Instant Expert: Weapons Technology

The Northrop B2 American stealth bomber (Image: Alisdair Macdonald/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

Violence and conflict have been a feature of human life throughout history. Starting with simple weapons, people have developed ever more advanced methods to kill one another. Technology has dominated warfare since the early 1900s, and an astounding 190 million people may have been killed during the 25 biggest conflicts of the 20th century.

Today guided weapons, like "smart" bombs dropped by stealth bombers, coupled with space-based sensors and precision satellite navigation, provide decisive advantages in conventional warfare. In this high-spending game, less capable opponents are soon reduced to guerrilla tactics, and human cost of war remains high.

Read more ....

My Comment: This article was written a few years ago, but it is still appropriate for today.

NASA's Messenger Is Approaching Mercury

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.

From Discovery Channel:

Sept. 28, 2009 -- Tomorrow, NASA's MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft will make its third and final flyby of the Solar System's innermost planet, Mercury. After coming within 142 miles to the small planet's rocky surface, the robotic probe will be flung back into interplanetary space before arriving in Mercury orbit in 2011 for a year-long mission to study the planet in unprecedented detail.

Read more ....

Secret Service Investigating Facebook Poll On Obama

From CNN:

(CNN) -- The social networking site Facebook on Monday pulled a third-party application that allows users to create polls after a site member built a poll asking if President Obama should be killed.

The U.S. Secret Service, the agency assigned to protect the president, has launched an investigation, agency spokesman James Mackin said.

"As is usually the case, our vigilant users reported it to us first," Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told CNN. "The USSS [Secret Service] sent us an e-mail late this morning PDT asking us to take it down. At that point, it had already been removed, and we let them know."

Read more ....

Champagne Bubbles' Flavour Fizz

From The BBC:

It is champagne's bubbles which give the drink flavour and fizz, and glasses that promote bubbles will improve the drinking experience, scientists say.

Research shows there are up to 30 times more flavour-enhancing chemicals in the bubbles than in the rest of the drink.

Wine experts say the finding changes completely our understanding of the role of bubbles in sparkling drinks.

The study is reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Read more ....

The Tiny Kingbird That Took A Piggyback On A Predatory Hawk And Lived To Tell The Tale

Time you were going: The red-tailed hawk shrieks in pain as the brave kingbird sinks its talons in

From The Daily Mail:

How far would you go to get rid of an unwelcome visitor?

This is the moment a tiny kingbird decided it was time to see off a potential predator circling his home.

In a bold move, the aggressive little bird launched itself at the fearsome red-tailed hawk and sank its talons into the larger bird's back.

Read more ....

A Life Of Its Own: Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us?

Image: If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.

From The New Yorker:

The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.

Read more ....

I Switched From Firefox To Internet Explorer─And Lived To Tell!

From Newsweek:

I am a loyal Firefox user. I love the tabs, the extensions, the customization. It’s fast and free and, because it’s an open-source project organized by a nonprofit in Silicon Valley, it gives me a warm, fuzzy, volunteering-at-the-soup-kitchen kind of feeling. I love watching its market share grow, from 15 percent in 2007 to 23 percent today. Each uptick in the chart is like a poke in the red, gleaming, robotic eye of our technological overlord, Microsoft, and its crusty workhorse, Internet Explorer.

But recently I was issued a challenge by this blog: forsake Firefox for a week and entrust my digital life to Internet Explorer 8. I expected a cataclysm of Katrina-like proportions. Frozen screens. Garbled Web pages. Cascading popup boxes. Molasses-like speed. With great trepidation I accepted, and tremblingly clicked online.

But you know what? It was ... fine.

Read more ....

GE's Risky Energy Research

Credit: GE Global Research

From Technology Review:

Michael Idelchik, VP of Advanced Technologies, discusses energy research.

Michael Idelchik is vice president of advanced technologies at GE Research, one of the world's largest corporate research organizations. He oversees a wide range of projects, including ones aimed at improving conventional energy sources--with better coal and gas turbines, for example--as well as projects involving renewable energy, primarily wind turbines. At the EmTech@MIT 2009 conference, Technology Review spoke to Idelchik about some of GE's most daring long-term research efforts.

Read more ....

New Nanostructure Technology Provides Advances In Eyeglass, Solar Energy Performance

Chemical engineers at Oregon State University are using extraordinarily small films at the nanostructure level to improve the performance of eyeglasses and, ultimately, solar energy devices. These films, which resemble millions of tiny pyramids, reduce the reflectance of any light that strikes the material. (Credit: Image by Seung-Yeol Han)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2009) — Chemical engineers at Oregon State University have invented a new technology to deposit "nanostructure films" on various surfaces, which may first find use as coatings for eyeglasses that cost less and work better.

Ultimately, the technique may provide a way to make solar cells more efficiently produce energy.

Read more ....

Mighty T. rex Killed by Lowly Parasite, Study Suggests

A reconstruction of the Trichomonas-like infection of the T. rex commonly known as "Peck's Rex." Note the yellowing at the back of the mouth and the lesions in the jaw that penetrate the full thickness of the bone. Credit: Chris Glen, University of Queensland

From Live Science:

The famous dinosaur known as Sue — the largest, most complete and best preserved T. rex specimen ever found — might have been killed by a disease that afflicts birds even today, scientists now suggest.

The remains of Sue, a star attraction of the Field Museum in Chicago, possess holes in her jaw that some believed were battle scars, the result of bloody combat with another dinosaur, possibly another T. rex.

Read more ....

Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?

Adam Kazmierski

From Scientific American:

A new study demonstrates that thinking about love--but not about sex--causes us to think more "globally," making it easier to come up with new ideas.

Love has inspired countless works of art, from immortal plays such as Romeo and Juliet, to architectural masterpieces such as the Taj Mahal, to classic pop songs, like Queen's “Love of My Life”. This raises the obvious question: why is love such a stimulating emotion? Why does the act of falling in love – or at least thinking about love – lead to such a spur of creative productivity?

Read more ....

Slime-Dispensing Hulls Could Boost Fuel Efficiency For Ships

Slick Hull A fine sheen of slime could someday cover Navy vessel hulls such as this, and cut fuel consumption to boot. U.S. Navy

From Popular Science:

A DOD-backed project would give ships a regenerating slime layer to help shed unwanted marine life.

Slime ships ahoy! A vessel that oozes a continual slick layer of slime from its hull could shed barnacles and other marine life forms, and possibly cut its fuel consumption by up to 20 percent.

Such a novel idea tackles the problem of removing marine plants, barnacles and tube worms from ship hulls every year, lest the buildup cut into both speed and fuel efficiency. The fuel savings in particular may look especially tempting for the U.S. Department of Defense, which has backed the project and previously invested in hull-cleaning bots.

Read more ....

Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers

This means war (Image: ColorBlind Images/Getty)

From New Scientist:

Victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone – but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. When male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, levels of the potent sex hormone plummeted.

This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone's effect on aggression is advantageous.

Read more ....

Are Recessions Good For Our Health?

Opportunity in Crisis? Although the Great Depression made have had a severe impact on the American economy, the crisis was actually good for U.S. health, according to a new study. The findings offer a silver lining for today's financial crisis. StockPhoto

From Discovery News:

Sept. 28, 2009 -- The name seems to say it all. The Great Depression was bad all around, wasn't it? Maybe not.

New findings show that the Great Depression was actually good for U.S. health. Annual death rates declined during years of downturn and increased in years of expansion.

The findings could offer a silver lining to today's financial crisis.

The results reinforce earlier research showing recessions reduce mortality, but researchers didn't know whether the effect would hold through a full blown economic meltdown like the Great Depression.

Read more ....

Popular Kids Grow Into Healthier Adults

A study over 50 years has revealed that popular school children are less likely to suffer conditions such as heart disease and diabetes than their unpopular counterparts. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Children who are the most popular and powerful at school also enjoy better health in adult life compared to counterparts at the bottom end of the pecking order, say Swedish scientists.

The long-term study covers 14,000 children born in 1953, who were questioned in 1966 when they were 12 or 13 years old and whose health was tracked up to 2003.

The children's place in the social hierarchy was determined by asking them who they most preferred to work with at school.

To assess their health in later life, the study delved into a national databank for hospital admissions.

Read more ....

Giant Fish 'Verges On Extinction'

From The BBC:

One of the world's largest freshwater fish is on the verge of going extinct.

A three-year quest to find the giant Chinese paddlefish in the Yangtze river failed to sight or catch a single individual.

That means that the fish, which can grow up to 7m long, has not been seen alive for at least six years.

There remains a chance that some escaped the survey and survive, say experts, but without action, the future of the species is bleak.

Read more ....

Time Lens Speeds Optical Data

Photo: Time lens: This silicon chip, called a time lens, is patterned with waveguides that split optical signals and combine them with laser light to speed data rates. Credit: Alexander Gaeta

From Technology Review:

An energy-efficient silicon device compresses light to make ultrafast signals.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a simple silicon device for speeding up optical data. The device incorporates a silicon chip called a "time lens," lengths of optical fiber, and a laser. It splits up a data stream encoded at 10 gigabits per second, puts it back together, and outputs the same data at 270 gigabits per second. Speeding up optical data transmission usually requires a lot of energy and bulky, expensive optics. The new system is energy efficient and is integrated on a compact silicon chip. It could be used to move vast quantities of data at fast speeds over the Internet or on optical chips inside computers.

Read more ....

By 2040 You Will Be Able To Upload Your Brain...

Standing up for GM: Kurzweil believes that opposition to advances such as genetic modification harm humankind. GETTY IMAGES

From The Independent:

...or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age – the 'singularity' – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

Read more ....

Global Increase In Atmospheric Methane Likely Caused By Unusual Arctic Warmth, Tropical Wetness

View of wetlands and tidal streams in the Ashe Island area. (Credit: NOAA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second.

NOAA scientists and their colleagues analyzed measurements from 1983 to 2008 from air samples collected weekly at 46 surface locations around the world. Their findings will appear in the September 28 print edition of the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters and are available online now.

Read more ....

Plumbing Of A Supervolcano Revealed

Geologist points to the edge of a boulder of reddish volcanic rock from the fossilized supervolcano in Sesia Valley, Italy. The volcanic rock is encased by a light-gray tuff, a relationship characteristic of deposits produced during caldera-forming, explosive eruptions. Credit: Silvano Sinigoi, Universita di Trieste

From Live Science:

The fossilized remains of a supervolcano that erupted some 280 million years ago in the Italian Alps are giving geologists a first-time glimpse at the deep "plumbing system" that brings molten rock from far underground to the Earth's surface.

James E. Quick of Southern Methodist University in Texas and his team discovered the "fossil," or extinct, supervolcano in the Alps' Sesia Valley two years ago, but they are just now reporting the results after careful study.

Read more ....