Hunting Hidden Dimensions

From U.S. News And World Report:

Black holes, giant and tiny, may reveal new realms of space.

In many ways, black holes are science's answer to science fiction. As strange as anything from a novelist's imagination, black holes warp the fabric of spacetime and imprison light and matter in a gravitational death grip. Their bizarre properties make black holes ideal candidates for fictional villainy. But now black holes are up for a different role: heroes helping physicists assess the real-world existence of another science fiction favorite—hidden extra dimensions of space.

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How Cooking Helped Us To Evolve

From Times Online:

The success of the human species is all down to our mastery of fire and cooking, a scientist claims. And hot food not sex was the basis for our relationships.

It is the ultimate domestic cliché: a woman, pinafored and dutiful, tending a stove all day in preparation for her husband’s homecoming. As soon as he walks in, the ritual can begin: family members take their seats around the table (he sits at the head, of course) and dinner is served. Our couple are reliving a scene that has played out billions of times in our history because gender roles — husband at work all day, woman as homebody — have been forged not by relatively recent social conventions but by our distant evolutionary past.

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WHO: H1N1 Vaccine Production To Fall Short

From Time Magazine:

(GENEVA) — Global production of swine flu vaccines will be "substantially less" than the previous maximum forecast of 94 million doses a week, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The number of doses produced in a year will therefore fall short of the 4.9 billion doses the global health body previously hoped could be available for the pandemic, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told reporters in Geneva.

Production will be lower because some manufacturers are still turning out vaccines for seasonal flu — an illness that can be serious in sick and elderly people, Hartl said.

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Magnetism Observed In Gas For The First Time

Graduate student Gyu-boong Jo optimizes the laser beam position on the mirror of the optical setup that produced an ultracold gas of lithium atoms. (Credit: Photo by Patrick Gillooly)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2009) — For the first time, MIT scientists have observed ferromagnetic behavior in an atomic gas, addressing a decades-old question of whether it is possible for a gas to show properties similar to a magnet made of iron or nickel.

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Urinating On Your Tomato Plants Could Give You Fruit Four Times Larger

Photo: Human urine mixed with wood ash was the ultimate eco-friendly fertiliser, according to researchers

From The Daily Mail:

Gardeners keen to boost their crop of tomatoes may be surprised to learn they can turn to an unusual and free source of fertiliser.

Allotment growers can enrich the soil and therefore their plants using their own wee, according to a new study.

Scientists discovered the unusual addition made crops up to four times larger.

A team of Finnish researchers found that sprinkling tomatoes with human urine mixed with wood ash was the ultimate eco-friendly fertiliser.

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Advanced Solar Panels Coming to Market

Photo: Cheaper solar: Nanosolar’s thin-film panels.
Credit: Nanosolar

From Technology Review:

Nanosolar's new factory could help lower the price of solar power, if the market cooperates.

A promising type of solar-power technology has moved a step closer to mass production. Nanosolar, based in San Jose, CA, has opened an automated facility for manufacturing its solar panels, which are made by printing a semiconductor material called CIGS on aluminum foil. The manufacturing facility is located in Germany, where government incentives have created a large market for solar panels. Nanosolar has the potential to make 640 megawatts' worth of solar panels there every year.

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Oil Rig Of The Future: A Solar Panel That Produces Oil

OIL FROM THE SUN Researchers propose creating a biological solar panel, which will contain diatoms instead of photovoltaic cells. Diatoms, microalgae that are found in all aquatic and moist environments, first appeared more than 180 million years ago. © KATIV, COURTESY OF ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

From Scientific American:

Researchers propose a novel approach to producing biofuel using diatoms.

BANGALORE, India—In the ongoing hunt for alternative fuel sources that are also cost-effective, researchers are looking into making biofuel from genetically engineered diatoms, a type of single-celled algae with shells made of glasslike silica.

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Jupiter Auroras Fed By Largest Moon's Magnetic "Bubble"

From The National Geographic:

A mini-magnetosphere around the largest moon in the solar system leaves a mighty footprint on Jupiter's atmosphere—helping to drive the "hyperauroras" that dance across the planet's poles.

That's one finding in new research that offers unprecedented details on interactions between Jupiter and two of its moons, the giant Ganymede and the volcanically active Io.

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Why Are We The Naked Ape?

No one is sure why Homo sapiens is the only primate to have lost its body hair
(Image: Laurent Gillieron / EPA / Corbis)

From New Scientist:

RIGHT from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. "No one supposes," wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, "that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection."

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Diamonds Are A Laser's Best Friend

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2009) — Tomorrow's lasers may come with a bit of bling, thanks to a new technology that uses man-made diamonds to enhance the power and capabilities of lasers. Researchers in Australia have now demonstrated the first laser built with diamonds that has comparable efficiency to lasers built with other materials.

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How You Write 'Shows If You're A Liar', Scientists Discover

Psychologists have suggested that handwriting changes when someone is lying because the brain has to work harder to invent facts Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

How you write can indicate whether you’re a liar, scientists in Haifa, Israel, have discovered.

Instead of analysing body language or eye movement, to catch out people telling fibs, people’s handwriting can instead give them away.

While stressing the research was in the early stages, scientists say it could one day help validate loan application or even insurance claims.

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Genetics May Explain Why Some Children Have Sex Earlier Than Others

From The Independent:

Genetics may explain why children who live in homes without fathers have sex at a younger age than others, according to a report published today.

The study, published in the American journal Child Development, found a genetic theory to challenge "environmental" theories which previously explained the link.

Researchers looked at more than 1,000 cousins aged 14 and older, testing for genetic influences as well as factors such as poverty, education opportunities and religion.

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Can A Daily Pill Really Boost Your Brain Power?

In recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers.

From The Guardian:

In America, university students are taking illegally obtained prescription drugs to make them more intelligent. But would you pop a smart pill to improve your performance? Margaret Talbot investigates the brave new world of neuro enhancement

A young man I'll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a term. He also ran a student organisation, for which he often worked more than 40 hours a week; when he wasn't working, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork he couldn't finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to parties. "Trite as it sounds," he told me, it seemed important to "maybe appreciate my own youth". Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

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U.S. Media Ignoring About Face by Leading Global Warming Proponent

From News Busters:

Imagine if the Pope suddenly announced that the Catholic Church had been wrong for centuries about prohibiting priests from marrying. Would that be considered big news?

Of course.

And yet something like that has happened in the field of global warming in which a major scientist has announced that the world, in contrast to his previous belief, is actually cooling.

This was the analogy made by columnist Lorne Gunter in the Calgary Herald:

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Impact Of Renewable Energy On Our Oceans Must Be Investigated, Say Scientists

Photo: Dolphin. Scientists are calling for urgent research to understand the impact of renewable energy developments on marine life. (Credit: Dr Matthew Witt, University of Exeter.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2009) — Scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth are calling for urgent research to understand the impact of renewable energy developments on marine life. The study, now published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, highlights potential environmental benefits and threats resulting from marine renewable energy, such as off-shore wind farms and wave and tidal energy conversion devices.

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Reminder: Dan Brown's 'Lost Symbol' Is Fiction

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON — Dan Brown's latest book, "The Lost Symbol," is woven with a maze of secretive plots, conspiracies, symbols and codes. "Symbol" is another thriller by Brown that draws inspiration from a mixture of science and mysticism.

One of the main characters is a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution's vast support center, a location that is off-limits to the public. The real science in "Symbol" takes a turn toward fiction when Brown suggests that noetics — a metaphysical discipline that attempts to examine the connection between human and supernatural intelligence — will revolutionize human knowledge. The "research" is based on the work of institutions that were formed in the late 1970s, during the height of New Age mysticism.

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The 'GI' Helmet That Will Help Our Troops To Shoot Straighter

Safer: The new-style Army helmet will allow troops to fire more accurately in the prone position than the older version

From The Daily Mail:

New helmets designed to help British troops to target the enemy are being rushed out to Afghanistan this weekend.

The Ministry of Defence is issuing the lighter headgear following soldiers’ complaints that the current helmet is unsuitable for firefights with the Taliban.

Five thousand Mark 7 helmets, along with new Osprey Assault body armour, are being sent to Afghanistan for the troops of 11 Brigade who are starting a six-month operational tour.

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Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?

Credit: Technology Review

From Technology Review:

Researchers say online recommendation systems can be distorted by a minority of users.

When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research confirms what some may already suspect: those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users.

Vassilis Kostakos, an assistant professor at the University of Madeira in Portugal and an adjunct assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), says that rating systems can tap into the "wisdom of the crowd" to offer useful insights, but they can also paint a distorted picture of a product if a small number of users do most of the voting. "It turns out people have very different voting patterns," he says, varying both among individuals and among communities of users.

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Solar System Dwarf Planet "Haumea" Has A Mystery Spot

SEE SPOT SPIN: An impression of what the dwarf planet Haumea's dark,
red spot might look like. P. LACERDA

From Scientific American:

A blotch on the distant, football-shaped body could help reveal what the dwarf planet is made of.

Haumea, the mini planet whose detection set off an international and as yet unresolved war of words in 2005 between the two teams claiming its discovery, is back on the astronomy scene with more intrigue.

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Robot Arm To Grab Robotic Ship -- A Space Station First

The International Space Station's robotic arm reaches out to capture the Japanese HTV cargo ship in an artist's rendering. The tricky cosmic catch, slated to happen on September 17, 2009, might affect the orbiting outpost's ultimate lifespan by offering a cheaper way of delivering supplies to space, experts say. Due to budget concerns, the space station is currently slated to be deorbited in 2015. Picture courtesy Canadian Space Agency

From National Geographic:

For the first time, a robotic arm attached to the International Space Station (ISS) will capture an unmanned spaceship for docking on Thursday.

The bus-size Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle, or HTV, was launched on its maiden flight September 10. The remote-control ship is carrying more than four tons of equipment, food, clothes, and other essentials for the six astronauts currently aboard the space station.

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