Black Hole Parasites Explain Cosmic Flashes

From New Scientist:

SOME of the brightest flashes in the universe may be the result of black holes burrowing into stars and devouring them from inside.

The flashes are known as gamma-ray bursts because most of their energy is in the form of high-energy radiation, including gamma rays and X-rays. The longer flashes, lasting at least a few seconds, have long been thought to signal the deaths of massive stars that have run out of fuel, causing them to collapse to form black holes, unleashing powerful jets of radiation in the process.

Now an alternative explanation has been given new lease of life: a black hole may instead be an external attacker that dives into the belly of a massive star and consumes it.

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DNA May Help Build Next Generation of Chips

From Gadget Lab:

In the race to keep Moore’s Law alive, researchers are turning to an unlikely ally: DNA molecules that can be positioned on wafers to create smaller, faster and more energy-efficient chips.

Researchers at IBM have made a significant breakthrough in their quest to combine DNA strands with conventional lithographic techniques to create tiny circuit boards. The breakthrough, which allows for the DNA structures to be positioned precisely on substrates, could help shrink computer chips to about a 6-nanometer scale. Intel’s latest chips, by comparison, are on a 32-nanometer scale.

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Isotope Crisis Threatens Medical Care

Domestic source-to-be?At 10 megawatts, the University of Missouri Research Reactor is the largest university research reactor in the country. Within two months, officials there will submit a proposal to the Energy Department to build a facility that would ultimately allow domestic production of a medical isotope that's currently in critically short supply.University of Missouri Research Reactor

From Science News:

Global production of the feedstock for the leading medical-imaging isotope is low and erratic, putting health care in jeopardy.

Within the next two weeks, the vast majority of radioactive-imaging medical tests could be delayed or replaced by less desirable procedures. The reason: temporary shutdowns of Canadian and Dutch reactors that together normally provide some 70 percent of the world’s supplies of the isotope molybdenum-99 and at least 80 percent of North American supplies.

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Early Farming Methods Caused Climate Change, Say Researchers

From The Guardian:

Farmers thousands of years ago cleared land by burning forests and moved to a new area once the yields declined, say scientists.

Farmers who used "slash and burn" methods of clearing forests to grow crops thousands of years ago could have increased carbon dioxide levels enough to change the climate, researchers claimed today.

The US scientists believe that small populations released carbon emissions as they cleared large tracts of land to produce relatively meagre amounts of food.

They were much less efficient than farmers using today's agricultural practices because there were no constraints on land.

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Close Encounters... UFOs Made 600 Visits To The UK In A Single Year, According To MoD 'X-Files'

An alien ship hovers over the planet in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'

From The Daily Mail:

Hundreds of Britons had 'close encounters' with UFOs, according to previously-classified documents
released by the Ministry of Defence today.

The sightings were made between 1981 and 1996 from observers including police officers, fighter pilots and school children. They range from lights in the sky to close contact with aliens with 'lemon-shaped heads', and include detailed analysis on some of the UK's most well-known cases.

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Warming Of Arctic Current Over 30 Years Triggers Release Of Methane Gas

Researchers in Germany have found that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Oceanography Centre, Southampton)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2009) — The warming of an Arctic current over the last 30 years has triggered the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from methane hydrate stored in the sediment beneath the seabed.

Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Birmingham, Royal Holloway London and IFM-Geomar in Germany have found that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres.

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Most U.S. Money Laced With Cocaine

From Live Science:

Traces of cocaine taint up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, a new study finds.

A group of scientists tested banknotes from more than 30 cities in five countries, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, and Japan, and found "alarming" evidence of cocaine use in many areas.

U.S. and Canadian currency had the highest levels, with an average contamination rate of between 85 and 90 percent, while Chinese and Japanese currency had the lowest, between 12 and 20 percent contamination.

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Moderate Drinking 'Boosts Bones'

From The BBC:

Women who drink moderate amounts of beer may be strengthening their bones, according to Spanish researchers.

Their study of almost 1,700 women, published in the journal Nutrition, found bone density was better in regular drinkers than non-drinkers.

But the team added that plant hormones in the beer rather than the alcohol may be responsible for the effects.

Experts urged caution, warning that drinking more than two units of alcohol a day was known to harm bone health.

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Big Tropical Storms in Atlantic Hit 1,000-Year High

From ABC News:

Study Suggests Hurricane Frequency Has Increased Dramatically; Climate Change a Potential Culprit.

The people of U.S. Gulf Coast have felt unusually battered by big storms during the past few years. Now, it turns out their instincts are right.

A new report in the scientific journal Nature indicates that the last decade has seen, on average, more frequent hurricanes than any time in the last 1,000 years. The last period of similar activity occurred during the Medieval Warm Period.

The study is not definitive, but it is a unique piece of work that combines an analysis of sediment cores from inland lakes and tidal marshes with computer modeling and finds a "striking consistency" between the two, the authors suggest.

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In Galileo’s Footsteps

Galileo

From Newsweek:

For the first time in hundreds of years, the most powerful telescopes may soon come from Europe.
Galileo has been getting a lot of press lately, and no wonder. Four centuries ago this year, the Italian genius pointed his small, primitive telescope at the night sky and saw wonders nobody had imagined. His discoveries transformed our view of the heavens, but also infected astronomers with a permanent desire to peer just a bit deeper in the universe and find a few more cosmic secrets. Which is why, less than 20 years after they put the finishing touches on a generation of telescopes so big they would have made the Renaissance stargazer swoon, the astronomers are at it again. Three teams are racing to build telescopes four times wider and with up to 16 times the light gathering power than what exists now, and to have them trained on the stars by 2018.

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Augmented Reality Reveals History to Tourists

From : Science News Service

Doing virtual reality one better, a consortium of technology companies and European Union countries have created a "visual time machine" that allows tourists equipped with a smart phone to take a picture of an ancient object and then instantly review its history and see what it originally looked like.

This new technology, dubbed the "Intelligent Tourism and Cultural Information through Ubiquitous Services" (iTacitus, after the Roman historian), brings augmented reality to museums, palaces, castles and other tourist attractions, according to its developers."[Tourists] can look at a historic site and, by taking a photo or viewing it through the camera on the mobile device, be able to access much more information about it," said Luke Speller, a scientist with the BMT engineering group based in the U.K. "They are even able to visualize, in real time, how it looked at different stages in history."

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Maine’s Windkeepers: From Ship Masts To Windmills

Mike Cianchette, operations manager of the Stetson Mountain wind project, scans the mountain ridge while making inspections on top of a 300-foot tall windmill, in Range 8, Township 3, Maine. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Today, winds help turn on the lights, run TVs and power washers, dryers and ovens in thousands of homes all over New England.

Silent surroundings almost tease the ears as clouds skitter across the top of this eastern corner of Maine. The wind, barely audible, swishes through beech and fir trees crowding the hills of an area so remote it’s part of the state’s Unorganized Territory.

Along the rounded ridge of Stetson Mountain, wisps of wind gain a whoosh-whoosh cadence as they push into motion mammoth blades at the tops of towers reaching hundreds of feet into the air.

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Cash In On Twitter -- But Beware

From CBS News:

(CBS) Twitter was once a place for people to stay in touch with each other and spread information, but now the site's taking on the role of marketplace.

The possibility of making money in 140 characters or less on Twitter has people atwitter about making big bucks via tweets. But is it really possible?

CBS News Science and Technology Correspondent Daniel Sieberg discussed it -- and ways others may try to cash in on you -- on "The Early Show" Friday.

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Cosmos: Probably The Greatest Science Documentary In The Universe

Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage provides a complete guide to life, the universe and everything.

From The Guardian:

Almost 30 years after it first aired, Carl Sagan's cosmic travel guide still educates, entertains and inspires awe.

I never got to watch Carl Sagan's epic science documentary Cosmos as a child. I was at boarding school in 1980 when it was released, so my TV watching was restricted. I've heard science journalist colleagues talk about the series almost with reverence, describing Sagan's commentary as "poetry". The 13 one-hour episodes of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage have just been re-released, digitally remastered and with updates on scientific progress in the quarter century that has passed since the series was created. Would it live up to such high expectations?

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Send ET A Text Message From Earth

From Yahoo News/Space:

Here's a truly long-distance message...one aimed more than 20 light-years away.

A new Web site in Australia is gathering text messages from around the world, all to be beamed to a distant alien planet called Gliese 581d.

The clock is ticking to submit text messages of no longer than 160 characters – perhaps a signal that extraterrestrial life may have a case of attention deficit disorder. The project - called "Hello From Earth" - (http://www.HelloFromEarth.net) ends Aug. 24.

Once the communiques are amassed, they will be transmitted from NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla.

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What Came Before The Big Bang?

Mehau Kulyk / Science Photo Library / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Even as a boy watching the first moon landing on TV, Brian Clegg remembers wondering, "How did it all begin?" In his latest book, Before the Big Bang, the Cambridge-educated writer examines the theories that physicists and philosophers alike have put forth to explain how we got here. TIME spoke with Clegg about science as a social network, thinking outside of the box without losing his mind, and using Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explain Einstein.

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India Launches Bhuvan, Rival To Google Earth

From Times Online:

India has launched a rival to Google Earth, the search engine's hugely popular satellite imagery service.

The online tool, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), has been developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). Its debut comes as India redoubles its efforts to reap profits from its 45-year-old state-sponsored space programme, criticised by some as a drain on a country where 700 million people live on $US2 a day or less.

The new site also follows in the slipstream of the country's first moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, which successfully reached the lunar surface last November.

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Night-Time Photos Shed Light On Growing Economies

Bright lights, big GDP (Image: NOAA/SPL)

From New Scientist:

NIGHT-TIME images taken from kilometres above the Earth could help us better understand the economies of some of the planet's least developed countries. So say the US economists behind a method for measuring changes GDP using the intensity of street lights and other night-time lighting.

A better way of estimating GDP is badly needed, especially for poorer nations. Data collected by national governments is weak when it comes to informal sectors of the economy, such as street markets. In some countries, such as Liberia, economic information systems are so poor that meaningful data is sometimes non-existent.

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Facebook Cornering Market on E-Friends

From The Washington Post:

Fight to Own Social Media Heats Up.

Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.

Facebook's purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It's a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.

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Cave Complex Allegedly Found Under Giza Pyramids

From Discovery News:

An enormous system of caves, chambers and tunnels lies hidden beneath the Pyramids of Giza, according to a British explorer who claims to have found the lost underworld of the pharaohs.

Populated by bats and venomous spiders, the underground complex was found in the limestone bedrock beneath the pyramid field at Giza.

"There is untouched archaeology down there, as well as a delicate ecosystem that includes colonies of bats and a species of spider which we have tentatively identified as the white widow," British explorer Andrew Collins said.

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