A Science News Aggregator That Covers Stories in the World Of Science And Technology.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Judge Delays Google Books Hearing
A New York judge has put Google's vision of creating the world's biggest digital library on hold.
Judge Denny Chin postponed a fairness hearing set for next month that was meant to address a settlement between Google and authors and publishers.
The $125m agreement, worked out last year, has effectively been sent back to the drawing board by the judge.
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Scandinavians Are Descended From Stone Age Immigrants, Ancient DNA Reveals
From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture. This is one conclusion of a new study straddling the borderline between genetics and archaeology, which involved Swedish researchers and which has now been published in the journal Current Biology.
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Scientists See Numbers Inside People's Heads
From Live Science:
By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals.
They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with.
Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans — the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact — until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive.
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Mercury Ready For A Rare Close-Up
From USA Today:
"A planetary flyby is very much like Christmas morning for the science team. We know there are presents under the tree," says Messenger principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "We expect to be surprised and we expect to be delighted."
Take A Virtual Tour Of Ancient Manhattan
New York City is one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Yet the rise of the greatest city in the world has obliterated most traces of what the island was like before Henry Hudson sailed into New York Bay.
But now everyone can take a virtual tour of ancient Manhattan, circa 1609. The tour shows Manhattan and the surrounding land in its original shape and topography. They’re all there: the salt marshes, ponds, rivers and native settlements, all available at the click of a mouse.
Human Ancestors Conflicted on Monogamy
From Discovery Magazine:
When it comes to love, we Homo sapiens are a peculiar breed: We thrill at the thought of torrid affairs while dreaming about the perfect someone with whom we can spend the rest of our lives.
Some of this never-ending tug-of-war for our hearts is certainly cultural, but according to a new study it's also encoded in the finger bones of Neanderthals and the upright walking primate Australopithecus.
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Aids/HIV: Where It Came From And How It Spread
Aids is now generally acknowledged to be caused by HIV which was originally transferred to humans from chimpanzees from West Africa.
The first known cases of Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (Aids) occurred in the United States in the early 1980s, among a number of homosexual men in New York and California. At that time, the illnesses were seen as rare, opportunistic and linked to cancer that seemed resistant to treatment. Before long, it became clear that the men were suffering from one illness.
As scientists delved into what had caused Aids, they discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) virus, which is know as a "lentivirus", or "slow virus", because it takes such a long time to produce any adverse effects in the body.
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Update: Aids/HIV by numbers -- The Telegraph
I'm Smarter Than I Look: How A Colony Of Chimps Deep In The African Jungle Have Taught Themselves To UseTools
From The Daily Mail:
The BBC'S new landmark natural history series, Life, has been three long years in the making.
It is a tribute to the dedication and professionalism of a team of filmmakers prepared to go to the ends of the earth to record the most extraordinary animal behaviour.
Journalist Tom Rawstorne was invited to accompany a film crew to Africa as they filmed a community of chimpanzees who use of every day objects as tools.
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How Astronauts Could 'Harvest' Water On The Moon
From New Scientist:
Newly confirmed water on the moon could help sustain lunar astronauts and even propel missions to Mars, if harvesting it can be made practical. A microwave device being developed by NASA could do just that.
Three spacecraft – India's Chandrayaan-1 and NASA's Cassini and Deep Impact probes – have detected the absorption of infrared light at a wavelength that indicates the presence of either water or hydroxyl, a molecule made up of a hydrogen and an oxygen atom. All found the signature to be stronger at the poles than at lower latitudes.
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Africa's Burning Charcoal Problem
From The BBC:
At a road block in western Tanzania, miles from anywhere, a uniformed official raises a flagged barrier. Nearby is a spill of black, like an oil slick.
This is one of several checkpoints which have been set up around the country in a half-hearted attempt to curtail the largely unregulated trade of charcoal, widely used across the continent as a fuel for cooking.
The guard on duty has confiscated six sacks. They lean against one another and bleed black dust into the sand.
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Ahead of Schedule, H1N1 Flu Season Arrives In The U.S.
From Time Magazine:
On the edge of the Western plains, in Spokane, Wash., the reports of significant student sickness started coming in this week. By Thursday morning, nine of the area's roughly 300 schools were reporting absentee rates in excess of 10%. H1N1 had arrived with the end of summer, just as expected.
"This would be comparable to what we would see in a moderate flu season in January or February," says Mark Springer, the Spokane Regional Health District's epidemiologist. "This is just a snapshot in time. We would anticipate increases."
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Friday, September 25, 2009
Ancestral Populations Of India And Relationships To Modern Groups Revealed
From Science Daily:
In a study published in the September 24th issue of Nature, an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India, the world's second most populous nation.
The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. The study, which has medical implications for people of Indian descent, was led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
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Moon Myths: The Truth About Lunar Effects On You
From Live Science:
The moon holds a mystical place in the history of human culture, so it's no wonder that many myths — from werewolves to induced lunacy to epileptic seizures — have built up regarding its supposed effects on us.
"It must be a full moon," is a phrase heard whenever crazy things happen and is said by researchers to be muttered commonly by late-night cops, psychiatry staff and emergency room personnel.
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The Big Question: What Might The Existence Of Water On The Moon Mean For Space Travel?
From The Independent:
Why are we asking this now?
The American space agency Nasa announced yesterday that three separate missions examining the Moon have found clear evidence of water there. The discovery has huge implications not only for science, but geopolitics as well.
Water, as on Earth? Water you could float a boat in?
No. We are not talking oceans here, or rivers, or lakes or even puddles. What researchers claim to have found are molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust in the top millimetres of the Moon's surface – in essence, water-bearing minerals, rather than water that is in any way free flowing. But water is water. And water is the essential element for life on earth.
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No Need For Panic About "Toxic" Shower Heads: Reality Check
From Popular Mechanics:
Prompted by a study tracing bacterial contamination to shower heads, news outlets across the globe have broadcast panicked reports proclaiming that shower heads harbor a bounty of germs, that shower heads may deliver a blast of bacteria, and that a long, hot shower "can kill you." Really? PM's investigation throws cold water on the claims.
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General Electric Gives Gearless Wind Turbines A Big Boost
From Popular Science:
Magnet-based wind turbine tech moves forward with GE investment.
Conventional wind turbines have an Achilles heel in the form of their clunky and expensive gearboxes. But that could change with GE's recent purchase of a company that has developed gearless turbine technology based on magnets.
Gearboxes act as the middleman to convert the slow rotations of wind turbine blades into the faster rotations needed for generators to create electricity. The downside of such gears comes from their high-maintenance requirements due to constant stress from wind turbulence.
Read more ....
Get Nervous: Rusty Soviet Doomsday System Still Turned On
From Gizmodo:
Wired Magazine has a fascinating article on the doomsday system that was built by the Soviets 25 years ago. It was designed to obliterate the US no matter what happened to the USSR—and it still works today. Shiver.
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
Read more ....Related Article: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine -- Wired News
My Comment: One thing that I am always trying to do in this blog is to find additional articles/opinions that relate to the main story. But for this story .... I have found nothing. Kudos to the Danger Room/Wired for getting some basic information that gives us a general outline of this "Doomsday Machine" story.
Feathered Fossils Prove Birds Evolved From Dinosaurs, Say Chinese Scientists
the fossils of which have been found in China
From The Daily Mail:
A new species of feathered dinosaurs provides hard evidence the prehistoric creatures evolved into birds, a group of Chinese scientists has claimed.
The fossils represent five different species from two different rock sequences in north-eastern China and all have feathers or feather-like structures.
The new finds are 'indisputably' older than archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, which scientists claim provides exceptional evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
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Asteroid Attack: Putting Earth's Defences To The Test
From New Scientist:
T LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there's something very particular about this one. The telescope's software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it's big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.
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Making Realistic Skin for Robots
From Technology Review:
Without realistic synthetic skin, robots will never be entirely accepted socially. Yet even measuring what it means for skin to be humanlike is proving tough.
When it comes to building realistic robots, it's not just the way they look that's important. It's also the way they feel to the touch, says John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and pals. They argue that if robots are ever to be accepted socially, they will need to have humanlike skin so that actions such as handshakes can be made as realistic as possible.
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