New Dinosaur Extinction Theory Causes Debate

An artist rendering of a space rock streaking toward Earth. Most experts think an impact off the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago was the primary cause of the dinosaur demise. Others think volcanism and climate change may have played a role. A new and controversial idea suggests there was another, larger impact in India that was responsible. Stockxpert

From MSNBC:

The extinction of the dinosaurs has often been traced to a giant space rock impact on the Earth 65 million years ago. But now a scientist is saying experts have blamed the wrong impact. The new thinking was met with sharp criticism from other researchers, however.

Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University says a giant basin in India called Shiva could also be an impact crater from the time of the dinosaurs' demise, and the crash that created it may have been the cause of the mass extinction scientists call the KT (Cretaceous–Tertiary) event, which killed off more than half the Earth's species along with the dinos. This argument runs counter to the widely-held wisdom that the Chicxulub impact on the Yucatan Peninsula off Mexico was behind the cataclysm.

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What Is The Real Cost Of Power Production?

POLLUTION COSTS: The hidden costs of power production include the health effects of air pollution and alternative fuels are no panacea. Corn ethanol has similar or even slightly higher negative impacts than gasoline. © iStockphoto.com / Mayumi Terao

From Scientific American:

Market prices don't reflect hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden costs of energy production to human health and the environment.

Market prices don't reflect hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden costs of energy production to human health and the environment, a National Research Council panel said in a report released today.

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Child-Care Centers And Parents Brace For Flu Season

Najlah Feanny / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Over the years, day-care and child-care centers have become a security blanket for millions of working parents who need their children looked after during the day. But as an H1N1 epidemic draws closer, these centers look less like protective bastions and more like potential H1N1 incubators.

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2012 Doomsday Not Likely, Mayans Insist

From Discovery:

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

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In Search Of That Word On The Tip Of Your Tongue

Jennie Pyers signs with a young deaf boy in Nicaragua. Pyers studied bilingual sign language speakers to solve the "tip of the tongue" question. Wellesley College

From USA Today:

On the tip of your tongue, that word you can't dig out. Why not?

The tip of your tongue may be the wrong place to look, psychologists suggest. They find that hearing, sign-language speakers may hold the keys to finding where those words are hiding.

"You know the word, you just can't get it out," says Jennie Pyers of Wellesley (Mass.) College. "Well, it turns out sign-language speakers have the same problem," she says. Only they are called "tip-of-the-finger" glitches, rather than "tip-of the tongue" by psychologists.

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How The Moon Produces Its Own Water

Chandrayaan-1 SARA measurements of hydrogen flux recorded on the Moon on 6 February 2009. (Credit: Elsevier 2009 (Wieser et al.), ESA-ISRO SARA data)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 19, 2009) — The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

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Why Have Sex? To Fend Off Parasites

Indiana University student Kayla King dissects snails under the microscope.
Credit: Kayla King, Indiana University

From Live Science:

Since Darwin’s time, biologists have tried to understand the advantages of sexual reproduction.
This is not trivial because there are clear disadvantages to sex.

Unlike sexual organisms, asexuals do not need a partner to reproduce, can reproduce clonally, and can produce twice as many female offspring. If there were no advantages to sex, and both sexual and asexual individuals were competing for resources, the asexuals would take over in only a few generations.

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Could Early Retirement Kill You?

From The Telegraph:

Full retirement after a life of work could actually kill you, claims new research.

A new study shows that people who give up work completely are less healthy than those who carry on in a part time job.

It found they experience fewer serious diseases and are able to function better day-to-day than those who stop working altogether.

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Are You Ready For The Third Dimension?

Photo: Coming to a home near you: Sky and Channel 4 are set to bring 3D technology into the living room

From The Daily Mail:

Cameras, laptops, computer games, even Channel 4 - the 3D experience is about to leap off the big screen and into your living room...

This Is It, the movie that documents Michael Jackson's final rehearsals for his never-to-be O2 residency, includes 3D movie sequences originally intended to be used in his comeback shows.

It's part of a new generation of 3D movies designed to tempt recession-hit movie-lovers back into the cinema - and it follows this year's string of 3D successes, including Coraline, Monsters vs Aliens and Bolt.

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Crystals Hold Super Computer Key

From The BBC:

Tiny crystals could hold the key to creating computers with massive storage capacity, scientists believe.

The crystals could be used as storage devices for desktop computers capable of holding 100-times more data than current systems.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have been using low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel.

The development could allow users to store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube within a decade.

This would be enough to hold the equivalent of 250,000 photographs or a million books.

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Energy Out Of The Blue: Generating Electric Power From The Clash Of River And Sea Water

ELECTRIC BLUE: New projects aim to generate energy by harnessing the salinity-balancing effects where freshwater rivers flow into salty seas. © NASA/ROBERT SIMMON

From Scientific American:

Two pilot projects are testing the potential of "salt power," a renewable energy that relies on the differing salinities at river mouths to make watts.

In the hunt for alternatives to polluting and climate-warming fossil fuels, attention has turned to where rivers meet the sea. Here, freshwater and saltwater naturally settle their salinity difference, a phenomenon that two pioneering projects in Europe will try to harness to generate clean energy.

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When Is A Species Endangered? Revising The Numbers

An endangered Sumatran tiger wades through a stream
Tom Brakefield / Getty

From Time Magazine:

The planet is in the middle of an extinction crisis, the sixth great wave in its history. But unlike major extinction events of the past — like the Permian-Triassic event 250 million years ago, in which 70% of all terrestrial species were wiped out, probably because of an asteroid impact or a similar natural disaster — this time human beings are the cause. Hard numbers are difficult to find, but many scientists believe Earth's species are going extinct at a rate that is up to 1,000 times higher than before human beings came on the scene.

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Barking Dogs Explained

Barking -- With Reason. Animal welfare researchers have uncovered why
city-living domestic dogs may be prone to nuisance barking. iStockPhoto

From Discovery:

Animal welfare researchers have uncovered why city-living domestic dogs may be prone to nuisance barking.

In this month's issue of Australian Veterinary Journal, a team from the University of Queensland's Center for Animal Welfare and Ethics report a case-control survey of 150 dog owners including 72 dogs whose owners had sought treatment for nuisance barking.

Barking can be classified as being a nuisance when it causes distress or interruption to the life of the dogs' owners or neighbors.

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In Search Of What Everyone's Clicking

Photo: Real-time search: Wowd indexes pages visited by its users and ranks them based on either their popularity or their freshness. Credit: Wowd

From Technology Review:

A real-time search engine bases its results on users' browsing habits.

Later this week, a new "real-time" and "social" search engine called Wowd will open a beta version of its service to the public. The company says that its search results include only pages that have actually been visited by its users, and that its ranking algorithms offer information based on its freshness and popularity.

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Quantcast Quantum Computers Could Tackle Enormous Equations

From U.S. News And World Report:

Trillions of variables may prove no match for envisioned systems.

A new algorithm may give quantum computers a new, practical job: quickly solving monster linear equations. Such problems are at the heart of complex processes such as image and video processing, genetic analyses and even Internet traffic control. The new work, published October 7 in Physical Review Letters, may dramatically expand the range of potential uses for quantum computers.

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Edge Of Solar System Is Not What We Expected

From Wired Science:

The edge of the solar system is tied up with a ribbon, astronomers have discovered. The first global map of the solar system reveals that its edge is nothing like what had been predicted. Neutral atoms, which are the only way to image the fringes of the solar system, are densely packed into a narrow ribbon rather than evenly distributed.

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In Shaping Our Immune Systems, Some 'Friendly' Bacteria May Play Inordinate Role

A little-known bacterial species called segmented filamentous bacterium, or SFB, can activate the production of specialized immune cells in mice. This scanning electron microscope image of an SFB colony shows a mass of long hair-like filaments created when the bacteria stay attached to each other after they divide. (Credit: Ivaylo Ivanov and Dan Littman (NYU Langone Medical Center) and Doug Wei (Carl Zeiss SMT, Inc.))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2009) — Out of the trillions of "friendly" bacteria -- representing hundreds of species -- that make our intestines their home, new evidence in mice suggests that it may be a very select few that shape our immune responses. The findings detailed in two October 16th reports appearing in the journals Cell and Immunity, both Cell Press publications, offer new insight into the constant dialogue that goes on between intestinal microbes and the immune system, and point to a remarkably big role for a class of microbes known as segmented filamentous bacteria (SFB).

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Egyptian Tombs Flooded By 'Faulty' Ancient Methods

This view down a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt, shows fracture traces running down the tomb ceiling. Credit: Katarin Parizek, Penn State

From Live Science:

A trick used by ancient Egyptians to exploit cracks in Earth to make tomb-digging easier has come back to haunt the Valley of the Kings, new evidence suggests.

While the natural fractures were followed to carve out burial sites, several instances show, rare heavy rainfall events can flood the tombs. Archaeologists are racing to map and photograph the tombs to better preserve their contents and figure out ways to divert the rain.

"We have seen evidence of seven separate flood events in four tombs so far," said Penn State researcher Katarin A. Parizek.

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Q&A: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

From The Guardian:

'My greatest hope for the next 10 years? That we will, on the internet, continue to forge a new cultural dialogue of reason and respect for the individual'

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.org in January 2001. It is now among the top five most visited sites on the web; in 2006, Wales was named one of the world's most influential people by Time magazine.

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Unique Painting Of A Medici Lord Found

Photo: A depiction of an Italian nobleman holding a gold watch attributed to Tommaso Manzuoli

Science Museum Unearths Unknown Portrait Of Medici Lord -- The Telegraph

Art experts at the Science Museum think they may have found the world's oldest painting to feature a watch in a hitherto unknown picture of a member of the influential Medici family.

Since obtaining the painting 33 years ago, it has simply been known as a depiction of an Italian nobleman holding an intriguing golden timepiece.

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