Longevity Tied to Genes That Preserve Tips of Chromosomes

Researchers have found a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that rebuilds telomeres -- the tip ends of chromosomes. (Credit: iStockphoto/Felix Möckel)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 15, 2009) — A team led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has found a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that rebuilds telomeres -- the tip ends of chromosomes.

The findings appear in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Female Wild Horses Stick Together

Wild mares socialize in new Zealand's Kaimanawa Mountains. Credit: Elissa Z. Cameron

From Live Science:

Wild mares that form strong social bonds with other mares produce more foals than those that don’t, researchers have found, in what may be the first documented link between “friendship” and reproductive success outside of primates.

The study followed bands of feral horses in the Kaimanawa Mountains of New Zealand over the course of three years. Elissa Z. Cameron, now at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and two colleagues computed sociality scores for 56 mares, based on parameters such as the proportion of time each animal spent near other mares and the amount of social grooming she did.

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California Droughts When Planet Warms?

From Future Pundit:

Why worry about earthquakes when we can worry about massive droughts instead?

California experienced centuries-long droughts in the past 20,000 years that coincided with the thawing of ice caps in the Arctic, according to a new study by UC Davis doctoral student Jessica Oster and geology professor Isabel Montañez.

The finding, which comes from analyzing stalagmites from Moaning Cavern in the central Sierra Nevada, was published online Nov. 5 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Global warming gets a lot of attention due to the prospects of huge low lying areas getting submerged. But big changes in regional climate - whether human caused or not - seem much more interesting to me. Such changes could occur at any time.

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On the Copenhagen Agenda, Reducing Deforestation May Still Succeed

Photo: A deforested area of rain forest in southern Para state, Brazil. JEFFERSON RUDDY / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

This month, the journal Nature Geoscience published a study calculating that deforestation is responsible for about 15% of global carbon emissions, down from earlier estimates of 20% or more. Most of the world's deforestation is concentrated in a few tropical nations, like Brazil and Indonesia where trees are disappearing fast — when these trees die or are burned, they release into the atmosphere all the carbon they've sucked up while they were alive. According to the Nature Geoscience study, the problem of deforestation is becoming a lot less dire than previously thought.

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Michael Jackson Planned 'Robot Duplicate' Of Himself

From Register:

Dead megastar droid zombie blueprints offered for $1m.

Famous dead pop legend Michael Jackson intended to construct an eerily-lifelike robotic duplicate of himself, according to reports. Detailed three-dimensional scans of the deceased globo-celeb's body were made, and the super-accurate body maps are now said to be on sale for a million dollars.

The story was reported yesterday by the Daily Star, which says that the occasionally troubled dead overlord of pop had the scans made in 1996 "in a bizarre bid to build a robot twin... [Unidentified] scientists say following his death on June 25, the eerie images could be used to bring him back".

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Mini Ice Age Took Hold Of Europe In Months

Big freezes can happen fast (Image: Tancrediphoto.com/Stone/Getty)

From New Scientist:

JUST months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

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Telegraph.co.uk At 15: Making The News

From The Telegraph:

The machinery for putting the news online has changed a lot in the 15 years that Telegraph.co.uk has been live, says Ian Douglas.

In the summer of 1999, when the web was nine years old, the Telegraph's website was almost five and I arrived at Canary Wharf for my first shift. Newcomers were paired with someone with more experience to learn the ropes.

Check the text, paste some tags in here and here, add links to the bottom of the page, then send it off, I was told. 'Send it off where,' I asked. 'To Overlord,' was the ominous reply. Overlord was the batch process built by Tim Brown, architect of the early online Telegraph efforts. Tim was usually to be found cropping photographs in the corner on night shifts, but two years before I arrived he had built the newspaper's first web content management system in his spare time. Overlord took the stories that had been worked on throughout the evening and turned them into web pages to be published on a server sitting in a cupboard a few doors down.

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The Giant Iceberg That Went Walkabout... Towards The Coast Of Australia

Should that be there? A giant iceberg is seen off Macquarie Island which lies halfway between Antarctica and Australia. Scientists say it is unusual to see one so far north

From The Daily Mail:

Australia is known for sunny beaches, surfers, and blistering Outback heat.

So scientists were a bit taken aback when they spotted this giant iceberg floating near an island Down Under.

Australian Antarctic Division researchers were working on Macquarie Island when they first saw the iceberg last Thursday about about five miles off the island. It is rare to see an iceberg floating so far north of Antarctica, researchers said.

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Apec Leaders Drop Climate Target

From The BBC:

World leaders meeting in Singapore have said it will not be possible to reach a climate change deal ahead of next month's UN conference in Denmark.

After a two-day Asia-Pacific summit, they vowed to work towards an "ambitious outcome" in Copenhagen.

But the group dropped a target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which was outlined in an earlier draft.

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Army Corps of Engineers Now Required to Consider Climate Change in All Future Projects

Flood Plans Here's to keeping above water Army Corps of Engineers

From Popular Science:

Worst-case planning never hurt anybody, and certainly not federal water projects that cost millions of dollars and could be easily undone by climate change and rising sea levels. A new policy now requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to plan for future climate change when designing plans for flood control or other projects.

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Can Alternative Energy Save The Economy And The Climate?

Photo: RENEWABLE WINDFALL: Utility companies are investing in diverse renewable energy projects with or without success at Copenhagen. ISTOCKPHOTO/JLGUTIERREZ

From Scientific American:

The "new energy" economy rolls forward even as hopes for an international deal to combat climate change at Copenhagen shift into reverse.

BRIGHTON, Colo. - The low-carbon economy has already arrived on the windy prairie north of this fast-growing Denver 'burb. It's here that Danish wind-turbine giant Vestas converted 298 acres of hayfield into the West's largest turbine factory - and turned Brighton into a magnet for "green" energy companies.

It's part of a $1 billion investment by the company in the United States, what Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter touts as a "new energy economy."

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Watch A 2006 Bugatti Veyron Crash On Video

2006 Bugatti Veyron Crashes On Video, Posted To Facebook -- Christian Science Monitor

Facebook video of a 2006 Bugatti Veyron crash shows the car making a wall of water as it hits a Texas lagoon. No one was injured in the crash.

It’s one of the rarest cars on the road, and Galveston, Tex. medical school student Joe Garza saw it crash on his way to get groceries.

He and a friend were driving off of Galveston Island when they pulled up alongside the $2 million French supercar, believed to be one of just 15 in the US. When they pulled up to the sporty two-seater, Garza whipped out his camera and started shooting. That’s when the unthinkable happened.

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Cocaine And Pepper Spray – A Lethal Mix?

Could be fatal (Image: Miguel Villagran/Getty)

From New Scientist:

DEATHS in US police custody during the early 1990s may have been the result of an interaction between capsaicin, the key ingredient in pepper sprays, and psychostimulant drugs, an experiment in mice suggests.

If the two have a fatal interaction in people then police forces might have to rethink their use of pepper spray as a non-lethal weapon, says John Mendelson of the Addiction and Pharmacology Research Laboratory at St Luke's Hospital in San Francisco, who led the mouse research.

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El Niño Gaining Strength

Click for large image - This image was created with data collected by the U.S./French satellite during a 10-day period centered on November 1, 2009. It shows a red and white area in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that is about 10 to 18 centimeters (4 to 7 inches) above normal. Image credit: NASA/JPL Ocean Surface Topography Team

From Watts Up With That?

From the “WUWT never reports on anything warm department”, JPL reports El Niño looks like it is on schedule to make a Christmas appearance as “The Boy”. The good news is that it will likely help California’s water situation this year.

From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

El Niño is experiencing a late-fall resurgence. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during October has triggered a strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave.

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Google's Replacement for HTTP Protocol To Make Web Browsing Twice As Fast

Faster Internet Google's Chromium group wants to boost your Internet browsing Google

From Popular Science:

The proposed rewrite of the web's backbone comes with both benefits and caveats.
Google has scarcely stopped for a breather since launching its cloud-based Chrome OS as an alternative to PC and Mac operating systems. Now its Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional HTTP web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent.

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Rat Made Supersmart -- Similar Boost Unsafe in Humans?

Scientists have tripled the memory of a rat named Hobbie-J (not pictured) by enhancing a single gene, suggesting that similar therapies may someday aid—or bedevil—humans, according to an October 2009 study. Photograph by Vincent J. Musi, National Geographic Stock

From National Geographic:

By modifying a single gene, scientists have made Hobbie-J the smartest rat in the world, a new study says.

A similar gene tweak might boost human brainpower too, but scientists warn that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.

For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction.

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The 10 Weirdest Physics Facts, From Relativity To Quantum Physics

Albert Einstein, who pointed out that the faster you move,
the heavier you get Photo: AFP/GETTY

From The Telegraph:

People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.

Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box.

We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users.

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Dinosaur Discovered In South Africa... And May Reveal How They Grew To Be So Big

Bridging the gap: A graphic released by Australian paleontologist Adam Yates shows the newly discovered dinosaur species - with the fossil bones found by the team marked on the outline

From The Daily Mail:

A new dinosaur named the 'Earth Claw' has been discovered in South Africa.

The discovery of the Aardonyx celestae marks a breakthrough in understanding how creatures began walking on all fours - and why they grew so large, scientists claimed yesterday.

Researchers believe the near-perfect skeleton bridges the gap between the earliest two-legged specimens and those who later walked on four limbs.

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Two Earth-sized Bodies With Oxygen Rich Atmospheres Found, But They're Stars Not Planets

Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopy of this inconspicuous blue object -- SDSS1102+2054 -- reveals it to be an extremely rare stellar remnant: a white dwarf with an oxygen-rich atmosphere (Credit: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two earth sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres -- however there is a bit of a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves, as they are not planets but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars.

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Humans Still Evolving As Our Brains Shrink

Weighing in at an average of 2.7 pounds (1,200 grams), the human brain packs a whopping 100 billion neurons. Every minute, about three soda-cans worth of blood flow through the brain. Credit: dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.

Shrinking brains

Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.

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