Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered A New Stage Of Evolution"

From The Daily Galaxy:

Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.

"By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

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Coffee 'May Reverse Alzheimer's'

From The BBC:

Drinking five cups of coffee a day could reverse memory problems seen in Alzheimer's disease, US scientists say.

The Florida research, carried out on mice, also suggested caffeine hampered the production of the protein plaques which are the hallmark of the disease.

Previous research has also suggested a protective effect from caffeine.

But British experts said the Journal of Alzheimer's disease study did not mean that dementia patients should start using caffeine supplements.

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Buzz Aldrin: Why We Should Leave The Moon Alone And Settle Mars Instead

Photo: Buzz Aldrin is pictured standing on the moon,
which Neil Armstrong can be seen reflected in his visor.

From The Daily Mail:

Nasa astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, has urged the world to forget about returning to our nearest satellite and head to Mars instead.

'Why do we want to go to go back to the Moon?' he asked.

'Some nations want to go for prestige to say they are 'first' in space exploration in the 21st century and they want Nasa to compete with them.

'But there's no reason for us to go back. We can look at the effects of long-term missions in space by flying around comets, rather than setting up a base on the Moon. We're not going to launch any missions from there.'

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Reasons Not to Panic Over a Painkiller

From The New York Times:

Few drugs are more ubiquitous than acetaminophen, the pain reliever found in numerous over-the-counter cold remedies and the headache drug Tylenol.

But last week, a federal advisory committee raised concerns about liver damage that can occur with overuse of acetaminophen, and the panel even recommended that the Food and Drug Administration ban two popular prescription drugs, Vicodin and Percocet, because they contain it.

The news left many consumers confused and alarmed. Could regular use of acetaminophen for pain relief put them at risk for long-term liver damage?

To help resolve the confusion, here are some questions and answers about acetaminophen.

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How Can YouTube Survive?

Brand of the free: Founder Jawed Karim appeared in the first video, of elephants at a zoo

From The Independent:

It's wildly popular - and thought to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now questions are being asked about the future of YouTube. Rhodri Marsden investigates a mystery of digital-age 'freeconomics'

It must surely rank as the most mundane business launch in history. Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube, shuffles timidly in front of a video camera while standing in front of a group of elephants at San Diego zoo, with precious little idea of what he was starting. "The cool thing about these guys," he says, nervously gesturing behind him, "is that they have really long trunks. And that's pretty much all there is to say."

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Caffeine Reverses Memory Impairment In Mice With Alzheimer's Symptoms

Coffee drinkers may have another reason to pour that extra cup. When aged mice bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease were given caffeine -- the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day -- their memory impairment was reversed. (Credit: iStockphoto/Royce DeGrie)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — Coffee drinkers may have another reason to pour that extra cup. When aged mice bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease were given caffeine – the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day – their memory impairment was reversed, report University of South Florida researchers at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

Back-to-back studies published online July 6 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, show caffeine significantly decreased abnormal levels of the protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, both in the brains and in the blood of mice exhibiting symptoms of the disease. Both studies build upon previous research by the Florida ADRC group showing that caffeine in early adulthood prevented the onset of memory problems in mice bred to develop Alzheimer's symptoms in old age.

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How Global Catastrophe Could Make Us Smarter

From Live Science:

When supervolcanoes blow their tops, the world's climate is altered and life is snuffed out regionally and challenged globally. Such an event is thought to have occurred 74,000 years ago when the Toba supervolcano erupted in what is now Sumatra with a force estimated to be 1,000 to 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens.

The timing of Toba's tempest fits with an interesting bottleneck known to exist in human evolution, as seen in DNA evidence. The population became very small sometime between 90,000 and 60,000 years ago. And a new idea floating around suggests that the eruption may have contributed — by necessity — to our supreme intelligence today. Further, it has been suggested, we may be undergoing the next great leap in smarts right now.

More on all that lower down. First, some fresh research on the eruption:

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Coming Soon: Photographic Memory In A Pill?

RGS-14: Will you remember what this protein looks like 2 months from now?

From Popsci.com:

Scientists isolate a protein that significantly increases visual recall.

Wish you had a photographic memory? Well, Encyclopedia Brown, drugs may amp your brain up to that point soon. A group of Spanish scientists claim to have singled out a protein that can extend the life of visual memory significantly. When the production of the protein was boosted in mice, the rodents' visual memory retention increased, from about an hour to almost 2 months.

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Who is Neil Armstrong?

Neil Armstrong

From The BBC:

A hero to millions, Neil Armstrong has consistently shunned the limelight. To mark the 40th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing, author Andrew Smith travelled across America to discover why the man who first set foot upon the Moon remains such an enigma.

His words on being the first person ever to set foot on the Moon have been written into soundbite history - but in the four decades since Neil Armstrong became a household name, he has also increasingly become an enigma.

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July 4, 1776: Preserving the Declaration

From Wired:

1776: The Declaration of Independence is signed. It will take 127 years before someone gets around to saying, “Hey, maybe we should preserve this thing.”

The Declaration of Independence can be fairly said to stand alongside the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights as the most important documents in the history of democracy. Its significance was understood from the moment it was signed, so one is left to wonder why its preservation was ignored for so long.

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'The Eagle Has Landed': A Space Geek Remembers The Moon Shot

Fly me to the Moon: the Apollo 11 ahead of lift-off on 16 July 1969. Getty

From The Independent:

As a 10-year-old 'space geek', Paul Rodgers was glued to the television when Neil Armstrong uttered the immortal words, 'The Eagle has landed.' Forty years on, he looks back at mankind's giant leap – and the Cold War politics that turned the space race into a mad dash

The first sign of trouble came when the Eagle was five minutes into its descent, 33,500ft above the Moon's surface. A shrill alarm rang through the cramped, seatless cabin in which two astronauts stood facing the stars. An error message flashed up on their primitive computer's tiny read-out: "1202". Neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin knew what it meant. It was left to Steve Bales, a 26-year-old technician at Mission Control in Houston to decide they should keep going. The error, he was fairly sure, would fix itself, and he repeatedly called "Go!" as the alarm sounded four more times.

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'Greedy' Trees Still Leave Room For The Little Plants

From New Scientist:

While they might hog the bulk of the resources, trees still leave enough "crumbs" for smaller neighbouring plants to eke out a living, researchers say. The finding contradicts previous notions of plant competition and adds support to a new view of how a plant's size affects the survival and composition of its neighbouring species.

Previously, it was assumed that trees and other large plants monopolized sunlight, water, and other available resources, limiting the number of smaller plant species that can coexist in their vicinity. Research in greenhouse settings supported this view.

Now a study of forests in southern British Columbia shows that larger plants do not always correlate with fewer species in an area.

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World's Oldest Bible Goes Online 1,600 Years After It Was Penned On Parchment

Reunited: Pages of the world's oldest surviving Christian Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus have been brought together for the first time online

From The Daily Mail:

Over 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and made available on the internet.

More than half of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript has been pieced together in a joint effort between institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

Now high-resolution digital images of the recovered pages of the 4th century book - written in Greek on parchment leaves - have been made available at www.codexsinaiticus.org.

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Paralyzed People Using Computers, Amputees Controlling Bionic Limbs, With Microelectrodes On (Not In) Brain

Photo: Microwires emerging from the green and orange tubes connect to two arrays of 16 microelectrodes. Each array is embedded in a small mat of clear, rubbery silicone. The mats are barely visible in this image. These microelectrode arrays sit on the brain without penetrating it, a step toward longer-lived, less invasive versions of "neural interfaces" that in recent experiments elsewhere have allowed paralyzed people to control a computer cursor with their thoughts. The new microeletrode arrays were placed in two patients at the University of Utah who already were undergoing brain surgery for severe epilepsy. The larger, numbered, metallic electrodes are used to locate the source of epileptic seizures in the brain, so the patients allowed the micoelectrodes to be placed on their brains at the same time. (Credit: University of Utah Department of Neurosurgery)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — Experimental devices that read brain signals have helped paralyzed people use computers and may let amputees control bionic limbs. But existing devices use tiny electrodes that poke into the brain. Now, a University of Utah study shows that brain signals controlling arm movements can be detected accurately using new microelectrodes that sit on the brain but don't penetrate it.

"The unique thing about this technology is that it provides lots of information out of the brain without having to put the electrodes into the brain," says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering and coauthor of the study. "That lets neurosurgeons put this device under the skull but over brain areas where it would be risky to place penetrating electrodes: areas that control speech, memory and other cognitive functions."

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Tropical Rainfall Moving North

The band of heavy precipitation indicates the intertropical convergence zone. The new findings are based on sediment cores from lakes and lagoons on Palau, Washington, Christmas and Galapagos islands. Credit: University of Washington

From Live Science:

Earth's most prominent rain band, near the equator, has been moving north at an average rate of almost a mile (1.4 km) a year for three centuries, likely because of a warming world, scientists say.

The band supplies fresh water to almost a billion people and affects climate elsewhere.

If the migration continues, some Pacific islands near the equator that today enjoy abundant rainfall may be starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner, researchers report in the July issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

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How Trivial DNA Changes Can Hurt Health

From Scientific American:

Small changes to DNA that were once considered innocuous enough to be ignored are proving to be important in human diseases, evolution and biotechnology.

Biologists long thought they understood how genetic mutations cause disease. But recent work has revealed an important twist in the tale and uncovered surprising—even counterintuitive—ways that alterations in DNA can make people sick. The classic view assumed that what are termed “silent” mutations were inconsequential to health, because such changes in DNA would not alter the composition of the proteins encoded by genes. Proteins function in virtually every process carried out by cells, from catalyzing biochemical reactions to recognizing foreign invaders. Hence, the thinking went, if a protein’s makeup ends up being correct, any small glitches in the process leading to its construction could not do a body harm.

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High Levels Of Cycling Training Damage Triathletes' Sperm

From Brightsurf:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: The high-intensity training undertaken by triathletes has a significant impact on the quality of their sperm, the 25th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology heard today (Monday 29 June). Professor Diana Vaamonde, from the University of Cordoba Medical School, Cordoba, Spain, said that the triathletes who did the most cycling training had the worst sperm morphology.

Professor Vaamonde's team has previously shown that both high exercise intensity and high exercise volume may be detrimental to sperm quality. They decided to take a more profound look at the sportsmen who seemed to show the greatest alteration - the triathletes - and assess the correlation between the volume of training in each activity and sperm quality. Of the three modalities, only cycling, the activity for which triathletes undertake the most training, showed a clear correlation with sperm quality. The more cycling training the sportsmen undertook, both in time and kilometres, the worse their sperm quality became.

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From Haiti, A Surprise: Good News About AIDS

In this May 7, 2009 photo, patients with HIV/AIDS wait to be attended at the Partners in Health hospital in Cange, in central Haiti. Haitian infection rates dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent among expectant mothers in the last 15 years. Researchers recently switched to a new methodology that tests all adults, which puts Haiti's official rate at 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

From Yahoo News/AP:

BLANCHARD, Haiti – When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin.

Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.

"I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."

In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.

Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.

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Why You Can’t Keep Your Foot Out of Your Mouth

From Wired:

It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of human nature: The harder we try not to say or do or think something, the more likely we are to slip — and often at the worst possible time. But maybe science can help.

More than a decade after the inability of a Dostoevsky protagonist to stop thinking about a white bear inspired his first experiments, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner has become one of the world’s foremost experts on what are now known as ironic processes.

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Can American Farms Make Bamboo the Next Big Cash Crop?

Could bamboo forests like these revive Mississippi Delta agriculture? (Photograph by David Sanger/Getty Images

From Popular Mechanics:

Bamboo has come into vogue as a green, sustainable resource that's used for everything from cutting boards to clothing to wood floors. But until now, almost all of the bamboo in products sold here has come from overseas. That could change soon, as new planting techniques may lead to millions of new acres of bamboo shoots in the American South.

Could the Mississippi Delta become America's bamboo belt, the breadbasket of a new class of homegrown structural building components? Earlier this June in Greenville, Miss., a group of engineers, manufacturers, bureaucrats and farmers gathered to discuss how land formerly cultivated for cotton might be converted to produce bamboo on a massive scale. Teragren, the world's largest bamboo building products manufacturer, has engineered new structural joists made of imported Moso, a bamboo species with the tensile strength of steel. Teragren VP Tom Goodham says a domestic Moso source is the key to renewable structural timber becoming mainstream and affordable: "The whole bamboo building-products category is just on the cusp of critical mass."

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