In Search of Chinese Science

The New Atlantis:

One of my schoolmasters was fond of saying that there are only two worthwhile forms of worldly immortality: to get a poem in the Oxford Book of English Verse, or to have a mathematical theorem named after you. The British scholar Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was no better than a passable amateur poet, judging by the handful of verses in Simon Winchester’s biography of him. He did have a scientific training, but it was in biochemistry, not math, so there is no Needham’s Theorem, nor even a Needham Conjecture. He does, though, enjoy the rare distinction of having a Question named for him. Not a mere question, but a Question, one that has generated endless discussion and many theories.

Read more ....

The Boy Aged Two With Einstein's IQ: Why Little Oscar Is Britain's Youngest Boy To Be Accepted Into Mensa

Little smasher: Oscar Wrigley is the youngest ever member of Mensa,
aged two years and five months

From the Daily Mail:

While other two-year-olds are discovering the joy of playgrounds, Oscar Wrigley would rather be learning about wildlife or the history of Ancient Rome.

He has recently taken to conducting classical music as he listens in the back of the car and identifies the different instruments.

So his parents were not surprised when, at the ripe old age of two years, five months and 11 days, he became the youngest boy in Britain to be accepted by Mensa.

Read more ....

What Happened To Global Warming?

From The BBC:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Read more ....

Chemists Win Nobel Prize For Atom-by-Atom Ribosome Map

The Ribosome

From Popular Science:

Rounding out the 2009 science Nobel Prizes are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada E. Yonath, who will receive the prize in chemistry for their work on an atomic-scale map of the ribosome.

Ribosomes are the cellular organelle responsible for assembling amino acids into proteins. If DNA is the blueprint, ribosomes are the construction workers. Ribosomes themselves are composed of a combination of RNA and specialized proteins.

Read more ....

I Didn't Sin—It Was My Brain

From Discover:

Brain researchers have found the sources of many of our darkest thoughts, from envy to wrath.

Why does being bad feel so good? Pride, envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It might sound like just one more episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but this enduring formulation of the worst of human failures has inspired great art for thousands of years. In the 14th century Dante depicted ghoulish evildoers suffering for eternity in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Medieval muralists put the fear of God into churchgoers with lurid scenarios of demons and devils. More recently George Balanchine choreographed their dance.

Read more ....

Unravelling The Secret Of Ageing

Australian researcher Elizabeth Blackburn, whose co-discovery of telomeres has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Credit: Elizabeth Finkel/COSMOS

From Cosmos:

More than 30 years after discovering an enzyme that prevents chromosomes from fraying, Elizabeth Blackburn is still unravelling the mystery of why our cells age.

Elizabeth Blackburn is not a household name. But the string of illustrious science awards she holds already suggest she is a hot favourite for a Nobel Prize. And that's exactly what happened - finally in 2009, more than 27 years after her initial research.

Read more ....

Bodies In Sync

Photo: Two young bonobos exhibit the ape equivalent of the human laugh, a “play face,” which is accompanied by laugh-like panting sounds. Just as in humans, if one ape laughs others usually do as well, especially during wrestling and tickling games.
Frans de Waal

From Natural History Magazine:

Contagious laughter, yawns, and moods offer insight into empathy’s origins.

One morning, the principal’s voice sounded over the intercom of my high school with the shocking announcement that a popular teacher of French had just died in front of his class. Everyone fell silent. While the headmaster went on to explain that the teacher had suffered a heart attack, I couldn’t keep myself from a laughing fit. To this day, I feel embarrassed.

Read more ....

Classical Chaos Occurs In The Quantum World, Scientists Find

This image shows the kind of pictures Jessen’s team produces with tomography. The top two spheres are from a selected experimental snapshot taken after 40 cycles of changing the direction of the axis of spin of a cesium atom, the quantum “spinning top.” The two spheres below are theoretical models that agree remarkably with the experimental results. (Credit: Image courtesy of Poul Jessen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — Chaotic behavior is the rule, not the exception, in the world we experience through our senses, the world governed by the laws of classical physics.

Even tiny, easily overlooked events can completely change the behavior of a complex system, to the point where there is no apparent order to most natural systems we deal with in everyday life.

Read more ....

'First Bird' Not Very Bird-Like

The bones of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx had flattened and parallel bone cells, one of the signs that this bird grew slowly, more like non-avian dinosaurs, researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE. Credit: Gregory Erickson.

From Live Science:

A feathered beast that lived some 150 million years ago and which is considered the first bird likely grew more like its sluggish ancestors, the dinosaurs.

That's according to new analyses of tiny bone chips taken from Archaeopteryx and detailed this week in the journal PLoS ONE. The study researchers estimate a 970-day period from baby Archaeopteryx to an adult. For comparison, birds reach adult size in a matter of weeks.

Read more ....

Just How Sensitive Is Earth's Climate to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide?

CLIMATE RECORD: The records preserved in stalagmites and ocean fossilsm, such as those harvested from mud cores drilled by the "Resolution" pictured here, suggest that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have an outsized effect on the Earth's climate. © Science / AAAS

From Scientific American:

Two new studies look far back in geologic time to determine how sensitive the global climate is to atmospheric CO2 levels.

Carbon dioxide levels climbing toward a doubling of the 280 parts per million (ppm) concentration found in the preindustrial atmosphere pose the question: What impact will this increased greenhouse gas load have on the climate? If relatively small changes in CO2 levels have big effects—meaning that we live in a more sensitive climate system—the planet could warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius on average with attendant results such as changed weather patterns and sea-level rise. A less sensitive climate system would mean average warming of less than 2 degrees C and, therefore, fewer ramifications from global warming.

Read more ....

Word Has It That eReaders Will Open The Next Chapter

From Times Online:

Microsoft and Apple are about to follow the tablet trend.

TRAVELLING between airports has given analyst Jon Peddie lots of time to study tech trends. There was the rise of the mobile, laptops, the iPod, the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

Now Peddie, who runs California-based Jon Peddie Research, sees another change coming: the rise of the eReader.

Laptops are becoming less popular, he reckons, and even netbooks are fading. The new must-have is an eReader.

Read more ....

The Evolving Face Of Social Networks

Illustration: Gennady Kurbat/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Laura Parker: What can evolutionary graph theory teach us about the spread of ideas on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?

It seems that everyone is excited about social networks. But not quite in the same way as Harvard graduate student Erez Lieberman, whose evolutionary graph theory is encouraging people to think about social networks in a different way: as an evolving population.

Read more ....

Overrated Optimism: The Peril of Positive Thinking

Tom Stewart / CORBIS

From Time Magazine:

If you're craving a quick hit of optimism, reading a news magazine is probably not the best way to go about finding it. As the life coaches and motivational speakers have been trying to tell us for more than a decade now, a healthy, positive mental outlook requires strict abstinence from current events in all forms. Instead, you should patronize sites like Happynews.com, where the top international stories of the week include "Jobless Man Finds Buried Treasure" and "Adorable 'Teacup Pigs' Are Latest Hit with Brits."

Read more ....

Super-Efficient BMW Concepts Are Simple and Clever

From Autopia/Wired:

BMW, the company that brought you Gina, that wild shape-shifting concept car made of cloth, went even further off the deep end with a pair of wacky concepts making their debut at the company museum in Munich.

The cars, dubbed “Simple” and “Clever” — acronyms that we’ll explain in a moment — are über-small, über-light three-wheelers that are supposed to show just how far down the efficiency road BMW can go. The Bavarians say Simple is “light in weight, low on energy” and Clever gives you “cooperative driving pleasure.”

We say, WTF?

Read more .....

Volcanoes Wiped Out All Forests 250 Million Years Ago

Trees damaged by the effects of toxic acid rain in the highly polluted area known as the "Black Triangle" are seen in northern Czechoslovakia in 1991. A similar treeless landscape full of wood-eating fungi dominated Earth about 250 million years ago, when acid rain from a volcanic eruption killed off most life on Earth. Photograph by Tom Stoddart/Getty Images

From National Geographic:

Massive volcanic eruptions wiped out the world's forests about 250 million years ago, leaving the planet teeming with wood-eating fungi, according to a new study.

The finding confirms that even hardy trees didn't survive the Permian mass extinction, one of the most devastating losses of life Earth has ever known.

Read more ....

The Green Case For Cities

From The Atlantic:

Nowhere has the greening message had a bigger impact than in the building industry. Green or sustainable architecture is all the rage—as well it should be, because buildings use a lot of energy. The construction and operation of residential and commercial buildings consume as much as 40 percent of the energy used in the United States today.

The calculation of a building’s total environmental impact must factor in everything from annual energy consumption to how and where building materials are manufactured and the handling of storm water. This requires some sort of rating system, and there are currently more than 40 of them in use around the world.

Read more ....

NASA's Future of Space Exploration (In Pictures)

NASA's Space Shuttle has been the United States government's spacecraft for human spaceflight missions since the early 1980's, but the Space Shuttle program is scheduled to be retired in 2010. The space agency began eliminating manufacturing jobs in May 2009 with only nine Space Shuttle missions remaining. John Raoux/AP/FILE

Cool Science News Editor: These pictures are from the Christian Science Monitor. To see more, the link is here.

New Way to Tap Gas May Expand Global Supplies

Engineers and geologists are learning how to extract natural gas from layers of shale, a sediment. Matt Nager for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

OKLAHOMA CITY — A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.

Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.

Read more ....

Major Step Forward In Cell Reprogramming, Researchers Report

Lee Rubin, director of translational medicine at HSCI and the other senior author on the research team, said that "our goals were to try to as discretely and specifically as possible guide the cells through the deprogramming process" from the adult state to the embryonic-like state. (Credit: Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2009) — A team of Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers has made a major advance toward producing induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, that are safe enough to use in treating diseases in patients.

“This demonstrates that we’re halfway home, and remarkably we got halfway home with just one chemical,” said Kevin Eggan, an HSCI principal faculty member who is the senior author of the paper being published online today by the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Read more ....

Computers Faster Only For 75 More Years

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (ISNS) -- With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast -- except they can't. A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we'll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.

Read more ....