Sunday, November 22, 2009
Fewer Players 'Secret To World Cup Success'
From The Telegraph:
The secret to success in next year’s Football World Cup could have been uncovered by academics.
New research shows that managers who field the fewest players during a campaign go on to win the most trophies.
By contrast, those who tinker too often with their selection cut their chances of victory.
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Beam Sent From Large Hadron Collider After 14 Months Of Repairs
Large Hadron Collider: The machine has been restarted after $40million of repairsFrom The Daily Mail:
The world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, has been re-started after 14 months of repairs.
The $10billion (£6billion) machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago – just nine days after the launch.
Scientists are hoping the results from the device, which was designed to smash together beams of protons in a bid to recreate conditions after the Big Bang, will shed some light on the makeup of matter and the universe.
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Water Mission Returns First Data
Smos builds up its map data in strips as it sweeps around the EarthFrom BBC:
Europe's latest Earth observation satellite has returned its first data.
Smos was launched earlier this month on a quest to help scientists understand better how water is cycled around the Earth.
The spacecraft will make the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.
The data will have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods.
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
W5 Investigates Intriguing New Theory About MS
Dr. Paolo Zamboniis seen at his research lab at the University of Ferrara.From CTV News:
A group of doctors in Italy is investigating a fascinating new treatment for multiple sclerosis, based on a theory that, if proven true, could radically alter the lives of patients.
An investigation by CTV's W5 reveals that this treatment appears to stop the disease from progressing. Patients seen in the documentary relate how, after the simple procedure, their MS symptoms suddenly stopped and, in some cases, they were able to resume normal lives.
The Italian research is asking fundamental questions about the origins of the debilitating condition, whose causes have long remained a mystery.
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Scientific Scandal Appears To Rock Climate Change Promoters
From The American Thinker:There's big news for climate change students. A hacker has gotten into the computers at Hadley CRU, Britain's largest climate research institute and a proponent of global warming, and seems to have uncovered evidence of substantial fraud in reporting the "evidence" on global warming; the unlawful destruction of records to cover up this fraud ,conspiracy,and deceit in the entire operation.
While hacking into the institute's records is inappropriate if not illegal, the activities disclosed appear illegal and damaging to science and the economies of the world.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Robotic Spy Planes Go Green
This photo shows the Ion Tiger in flight. The 550-watt fuel cell is show in the box in the lower left corner. Credit: Naval Research LaboratoryFrom Live Science:
Robot spy planes are harnessing alternative energy to make them more covert and longer lasting than ever.
Such drones could also find use in civilian life to help monitor the earth or wildlife as well, researchers noted.
Increasingly, the military is deploying unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as eyes in the sky to scan the ground for targets and threats, especially for missions that are too dangerous for manned aircraft.
The problem with using internal combustion engines for these spy drones is how noisy they are.
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Hacked: Sensitive Documents Lifted From Hadley Climate Center
From The Wall Street Journal:Well, this should get interesting.
The Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain was hacked yesterday, apparently by Russian black hats, and thousands of sensitive documents, including emails from climate scientists dating back a decade, were posted online. More here.
Officials at Hadley, a leading global-warming research center, have apparently confirmed to an Australian a Kiwi publication that the documents are genuine.
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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. NASAFrom 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.
Read more ....Outlandish Planet Has Wonky Orbit
WASP-17 (pictured) was another planet found to have a weird reverse orbitin 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
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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