Animals Survived Apocalypse By Burrowing

Ninety percent of all life was killed during the Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago. But the pig-sized animal Lystrosaurus curvatus and other species apparently survived by burrowing underground. Lunar and Planetary Institute

From Discovery:

When the going gets tough, putting your head in the sand isn't always a bad idea. According to a new study, that's exactly how a group of animals living 250 million years ago survived the worst mass extinction of all time.

In a series of new fossil discoveries in South Africa, researchers have uncovered a slew of petrified burrows, many of them a foot wide and a meter (3.3 feet) or more deep.

Read more ....

The Legacy Of America’s Largest Forest Fire

The forest fire of 1910 ripped through the town of Wallace, Idaho leaving it in complete shambles. Library of Congress

From The Smithsonian:

A 1910 wildfire that raged across three Western states helped advance the nation’s conservation efforts

Here now came the fire down from the Bitterroot Mountains and showered embers and forest shrapnel onto the town that was supposed to be protected by all those men with faraway accents and empty stomachs. For days, people had watched it from their gabled houses, from front porches and ash-covered streets, and there was some safety in the distance, some fascination even—See there, way up on the ridgeline, just candles flickering in the trees. But now it was on them, an element transformed from Out There to Here, and just as suddenly in their hair, on front lawns, snuffing out the life of a drunk on a hotel mattress, torching a veranda. The sky had been dark for some time on this Saturday in August of 1910, the town covered in a warm fog so opaque that the lights were turned on at three o’clock in the afternoon. People took stock of what to take, what to leave behind. A woman buried her sewing machine out back in a shallow grave. A pressman dug a hole for his trunk of family possessions, but before he could finish the fire caught him on the face, the arms, the neck.

Read more ....

War Injury Leads To Advances At Home

British soldiers on patrol in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
Photograph: John D McHugh/AFP/Getty images

From The L.A. Times:

The military takes the lead in brain trauma research, giving hope to wounded civilians of a 'silent epidemic.'

A world away from the roadside bombs and combat injuries of Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are suffering the same type of brain injury seen in troops coming home from those war-torn countries. On American roads, at workplaces and on playing fields, more than 11 million have been hurt since the fighting overseas started.

Almost 1 in 5 of these civilians will struggle with lingering, often subtle symptoms -- headaches, dizziness, concentration difficulties and personality changes -- for a year, and often longer. As their memories falter, their work suffers and their relationships fray, many victims of brain trauma don't realize that their cognitive struggles are related to a blow to the head.

Read more ....

My Comment: Explosions, bombings, the noise and concussion of war has consequences that we are only now starting to understand. This research is valuable .... and should be pushed further.

Fresh Impact Risks For Asteroid 'Poster Child'

Still heading our way (Image: Stocktrek Images/Getty)

From New Scientist:

The chances of the asteroid Apophis hitting Earth in 2036 are lower than we thought. But those worried about deep impacts should add a new entry to their calendar: 2068.

When Apophis was first spotted in 2004, the 250-metre-wide rock was briefly estimated to have a 2.7 per cent chance of hitting Earth in 2029. Further observations quickly showed that it will miss Earth that year – but should it pass through a 600-metre-wide "keyhole" in space, it will return to hit Earth in 2036.

Read more ....

Brain-Computer Interface Allows Person-to-person Communication Through Power Of Thought

Dr. Chris James demonstrating brain to brain communication using BCI to transmit thoughts, translated as a series of binary digits, over the Internet to another person whose computer receives the digits. (Credit: University of Southampton)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 6, 2009) — New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought -- with the help of electrodes, a computer and Internet connection.

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) can be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into commands that allow humans to control (just by thinking) devices such as computers, robots, rehabilitation technology and virtual reality environments.

Read more ....

Proposal Would Turn San Francisco Bridge Into A City

The Bay Line, a proposal for modular housing and other structures bolted to the now-unused San Francisco Bay Bridge. Design by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello

From Live Science:

San Francisco's Bay Bridge is being redone; a large portion of the bridge will remain unused, but in good shape. What can city planners do with this unique, unused space?

Science fiction writer William Gibson thought about the Bay Bridge in his 1993 novel Virtual Light:

"[Chevette] looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She'd seen pictures of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she'd never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to many and all their dreams."

Read more ....

In The Future, All Our Pop Idols Will Be Machines

From Popular Science:

Performing live at CEATEC, everyone's favorite catwalk model bot has been loaded with Vocaloid software (Rin), enabling her to croon sweet pop songs.

Read more ....

Direction of NASA’s Future At An Impasse

From Wired Science:

The committee charged with rethinking American human spaceflight is done thinking, but it’s still unclear what the future of NASA’s astronaut corps might be, and some nagging issues have yet to be resolved.

The U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee — known informally as the Augustine commission, after its head Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin — held its last teleconference today. The ball, or hot potato, will soon be in the Obama administration’s court when the group formally presents its alternatives to the Office for Science and Technology Policy.

Read more ....

Fossils Suggest An Ancient CO2-Climate Link

Mark Pink / Alamy

From Time Magazine:

Some of the best evidence linking rising carbon dioxide levels to a warmer world comes from the coldest places on earth. Samples of ancient air extracted from deep inside the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps make it clear that CO2 is scarce in the atmosphere during ice ages and relatively abundant during warmer interglacial periods — like the one we're in now.

The relationship between CO2 and climate is clear going back about 800,000 years. Before that, however, it gets murkier. That's largely because ice and air that old haven't yet been found. So scientists rely instead on indirect measurements — and these have led to a climate mystery: some episodes of past warming, including a planetary heat wave about 15 million years ago and another about 3.5 million years ago, seem to have happened without a rise in CO2. No one quite understands why. Maybe other greenhouse gases were the cause — methane, for example. Or maybe it had to do with changes in ocean circulation.

Read more ....

Europa, Jupiter's Moon, Could Support Complex Life

Europa, pictured above, may have enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms, according to a new study. NASA

From Discovery:

Jupiter's moon Europa should have enough oxygen-rich water to support not only simple micro-organisms but also complex life, according to a University of Arizona researcher who studies ice flows on the frozen moon.

Judging by how quickly Europa's surface ice is replenished, Richard Greenberg estimates that enough oxygen reaches the subterranean ocean to sustain "macrofauna" -- more complex, animal-like organisms.

Read more ....

The Fatal Consequences Of Counterfeit Drugs

From Smithsonian Magazine:

In Southeast Asia, forensic investigators using cutting-edge tools are helping stanch the deadly trade in fake anti-malaria drugs

In Battambang, Cambodia, a western province full of poor farmers barely managing to grow enough rice to live on, the top government official charged with fighting malaria is Ouk Vichea. His job—contending with as many as 10,000 malaria cases a year in an area twice as large as Delaware—is made even more challenging by ruthless, increasingly sophisticated criminals, whose handiwork Ouk Vichea was about to demonstrate.

Read more ....

PCs Are Best For E-Reading, Microsoft's Ballmer Says

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft Corporation Steve Ballmer gestures during a news conference to present the new Windows 7 operating system in Munich October 7, 2009. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

From The Reuters:

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) - Microsoft has no plans to develop a digital book reader to compete with the fast-growing popularity of Amazon's Kindle or a device that rival Apple is reportedly developing.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Microsoft had no need for its own e-reader, since it already supplies the software that runs the most popular device for electronic reading.

"We have a device for reading. It's the most popular device in the world. It's the PC," Ballmer said on Thursday on the sidelines of television show recording at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

Read more ....

NASA Catches Two Black Holes Sucking Face

Black Hole Merger: Two pinpoints of light represent black holes in the center of this combined X-ray/optical image NASA/CXC/MIT/C.Canizares, M.Nowak/STScI

From Popular Science:

The Chandra X-ray Observatory helped discover two merging black holes a mere 3,000 light years apart

Colliding black holes may prove more interesting to scientists than the immovable object versus the unstoppable force. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has combined with optical images from Hubble to show off a merging black hole pair in all its glory.

Read more ....

Why NASA Barred Women Astronauts

From New Scientist:

About 50 years ago, as the US worked towards putting its first men in space, a few people thought there was another option: women in space. The facts about this episode have been somewhat obscured by the myths that have grown up around it.

In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts, and scored very well on them – in fact, better than some of the astronauts did. A new study that presents the first published results of their physiological tests shows that much is fact.

Read more ....

Twitter On The Verge Of Big Search Deals?

From CNET:

Are Microsoft and Google hoping to get into Twitter's treasure trove of real-time information? Yes, says Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, citing sources who indicate that the two companies are separately in talks with Twitter about data licensing deals.

This would involve the exchange of several million dollars plus a revenue-share to "compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets of its 54 million monthly users," Swisher wrote.

Read more ....

'Significant Risk' Of Oil Production Peaking In Ten Years, Report Finds

Offshore oil rig at sunset. (Credit: iStockphoto/Kristian Stensønes)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 8, 2009) — A new report, launched by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), argues that conventional oil production is likely to peak before 2030, with a significant risk of a peak before 2020. The report concludes that the UK Government is not alone in being unprepared for such an event - despite oil supplying a third of the world's energy.

Read more ....

New Shroud of Turin Evidence: A Closer Look

From Live Science:

An Italian scientist and his team claim to have replicated the Shroud of Turin, believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pavia, used linen identical to that on the famous shroud, made an impression over a volunteer's face and body, and artificially aged the cloth with heat.

Read more ....

Unmanned Helicopter Hunts Drug Smugglers

From Popular Mechanics:

The Fire Scout unmanned helicopter got its first job—hunting drug smugglers.

MQ-8B became the first unmanned helo to deploy on a naval anti-narcotics mission when it left port in Florida on Monday aboard the USS McInerney (FFG-8). The ship hosted the unmanned aerial vehicle during developmental testing, and crew of Northrop Grumman engineers are also on board to help the aircraft stay healthy.

Read more ....

Electron Microscopes Powered by Quantum Mechanics Could See Through Living Cells

Butterfly Wing Under an Electron Microscope MIT and NSF

From Popular Science:

Electron microscopes are great and all, but the problem is that you can't use them to get up close and personal inside a living cell without killing it. That might change, however, as scientists are working to use quantum mechanics to overcome this obstacle.

Read more ....

Make Your Own Barcode, Just Like Google

Can you decode our secret message?
(http://www.barcodesinc.com)

From the Christian Science Monitor:

What’s black and white and read all over? Barcodes. And boy do you people like them.

The Web was buzzing about barcodes today because Google decided to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the first ever patent on them with one of their popular doodles.

Read more ....