Widespread Occurrence Of Intersex Bass Found In U.S. Rivers

USGS researcher examining bass for abnormalities in the field. (Credit: Jo Ellen Hinck / U.S. Geological Survey)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2009) — Intersex in smallmouth and largemouth basses is widespread in numerous river basins throughout the United States is the major finding of the most comprehensive and large-scale evaluation of the condition, according to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research published online in Aquatic Toxicology.

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Electricity Harvested From Trees

This custom circuit is able to store up enough voltage from trees to be able to run a low-power sensor. Credit: University of Washington.

From Live Science:

Researchers have figured out a way to plug into the power generated by trees.

Scientists have known for some time that plants can conduct electricity. In fact, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants can pack up to 200 millivolts of electrical power. A millivolt is one-thousandth of a volt.

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Video / The Evolution of Swine Flu

Congress Faces NASA’s Shaky Future

From Wired Science:

Congress took its first crack at coming up with a plan for NASA in the wake of an independent report that could mean big changes at the agency — or not.

The Augustine committee, as it’s known because of its head, Norm Augustine, sent over a summary of its findings to the Office for Science and Technology Policy last week. It contained five options for human spaceflight — four of them entailing major changes for the Bush-era Constellation program. All of the plans would require upping NASA’s annual budget by $3 billion a year.

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Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

Lukasz Laska

From Scientific American:

A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people.

As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French.

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Google Explains Street View to Wary Japanese With--What Else?--Adorable Stop-Motion Animation

From Popular Science:

Google Japan's new video aims to alleviate privacy concerns among Japanese residents.

Fret no longer, citizens of Japan, about Google's camera vans exposing the awkward moments of your private lives to millions via Street View. Because here, see? All that's behind its scary secrets is an impossibly adorable anthropomorphic camera truck in a wonderland of children's toys. Dawww, its bobbing camera head just snapped a photo of your car! It's so cute!

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Antarctica's Hidden Plumbing Revealed

From The New Scientist:

THE first complete map of the lakes beneath Antarctica's ice sheets reveals the continent's secret water network is far more dynamic than we thought. This could be acting as a powerful lubricant beneath glaciers, contributing to sea level rise.

Unlike previous lake maps, which are confined to small regions, Ian Joughin at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues mapped 124 subglacial lakes across Antarctica using lasers on NASA's ICESat satellite (see map).

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Scale Of Gorilla Poaching Exposed

From The BBC:

An undercover investigation has found that up to two gorillas are killed and sold as bushmeat each week in Kouilou, a region of the Republic of Congo.

The apes' body parts are then taken downriver and passed on to traders who sell them in big-city markets.

Conducted by the conservation group Endangered Species International, the investigation helps expose the extent of gorilla poaching in the country.

It fears hundreds more gorillas may be taken each year outside the region.

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Information-Rich And Attention-Poor

From The Globe And Mail:

Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision.

Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.

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Thunderstorm On Saturn Is A Record-Buster

The moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet.

From AFP:

PARIS — A tempest that erupted on Saturn in January has become the Solar System's longest continuously observed lightning storm, astronomers reported on Tuesday.

The storm broke out in "Storm Alley," a region 35 degrees south of the ringed giant's equator, researchers told the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Thunderstorms there can be as big as 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) across.

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New Virus From Rats Can Kill 80 Per Cent Of Human Victims

From Sydney Morning Herald:

A PREVIOUSLY unknown virus that killed four of the five people it struck in an outbreak in South Africa last year has been identified as part of a family of viruses humans can catch from rats.

The virus, named Lujo, is an arenavirus that over nine days caused rash, fever, muscle pain, diarrhoea, severe bleeding, vomiting, organ failure and death, said Nivesh Sewlall, who treated the first patient at Johannesburg's Morningside MediClinic Hospital. He reported the findings at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco yesterday.

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Wine Tasting: Expectations Influence Sense Of Taste, Tests Show

Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown.

Many a wine grower trembles at the prospect of a visit from Robert Parker, one of the most famous wine critics in the world. His “Parker Points” have a similar impact to the Roman Emperor’s thumb, deciding the success of a winery instead of life and death. The extent to which product information like Parker’s ratings influence the consumer is revealed in a study by Michael Siegrist, Professor of Consumer Behavior at the Institute for Environmental Decisions, and his post-doc Marie-Eve Cousin from ETH Zurich, which was published in the journal Appetite.

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Do Brains Shrink As We Age?

From Live Science:

As we get older, our brains get smaller, or at least that's what many scientists believe. But a new study contradicts this assumption, concluding that when older brains are "healthy" there is little brain deterioration, and that only when people experience cognitive decline do their brains show significant signs of shrinking.

The results suggest that many previous studies may have overestimated how much our brains shrink as we age, possibly because they failed to exclude people who were starting to develop brain diseases, such as dementia, that would lead to brain decay, or atrophy.

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Google Book Search: Why It Matters

From Times Online:

European publishers and copyright holders gathered in Brussels on Monday to submit their opinions to a European Commission hearing on the American Google Book Search settlement.

In a nutshell, the situation is this: Google has embarked on a project to digitise hundreds of thousands of out-of-print and out-of-copyright books in the United States.

Some of these works are still technically in copyright, and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers took Google to court. A proposed settlement was reached last year, under which Google will essentially agree to pay royalties to anyone whose book they inadvertently put on line.

The settlement will be ratified in a Manhattan court on October 7 this year, by which time any European reservations will need to be registered.

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Splashdown! Cirque du Soleil Founder Prepares For First 'Poetic' Space Mission

Mr Laliberte in a rare serious mood at the Star City training centre

From The Daily Mail:

Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte made a splash at the space training centre in Star City outside Moscow. He was taking part in emergency landing practice for his trip to the International Space Station next month.

The owner of Cirque du Soleil, is spending £21million to become the world's seventh space tourist, after being slated to travel on a Russian Soyuz space craft at the end of September.

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China's Potent Wind Potential

Photo: Wind power: Wind power plants in Xinjiang, China. Credit: Chris Lim

From Technology Review:

Forecasters see no need for new coal and nuclear power plants.

China has doubled its installed wind power capacity every year for the past five, and is on pace this year to supplant the United States as the world's largest market for new installations. But researchers from Harvard University and Beijing's Tsinghua University suggest that the Chinese wind power industry has hardly begun to tap its potential. According to their meteorological and financial modeling, reported in the journal Science last week, there is enough strong wind in China to profitably satisfy all of the country's electricity demand until at least 2030.

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Space Robot 2.0: Smarter Than The Average Rover

Artist's conception of NASA's planned Mars rover, Curiosity. See other rovers in our gallery (Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

SOMETHING is moving. Two robots sitting motionless in the dust have spotted it. One, a six-wheeled rover, radios the other perched high on a rocky slope. Should they take a photo and beam it back to mission control? Time is short, they have a list of other tasks to complete, and the juice in their batteries is running low. The robots have seconds to decide. What should they do?

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Jupiter Turned Comet Into "Moon" For 12 Years

Jupiter (shown in a 2006 Hubble Space Telescope picture) captured a comet in 1949, and the "temporary moon" orbited the giant planet for 12 years before being cast aside, astronomers announced in September 2009.Image courtesy NASA via AP

From National Geographic:

Sixty years ago, Jupiter carried on a 12-year fling with an extra "moon" then casually cast it aside—and the gas giant will likely do it again within decades, scientists announced today.

In 1949 the massive planet's gravity pulled in comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu and held it in orbit until 1961, according to an international team led by Katsuhito Ohtsuka of the Tokyo Meteor Network.

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Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius Craft Finally Bags $1 Million Lunar Lander Challenge

Scorpius Shoots for the Moon: Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle completed a mock lunar landing on Earth -- next step, space Armadillo Aerospace

From Popular Science:

Armadillo Aerospace may claim a $1 million prize for completing a mock lunar landing, if no other competitors step up

A future trip to the moon could use a commercial vehicle, if Armadillo Aerospace has anything to say about it. The company's rocket-powered craft pulled off a mock lunar landing on Saturday to qualify for a $1 million purse from NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

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Microsoft Testing 'Visual Search'

Microsoft unveiled a twist on the Internet search experience on Monday with a new feature

From AFP:

WASHINGTON — US software giant Microsoft unveiled a twist on the Internet search experience on Monday with a new feature which allows Web surfers to search using image galleries instead of text links.

Microsoft, which teamed up with Yahoo! in July in a bid to challenge Internet search giant Google, rolled out a beta, or test, version of the feature at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco.

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