Wolves Beat Dogs on Logic Test

Wolves and dogs diverged from a common ancestor at least 15,000 years ago.
Credit: stock.xpert

From Live Science:

Wolves do better on some tests of logic than dogs, a new study found, revealing differences between the animals that scientists suspect result from dogs' domestication.

In experiments, dogs followed human cues to perform certain tasks despite evidence they could see suggesting a different strategy would be smarter, while wolves made the more logical choice based on their observations.

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Arctic Ice Proves To Be Slippery Stuff -- Commentary

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

From The Telegraph:

The extent of the sea-ice is now half a million square kilometres more than it was this time last year, says Christopher Booker.

BBC viewers were treated last week to the bizarre spectacle of Mr Ban
Ki-moon standing on an Arctic ice-floe making a series of statements so laughable that it was hard to believe such a man can be Secretary-General of the UN. Thanks to global warming, he claimed, "100 billion tons" of polar ice are melting each year, so that within 30 years the Arctic could be "ice-free". This was supported by a WWF claim that the ice is melting so fast that, by 2100, sea-levels could rise by 1.2 metres (four feet), which would lead to "floods affecting a quarter of the world".

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New England Prep School Builds Library Without Books

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said headmaster James Tracy. (Mark Wilson for The Boston Globe)

Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. -- Boston Globe

ASHBURNHAM - There are rolling hills and ivy-covered brick buildings. There are small classrooms, high-tech labs, and well-manicured fields. There’s even a clock tower with a massive bell that rings for special events.

Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

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6 Geeked-Out TV Shows We Can't Wait For

From Popular Mechanics:

Normally, we'd be sad to see summer go—but with new fall TV just around the corner, we can't get too upset. Our favorites—including Fringe, Dollhouse, Lost and Heroes—are coming back with all-new episodes, and two new series with real sci-fi promise are making their big debut. Here are the six shows that will have us couch-surfing this fall.

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My Comment: Yeah .... but Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles is not coming back.

Super-Strong German Steel Velcro: Not for Sneakers

Velcro of Steel: So strong, yet still removable TUM Institute of Metal Forming and Casting (utg)

From Popular Science:

German-created steel fasteners can withstand loads of more than 38 tons per square meter, hook and unhook without tools.

Velcro has proved plenty useful as a quick fastener on shoes and other household items, but lacks the strength to resist fiery temperatures and powerful chemicals in industrial settings. Now German scientists have taken the hook-and-loop fastener concept and developed a Superman version, called Metaklett.

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Mystery Solved! Find Out Why Google Used A Doodle Of A UFO On Its Search Engine

Doodle mystery: Google used the image of a UFO on its logo, sparking mass internet speculation and rumours on Twitter and Facebook

From The Daily Mail:

Google bamboozled its users today by displaying the symbol of a UFO on its search engine page.

The website featured the classic image of a flying saucer shining a beam of light onto the middle of the classic logo.

It usually displays images that mark anniversaries or key events on its home page but its selection this time seemed a total mystery.

Clicking on the link only led to the results for 'unexplained phenomena', adding to the confusion which soon spread around the world.

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How Old Is This Internet Thing, Again?

From The Wall Street Journal:

Poor Al Gore has been teased mercilessly for supposedly claiming he invented the Internet.

But that’s not the only portion of cyber-history that’s in dispute.

Media outlets are celebrating Sept. 2 as the 40th anniversary of the day the Internet was invented. Security company Symantec even chose to ring the day in by creating a top-10 list of the most notorious online threats, with No. 1 as 2000’s “I Love You” worm, which infected an estimated 5 million computers.

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Astronauts Take a Break From Busy Space Mission

From Space.com:

Astronauts took a hard-earned break from work aboard the International Space Station Friday as they hit the midpoint of a busy mission to boost the outpost's science gear and supplies.

The 13 astronauts aboard the docked station and shuttle Discovery had a half-day off from their joint mission, time enough to gaze down at their home planet or simply enjoy flying in weightlessness.

"Sometimes, you've just got to look out the window and enjoy the view," shuttle astronaut Jose Hernandez told reporters in a televised interview this week. "It's just breathtaking and I can't describe it with words. It's just indescribable."

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Chemical Neurowarfare

From Ryan Sager - Neuroworld:

Imagine a future where the Iranian regime didn’t need to spend weeks in the streets beating, killing, and jailing protesters to put down the reform movement. Imagine in this future that the beatings would be replaced with something gentler, but ultimately more sinister: non-lethal, weaponized drugs designed to decrease aggression and increase trust.

That’s the future imagined and fretted over in an opinion piece (non-gated, samizdat version here) and editorial (PDF) in the current issue of Nature.

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My Comment: Chemical weapons .... but with a twist. This is a fascinating article, and probably more real than we think.

This reminds me of an article that was published in The Telegraph last year titled .... Future wars 'to be fought with mind drugs'.

50 Things That Are Being Killed By The Internet

The web is changing the way we work, play and think Photo: REUTTERS

From The Telegraph:

The internet has wrought huge changes on our lives – both positive and negative – in the fifteen years since its use became widespread.

Tasks that once took days can be completed in seconds, while traditions and skills that emerged over centuries have been made all but redundant.

The internet is no respecter of reputations: innocent people have seen their lives ruined by viral clips distributed on the same World Wide Web used by activists to highlight injustices and bring down oppressive regimes

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Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

This is an impression of a "spin spaghetti" of Dirac strings.
(Credit: HZB / D.J.P. Morris & A. Tennant)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2009) — Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden, St. Andrews, La Plata and Oxford, for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material.

Results of their research are being published in the journal Science.

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Your Brain Is Organized Like a City

Brains and cities, as they get bigger, do so based on similar mathematical rules. Image credit: Credit: Rensselaer/Mark Changizi

From Live Science:

A big city might seem chaotic, but somehow everything gets where it needs to go and the whole thing manages to function on most days, even if it all seems a little worse for the wear at the end of the day. Sound a bit like your brain?

Neurobiologist Mark Changizi sees strikingly real similarities between the two.

Changizi and colleagues propose that cities and brains are organized similarly, and that the invisible hand of evolution has shaped the brain just as people have indirectly shaped cities. It's all driven by the need for organization and efficiency, the researchers say.

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A Giant Fingerprint On Mars: High Res Camera Reveals Details Just 3ft Across On Red Planet

(Click Image To Enlarge)
Planet print: This picture was taken in a crater near Fan in the Coprates Region of Mars. The giant fingerprint-like shape was created by possible evaporites - sediments formed by the evaporation of water

From The Daily Mail:

This striking range of dunes and craters appears to form a giant cosmic fingerprint on the surface of the Red Planet.

Scientists believe the undulating ground reveals global climate changes that took place on Mars over the past few million years.

The area is in the Coprates region, a large trough that forms part of the Valles Marineris - a system of canyons stretching thousands of miles along Mars' equator.

The whitish areas could be evaporites - mineral sediments left behind when salt water evaporates. Such deposits would be of great interest as they indicate potential habitats for past martian life.

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Astronauts Continue Rigging ISS For Science

From Aviation Week:

The 13 astronauts and cosmonauts on the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station took some time off Friday before plunging into preparations for the third and final spacewalk of the docked portion of their mission.

Halfway through the 13-day STS-128 mission, the two crews had accomplished two of their most important tasks - delivering NASA astronaut Stott as the replacement for Tim Kopra, also of NASA, on the space station crew, and swapping out a depleted ammonia-tank with a fresh unit containing 600 pounds of fresh coolant.

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Prehistoric Hand Axes Older Than Once Thought

Oldest Old World Tools A collection of prehistoric stone hand axes appears above. When first discovered, most researchers thought that the hand axes were made between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. However, a new study contends that they are in fact much older -- possibly the oldest hand axes in Europe. Michael Walker

From Discovery News:

Sept. 3, 2009 -- Europe's Stone Age has taken an edgy turn. A new analysis finds that human ancestors living in what is now Spain fashioned double-edged stone cutting tools as early as 900,000 years ago, almost twice as long ago as previous estimates for this technological achievement in Europe.

If confirmed, the new dates support the idea that the manufacture and use of teardrop-shaped stone implements, known as hand axes, spread rapidly from Africa into Europe and Asia beginning roughly 1 million years ago, say geologist Gary Scott and paleontologist Luis Gibert, both of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California.

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Quantum Computer Slips Onto Chips

From the BBC:

Researchers have devised a penny-sized silicon chip that uses photons to run Shor's algorithm - a well-known quantum approach - to solve a maths problem.

The algorithm computes the two numbers that multiply together to form a given figure, and has until now required laboratory-sized optical computers.

This kind of factoring is the basis for a wide variety of encryption schemes.

The work, reported in Science, is rudimentary but could easily be scaled up to handle more complex computing.

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How 20 Popular Websites Looked When They Launched

1. Google.com - launched in 1996

From The Telegraph:

From Google to youtube, from craigslist to flickr - how some of today's biggest sites looked back in the early days of their existence.

Remember the days when the word Google was not interchangeable with internet? Or when every site seemed to have a Netscape icon on it? Or when Flash was still something you cleaned your floor with? Then you were clearly using the web in the mid to late 1990s when pages were rudimentary affairs containing lists of links and information.

Thanks to the waybackmachine internet archive, we're still able to see some of the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 pioneers looked in their earliest incarnations.

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AT&T Customers Speak Out Over Poor Service

From ZDNet:

Following yesterday’s piece on how the iPhone (or, more specifically, iPhone users) are strangling the AT&T network, I’ve been hit by a deluge of emails from customers giving me their side of the story.

It’s not a pretty picture for AT&T. Here’s just a small selection of quotes I received:

“I can’t even get service at my own home.”

“MY iPhone drops calls at least 5 times a day, sometimes 5 times on the same attempted conversation.”

“I live in Boulder but feel like I live in the middle of Montana where I can only get service by hiking the local hill.”

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Super-Fast Computers Of The Future

Prof. Anatoly Zayats from Queen's University Belfast's Centre for Nanostructured Media. (Credit: Image courtesy of Queen's University, Belfast)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2009) — Computers which use light to process large amounts of data faster than ever before are just one of many groundbreaking potential applications of a new £6 million research programme at Queen’s University Belfast and Imperial College London, launched September 1, 2009.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is funding the two universities to establish a world-leading research programme on the fundamental science of so-called ‘nanoplasmonic devices’.

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Tipping Points: What Wall Street and Nature Have in Common

From Live Science:

When a big change is coming – be it in ocean circulation patterns, wildlife populations, or even the global economy – it is often heralded by telltale signs, scientists have found.

In many man-made and natural systems, conditions reach a tipping point when a major transition occurs and the system shifts from one state to another. Now researchers say they can begin to predict these tipping points by searching for universal early warning signs.

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