Sea Levels Rose Two Feet This Summer In U.S. East

High tides lash a Destin, Florida, pavilion—usually on dry land—ahead of tropical storm Claudette on August 17, 2009. Aside from such short-term events as storms, anomalous wind and ocean patterns caused a sustained and unexpected rise in sea levels on the U.S. East Coast through much of summer 2009, according to a September 2009 report. Photograph by Mari Darr-Welch/AP

From National Geographic:

Sea levels rose as much as 2 feet (60 centimeters) higher than predicted this summer along the U.S. East Coast, surprising scientists who forecast such periodic fluctuations.

The immediate cause of the unexpected rise has now been solved, U.S. officials say in a new report (hint: it wasn't global warming). But the underlying reason remains a mystery.

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World's Oldest Submerged Town Dates Back 5,000 Years

Underwater archaeologists at Pavlopetri. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Nottingham)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 16, 2009) — Archaeologists surveying the world’s oldest submerged town have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic. Their discovery suggests that Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, was occupied some 5,000 years ago — at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought.

These remarkable findings have been made public by the Greek government after the start of a five year collaborative project involving the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and The University of Nottingham.

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Speed of Thought-to-Speech Traced in Brain

This is a brain scan showing electrodes that surgeons use to find and remove the source of seizures (to cure epilepsy) while sparing the source of mental functions like language. Credit: Illustration: Ned T. Sahin, Ph.D.. Brain Image Reconstruction: Sean McInerney.

From Live Science:

In just 600 milliseconds, the human brain can think of a word, apply the rules of grammar to it and send it to the mouth to be spoken. For the first time, researchers have traced this lightning-fast sequence and broken it down into distinct steps.

Researchers got this rare glimpse into the fine-tuned workings of the brain from the signals sent by electrodes implanted in the brains of epileptics. The electrodes help surgeons locate the parts of the brain that cause epileptic seizures so they can be removed, and also help keep surgeons from removing critical parts of the brain

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Solving The Crystal Maze: The Secrets Of Structure

What makes graphite like this? (Image: Walden)

From New Scientist:

CRYSTALS are objects of true and profound mystery. That's not because they channel occult energies, or hold misty hints of the future in their limpid depths. Their puzzle is much less esoteric: why are they as they are?

It is an incredibly basic question, yet physicists still struggle with it. Can we say why a given group of atoms prefers one particular arrangement over another? Can we predict how a crystal will be structured, and so deduce what properties it will have?

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Barnacles' Sticky Secret Revealed

Inside out, a cross section of a barnacle

From the BBC:

Barnacles are able to attach themselves to almost anything.

They are found clinging to the hulls of ships, the sides of rock pools and even to the skin of whales.

Just how they stick so steadfastly whilst underwater has remained a biochemical puzzle for scientists for many years.

Now researchers have solved this mystery, showing that barnacle glue binds together exactly the same way as human blood does when it clots.

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NASA Moon Crash Did Kick Up Debris Plume As Hoped

A satellite camera picks up a plume of debris, circled above, seconds after a rocket smashed into the Cabeus crater. NASA estimates the dust went up about a mile. (NASA)

From The L.A. Times:

Images are released showing that the lunar mission may be more successful than it first appeared. Scientists are 'are blown away by the data returned.'

NASA's recent lunar-punch mission apparently was not the high-profile flop it first appeared.

Officials at Ames Research Center in Northern California, which managed the mission, released images Friday that clearly show a plume of debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency's rocket plowed into it.

The plume reached an estimated mile above the lunar surface.

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The Collider, The Particle And A Theory About Fate

SUICIDE MISSION? The core of the superconducting solenoid magnet at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

From The International Herald Tribune:

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

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New Software Could Smooth Supercomputing Speed Bumps

ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL: Researchers are increasingly turning to computers powered by a combination of graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs), but they're looking for a better way to write software for these systems. © FOTOIE, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

From Scientific American:

Researchers turn to the Open Computing Language as a way to get graphics and general-purpose computer processors on the same page for more powerful number crunching

Supercomputers have long been an indispensable, albeit expensive, tool for researchers who need to make sense of vast amounts of data. One way that researchers have begun to make high-speed computing more powerful and also more affordable is to build systems that split up workloads among fast, highly parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and general-purpose central processing units (CPUs).

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The Dissection: A Home Electric Meter

Electric Meter An unsuspecting electric meter, waiting to be dissected. Vin Marshall

From Popular Science:

A peek inside the simple gears and complicated math that make up one of the coolest devices in your house.

You remember calculus, right? In a time before mechanized computing was performed by computers, complex (or sometimes just clever) machines were used to automate calculations. One example that has always impressed and fascinated me is the wheel-and-disk integrator, a simple machine capable of solving the calculus equations you labored over in high school without breaking a sweat. While this concept was used most impressively in Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, an analog computer built in 1931, the chances are good that you've seen one in a more mundane application around your house: the power meter. Click on the photo gallery to see inside one and how it works, and follow the jump for more in-depth electro-geekery.

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Digital Rosetta Stone For Digital Storage For 1000 years

From The Next Big Future:

Tadahiro Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory chip sealed in silicon that he says can store data for 1,000 years.

Currently long term data storage requires: Data typically has to be put on new storage systems every 20 years or less for it to be accessible. The digital migration costs time and money. Storing and maintaining a digital master of a very high-resolution movie, for example, costs $12,500 a year; archiving a standard film costs $1,000 a year.

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Exact Date Pinned To Great Pyramid's Construction?

The setting sun casts a golden hue over the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt in an undated picture. Construction of the Great Pyramid (right), the tomb of the pharaoh Khufu, started on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research announced in August 2009. Photograph by Kenneth Garrett/NGS

From National Geographic:

The Egyptians started building the Great Pyramid of Giza on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research that attempts to place an exact date on the start of the ancient construction project.

A team of Egyptian researchers arrived at the date based on calculations of historical appearances of the star Sothis—today called Sirius.

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More Than 4735 Deaths So Far From H1N1 Flu

Shortage Of Shots As More Kids Die Of Swine Flu -- MSNBC

CDC: H1N1 virus causing unprecedented number of infections for early fall

WASHINGTON - Even as swine flu infections are causing an unprecedented amount of illness for this time of year — and a growing number of deaths, particularly among children — supplies of vaccine to protect against it will be delayed, government health officials said Friday.

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200,000-Year-Old Cut Of Meat: Archaeologists Shed Light On Life, Diet And Society Before The Delicatessen

A bone from the Qesem Cave showing irregular cutmarks. (Credit: Photo by Dr. Mary Stiner)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 15, 2009) — Contestants on TV shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen know that their meat-cutting skills will be scrutinized by a panel of unforgiving judges. Now, new archaeological evidence is getting the same scrutiny by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona.

Their research is providing new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they're changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviors through the millennia.

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Small Asteroid to Fly Past Earth Tonight

From Live Science:

A small asteroid will buzz the Earth late Friday EDT (early Saturday GMT), flying just inside the orbit of the moon. It should pass safely by our home planet, according to a crack team of NASA space rock trackers.

The space rock, named 2009 TM8, was just discovered Thursday by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. It will get within 216,000 miles (348,000 km) of Earth when it zooms by at a speed of about 18,163 mph (29,232 kph).

"That's slightly closer than the orbit of our moon," NASA's Asteroid Watch team said Friday via Twitter.

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Remembering The Man Who Made Jet Fighters Possible

Richard T. Whitcomb solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, leading to supersonic flight. He died Tuesday at age 88. NASA

He Sparked Supersonic Flight With A Coke Bottle And File -- Wall Street Journal

Richard T. Whitcomb dreamed up techniques that made supersonic flight possible and innovations that endure on passenger jets today.

Mr. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 13 at age 88, solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, whose designs couldn't achieve supersonic flight even though they seemed to have enough power. Increased wind resistance at speeds approaching the speed of sound was the problem. Engineers took to calling it the "sound barrier."

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My Comment: We have gone a long way since his techniques made supersonic flight possible .... but he was the first to dream of the impossible becoming possible.

The Moon Belongs To No One – Yet

Making the moon mine (Image: View China Photo/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

LAST week, NASA bombed the moon. Or rather, it crashed its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite into the moon's south pole in a bid to discover reserves of water and other resources.

This was the latest in a veritable flurry of moon missions: between 2007 and 2011 there will have been eight: one from Japan, two from China, one from India, one from Russia and three from the US.

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LHC Gets Colder Than Deep Space

The giant Atlas detector will search for hints of the elusive Higgs boson particle

From The BBC:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.

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How Net Activity Boosted 'Paranormal Activity'

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Fueled by a grassroots Internet campaign that included a "Tweet Your Scream" promotion using Twitter, a low-budget horror film titled "Paranormal Activity" has become a surprise box office hit.

Meanwhile, a more anticipated movie, "Where the Wild Things Are," gained 871,000 fans on its Facebook page last week and now has more than 1.5 million eager devotees even before the film hits screens today.

And the official Twitter account promoting next month's sequel to the romantic vampire movie "Twilight" went live Monday and bit into more than 79,000 followers by Thursday. Its Facebook page already had 3.8 million fans.

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Cheetah, Gecko And Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs

From Gadget Lab:

A cheetah can run faster than any other animal. A gecko’s feet can stick to almost any surface without using liquids or surface tension. And some roaches scurry at nearly 50 times their body length in one second, which, scaled up to human levels, can be around 200 miles an hour.

The wonders of the animal kingdom are not just for fans of National Geographic. Robotic designer Sangbae Kim, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to understand how he can take some of the mechanisms animals use and replicate them in robots.

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Stormy Times For Cloud Computing?

From Times Online:

Concern over data loss and legal uncertainty may delay the development of cloud computing, experts warned on Monday.

Cloud computing involves the storage of data online, rather than on locally networked servers or machines. The best known services are provided by Google and Microsoft.

Last weekend, Microsoft in the United States was forced to admit that it had irretrievably lost all online data belonging to owners of the T-Mobile Sidekick, a smartphone that backs up its data online, in the cloud.

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