Antarctic Temperature Spike Surprises Climate Researchers

Photo: Is Antarctica more sensitive to global warming that we thought? Getty

From Nature:

Polar region was unexpectedly warm between ice ages.

During the warm periods between recent ice ages, temperatures in Antarctica reached substantially higher levels than scientists had previously thought. This conclusion, based on ice-core studies, implies that East Antarctica is more sensitive than it seemed to global warming.

Previous estimates suggested that peak temperatures during the warmest interglacial periods — which occurred at around 125,000, 240,000 and 340,000 years ago — were about three degrees higher than they are today. But a team led by Louise Sime of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, concludes that Antarctica was actually around six degrees warmer.

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The Military Is Looking For A 25-Year Battery

Photo: Nuclear power: The package inside this prototype betavoltaic battery contains layers of silicon carbide and metal foil embedded with the radioactive isotope tritium. When high-energy electrons emitted by the decay of tritium hit the silicon carbide, it produces an electrical current that exits the cell through the metal pins. Such batteries are designed to last 25 years. Credit: Widetronix

From Technology Review:

Long-lived nuclear batteries powered by hydrogen isotopes are in testing for military applications.

Batteries that harvest energy from the nuclear decay of isotopes can produce very low levels of current and last for decades without needing to be replaced. A new version of the batteries, called betavoltaics, is being developed by an Ithaca, NY-based company and tested by Lockheed Martin. The batteries could potentially power electrical circuits that protect military planes and missiles from tampering by destroying information stored in the systems, or by sending out a warning signal to a military center. The batteries are expected to last for 25 years. The company, called Widetronix, is also working with medical-device makers to develop batteries that could last decades for implantable medical devices.

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Top 10 Cyborg Videos

From Wired Science:

With each passing year, the boundary between man and machine gets slimmer. Bionic ears have become commonplace, motorized prosthetics allow wounded soldiers to care for themselves, and electronic eyes are just over the horizon.

Neuroscientists have almost jacked rodents into the matrix: They have used electrodes to read signals from individual mouse brain cells as the critters wandered through a virtual maze. Monkeys can feed themselves with robot arms wired directly into their brains. Here are ten clips of inventions that unite nerves with electronic circuits.

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Four Ways To Feed The World

From New Scientist:

IT IS humanity's oldest enemy. Despite all our science, a sixth of people in the developing world are chronically hungry. At a summit in Rome this week, world leaders reaffirmed a pledge to end hunger "at the earliest possible date".

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) wanted them to promise to end hunger by 2025, but the delegates declined. They said instead that they would keep trying to meet their previous goal: to halve chronic hunger from 20 per cent of people in developing countries to 10 per cent by 2015 (see graph). But can they? Based on their performance so far, the FAO considers it "unlikely".

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Robotic Surrogate Takes Your Place At Work

Anybots "QA" at Work Anybots

From Popular Science:

Having one of those days where even a hearty bowl of Fruit Loops and Jack Daniels can't get you out of bed? A telepresence robot can come into the office for you, elevating telecommuting to a decidedly new level. The somewhat humanoid 'bots, produced by Mountain View, California-based Anybots, are controlled via video-game-like controls from your laptop, allowing you to be "present" without actually being in the office.

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Large Hadron Collider Ready To Restart

Nine days after the launch a single electrical splice overheated because it had been badly soldered, and disaster struck Photo: PA

From The Telegraph:

Scientists have repaired the world's largest atom smasher and plan by this weekend to restart the fault-ridden Large Hadron Collider.

The 'Big Bang' machine was launched with great fanfare last year before its spectacular failure from a bad electrical connection.

This time the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is taking a cautious approach with the super-sophisticated equipment, said James Gillies, a spokesman. It cost about $10 billion, with contributions from many governments and universities around the world.

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Insects May Have Consciousness And Could Even Be Able To Count, Claim Experts

A honeybee's brain weighs one mg and contains fewer than a million nerve cells

From The Daily Mail:

Insects with minuscule brains may be as intelligent as much bigger animals and may even have consciousness, it was claimed today.

Having a brain the size of a pinhead does not necessarily make you less bright, say researchers.

Computer simulations show that consciousness could be generated in neural circuits tiny enough to fit into an insect's brain, according to the scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Cambridge University.

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How To Explore Mars And Have Fun

Scientists hope the public's help will have a big impact on research.

From The BBC:

The US space agency needs your help to explore Mars.

A Nasa website called "Be A Martian" allows users to play games while at the same time sorting through hundreds of thousands of images of the Red Planet.

The number of pictures returned by spacecraft since the 1960s is now so big that scientists cannot hope to study them all by themselves.

The agency believes that by engaging the public in the analysis as well, many more discoveries will be made.

The new citizen-science website went live on Tuesday at http://BeAMartian.jpl.nasa.gov.

The site is just the latest to use crowdsourcing as a tool to do science.

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Tension On The Grapevine: Trellis Tension Monitoring Offers Accurate Solution For Grape Growers

Trellis Tension Monitoring (TTM) assembly (center) in line with the main trellis wire in a wine grape vineyard. The row in the background also contains a TTM assembly (toward right). The metal post supports the vine at the left edge of the photo and is a normal part of this trellis system. (Credit: Photo courtesy of Julie Tarara)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 18, 2009) — Predictions of grape yields are extremely important to juice processors and wineries; timely and precise yield forecasts allow producers to plan for harvest and move the highly perishable grape crop from vine to processing efficiently. Until recently, wineries and grape juice processors have relied on expensive and labor-intensive hand-sampling methods to estimate yield in grape crops.

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Study Paints Sabertooths as Relative Pussycats

The sabertooth cat may have been less aggressive than its feline cousin, the American lion, a new study says. Credit: National Park Service.

From Live Science:

Though their long teeth look fearsome, male sabertooth cats may have actually been less aggressive than their feline cousins, a new study finds.

Commonly called the sabertoothed tiger, Smilodon fatalis was a large predatory cat that roamed North and South America about 1.6 million to 10,000 years ago, when there was also a prehistoric cat called the American lion. The study examined size differences between sexes of these large felines using clues from bones and teeth.

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Senate Panel: 80 Percent of Cyber Attacks Preventable

From Threat Level:

If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring, about 80 percent of commonly known cyber attacks could be prevented, a Senate committee heard Tuesday.

The remark was made by Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s information assurance director, who added that simply adhering to already known best practices would sufficiently raise the security bar so that attackers would have to take more risks to breach a network, “thereby raising [their] risk of detection.”

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My Comment: There is a lot of meat in this story .... read it all.

Robots Perform Shakespeare

From Autopia:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been updated for the 21st Century with seven small robots playing fairies alongside carbon-based co-stars.

Beyond being a cool thing to do, researchers saw bringing ‘bots to the Bard as a chance to introduce robots to the public and see how people interact with them. Their findings could influence how robots are designed and how they’re used in search and rescue operations.

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The Race To Build A 1000 mph Car

From New Scientist:

Strapped into a custom built seat, Andy Green prepares for the ride of his life. The pancake-flat desert stretches out for miles ahead. The computer indicates all systems are normal. He eases off the brakes and puts his foot down on the throttle. The jet engine roars into life. In precisely 42.5 seconds he'll be travelling 1000 mph. In a car.

"It's almost impossible to tell the difference between going supersonic in a car and in an aircraft," says Green. He is the only person on Earth who can say that from personal experience. Green was a fighter pilot for the UK Royal Air Force for 20 years, and he is also the fastest man on wheels. In 1997, driving a vehicle called ThrustSSC, he set the world land speed record of 763 miles per hour, becoming the first and only person to break the sound barrier in a car (761 mph under standard conditions). Now, together with the Bloodhound SSC design team, he's attempting to do it all over again, and then some.

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Liquid Cooling Bags For Data Centers Could Trim Cost and Carbon By 90 Percent

The Iceotope Water-Cooling Component After the individual bags of coolant pull heat away from the individual server components, a water transfer system moves heat out of the data center, possibly for use in heating offices during cold weather. Iceotope

From Popular Science:

Server farms are undeniably awesome in that they store huge pools of data, enable such modern phenomena as cloud computing and Web-hosted email, and most importantly, make the Internet as it stands today possible. The downside: data centers get very, very hot. Cooling huge banks of servers doesn't just cost a lot, it eats up a lot of energy, and that generally means fossil fuels. UK-based Iceotope hopes to cut those costs by about 93 percent by wrapping servers in liquid coolant.

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Women 'Should Bare 40 Per Cent Of Their Bodies To Attract Men'

Liz Hurley wearing her famous 'safety pin' dress Photo: REX

From The Telegraph:

Women should wear clothes that bare 40 per cent of their flesh to maximise their chances of attracting men, new scientific research indicates.

Striking the right balance between revealing too much and being too conservative in how much skin is on show has long been a dilemma for women when choosing the right outfit for a night out.

However, a study by experts at the University of Leeds has come to the rescue by calculating the exact proportion of the body that should be exposed for optimum allure.

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Email Could Be 'Extinct Within A Decade' As Teens Turn To Twitter-Style Messaging

Photo: Email took 20 years to develop but may disappear within a decade, experts believe

From The Daily Mail:

Email could be extinct within a decade as millions of teenagers ditch it as their main form of communication, say researchers.

Youngsters have been shown to favour social networking sites and instant messaging instead.

The report found the electronic form of contact is already becoming 'grey mail' with the most devoted users being pensioners, followed by middle-aged Britons.

Although inboxes are still filling up daily all over the world, experts believe emails are dying out because they are too slow, too inconvenient and simply not fashionable any more.

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PICTURES: The Hunt for Lost WWII 'Samurai Subs'

In this image, the I-401 submarine is shown. The I-401 aircraft-carrying submarine could travel one and a half times around the world without refueling. (Wild Life Productions, National Geographic Channel)

From ABC News:

National Geographic Channel Program Documents Undersea Search for Japanese Super-Submarines.

With more time, military experts say, a fleet of revolutionary Japanese super-submarines could have changed the course of World War II.

Some were designed to launch bombers on kamikaze missions against New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Panama Canal. Others were thought to be twice as fast any other submarine used in the war.

None had the chance to execute their stealth missions against the U.S. mainland or critical targets in the Pacific during the war.

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CSN Editor: For background information, see History of Submarine Aircraft Carriers -- New Wars

What Would Shackleton's Whisky Taste Like?

From the BBC:

After a century buried in the Antarctic ice, a rare batch of whisky that belonged to the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton is to be recovered. So what might it taste like?

It's been on the rocks for the last 100 years, buried under two feet of Antarctic ice. Now the two cases of "Rare Old" brand Mackinlay and Co whisky are to be retrieved.

A team of New Zealand explorers heading out in January has been asked by Whyte & Mackay, the company that now owns Mackinlay and Co, to get a sample of the drink. The crates were left behind by Sir Ernest Shackleton when he abandoned his mission to the South Pole in 1909.

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My Comment: I will now formally volunteer to be a taster for any whiskey that is retrieved.

Space Shuttle Has Docked With The Space Station

Shuttle Docks With Space Station -- BBC

The space shuttle Atlantis has successfully docked with the International Space Station, according to Nasa officials.

The shuttle blasted off on Monday with six astronauts on an 11-day voyage to deliver new equipment to the station.

The docking was manually completed by commander Charlie Hobaugh as the two spacecraft travelled towards each other at 17,000 miles an hour.

The astronauts' arrival will be met with a traditional welcoming ceremony.

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More News On the Space Shuttle Mission

Shuttle Atlantis arrives at space station -- Reuters
Shuttle docks at space station, looks 'beautiful' -- AP
Space Shuttle Atlantis Docks at ISS -- Voice of America
FACTBOX: The mission of space shuttle Atlantis -- Reuters
NASA: With Atlantis docked, work begins today -- Computer World
NASA seeks new emblem for shuttle program -- MSNBC

'Vampire Star': Ticking Stellar Time Bomb Identified

The expanding shell around V445 Puppis. (Credit: Image courtesy of ESO)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 17, 2009) — Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a "vampire star," which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion's matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object.

It appears that this double star system is a prime candidate to be one of the long-sought progenitors of the exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae, critical for studies of dark energy.

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