Mapping The Globe's Soils

DIGITIZING DIRT: A global soil map could aid many areas of scientific research, including agriculture and climate modeling. ISTOCKPHOTO/ANTHONYROSENBERG

From Scientific American:

The lack of good information on global soils is hampering efforts to improve agriculture and combat climate change.

Long left in the dust by their peers in climate research, a small group of soil scientists is spearheading an effort to apply rigorous computer analysis to the ground beneath our feet.

Their goal: to produce a digital soil map of the entire world.

It is a daunting task. In many parts of the world, such as Africa and South Asia, knowledge of soil is sketchy at best, relying on fading paper maps. And without accurate soil information, it is difficult for planners to know where crops are best grown, or for climate modelers to predict how much carbon might be released from soil into the atmosphere.

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Life On Mars Theory Goes Up In A Puff: Scientists Find Methane Gas Would Make Planet Poisonous

Are we alone? Scientists believed methane gas on Mars was proof of life on the planet - but now that theory could be wrong

From The Daily Mail:

The discovery of seasonal plumes of methane on Mars was embraced as evidence of life on the red planet.

With most of the methane on Earth produced by living organisms, the Nasa finding earlier this year was a tantalising sign we may not be alone in the universe.

But alas, it now seems it could actually be the opposite.

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How Sensitive Is The Earth’s Climate?

From Watts Up With That?

Introduction

Projections of climate warming from global circulation models (GCM’s) are based on high sensitivity for the Earth’s climate to radiative forcing from well mixed greenhouse gases (WMGG’s). This high sensitivity depends mainly on three assumptions:

1. Slow heat accumulation in the world’s oceans delays the appearance of the full effect of greenhouse forcing by many (eg. >20) years.

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Chicken-hearted Tyrants: Predatory Dinosaurs As Baby Killers

Fossil evidence suggests that the large carnivores hunted mainly juvenile dinosaurs instead of giant herbivorous adults. (Credit: iStockphoto/David Coder)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2009) — Two titans fighting a bloody battle – one that often turns fatal for both of them. This is how big predatory dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus are often depicted while hunting down their supposed prey, even larger herbivorous dinosaurs. The fossils, though, do not account for that kind of hunting behavior but indicate that theropods, the large predatory dinosaurs, were hunting much smaller prey.

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Robot Chefs Run A Restaurant

From Live Science:

The FuA-Men - Fully Automated raMen restaruant in Nagoya, Japan features a chef and assistant - both fully autonomous robots. The robots perform all of the cooking tasks needed to make eighty bowls per day, serving the customers who come to their small shop.

When asked, customers seem to feel that there is little difference between noodle dishes prepared by real, human chefs, and meals prepared by autonomous robots. For those who appreciate precision in food preparation, you can't beat robot chefs.

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Perseids Meteors To Light Up Skies Midweek

From San Francisco Chronicle:

The rocky debris from a wandering comet is filling the sky with shooting stars these nights, just as scribes in ancient China saw them 2,000 years ago and modern stargazers see them every August.

They are the Perseids, an annual meteor shower that makes a brilliant show wherever the viewing is good and the night sky is dark and clear.

This year, the bright streaks and occasional blazing fireballs of the meteors should reach their peak well before dawn Wednesday and after sunset that night.

But Tuesday night should offer a better view as the waning gibbous moon doesn't rise until 11 p.m and the sky will be darkest before the moonlight interferes, says Andrew Fraknoi, chairman of astronomy at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.

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Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?

From The Washington Post:

Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn't tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results.

A few search engine experts we've spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they're from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search.

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My Comment: I prefer Google and Yahoo .... and sometimes Ask.

China's First Mars Orbiter In Russia For Launch: State Media

Image: Yinghuo-1, the 110-kilogramme (242-pound) Chinese satellite.

From Space Daily:

China's first satellite to probe Mars has been transported to Russia for a launch later this year, state media reported Thursday.

Yinghuo-1, the 110-kilogramme (242-pound) Chinese satellite, is scheduled to be launched along with Russia's "Phobos Explorer" aboard a Zenit rocket in October after final testing, the Beijing News said.

After entering Mars' orbit -- 10 to 11 months later -- the orbiter will probe the Martian space environment, with a special focus on what happened to the water that appears to have once been abundant on the planet's surface.

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The Truth About Airplane Turbulence

(Photograph courtesy of NASA Langley Research Center)

From Popular Mechanics:

Rough air injured more than two dozen airline passengers this week, but that's just one unavoidable risk you take while flying. Or is it? Our primer explains the three kinds of airplane turbulence, and what you can do to stay safe on a plane.

It's an unpleasant but familiar experience: You're cruising along at 30,000 feet when turbulence seems to yank the airplane out from under you. If you're like some of the 26 injured passengers on Continental Airlines Flight 128 last Monday (or the two people on Delta Airlines Flight 2871 last Tuesday) and you're not buckled in when this happens, you could meet the ceiling with unpleasant results.

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PHOTOS: World's Largest Telescope Unveiled

From National Geographic:

August 6, 2009--A low-hanging sun brightens the fields around the dome of the Gran Telescopio Canarias, or GTC, the latest addition to the handful of Earth-based optical telescopes designed to study the heavens.

Crowds gathered last week on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands--a Spanish territory--to watch Spanish King Juan Carlos inaugurate the U.S. $180-million GTC, which is co-owned by Spain, Mexico, and the University of Florida in the U.S.

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Shuttle Astronauts Practice Launch Pad Escape

The space shuttle Discovery lifts off (Reuters: Scott Audette)

From Yahoo News/Space.com:

Seven astronauts climbed aboard NASA's space shuttle Discovery Friday for a vital drill to practice escaping from the spacecraft at the launch pad and go over plans for their late August blast off.

Clad in bright orange pressure suits, the astronauts strapped into Discovery at NASA's seaside Kennedy Space Center in Florida and rehearsed the last few hours before liftoff before scurrying out the shuttle's hatch to a set of baskets designed to zip down a 1,200-foot slide wire away from the launch pad in the event of an emergency.

The exercise capped a three-day training session to give Discovery's astronauts some hands-on experience with the spacecraft before their planned Aug. 25 launch to the International Space Station.

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Why ARE So Many Planes Falling Out Of The Sky? A Spate Of Disastrous Crashes Reveals One Terrifying Common Flaw...

Some of the debris from the missing Air France flight was eventually recovered

From the Daily Mail:

Three hours into the flight, none of the 216 passengers would have had any reason to be concerned. As the dinner plates in business class were being cleared away, the beaches of northern Brazil, 35,000ft below, were slipping past at 550mph. Some of the passengers might have ordered an after-dinner drink, others might have been crawling beneath their blankets, hoping for a few hours' sleep.

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San Diego Zoo's Giant Panda, Bai Yun, Gives Birth To A Healthy Cub

From The L.A. Times:

Late last month, the San Diego Zoo announced that its resident female giant panda, Bai Yun, was pregnant. Pandas' reproductive systems are still largely a mystery to researchers, so even zoo staff, who'd been monitoring Bai Yun extremely closely, didn't know when she would give birth.

Today just before 5 a.m., Bai Yun gave birth to what the zoo's senior research technician Suzanne Hall called a "vigorous, squawking" cub. For about 24 hours prior to the birth, Bai Yun had been restless, alternating between sleep and bouts of nest-building, Hall wrote on the zoo's blog. The cub's gender is not yet known.

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Twitter Continues to Battle DDoS Attack

From PC World:

More than two days after experiencing a complete outage as a result of a distribute denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook are still battling a surge in traffic related to the attack. Twitter has taken some steps to mitigate the spike in traffic and ensure that the site is not knocked offline again, but some of those steps are having an impact on third-party tools that link to Twitter through API's (application programming interface).

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More Accurate Weather Forecasts Coming Soon

Queen's University Belfast engineers Raymond Dickie (L) and Professor Robert Cahill (R) are pictured with their new filter, that for the first time, will give scientists access to a completely new range of data, leading to improved accuracy in weather forecasting. (Credit: Queen's University Belfast Media Services)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2009) — More accurate global weather forecasts and a better understanding of climate change are in prospect, thanks to a breakthrough by engineers at Queen's University Belfast's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT).

The ECIT team has developed a high performance electronic device -- known as a dual polarized Frequency Selective Surface filter -- that is to be used in future European Space Agency (ESA) missions.

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How Fast Can Sprinters Go?

From Live Science:

Well, maybe Usain Bolt was right after all. As discussed in our Physiology of Speed story, Bolt predicted he could run 100 meters in 9.54 seconds, lowering his own world record of 9.69 seconds.

Now, researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands say he could shave another 3/100ths of a second off and hit the tape at 9.51 seconds.

Using the "extreme value theory," Professor of Statistics John Einmahl and former student Sander Smeets have calculated the fastest possible times for men and women. Between 1991 and 2008, they chronicled the best times for 762 male sprinters and 469 female sprinters. They did not trust the data prior to 1991 as possibly being tainted by doping athletes (not that's its gotten much better since then.)

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Extinction Hits 'Whole Families'

From The BBC:

Whole "chunks of life" are lost in extinction events, as related species vanish together, say scientists.

A study in the journal Science shows that extinctions tend to "cluster" on evolutionary lineages - wiping out species with a common ancestor.

The finding is based on an examination of past extinctions, but could help current conservation efforts.

Researchers say that this phenomenon can result in the loss of an entire branch of the "tree of life".

The message for modern conservation, say the authors, is that some groups are more vulnerable to extinction than others, and the focus should be on the lineages most at risk.

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Fast-Spinning Black Holes Might Reveal All

Image: Spinning away in space (Image: David A. Aguilar (CfA))

From New Scientist:

IT IS the ultimate cosmic villain: space and time come to an abrupt end in its presence and the laws of physics break down. Now it seems a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon.

In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose postulated that every singularity, or black hole, must be shrouded by an event horizon from which nothing, including light, can escape. His Cosmic Censorship Conjecture has it that singularities are always hidden.

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Apollo Led To Cosmic Shift In Human Condition

The Earth is photographed, seemingly rising up from behind the Moon, by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders in December 1968. Credit: NASA

From Cosmos:

One of the many legacies of the Apollo program was the way it caused an extraordinary, enduring – and, for some, troubling – change in how we perceived the universe and our place in it.

Before Apollo, the Moon was distant and aloof, a symbol of everything that is unattainable, a place of dreams, an object of superstition and veneration.

After being explored by Apollo 11 on July 20 1969, the Moon's enigma was stripped away. Human willpower and the rigour of science revealed it to be an arid, airless, inhospitable rock for which there was little use as a resource.

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How Lice Thwarted Napoleon's Invasion of Russia

Napoleon's failed 1812 invasion of Russia has long been blamed on the weather. But a new theory argues that body lice were to blame. DPA

From Der Spiegel:

His invasion of Russia failed miserably, leaving a trail of corpses from Moscow all the way to Paris. In a new book, one historian blames not the wintry march but the spread of "war plague" -- typhus -- through Napoleon's Grand Army.

The fate of Napoleon's Grand Army was sealed long before the first shot was fired. In the spring of 1812, more than 600,000 men marched towards Russia under the command of the diminutive Corsican -- an army larger than the population of Paris at the time.

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