Creative Is Latest To Tackle E-book Readers

From CNET:

The question is, who isn't getting in on the e-book reader action these days? Less than two weeks after we met Barnes & Nobles' Nook and just a few days after hearing of tire maker Bridgestone's plans for a flexible e-reader, our friends at Crave UK alerted us that Creative may be hopping on the e-reader bandwagon as well.

Creative fan site EpiZenter.net (so named for Creative's family of popular Zen MP3 players) reports that the company showed off a working model of its first e-book reader, tentatively named the MediaBook, at its annual general meeting Thursday in Singapore. The device reportedly has a touch screen, text-to-speech function, and an SD memory card slot. It will run on Creative's Zii System-On-Chip technology and will be Internet-enabled.

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English Wine Gets Help From Space

The system can help to optimise harvests, and hopefully wine quality

From BBC:

A number of English vineyards have signed up to make use of a satellite imaging service to boost harvests.

The satellite measures a vineyard's reflectivity in a number of colours in the visible and infrared.

The Oenoview system, first launched in France last year, analyses the images to determine vine leaf density, soil water content and grape bunch sizes.

The English Wine Producers trade group said that wines made using the system could be available as early as 2011.

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Heaven Can Wait

Patients recount near-death experiences in drawings

From Newsweek:

A new book promises incontrovertible proof of the afterlife. That's cold comfort to those of us left behind.

On a spring day last year, three months after the death of my younger son, Max, I opened my front door and saw a butterfly resting on the steps—an Eastern tiger swallowtail, I later determined, a species native to the Northeast but not one I remembered seeing before in the middle of Brooklyn. The date stuck in my mind because, as it happens, it was also my birthday. The butterfly, with its otherworldly beauty and silence, is, of course, a common metaphor for the soul. Its emergence from entombment as a chrysalis may have inspired ideas about human resurrection.

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Regeneration Can Be Achieved After Chronic Spinal Cord Injury

Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 31, 2009) — Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that regeneration of central nervous system axons can be achieved in rats even when treatment delayed is more than a year after the original spinal cord injury.

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Oldest Known Spider Webs Discovered

This light micrograph shows spider web threads coated with sticky droplets (left panel) and threads with helical twists (right panel) that were preserved inside amber for about 140 million years. Credit: Martin Brasier.

From Live Science:

Silken spider webs dating back some 140 million years have been discovered preserved in amber, scientists announce today.

The viscous tree sap flowed over the spider webs before hardening and preserving the contents, which were discovered in Sussex, England. Other bits sealed up in the amber included plant matter, insect droppings and ancient microbes.

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Earhart's Final Resting Place Believed Found

Amelia Earhart appears above in her flight gear in this undated photo. Legendary aviator Amelia Earhart mostly likely died on an tropical island in the southwestern Pacific. AP

From Discovery News:

Oct. 23, 2009 -- Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart most likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery.

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Researchers Ask How Best To Engineer The Planet

From CNET:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A group of academics on Friday considered the ultimate engineering challenge: building machines to stabilize the earth's climate.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology convened a symposium here to discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of geoengineering, also called climate engineering. Everything from shooting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere to "artificial trees" is being seriously studied, despite trepidation among researchers and opposition from others.

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Ariane Puts Satellites In Orbit

Photo: The sixth Ariane flight of 2009

From The BBC:

Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has launched another two telecommunications satellites into orbit.

Ariane sent the payloads into space from its Kourou base in French Guiana.

The 5,700-kg NSS-12 satellite is owned by SES World Skies and will deliver TV broadcasts to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.

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Fructose Causes High Blood Pressure?

From Future Pundit:

Beware a diet high in fructose.

A diet high in fructose increases the risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension), according to a paper being presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, California. The findings suggest that cutting back on processed foods and beverages that contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may help prevent hypertension.

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A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task

Serge Bloch

From The New York Times:

If you’ve ever had a problem with rodents and woken up to find that mice had chewed their way through the Cheerios, the Famous Amos, three packages of Ramen noodles, and even that carton of baker’s yeast you had bought in a fit of “Ladies of the Canyon” wistfulness, you will appreciate just how freakish is the strain of laboratory mouse that lacks all motivation to eat.

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Rocket Men

Aly Song / Reuters-Landov

From Newsweek:

Politicians won't get us back into the space race, but novelists just might.

Six months ago, President Obama asked a team of academics, astronauts, and aerospace executives to give him options for the future of the space program. Those options, as described in the Augustine Committee's just-released final report, must have sent a little thrill up our Spock-loving nerd in chief's leg: setting up a lunar base, flying to a Martian moon, etc. There's just one catch: NASA doesn't have the resources it needs to pursue these plans. Exciting proposals for voyages to alien moons aside, the report's attention to dollars and cents makes it a cosmic buzzkill.

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Physicist Makes New High-resolution Panorama Of Milky Way

Full sky panorama of the Milky Way.

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 29, 2009) — Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

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Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special

From Live Science:

Humans are unusual animals by any stretch of the imagination, ones that have changed the face of the world around us. What makes us so special when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? Some things we take completely for granted might surprise you.

- Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

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Prairie Pioneer Seeks To Reinvent The Way We Farm

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, at his farm in Salina, Kan. Richard Harris

From NPR:

We tend to think Earth can provide us with an endless bounty of food. But farming practices in most parts of the world can't work forever. Soil is constantly washing away, and what's left is gradually losing the nutrients it needs to sustain our crops.

In the prairies of Kansas lives Wes Jackson, a man who has spent his long and rich career trying to invent a new kind of agriculture — one that will last indefinitely.

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Best View Yet Of Apollo Landing Site

The new LRO image. Click it to enlarge

From Scientific American:

A NASA spaceprobe has sent back the clearest photo yet of an Apollo landing site - including even the US flag. It clearly shows the descent stage of Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger, nearly 37 years after it touched down in December 1972 in the Taurus Littrow valley. The new LRO image. Click it to enlarge For the first time even its legs are visible, thanks to the detail possible with the orbiting digital camera.

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ANIMAL ROBOTS: Marine Machines Made in Nature's Image

From National Geographic:

October 26, 2009--If it looks like a fish and swims like a fish, it could be a robot--such as the University of Bath's Gymnobot (pictured), inspired by an Amazonian knifefish.

Researchers worldwide are developing robots that look and act like aquatic creatures. That's because biomimetic gadgets--bots that take inspiration from nature--are often more efficient than their clunkier counterparts.

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America’s Electronic Waste Is Polluting the Globe

From Discover Magazine:

It seems that every day brings a new electronic gadget to the market, whether it’s a smart phone, an electronic reader, a laptop the size and weight of a magazine, or a television the size of a wall. But each advance adds to the world’s electronic waste, which is the fastest-growing component of solid waste. Much of the electronic refuse ends up in developing countries, where workers strip down the gadgets to get at the copper and other valuable metals inside, often exposing themselves to toxins in the process. Now, scientists are calling for federal regulations in the United States to stem the tide.

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Innovation: Ultimate Jukebox Is Next Step In Net Music

Find what you want and listen to it (Image: Gary Burchell/Getty)

From New Scientist:

Something exciting has just happened to online music, and it has nothing to do with Google's new music service garnering all the headlines.

If you Google search for music related terms, like an artist's name, some results now come with links to audio previews for relevant tracks. It is easy to use, but the service taps into just a few of the online music streaming sites. Lala and iLike are included but others with large libraries like Spotify and Last.fm are ignored. It also only works in the US. But more importantly, Google's service only helps people find music, and what they really want is to listen to it.

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9,000-Year-Old Brew Hitting The Shelves This Summer

From Scientific American:

This summer, how would you like to lean back in your lawn chair and toss back a brew made from what may be the world’s oldest recipe for beer? Called Chateau Jiahu, this blend of rice, honey and fruit was intoxicating Chinese villagers 9,000 years ago—long before grape wine had its start in Mesopotamia.

University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern first described the beverage in 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on chemical traces from pottery in the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China.

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New Unmanned Chopper Sniffs Out Improvised Explosives While Looking Adorable

Helipanda This little fella likes flying through rainbows and sniffing for bombs Scheibel

From Popular Science:

The Pentagon is testing an unmanned helicopter that can detect electromagnetic emissions from IEDs. Codename: HELIPANDA (we wish)

Roadside bombs have long represented the greatest killer of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's hope beyond the sturdy little demolition bots that already work with their human handlers. The Pentagon now has two aerial drones on the testing docket as possible countermeasures for improvised explosive devices (IEDs)--one of which we're calling 'Helipanda' for the remainder of this post.

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