Dogs Descended From Wolf Pack On Yangtze River

From The Telegraph:

Today's dogs are all descended from a pack of wolves tamed 16,000 years ago on the shores of the Yangtze river, according to new research.

It was previously known that the birthplace of the dog was eastern Asia but historians were not able to be more precise than that.

However, now researchers have made a number of new discoveries about the history of man's best friend - including that the dog appeared about 16,000 years ago south of the Yangtze river in China.

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We Are All Mutants Say Scientists

From The BBC:

Each of us has at least 100 new mutations in our DNA, according to research published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists have been trying to get an accurate estimate of the mutation rate for over 70 years.

However, only now has it been possible to get a reliable estimate, thanks to "next generation" technology for genetic sequencing.

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Discovery Of Novel Genes Could Unlock Mystery Of What Makes Us Uniquely Human

A baby chimp (Pan troglodytes) and his handler looking at each other.
(Credit: iStockphoto/Warwick Lister-Kaye)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2009) — Humans and chimpanzees are genetically very similar, yet it is not difficult to identify the many ways in which we are clearly distinct from chimps. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have made a crucial discovery of genes that have evolved in humans after branching off from other primates, opening new possibilities for understanding what makes us uniquely human.

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What Happens When an Astronaut Sneezes?

No kidding! This CDC photograph captured a sneeze in progress, revealing the plume of salivary droplets as they are expelled in a large cone-shaped array from this man's open mouth. The flu virus can spread in this manner and survive long enough on a doorknob or countertop to infect another person. It dramatically illustrating the reason you should cover your mouth when sneezing or coughing to protect others from germ exposure, health officials say. It’s also why you need to wash your hands a lot, on the assumptions others don’t always cover their sneezes. Credit: CDC/James Gathany .

From Live Science:

Best to do the sneezing inside a shuttle or the space station, not on a spacewalk, when it can get real messy, with goo sprayed all over the inside of the helmet's "windshield."

Lately astronauts have been complaining about stuffy heads up there on the International Space Station. NASA doesn't think they have colds, though. Rather, the effects have more to do with pockets of carbon dioxide generated when they gather in groups, space station flight controller Heather Rarick said.

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Space Mission To Mercury: How An Ion Engine Works

Photo courtesy NASA
This image of a xenon ion engine, photographed through a port of the vacuum chamber where it was being tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the faint blue glow of charged atoms being emitted from the engine. The ion propulsion engine is the first non-chemical propulsion to be used as the primary means of propelling a spacecraft.

From The Telegraph:

The solar electric propulsion systems – or ion engines - which will power the next generation of spacecraft to Mercury and beyond are ten times more efficient than conventional rocket engines.

In an ion engine the gas xenon is pumped through a chamber where xenon atoms are stripped of an electron, becoming electrically charged ions, and drift towards two grids a millimetre apart.

The grids are fed with two thousand volts – in space this power will come from paper-thin solar panels spanning 26m. As the ions pass through the electrified grids they accelerate to up to 50km a second and shoot from the rear in a parallel beam.

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First Baby Born From New Egg-Screening Technique

From Breitbart/AFP:

Meet Oliver, the first baby in the world born using a new egg-screening technique that could double the odds of an implanted embryo taking hold in the womb, unveiled by British experts on Wednesday.

Baby Oliver was born in Britain to a 41-year-old woman after 13 failed attempts at in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

The new technique, called array comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH), makes it possible to ensure eggs have a normal number of chromosomes, boosting the likelihood of a successful pregnancy.

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Great Ball Of Fire? No, Just A 'Sun Dog' Scampering Across The Sky

Blazing light: The flash was photographed by Matthew Pinless
near his home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

From The Daily Mail:

Matthew Pinless was sure that the streak of light he spotted in the sky while walking was more likely to be a meteor than a UFO.

In fact it was neither. The blazing ball hanging above a residential street in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is thought to be a ‘sun dog’.

The phenomenon occurs when sunlight is refracted by hexagonal-shaped ice crystals in high and cirrus clouds - and is quite common, experts say.

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First Spacewalk Complete

Credit NASA

From Red Orbit:

The first spacewalk of the STS-128 mission came off without a hitch on Tuesday, as spacewalkers Danny Olivas and Nicole Stott completed all the tasks on their to-do list.

Olivas and Stott left the International Space Station at 4:49 p.m. Tuesday, and spent the next 6 hours and 35 minutes outside, working to get cargo that space shuttle Discovery will bring home ready for its return. They started with a depleted ammonia tank assembly on the P1, or port 1, segment of the station’s truss, getting it out of the way in preparation for the installation of a new tank to be installed on Thursday, during the mission’s second spacewalk. The ammonia in the tanks is used to cool the station and expel the heat generated by its residents and systems.

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Maintenance Error Causes Two-Hour Gmail Outage

From ZDNet:

Google's nearly two-hour Gmail outage yesterday was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late on Tuesday.

Gmail (Google Mail) was down from about 12:30pm PDT (8:30pm BST) Tuesday to about 2:30pm PDT (10:30pm BST), affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

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Finding Smells That Repel

Michael C. Witte

From The Wall Street Journal:

If you're one of those people whom mosquitoes tend to favor, maybe it's because you aren't sufficiently stressed-out.

Insects have very keen powers of smell that direct them to their targets. But for researchers trying to figure out what attracts or repels the pests, sorting through the 300 to 400 distinct chemical odors that the human body produces has proved daunting.

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Keeping Genes Out Of Terrorists' Hands

Photo: Low standards could mean that hazardous genes get through screening more easily. W. Philpott/Reuters

From Nature:

Gene-synthesis industry at odds over how to screen DNA orders.

A standards war is brewing in the gene-synthesis industry. At stake is the way that the industry screens orders for hazardous toxins and genes, such as pieces of deadly viruses and bacteria. Two competing groups of companies are now proposing different sets of screening standards, and the results could be crucial for global biosecurity.

"If you have a company that persists with a lower standard, you can drag the industry down to a lower level," says lawyer Stephen Maurer of the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying how the industry is developing responsible practices. "Now we have a standards war that is a race to the bottom."

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My Comment: This is a topic that I am ignorant of. But my brother .... who has a Doctorate in Chemistry and who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry exploring these topics for he past 20 years tells me to be afraid .... be very afraid.

Hmmmm .... OK .... I am afraid.

Global Warming And The Sun -- A Commentary

From L.A. Times:

Recent studies seem to show that there's more to climate change than we know.

Assuming there are no sunspots today, a 96-year record will have been broken: 53 days without any solar blemishes, giant magnetic disruptions on the sun's surface that cause solar flares. That would be the fourth-longest stretch of stellar solar complexion since 1849. Wait, it gets even more exciting.

During what scientist call the Maunder Minimum -- a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 -- the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice skated on the Thames, and New Yorkers (then New Amsterdamers) sometimes walked over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

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World's Smallest Semiconductor Laser Heralds New Era In Optical Science

Image: The schematic on the left illustrates light being compressed and sustained in the 5 nanometer gap -- smaller than a protein molecule -- between a nanowire and underlying silver surface. To the right is an electron microscope image of the hybrid design shown in the schematic. (Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang Lab, UC Berkeley)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world's smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

This breakthrough, described in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature on Aug. 30, breaks new ground in the field of optics. The UC Berkeley team not only successfully squeezed light into such a tight space, but found a novel way to keep that light energy from dissipating as it moved along, thereby achieving laser action.

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Why Pacific Hurricanes Hit The Americas So Rarely

Hurricane Jimena was heading west-northwest toward Mexico’s Baja Peninsula on August 30, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image. Near the time of the image, the storm had sustained winds of 140 mph, making it a Category 4 storm. Clouds from the storm stretch out over western Mexico. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

From Live Science:

Stories of hurricane winds and rain lashing the coasts of Florida, Louisiana and other southeastern states pop up in the news constantly during the summer, but warnings of Pacific storms such as Jimena are few and far between.

In fact, only one hurricane is thought to have ever struck California, and that was clear back in 1858. Could it happen again? Not impossible, but also extremely unlikely in any given year.

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The Race To The Higgs Boson: LHC Versus Tevatron

Tevatron Fermilab

From Popular Science:

While the LHC's in the shop for repairs from its massive breakdown last September, an older particle accelerator might beat them to finding the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle thought to give matter mass.

At a conference last week, Tevatron physicists threw down the gauntlet, vowing that by 2011, the Tevatron accelerator (located at Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago) will be able to definitively prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.

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8 Of The Most Dangerous Places (To Live) On The Planet

A monument reading "Polyus Cholada," Russian for "Pole of Cold," stands at the entrance to the city of Verkhoyansk.

From Popular Mechanics:

It’s hurricane season, a time of year when residents in vulnerable areas—like New Orleans—need to hunker down, stock up and prepare for the unforeseen. But there are other places in the world where the dangers are so great that it’s hard to believe anyone is willing to stay put and fight it out with Mother Nature. Here, we have canvassed the globe for 10 places that require fortitude, resourcefulness and a great faith in one’s DIY skills to make it through the year alive.

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Astrophysicists Puzzle Over Planet That's Too Close To Its Sun

From L.A. Times:

Completing an orbit in less than an Earth day, planet Wasp-18b should have burned up, according to accepted theory.

Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.

The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light-years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.

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Social Networking Sites Grab Big Slice Of Web Ads

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - About one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook, according to a new report.

The report by analytics firm comScore underscores the increasing prominence of social media sites in the Internet landscape and broadening acceptance of the sites by brand advertisers.

It also illustrates the increasing competition between social media sites and established Internet companies like Yahoo Inc and Time Warner Inc's AOL which have long billed themselves as the top online destinations for brand advertisers.

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5 Future Robotic Expeditions And What They Could Reveal [Slide Show]

ESA/AOES Medialab

From Scientific American:

Some are already on their way and some are still in the works, but here is what we may see from unmanned exploration of space in the coming years.

Fifty years ago this month, the Soviet Union scored a coup in the space race with a probe called Luna 2. The spacecraft, which resembled a squat, souped-up version of its cousin Sputnik, was launched on September 12, 1959, and two days later reached the lunar surface. By impacting the moon, Luna 2 became the first man-made object to land on a celestial body other than Earth.

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Fahrenheit 747: World’s Biggest Fire Extinguisher Douses L.A. County

From Autopia/Wired Science:

The deadly fires that have blackened more than 105,000 acres around Los Angeles prompted authorities to call in the world’s largest fire extinguisher — a Boeing 747 that can drop 20,000 gallons of retardant over a swath of land three miles long.

The plane made its first-ever drop in the continental United States when fire officials summoned it to the Oak Glen fire east of Los Angeles mid day on Monday. After the successful first drop, the Supertanker was called back into action Monday evening where it made further drops on the massive Station fire north of the city which grew to more than 164 square miles and threatened 10,000 homes. Nearly 2,600 firefighters from as far away as Montana are throwing everything they have at the blaze, and on Monday they called in the biggest tool in their inventory.

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