Sunspots Linked To Pacific Rain

From The BBC:

A study has shown how sunspots could affect climate in the Pacific.

Writing in the journal Science, the international team detailed how the 11-year sunspot cycle might influence the amount of rain falling on the ocean.

It is hoped the findings will lead to better models for regional climate predictions.

The authors emphasised the findings "cannot be used to explain recent global warming because of the trend over the past 30 years".

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Scientists Find 'Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch'

SEAPLEX researchers spotted a large net tangled with plastic in the "garbage patch." (Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2009) — Scientists have just completed an unprecedented journey into the vast and little-explored "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch."

On the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX), researchers got the first detailed view of plastic debris floating in a remote ocean region.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

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More Wind Power: Not So Simple

From Live Science:

By 2030 the Department of Energy wants 20 percent of electricity produced in the United States to be generated by wind. Wind currently generates less than 1 percent of the country's electricity, so the increase will require the number of new wind turbine installations to jump from 2,000 to 7,000 per year, according to the DOE.

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U.S. Senate Bill Will Give Control Of The Internet To The White House In The Event Of A National Security Emergency

Bill Would Give President Emergency Control Of Internet -- CNET

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

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My Comment: If this does not give you a cold chill down your spine .... nothing will.

In my case, I am dependent on the web for my information and communication. Any interruption will be catastrophic to me professionally as well as personally.

But I know that in the event of a national security emergency .... my concerns will be thrown out the window. I can easily the Government simply cutting off the web to the public and/or severely limiting its use. China already has some form of control over the web for its citizens, and I am sure that Iran wished it had a better handle on its access to the web. For the U.S. .... this control will become fact within a year.

Milk Was The World's First Superfood

Woman drinking milk the first superfood. Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph

Milk was the world’s first “superfood”, claim scientists, who believe that it helped prehistoric families inhabit harsh northern climes.

British researchers believe that humans first evolved into milk drinkers 7,500 years ago in the Balkans and used the ability to populate northern Europe, including Britain.

At the time, the north was very inhospitable, being cold and damp and covered in forests. Settlers would die if a crop failed.

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Apple's Snow Leopard Reviewed

A detail of the Snow Leopard desktop. Photograph: Apple

From The Guardian:

The Guardian's comprehensive review of Apple's new Snow Leopard OS.

Mac OS X 10.6 – aka Snow Leopard – will be released tomorrow. The truth is that it doesn't contain hundreds of big new features to entice you into upgrading – but it does have one that everyone will appreciate: speed.

Snow Leopard is, in fact, blisteringly fast. Booting is quicker, waking from sleep is quicker, and, of course, launching applications is quicker than if you're using Leopard.

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Physicists Successfully Predict Stock Exchange Plunge

Predicting the drop (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

WITH 20/20 hindsight, financial crashes seem inevitable, yet we never see them coming. Now a team of physicists and financiers have bucked the trend by successfully predicting a steep fall in the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Their model, which employs concepts from the physics of complex atomic systems, was developed by Didier Sornette of the Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich, Switzerland, and Wei-Xing Zhou of the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. The idea is that if a plot of the logarithm of the market's value over time deviates upwards from a straight line, it's a clear warning that people are investing simply because the market is rising rather than paying heed to the intrinsic worth of companies. By projecting the trend, the team can predict when growth will become unsustainable and the market will crash.

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IBM Scientists Take First Close-Up Image Of A Single Molecule

Pentacene, Up Close: IBM Research - Zurich

From Popular Science:

As part of a greater effort to someday build computing elements at an atomic scale, IBM scientists in Zurich have taken the highest-resolution image ever of an individual molecule using non-contact atomic force microscopy. Performed in an ultrahigh vacuum at 5 degrees Kelvin, scientists were able to "to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule for the first time," a feat necessary for the further development of atomic scale electronic building blocks.

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Europe Looks To Buy Soyuz Craft

A Soyuz craft has three seats versus the shuttle's seven.

From The BBC:

Europe is seeking to maintain flight opportunities for its astronauts by buying Soyuz spacecraft from Russia.

The European Space Agency (Esa) has asked Moscow if it is possible to increase the production of the craft from four to five a year.

Esa could then buy its own vehicle, perhaps with the Canadians who are also looking for more seat opportunities.

The expected retirement of US shuttles in 2010/11 means fewer humans will be going into space in the coming years.

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‘Peak Oil’ Is A Waste Of Energy

From The New York Times:

REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).

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Extrasolar Hot Jupiter: The Planet That 'Shouldn’t Exist'

Artist's impression shows a gas-giant exoplanet transiting across the face of its star.
(Credit: ESA/C. Carreau)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — A planet has been discovered with ten times the mass of Jupiter, but which orbits its star in less than one Earth-day.

The discovery, reported in this week’s Nature by Coel Hellier, of Keele University in the UK, and colleagues, poses a challenge to our understanding of tidal interactions in planetary systems.

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Rat Race: New Evidence That Running Is Addictive

Serious runners know the feeling, a sense of never-ending endurance that comes on a long run. But is it good for you? The sensation may be addictive, the new study finds. Image credit: Stockxpert

From Live Science:

Just as there is the endorphin rush of a "runner's high," there can also be the valley of despair when something prevents avid runners from getting their daily fix of miles.

Now, researchers at Tufts University may have confirmed this addiction by showing that an intense running regimen in rats can release brain chemicals that mimic the same sense of euphoria as opiate use. They propose that moderate exercise could be a "substitute drug" for human heroin and morphine addicts.

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NASA Aborts Critical Rocket Test

The five-segment solid rocket motor for Ares I. Credit: NASA

From Technology Review:

The first full-scale test of the booster for NASA's Ares I rocket was called off because of a power failure.

Today NASA was supposed to conduct the first full-scale test of the motor for the first stage of its future space rocket, Ares I. The test, at NASA partner Alliant Techsystems, was in Utah at 3:00 P.M. EST and was intended to last two minutes. The goal was to obtain data on thrust, roll control, acoustics, and vibrations to aid engineers in designing Ares I. But the test was scrubbed 20 seconds before ignition of the 154-foot motor, which was anchored to the ground horizontally. The problem: failure of a power unit that drives hydraulic tilt controls for the rocket's nozzle, according to a local report. The static firing test of the motor has not yet been rescheduled.

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Weather Supercomputer Used To Predict Climate Change Is One Of Britain's Worst Polluters

The computer used 1.2 megawatts to run - enough to power 1,000 homes

From The Daily Mail:

The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain's worst polluters.

The massive machine - the UK's most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory - was installed in the Met Office's headquarters in Exeter, Devon.

It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run - enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

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Climate Change 'To Cost More Than £300 Billion'

Oxfam staged an underwater family to highlight the risk of sea rises due to climate change.

From The Telegraph:

The world will have to spend £300 billion, three times as much as previously thought, adapting to the effects of climate change, scientists have said.

The UN originally said it would cost just £25 to £105 billion ($40-170 billion), or the cost of about three Olympic Games per year, from 2030 to pay for the sea defences, increase in deaths and damage to infrastructure caused by global warming.

However a new study by leading scientific body the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London estimated it will cost more than triple that amount per annum.

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Laughing Gas Is Biggest Threat To Ozone

From The Telegraph:

It's no joke - laughing gas is now the biggest threat to the Earth's ozone layer, scientists have said.

Nitrous oxide, better known as the dental anaesthetic "laughing gas", has replaced CFCs as the most potent destroyer of ozone in the upper atmosphere, a study has shown.

Unlike CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), once extensively used in refrigerators, emissions of the gas are not limited by any international agreement.

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Girls Are Primed To Fear Spiders

Women are more likely to be fearful of spiders (Image: Donna Day/Getty)

From New Scientist:

The sight of eight long black legs scuttling over the floor makes some people scream and run – and women are four times more likely to take fright than men. Now a study suggests that females are genetically predisposed to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals.

David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that baby girls only 11 months old rapidly start to associate pictures of spiders with fear. Baby boys remain blithely indifferent to this connection.

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Sunspots Stir Oceans

Image from NASA

From Nature News:

Variations in the Sun's brightness may have a big role in Pacific precipitation.

Computer simulations are showing how tiny variations in the Sun's brightness can have a big influence on weather above the Pacific Ocean.

The simulations match observations that show precipitation in the eastern Pacific varies with the Sun's brightness over an 11-year cycle. However, the model does not indicate a relationship between solar activity and the rise in global temperature over the past century.

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Tiny Ancient Shells -- 80,000 Years Old -- Point To Earliest Fashion Trend

Perforated Nassarius gibbosulus from archaeological layers dated to between 73,400 and 91,500 years ago at Taforalt. (Credit: Image courtesy of d'Errico/Vanhaeren)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — Shell beads newly unearthed from four sites in Morocco confirm early humans were consistently wearing and potentially trading symbolic jewelry as early as 80,000 years ago. These beads add significantly to similar finds dating back as far as 110,000 in Algeria, Morocco, Israel and South Africa, confirming these as the oldest form of personal ornaments. This crucial step towards modern culture is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A team of researchers recovered 25 marine shell beads dating back to around 70,000 to 85,000 years ago from sites in Morocco, as part of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme 'Origin of Man, Language and Languages'. The shells have man-made holes through the centre and some show signs of pigment and prolonged wear, suggesting they were worn as jewelry.

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How to Swat a Mosquito

An Aedes aegypti mosquito feeding on blood. Credit: USDA

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (ISNS) -- Spring this year was unusually wet in the eastern half of the United States, with heavy rains falling from everywhere from Kansas and Missouri to New York City and Washington, D.C., the National Weather Service reported -- and with those rains has come a bumper crop of mosquitoes.

According to Jeannine Dorothy, a Maryland state entomologist, the wetter than usual spring means more mosquito eggs -- and more of the adult critters to swat.

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