Large Hadron Collider Restarted

Large Hadron Collider Photo: PA

From The Australian/AFP:

THE world's biggest atom-smasher, shut down after its inauguration in September 2008 amid technical faults, has been restarted.

"The first tests of injecting sub-atomic particles began around 1600 (01:00 AEDT),'' CERN spokesman James Gillies said.

He said the injections lasted a fraction of a second, enough for "a half or even a complete circuit'' of the Large Hadron Collider built in a 27km long tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

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Little Progress In Freeing A Rover On Mars

NASA's Mars Rover Spirit took this image with its front hazard-avoidance camera on May 6. Wheel slippage during attempts to extricate it from a patch of soft ground during the preceding two weeks had partially buried the wheels. NASA

From The New York Times:

The NASA rover Spirit, stuck in sand on Mars, tried to move Tuesday for the first time since May. In less than a second, it stopped.

Cautious mission managers had put tight constraints on the Spirit’s movement to ensure that it did not drive itself into a deeper predicament. Because the uncertainty in its tilt was more than one degree, the rover called it a day. Spirit awaits new instructions.

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Norwegian Scientists Detect Mutated Form Of Swine Flu

From The Washington Post:

Norwegian scientists detect mutated form of swine flu.

Scientists in Norway announced Friday they had detected a mutated form of the swine flu virus in two patients who died of the flu and a third who was severely ill.

In a statement, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said the mutation "could possibly make the virus more prone to infect deeper in the airways and thus cause more severe disease," such as pneumonia.

The institute said there was no indication that the mutation would hinder the ability of the vaccine to protect people from becoming infected or impair the effectiveness of antiviral drugs in treating people who became infected.

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Mammoth Dung Unravels Extinction

Mastadons and other megafauna left traces of dung in ancient lake beds.

From The BBC:

Mammoth dung has proven to be a source of prehistoric information, helping scientists unravel the mystery of what caused the great mammals to die out.

An examination of a fungus that is found in the ancient dung and preserved in lake sediments has helped build a picture of what happened to the beasts.

The study sheds light on the ecological consequences of the extinction and the role that humans may have played in it.

Researchers describe this development in the journal Science.

The study was led by Dr Jacquelyn Gill from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US.

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Intel Labs Europe Tackles Large-Scale Computing

From CNET News:

Intel Labs Europe is joining a handful of French institutions to investigate large-scale computing challenges that face today's information technology industry.

The Exascale Computing Research Center will investigate machines that can perform 1,000 times more calculations than today's top supercomputers, Intel said, and the chipmaker is spending millions of dollars on the three-year partnership.

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Outlandish Planet Has Wonky Orbit

WASP-17 (pictured) was another planet found to have a weird reverse orbit
in a study published in mid-2009. Credit: ESA

From Cosmos Magazine:

SYDNEY: Astronomers have found an extrasolar planet with an "outlandish orbit" that circles its star either backwards, or at an angle of around 90º to the orientation of the star's rotation.

Planets in our own Solar System orbit in the same plane and direction as the Sun's own rotation. This led astronomers to propose the 'nebula hypothesis' - whereby planets form from a flat, swirling disk of gas around a proto-Sun.

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A Few Million Degrees Here And There And Pretty Soon We’re Talking About Real Temperature

From Watts Up With That?

This is mind blowing ignorance on the part of Al Gore. Gore in an 11/12/09 interview on NBC’s tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, speaking on geothermal energy, champion of slide show science, can’t even get the temperature of earth’s mantle right, claiming “several million degrees” at “2 kilometers or so down”. Oh, and the “crust of the earth is hot” too.

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Studying A Legend: K.E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry

From The Space Review:

Anyone who has studied the history of the space age has come across the name Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857–1935), often under the more common alternative spelling Tsiolkovsky. He is generally credited with the development of the basic mathematical formulae for space travel. Other than that, he is often described as the man who after the revolution inspired a small group of space enthusiasts, including Glushko and Korolev, to begin serious work on rocket technology. The details of his life, as James Andrews explains in his new study of the man, are more complex and far more interesting than the legend.

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Pushing The Brain To Find New Pathways

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 19, 2009) — Until recently, scientists believed that, following a stroke, a patient had about six months to regain any lost function. After that, patients would be forced to compensate for the lost function by focusing on their remaining abilities. Although this belief has been refuted, a University of Missouri occupational therapy professor believes that the current health system is still not giving patients enough time to recover and underestimating what the human brain can do given the right conditions.

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Mad Science? Growing Meat Without Animals

From Live Science:

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.

Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

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Under Pressure: Bathers Duck Weak Shower Heads

Click HERE to Expand the Image

From The Wall Street Journal:

Water Shortages Spur Restrictions and Low-Flow Designs, but Some People Aren't Willing to Sacrifice, and Skirt the Rules

One way to ruin someone's day is to mess with a good morning shower. That was the hard-learned lesson of past campaigns to conserve water -- and a mistake that could be easy to repeat.

Margy Barrett, a store manager in Dallas, will make some environmental sacrifices. She recycles, and she carts reusable cloth bags to the grocery store. But this month, when she couldn't stand her weak shower head any longer, she replaced it with one that sprays hard enough, she says, to help erode "all the stress involved in today's life."

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Remembering Dr. Paul Zamecnik

Although Dr. Paul Zamecnik was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel and rumors circulated each year that he would finally receive it, the prize never came. He did, however, win a 1996 Lasker Award, the prestigious American prize that is often a precursor of the Nobel, and the National Medal of Science in 1991. (Mercer Photography / University of Massachusetts Medical School)

Dr. Paul Zamecnik Dies At 96; Scientist Made Two Major Discoveries -- L.A. Times

He discovered transfer RNA, a crucial molecule in the synthesis of proteins in the cell, and antisense therapy, in which strands of DNA or RNA are used to block the activity of genes.

Most scientists are fortunate if they can make one major discovery in their lifetime. Dr. Paul Zamecnik made two, each of which should have won him a Nobel Prize.

Working with Dr. Mahlon Hoagland, he discovered transfer RNA, a crucial molecule in the synthesis of proteins in the cell. Later, he invented the idea of antisense therapy, in which strands of DNA or RNA are used to block the activity of genes -- a concept that is now being turned into a new class of drugs for cancer, HIV and a host of other diseases.

Zamecnik died of cancer Oct. 27 at his home in Boston. He was 96.

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Seeking Wind Energy, Some Consider The Sea

Click Image to Enlarge

From The New York Times:

LAST June in a fjord in southwestern Norway, a 213-foot-tall wind turbine did something large wind turbines normally don’t do: it headed out to sea.

Towed by tugboats, the newly built turbine, with three 139-foot rotor blades and a 2.3-megawatt generator atop the tower, which itself was bolted to a ballasted steel cylinder extending more than 300 feet below the waterline, made its way to a spot six miles off the coast. Once in position it was moored with cables to the seafloor, about 700 feet below.

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"Shangri-La" Caves Yield Treasures, Skeletons

Climber Renan Ozturk watches a local Tibetan look at an illuminated manuscript found in 2008 in a cave in the ancient kingdom of Mustang—today part of Nepal. The 15th-century folio is part of a treasure trove of Tibetan art and manuscripts uncovered in the remote Himalayan caves. The team that made the discovery, which is featured in a pair of November 2009 documentaries, thinks the sacred hoard could be linked to the fictional paradise of Shangri-La. Photograph courtesy Kris Erickson

From National Geographic:

A treasure trove of Tibetan art and manuscripts uncovered in "sky high" Himalayan caves could be linked to the storybook paradise of Shangri-La, says the team that made the discovery.

Few have been able to explore the mysterious caves, since Upper Mustang is a restricted area of Nepal that was long closed to outsiders. Today only a thousand foreigners a year are allowed into the region.

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'Big Bang' Experiment To Re-Start

The Compact Muon Solenoid is one of two multi-purpose detectors at the LHC

From BBC:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment could be re-started on Saturday morning at the earliest, officials have said.

Engineers are preparing to send a beam of sub-atomic particles all the way round the 27km-long circular tunnel which houses the LHC.

The £6bn machine on the French-Swiss border is designed to shed light on fundamental questions about the cosmos.

The LHC has been shut down for repairs since an accident in September 2008.

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Analyst: Timing Of The Apple Tablet Is Irrelevant

From CNET News:

A new report from Digitimes on Thursday says Apple's anticipated tablet will not be released in the first part of 2010 as originally thought, but rather in the second half of the year. One industry analyst said the timing of the release is irrelevant to Wall Street.

According to Digitimes, Apple will delay the release of the long rumored tablet because it has decided to change some of its components. Citing unnamed sources, the report says Apple will launch a model using a 9.7-inch OLED from LG.

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Yawning Is Part Of What Makes Us Human

Chimps do it, dogs do it, lions do it, even babies in the womb do it Photo: AFP

From The Telegraph:

Far from being bad manners, yawning is a sign of our deep humanity, says Steve Jones.

What may become 2010's Conference of the Year has just been announced. The International Congress of Chasmology will take place in June in Paris, and papers are solicited now. Anyone bored by that statement should read further, for the topic to be discussed is not diving but yawning ('chasmology' deriving from the Greek word for the pastime).

Why do we yawn? Dogs do it, lions do it, even babies in the womb do it - but nobody really knows why. Theories abound. We open wide when we are tired, bored, or hungry. Some have suggested that a sudden drop in blood oxygen, or a surge of carbon dioxide pumped out by a tired body, sparks it off – but no, breathing air rich in that gas, or with extra oxygen, makes no difference.

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Bigger Not Necessarily Better, When It Comes To Brains

Tiny insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals, despite only having a brain the size of a pinhead, say scientists at Queen Mary, University of London. (Credit: Image courtesy of Queen Mary, University of London)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 18, 2009) — Tiny insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals, despite only having a brain the size of a pinhead, say scientists at Queen Mary, University of London.

"Animals with bigger brains are not necessarily more intelligent," according to Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary's Research Centre for Psychology and University of Cambridge colleague, Jeremy Niven. This begs the important question: what are they for?

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Strange Ancient Crocodiles Swam the Sahara

Paleontologist Paul Sereno and his colleagues unearthed a bizarre bunch of crocodile remains in the Sahara. The crocs sported snouts and other traits that resembled some modern-day animals and inspired nicknames, including SuperCroc (weighed 8 tons), BoarCroc (upper right), PancakeCroc (lower right), RatCroc, DogCroc and DuckCroc. Credit: Photo by Mike Hettwer, courtesy National Geographic.

From Live Science:

From a crocodile sporting a boar-like snout to a peculiar pal with buckteeth for digging up grub, an odd-looking bunch of such reptiles dashed and swam across what is now the Sahara Desert some 100 million years ago when dinosaurs ruled.

That's the picture created by remains of three newly identified species of ancient crocs plus fossils from two species previously named.

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The History Of The Internet In A Nutshell

From Six Revisions:

If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you spend a fair amount of time online. However, considering how much of an influence the Internet has in our daily lives, how many of us actually know the story of how it got its start?

Here’s a brief history of the Internet, including important dates, people, projects, sites, and other information that should give you at least a partial picture of what this thing we call the Internet really is, and where it came from.

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