Pretty, But Is it Any Good?

From Popsci.com:

The Grouse takes a chance on Microsoft's Google-killer

Heard of Bing yet? If not, you soon will. Backed by a reported $100-million-dollar promotional campaign, Bing is Microsoft's latest grasp at double digits in the war for search engine market share, of which Redmond now owns between 5 and 6 percent (according to Net Applications' Market Share report). After months of beta testing followed by a public preview, Bing officially took over this week as THE search engine powering all of MSN. So, if you use any Microsoft services with even limited frequency, you'll be getting friendly with Bing whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not.

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Long Distance Space Travel Leaves You Short, Fat And Ugly, Claim Scientists

Image: Making long space journeys, like those envisaged in the future, will not be good for your looks or figure, claim scientists who believe they will leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald. Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

Going boldly where no man has gone before is likely to leave you going bald, claims scientists – not to mention fat and ugly.

Making long space journeys, like those envisaged in the future, will not be good for your looks or figure, claim scientists who believe they will leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald.

They believe living permanently in space for many years, perhaps even for many generations, adversely affects human's looks because they will not require any effort to move or keep warm.

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Cloned Species:

Recipe for a Resurrection

From National Geographic:

Bringing extinct species back to life is no longer considered science fiction. But is it a good idea?

Each new woolly mammoth carcass to emerge from the Siberian permafrost triggers a flurry of speculation about resurrecting this Ice Age giant. Researchers have refined at least some of the tools needed to turn that hope into reality. Last November, when a team led by Teruhiko Wakayama, a reproductive biologist based in Kobe, Japan, reported it had cloned mice that had been frozen for 16 years, the scientists conjectured that the same techniques might open the door to cloning mammoths and other extinct species preserved in permafrost. Talk of cloning surged again a few weeks later when a group at Pennsylvania State University, led by Webb Miller and Stephan C. Schuster, published 70 percent of the mammoth genome, laying out much of the basic data that might be required to make a mammoth.

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Email 17 Great Historical Moments Ruined by Modern Technology

From Cracked:

Back in the days before the internet, if a man wanted to learn something, he had to open a newspaper. If he needed to kill Germans, he did it with his bare hands. And if he wanted some milk ... well, he had it delivered right to his door.

Yes, everything other than milk acquisition was much more difficult without modern technology. But does that make it worse? We asked you to show us how some famous historic moments would have been ruined if modern technology had existed at the time. The winner is below, but first the runners up ...

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Hat Tip Geek Press.

Scientists Trace Laughter Back 16million Years... By Tickling Apes

Amusing research: By analysing the reactions produced by gently tickling ape feet, palms, necks and armpits, Dr Davila Ross has concluded that laughter can be traced back 16million years

From The Daily Mail:

As science experiments go, it was real hoot.

Researchers mapping the evolution of laughter gently tickled the feet, palms, necks and armpits of baby humans and apes.

By analysing the sounds the animals made - giggles, hoots, grunts and pants - they concluded that laughter can be traced back some 16million years, and that it evolved along the same pathway as our evolution.

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