PICTURES: Prehistoric European Cave Artists Were Female

From National Geographic:

June 16, 2009--Inside France's 25,000-year-old Pech Merle cave, hand stencils surround the famed "Spotted Horses" mural.

For about as long as humans have created works of art, they've also left behind handprints. People began stenciling, painting, or chipping imprints of their hands onto rock walls at least 30,000 years ago.

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China’s Manufacturing Boom Has Brought Widespread Pollution And Unexpected Changes To The Bodies, Minds, And Souls Of The Chinese People

A River Runs Through It -- Search Magazine

China’s manufacturing boom has brought widespread pollution—and unexpected changes to the bodies, minds, and souls of the Chinese people.

The cancer ward of Shenqiu County Hospital is busy on this weekday morning. Bicycles and motorbikes are scattered around the dusty brick courtyard and a white doctor’s jacket hangs from a tree to dry. A line of people stand outside a small one-story concrete building, patiently waiting their turn for a few minutes with Dr. Wang Yong Zeng, the chief oncologist. Most carry their life’s medical records with them, clutching the thick folders full of X-rays and documents tightly to their chest.

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Black Holes On A Desktop

From The Economist:

Sound may offer a better way than light to test Stephen Hawking’s prediction that black holes emit radiation.

WHEN the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator near Geneva, was switched on last September, the press was full of scare stories about the risk of it producing a tiny black hole that would, despite its minuscule size, quickly swallow the Earth. In fact, the first test runs could never have made such an object. And, just over a week later, the LHC broke and has not yet been repaired. But it is true that one of the things its operators would like to create, if and when they get it going again, are miniature versions of those fabled astronomical objects whose intense gravity means no light can escape them.

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One In 25 Deaths Worldwide Attributable To Alcohol

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2009) — Research from Canada's own Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) featured in this week's edition of the Lancet shows that worldwide, 1 in 25 deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption. This rise since 2000 is mainly due to increases in the number of women drinking.

CAMH's Dr Jürgen Rehm and his colleagues found that alcohol-attributable disorders are among the most disabling disease categories within the global burden of disease, especially for men. And in contrast to other traditional risk factors for disease, the burden attributable to alcohol lies more with younger people than with the older population.

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Study Dispels Myth of Post-Workout Fat Burn

Yes, you burn calories while weightlifting, running or doing other exercise. No, the calorie burn does not continue as you pig out later. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

After an intense hour of sweating on the treadmill or pumping iron, most of us look forward to the extra post-exercise "afterburn" of fat cells that has been promised to us by fitness pundits. This 24-hour period of altered metabolism is supposed to help with our overall weight loss.

Unfortunately, a recent study found this to be a myth for moderate exercisers.

The new research clarifies a misunderstanding that exercisers can ignore their diet after a workout because their metabolism is in this super active state.

"It's not that exercise doesn't burn fat," said Edward Melanson, associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, "It's just that we replace the calories. People think they have a license to eat whatever they want, and our research shows that is definitely not the case. You can easily undo what you set out to do.”

The findings were detailed in the April edition of Exercise and Sport Sciences Review.

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Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels But Data

From The New York Times:

MOUNT GRAHAM, Ariz. — Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham.

“Got it. O.K., it’s happy,” says Christopher J. Corbally, the Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, as he sits in the control room making adjustments. The idea is not to watch for omens or angels but to do workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

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Brains Replay Memories While We Sleep And Store The Highlights, Claim Scientists

From The Telegraph:

We may think we are asleep - but deep in the recesses of our mind a "memory editor" is working overtime, replaying the experiences of the day and storing the highlights on our brain's version of a video recorder, claim scientists.

Researchers have discovered that the mind keeps most memories for just a day but then at night acts like a film editor sifting through the "video clips" before transferring the best bits to long term storage in our own movie archive.

The research has "profound implications" for the importance of sleep and its link with long term memory, they said.

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Sun Leaves Earth Wide Open To cCsmic Rays

The sun protects the earth from cosmic rays and dust from the solar system but squeezing of various stars could leave us unprotected (Image: NASA/HST collection)

From New Scientist:

THE sun provides ideal conditions for life to thrive, right? In fact, it periodically leaves Earth open to assaults from interstellar nasties in a way that most stars do not.

The sun protects us from cosmic rays and dust from beyond the solar system by enveloping us in the heliosphere - a bubble of solar wind that extends past Pluto. These cosmic rays would damage the ozone layer, and interstellar dust could dim sunlight and trigger an ice age. However, when the solar system passes through very dense gas and dust clouds, the heliosphere can shrink until its edge is inside Earth's orbit.

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Light Goes Out On Solar Mission

From The BBC:

After more than 18 years studying the Sun, the plug is finally being pulled on the ailing spacecraft Ulysses.

Final communication with the joint European-US satellite will take place on 30 June.

The long-serving craft, launched in October 1990, has already served four times its expected design life.

The Esa-Nasa mission was the first to survey the environment in space above and below the poles of the Sun.

Data from the craft, published last year, also suggested that the solar wind - the stream of charged particles billowing away from the Sun - is at its weakest for 50 years.

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Ancient Climate Change: When Palm Trees Gave Way To Spruce Trees

New research reveals the demise of an ancient forest. These are dawn redwood stumps on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut. (Credit: Copyright David Greenwood / Used with permission)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2009) — For climatologists, part of the challenge in predicting the future is figuring out exactly what happened during previous periods of global climate change.

One long-standing climate puzzle relates to a sequence of events 33.5 million years ago in the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. Profound changes were underway. Globally, carbon dioxide levels were falling and the hothouse warmth of the dinosaur age and Eocene Period was waning. In Antarctica, ice sheets had formed and covered much of the southern polar continent.

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Nanoparticles Explored for Preventing Cell Damage

Sudipta Seal, materials scientist and engineer at the University of Central Florida, holds a bottle containing billions of ultrasmall, engineered nanoceria. In the background, are jars filled with different types of nanoceria. Credit: Sudipta Seal, University of Central Florida

From Live Science:

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Sudipta Seal is enthralled by nanoparticles, particularly those of a rare earth metal called cerium. The particles are showing potential for a wide range of applications, from medicine to energy.

Seal is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and several years ago he and his colleagues engineered nanoparticles of cerium oxide (CeO2), a material long used in ceramics, catalysts and fuel cells. The novel nanocrystalline form is non-toxic and biocompatible — ideal for medical applications.

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Dreaming Of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma Of Dream Content

From Scientific American:

Friday, June 19, 2:12 a.m.: Loading up the trunk of my car with clothes hangers when approached by two transients… try to engage them in good-natured conversation about the benefits of wooden clothes hangers over metal ones, but they make me uneasy, say they want to go out to get a drink but I’ve got to go. In a city somewhere… looks like a post-apocalyptic Saint Louis.

Saturday, June 20, 4:47 a.m.: Was just now trying to return my dead grandmother’s cane to her. Took elevator to her apartment… meant to go to the 8th floor, but elevator lurched up to the 18th floor, swung around violently then shot back down. Could hear voices in the corridors outside elevator shaft…. a mother yelling at her child. Grandma then became my other grandma, also decesased, yet in a nursing home; doctors say she’s doing fine.

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FYI: Why Does My Voice Sound Different When I Hear it On A Recording?

Tone Deaf: Your voice makes
 vibrations that only you can hear iStock

From Popsci.com:

It sounds different because it is different. "When you speak, the vocal folds in your throat vibrate, which causes your skin, skull and oral cavities to also vibrate, and we perceive this as sound," explains Ben Hornsby, a professor of audiology at Vanderbilt University. The vibrations mix with the sound waves traveling from your mouth to your eardrum, giving your voice a quality — generally a deeper, more dignified sound — that no one else hears.

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How Michael Jackson's Death Shut Down Twitter, Brought Chaos To Google... And 'Killed Off' Jeff Goldblum

TMZ.com was the first to break the story that Michael Jackson had had a cardiac arrest.

From The Daily Mail:

The internet came alive like never before as people around the world logged on to follow the stunning news of Michael Jackson's death.

The story created such a surge in online traffic last night that Google returned an 'error message' for searches of the singer's name as it assumed it was under attack.

And just seconds after the story broke on the American entertainment website TMZ.com, messages or 'Tweets' about the singer on the micro-blogging site Twitter doubled, leading to a temporary shutdown of the site.

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Magnetic 'Superatoms' Promise Tuneable Materials

Designer clusters of atoms that can mimic other elements have for the first time been devised with magnetic properties (Image: Ulises Reveles, VCU)

From The New Scientist:

New "superatoms" – clusters of atoms that share electrons and can mimic the behaviour of other elements – have been devised with magnetic properties for the first time. The breakthrough provides a way to design novel nano-scale building blocks with controllable magnetic properties that could be used to make faster computer processors and denser memory storage.

Superatoms were discovered in the 1980s when Walter Knight and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that groups of sodium atoms can share electrons amongst themselves.

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The Milk Myth: What a Body Really Needs

Photo: Milk is dandy, but yogurt has more calcium and is easier to digest. Collards and other greens also have about as much or more calcium than milk by the cup. Greens, unlike milk, have the added benefit of vitamin K, also necessary for strong bones. Tofu and sesame are also very high in calcium. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Young adults are not drinking enough milk, according to a study published in the July/August issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior by researchers from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Well, at least that's according to the press release about the study, along with a few press reports on the matter. But according to lead author Nicole Larson, the focus on the study was on calcium.

Once again, we see the words "milk" and "calcium" used interchangeably in the popular press. Milk is a calcium source, but by no standard other than that of the National Dairy Council is it the best calcium source.

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Space Shuttle Science Shows How 1908 Tunguska Explosion Was Caused By A Comet

In 1927 Professor Leonid Kulik took the first photographs of the massive destruction of the taiga forest after the Tunguska catastrophe. (Credit: Professor Leonid Kulik)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2009) — The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

The research, accepted for publication (June 24, 2009) by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, connects the two events by what followed each about a day later: brilliant, night-visible clouds, or noctilucent clouds, that are made up of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.

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Evolutionary Origins Of Your Right And Left Brain

Photoillustration by TWIST CREATIVE; MedicalRF.com Corbis (brain); Medioimages Getty Images (calculator); Joerg Steffens Corbis (faces); Westend61 Corbis (woman smiling); Dougal Waters Getty Images (ballerina); Mike Kemp Getty Images (rattlesnake); C Squared Studios Getty Images (palette); Vladimir Godnik Getty Images (paintbrushes); Carrie Boretz Corbis (girls whispering); Robert Llewellyn Corbis (calipers)

From Scientific American:

The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates.

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space. Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone. Other animals, it was thought, have no hemispheric specializations of any kind.

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Cloud Computing: Just Another Online Fad--or the Biggest Revolution Since the Internet?

Credit: James Gulliver Hancock

From Technology Review:

According to its advocates, cloud computing is poised to succeed where so many other attempts to deliver on-demand computing to anyone with a network connection have failed. Some skepticism is warranted. The history of the computer industry is littered with the remains of previous aspirants to this holy grail, from the time-sharing utilities envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s to the network computers of the 1990s (simple computers acting as graphical clients for software running on central servers) to the commercial grid systems of more recent years (aimed at turning clusters of servers into high-­performance computers). But cloud computing draws strength from forces that could propel it beyond the ranks of the also-rans.

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Stuck on Mars, Spirit Rover Does Science

From Yahoo News/Space:

The Mars rover Spirit is keeping scientists' spirits up by doing some science while it is stuck in soft soil on the red planet.

The rover has been immobile, trapped hub-deep since May 6. Engineers have replicated the landscape in lab back home and, using an identical rover model, tried to figure out what to do, so far to no avail.

A rock seen beneath Spirit in images from the camera on the end of the rover's arm may be touching Spirit's belly, NASA said in a statement today. It appears to be a loose rock not bearing the rover's weight.

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