Pollination In The Pre-Flower-Power Era

The long, tubular proboscis (arrow, left image) sported by some species of scorpionflies suggests that the insects were pollinating ancient plants including conifers (right) millions of years before flowers evolved. Credit: Photo: Wenying Wu; Illustration: Mary Parrish/National Museum of Natural History

From Science News:

Scorpionflies may have aided plant reproduction long before blossoms evolved.

An obscure group of scorpionflies with specialized mouthparts may have pollinated ancient plants millions of years before flowers evolved, a new study suggests.

Fossils indicate that before flowers evolved about 130 million years ago, most plants with seeds were wind-pollinated. Yet the pollen grains of some plants that lived in the prefloral era were too big to be wind-dispersed, say Conrad Labandeira, a paleoentomologist at Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Also, he notes, pollen receptors were hidden deep within some of those plants and wouldn’t have been readily exposed to windborne pollen.

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ESA Spacecraft May Help Unravel Cosmic Mystery

Cassini-Huygens swings by Earth and accelerates towards Saturn. (Credit: ESA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — When Europe's comet chaser Rosetta swings by Earth on Nov. 13 for a critical gravity assist, tracking data will be collected to precisely measure the satellite's change in orbital energy. The results could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades.

Since 1990, scientists and mission controllers at ESA and NASA have noticed that their spacecraft sometimes experience a strange variation in the amount of orbital energy they exchange with Earth during planetary swingbys. The unexplained variation is noticed as a tiny difference in speed gained or lost during the swingby when comparing that predicted by fundamental physics and that actually measured after the event.

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Friday The 13th: Your Luck Is About To Change

From Live Science:

If Friday the 13th is unlucky, then 2009 has been an unusually unlucky year. But your luck is about to change. Today is the last of three Friday the 13ths you'll have to endure this year.

The other two were in February and March. Such a rare triple-threat occurs only once every 11 years.

The origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and the number 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.

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Tiny Mutation Led To Human Speech

Human speech is thought to have emerged 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, some five million years after chimps and humans took divergent paths on the tree of evolution. Photo: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Two minute evolutionary changes in a gene that is otherwise identical in humans and chimps could explain why we have fully fledged power of speech while other primates do not.

The findings may also point to new drug targets for hard-to-treat diseases that disrupt speech, such as schizophrenia and autism, said a study detailed in the British journal Nature today.

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Behind The CDC's Soaring H1N1 Death Totals

From Time Magazine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday updated estimates of the number of H1N1 infections and deaths in the U.S. According to the new figures, about 4,000 Americans, including 540 children, have died of H1N1 flu, and 2 million people have been infected since April, when the novel flu virus first surfaced. The new death toll, which encompasses data through Oct. 17, represents a tripling of CDC estimates issued just last week; the number of deaths in children quadruples last week's figures. But the increase does not mean that the disease has suddenly become more deadly or severe, according to health officials, who say they are not surprised by the higher numbers.

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Undercurrent Of Doubt Over Electric Motors

A loophole in EU targets on cutting CO2 emissions means that the more electric cars are produced, the more SUVs manufacturers can sell. Reuters

From The Independent:

Greener power generation needed if electric vehicles are really to reduce emissions.

Electric cars , which emit no carbon dioxide from their tailpipe, are not the answer some people think they are to environmental transport problems, a new report claims today.

The idea that a wholesale switch to electric transport would automatically reduce CO2 emissions and dependence on oil is a myth, says the analysis prepared for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA).

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His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’

Facebook has become more than a diversion for Rodney Bradford. Damiano Beltrami

From The New York Times:

Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

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Mars Rover Battles For Its Life

Last chance to lift NASA's spirit (Image: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

NASA's twin Mars rovers have outlasted their planned three-month missions for so long that they seem indestructible. Nearly six years on, their presence on the Red Planet is taken for granted, as if they are immutable parts of the Martian landscape.

But we may soon have to confront a new reality. Spirit, which has always suffered more hardships than Opportunity, is facing its toughest challenge yet. When New Scientist went to press, the rover was set to begin a risky push to free itself from a sand trap it has been mired in for six months. Mission engineers say it may not survive the attempt. "She's in a very precarious situation, and we don't know for sure if we're going to get her out," says rover driver Scott Maxwell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

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Robo-Negotiator Talks Down Armed Lunatic

You Want My Hydraulic Fluid! Take My Hydraulic Fluid! Via OK.gov

From Popular Science:

Hostage situations are often described like explosive devices, as ticking time bombs waiting to go off. And just as bomb disposal units have robots to help with their job, now police negotiators have a bot of their own for defusing a different kind of explosive situation.

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Warning Of Extra Heart Dangers From Mixing Cocaine And Alcohol

A man snorting cocaine. Photograph: Andy Drysdale/ADR

From The Guardian:

A third chemical – cocaethylene – builds up in the liver over a number of years among those who mix the two drugs. And this is now having major health consequences.

"I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher," a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

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Great Pacific Garbage Patch Keeps Getting Bigger

In a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement. Photo: Mario Aguilera/New York Times

From Future Pundit:

We are letting far too much plastic end up in the oceans.

ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.

In 1804, a little over 200 years ago, the planet had a human population of 1 billion people. Back then the oceans seemed immense and beyond the capacity of humans to change. Yet by 1850 whale hunting peaked due to over harvesting and we've since drastically drawn down the stocks of other ocean-going creatures such as cod and salmon.

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High-performance Plasmas May Make Reliable, Efficient Fusion Power A Reality

Artist's rendering of a tokamak plasma. The plasma is confined by the combination of strong magnetic field in the toroidal direction (around the hole in the "donut" as shown by the black arrow) generated by external coils (not shown) and the magnetic field from a large current flowing in the same toroidal direction. The plasma is held inside a sealed metal structure that is evacuated and lined with special material to keep the plasma pure and handle the heat exhaust. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)

From The Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 12, 2009) — In the quest to produce nuclear fusion energy, researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have recently confirmed long-standing theoretical predictions that performance, efficiency and reliability are simultaneously obtained in tokamaks, the leading magnetic confinement fusion device, operating at their performance limits. Experiments designed to test these predictions have successfully demonstrated the interaction of these conditions.

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Origin of Household Dust Pinned Down

A new computer model that simulates how dust comes into and out of homes found that most indoor dust originates outside. The model may help communities figure out how to best clean up contaminated waste sites. Credit: Stockxpert.

From Live Science:

No matter how much you clean, dust always comes back, and you might have wondered how it all gets there. Now, researchers have created a new computer model to explain what happens.

Most dust originates outdoors and comes in through the air, rather than trampled in on people's shoes, at least in a group of homes in the Midwestern United States, they found.

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U.S. Army Orders Bridges Made Of Recycled Plastic

An M1A1 70-ton tank crosses a bridge made from Axion's thermoplastic composite at Camp Mackall in North Carolina. (Credit: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army/Dawn Elizabeth Pandoliano)

From CNET News:

Axion International Holdings has won a $957,000 contract to provide the U.S. Army with two bridges made from a thermoplastic composite and recycled plastic, the company announced Wednesday evening.

The two bridges, which are replacing old wooden ones, will be constructed at Fort Eustis in Virginia from a proprietary Recycled Structural Composite (RSC) developed by Axion in conjunction with scientists at Rutgers University.

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Flu Spray vs. Shot: Is One Better?

From Discovery News:

My four-year-old got her swine flu vaccination yesterday. At the time, I was relieved when the school nurse pulled out a spray rather than a syringe.
Flu-spray-278x225

There were no tears -- or at least fewer than if she had gotten a shot.

But then I started to wonder -- is this really as good as the real thing ... that is, the needle?

Apparently I'm not alone. My neighborhood parent list serve has been peppered with posts from parents wondering the same thing.

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Lithium Clue For Planet-Hunters

Planets grow in the dusty discs that form around infant stars

From The BBC:

Astronomers may have found a way to identify those Sun-like stars most likely to harbour orbiting planets.

A survey of stars known to possess planets shows the vast majority to be severely depleted in lithium.

To date, scientists have detected just over 420 worlds circling other stars using a range of techniques.

Garik Israelian and colleagues tell the journal Nature that future planet hunts could be narrowed by going after stars with particular compositions.

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4 High-Tech Surprises From The USS New York

USS New York makes her way up the Hudson River.

From Popular Mechanics:

The USS New York, commissioned this month in its namesake city, is the Navy's newest warship. It's a Landing Platform Dock ship, which means it brings Marines to wherever they are needed. The 700 marines on the ship travel ready for combat, and that means landing hovercraft (called Landing Craft Air Cushions), attack helicopters, tanks, amphibious vehicles and V-22 Ospreys come along for the ride. The aircraft launch from the ship and are maintained in hangars on and below the flight deck. The New York has the most famous hull in the world—the Navy integrated 7.5 tons of steel from the fallen World Trade Center towers into the bow. But that is not the only interesting detail of this new vessel's design. Here are four high-tech surprises the USS New York has in store for enemies.

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In SUSY We Trust: What The LHC Is Really Looking For

From New Scientist:

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

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When the DoD's Fantasy Projects Get Real: DARPA Monitors Student Minds, SOCOM Wants Robo-Go-Fast Boats, And More

Robot At The Helm? courtesy of the Department of Defense

From Popular Science:

Three times a year, the Department of Defense (DoD) solicits help from the small business community to transform their high-tech research projects into actual, usable products. While the businesses use this opportunity to fight for some of that sweet, sweet government pork, for us, it's a chance to get a look at the next generation of advanced military gear. With the new solicitations out today, we're counting down the most intriguing projects that the DoD wants to get out of the lab and onto the battlefield.

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My Comment: Everyone comes out of the woodwork for these type of shows .... myself included.

October USA – Temperature 3rd Coldest On Record, Wettest Ever On Record

From Watts Up With That?

Temperature Highlights – October

* The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data.
* For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts. Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation’s nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.

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