Space Shuttle To Haul Spare Parts For Monday Afternoon Launch

Space Shuttle Atlantis on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on Sunday in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

From The New York Times:

The space shuttle has often been called a pickup truck to orbit, and the next flight of the shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to launch Monday afternoon, lives up to that description.

The Atlantis is lugging up to the International Space Station a cargo bay full of spare parts, including a couple of refurbished gyroscopes, pumps, tanks for ammonia and nitrogen and piece called the “trailing umbilical system reel assembly” for the railway system that moves the station’s robotic arm.

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Love and Envy Linked By Same Hormone, Oxytocin

Studies have shown that the oxytocin hormone has a positive effect on positive feelings. The hormone is released in the body naturally during childbirth and when engaging in sexual relations. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — A new study carried out at the University of Haifa has found that the hormone oxytocin, the "love hormone," which affects behaviors such as trust, empathy and generosity, also affects opposite behaviors, such as jealousy and gloating. "Subsequent to these findings, we assume that the hormone is an overall trigger for social sentiments: when the person's association is positive, oxytocin bolsters pro-social behaviors; when the association is negative, the hormone increases negative sentiments," explains Simone Shamay-Tsoory who carried out the research.

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The Beautiful Aftermath Of Tropical Storm Ida

Clouds of sediment clouded the Gulf of Mexico on Nov. 10, 2009, after Hurricane Ida came ashore. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

From Live Science:

One of the dramatic and often unseen effects of tropical storms and hurricanes is the muck they churn up from the ocean floor as they come ashore.

These clouds of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico were spotted Nov. 10, after Tropical Storm Ida made landfall and then moved on.

The image was made from data collected by NASA’s Aqua satellite.

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In A Malaria Hot Spot, Resistance To A Key Drug

From Time Magazine:

Every year, thousands of workers arrive at the sapphire and ruby mines of Pailin, Cambodia, risking their lives to unearth gems in the landmine-ridden territory. Soon, however, they could be the ones to put millions of others at risk. On the Thai-Cambodian border, a rogue strain of malaria has started to resist artemisinin, the only remaining effective drug in the world's arsenal against malaria's most deadly strain, Plasmodium falciparum. For six decades, malaria drugs like chloroquine and mefloquine have fallen impotent in this Southeast Asian border area, allowing stronger strains to spread to Burma, India and Africa. But this time there's no new wonder drug waiting in the wings. "It would be unspeakably dire if resistance formed to artemisinin," says Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on malaria issues.

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Penis Implant Brings Hopes To Thousands

From The Independent:

An unusual organ implant grown in the laboratory and rigorously tested on highly-sexed male rabbits could bring new hope to thousands of men.

Scientists in the US completely rebuilt the "stiffening" elements of the penis from donor cells - and showed that they worked.

Rabbits given the implants attempted to mate within one minute of being introduced to a female partner, and 83 per cent succeeded.

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Drink Culture: It's As Old As The Hills

From The New Scientist:

QUESTS don't come much more appealing than this. But while for most people the quest ends in the nearest bar, biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern has gone much further. He has spent decades travelling the world and journeying back in time, scraping dirty crusts from ancient cauldrons, retrieving dribbles of liquid from sealed jars and extracting residues from the pores of prehistoric pots, all in the name of investigating the origins of ancient alcoholic beverages.

After he famously identified the world's oldest wine - a resinated grape wine found in two clay jars from the Neolithic village of Hajji Firuz in Iran, in 2004 he found an even older sample in China. At a 9000-year-old site called Jiahu on the banks of the Yellow river, he recovered the remains of grog made from rice, hawthorn fruit, grapes and honey. Another of his recent revelations is that the people of Central America got drunk on fermented chocolate, giving new meaning to the word chocoholic.

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Weekend Lie-Ins For Teenagers Wards Off Obesity

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Teenagers lying in at the weekend might seem like laziness, but it will actually help them stay slim and healthy, claim scientists.

New research suggests lazing in bed at the end of a busy week is just what children need to ward off obesity.

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems.

They believe the weekend snooze is crucial for school-age children to catch up on the sleep they miss out on during a busy week.

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Surf's Up! Hawaiian Sea Turtles Take To The Waves

Here comes the wave: A giant Hawaiian sea turtle prepares to ride the surf

From The Daily Mail:

He has eaten a big lunch and had a snooze on the beach. So this turtle is looking for a nice quiet journey home.

Rather than be crashed about on the breakers as he makes his way back out to sea, he ducks down to the sand for a smoother ride.

The Hawaiian green sea turtle makes the same journey every day to and from the Laniakea Beach in Hawaii, where he munches on seaweed and takes his rest.

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Tick-Tock - The Clock Is Running On Europe's Proposed Sat-Nav System, Galileo

From The BBC:

Most people have had a pop at Europe's proposed sat-nav system, Galileo, down the years. Let's face it, it's been an easy target.

Artist's impression of an IOV satellite in orbit"How not to implement a large-scale infrastructure project" is the criticism you often hear. "The Common Agricultural Policy in the sky" also became a popular jibe for a while.

Galileo will be at least five years late on its original timescale and hugely over budget.

It should have been fully operational by now and have cost the European taxpayer no more than 1.8bn euros.

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Scientists Find Key To Creating Clean Fuel From Coal And Waste

From The Guardian:

'Gasification' process enhanced to save millions of tonnes of carbon and provide energy

Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.

Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.

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The Vatican And The Internet. Working Together

The Pope said that Catholics 'must find ways to spread voices and pictures of hope through the internet'. (Jonathan Bainbridge/Reuters)

Vatican Gathers Internet Experts To Help The Holy See Get To Grips With New Media -- Times Online

Experts on the internet have gathered at the Vatican to help the Holy See improve its public relations by getting to grips with new media, including the mysteries of internet searching, downloading, hacking and social networking.

The conference, attended by European Catholic bishops, includes representatives of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Corriere della Sera said that the bishops and Vatican officials would be given advice by a young hacker from Switzerland, named only as "Petit Frere Bruno", and an Interpol expert on cybercrime. It is organised by the Swiss-based European Episcopal Commission for Media.

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New Type Of Supernova Lacks "Oomph"

False colour image of the supernova SN2002bj (blue) on top of its host galaxy, NGC1821. Credit: D. Poznanski; W. Li; and A.V. Filippenko

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: Astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova - the thermonuclear blast from a dying star - which happens three to four times faster than other known types.

Writing in the U.S. journal Science, the researchers, led by astronomer Dovi Poznanski from the University of California, Berkeley, said it is the fastest evolving supernova they have ever seen.

"It was three to four times faster than a standard supernova, basically disappearing within 20 days. Its brightness just dropped like a rock," he said.

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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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