Why Do Human Testicles Hang Like That?

From Scientific America:

Earlier this year, I wrote a column about evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup’s “semen displacement hypothesis,” a convincing hypothesis presenting a very plausible, empirically supported account of the evolution of the peculiarly shaped human penis. In short, Gallup and his colleagues argued that our species’ distinctive phallus, with its bulbous glans and flared coronal ridge, was sculpted by natural selection as a foreign sperm-removal device. As a companion piece to that work on our phallic origins, Gallup, along with Mary Finn and Becky Sammis, have put forth a related hypothesis in this month’s issue of Evolutionary Psychology. This new hypothesis, which the authors call “the activation hypothesis,” sets out to explain the natural origins of the only human body part arguably less attractive than the penis--the testicles.

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Shuttle Astronauts Conduct 3rd Spacewalk

From Voice of America:

Robert Satcher and Randy Bresnik ventured into open space Monday for the walk that lasted nearly six hours. The two worked to attach a new oxygen tank at the orbiting outpost and installed a unit to conduct experiments.

Two U.S. astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis have conducted a third and final spacewalk at the International Space Station.

Robert Satcher and Randy Bresnik ventured into open space Monday for the walk that lasted nearly six hours. The two worked to attach a new oxygen tank at the orbiting outpost and installed a unit to conduct experiments.

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Report: Wikipedia Losing Volunteers

From CNET:

Wikipedia's exponential growth over this decade is due to the efforts of the millions of volunteers who write, edit, and check its entries. But could that volunteer effort now be in danger?

Volunteers have increasingly been quitting Wikipedia en masse for a variety of potential reasons, according to Monday's Wall Street Journal.

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Computers Can't Answer Everything

Image: Information hookup: The social search engine Aardvark helps users find other people who can answer questions for them. Credit: Aardvark

From Technology Review:

A startup says natural language processing works best with human intelligence.

Providing answers to tricky questions has become big business online. But community question-and-answer sites can get clogged up with outdated answers, and it's fiendishly difficult to create software that can automatically understand a question and provide the best answer.

Damon Horowitz, chief technology officer and cofounder of the San Francisco-based Aardvark, will outline a different approach when he speaks at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York today.

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LHC Smashes Protons Together For First Time

The LHC's first collisions occurred on 23 November in the ATLAS detector,
as reconstructed here (Image: CERN)

From New Scientist:

The Large Hadron Collider bashed protons together for the first time on Monday, inaugurating a new era in the quest to uncover nature's deepest secrets.

Housed in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, designed to collide protons together at unprecedented energies.

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Rat Brain Modelers Denounce IBM's Cat Brain Simulation As "Shameful and Unethical" Hoax

Rat vs. Cat Someone smells a rat

From Popular Science:

The Blue Brain project leader says that IBM's simulated brain does not even reach an ant's brain level.

IBM's claim of simulating a cat cortex generated quite a buzz last week, but now the head researcher from the Blue Brain project, a team who working to simulate their own animal brain (a rat's), has gone incandescent with fury over the what he calls the "mass deception of the public."

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Climate Emails Stoke Debate

Hacked e-mails have raised questions on climate change data. Photo from The BBC

From The Wall Street Journal:

Scientists' Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming.

The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.

The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.

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IBM Reveals The Biggest Artificial Brain of All Time

From Popular Mechanics:

IBM has revealed the biggest artificial brain of all time, a simulation run by a 147,456-processor supercomputer that requires millions of watts of electricity and over 150,000 gigabytes of memory. The brain simulation is a feat for neuroscience and computer processing—but it's still one-eighty-third the speed of a human brain and is only as large as a cat's. Will we ever get to truly capable artificial intelligence? PM reports from IBM's Almaden research center to find out.

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Ghostly Bones of Galactic Feast Revealed

From Wired Science:

A new infrared image of the galaxy Centaurus A reveals the gassy, ghastly bones of a galaxy that it consumed several hundred million years ago.

The parallelogram of stars leftover from the collision had been obscured by dust. But using new processing techniques in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, European Southern Observatory astronomers were able to glimpse the leftovers of the cosmic dinner.

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Physicists Move One Step Closer to Quantum Computing

Photo: This is postdoctoral researcher Greg Fuchs in the lab of UCSB's Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation. (Credit: George Foulsham, Office of Public Affairs)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 23, 2009) — Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have made an important advance in electrically controlling quantum states of electrons, a step that could help in the development of quantum computing. The work is published online November 20 on the Science Express Web site.

The researchers have demonstrated the ability to electrically manipulate, at gigahertz rates, the quantum states of electrons trapped on individual defects in diamond crystals. This could aid in the development of quantum computers that could use electron spins to perform computations at unprecedented speed.

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Why Kids Ask Why

From Live Science:

A child's never-ending "why's" aren't meant to exasperate parents, scientists say. Rather, the kiddy queries are genuine attempts at getting at the truth, and tots respond better to some answers than others.

This new finding, based on a two-part study involving children ages 2 to 5, also suggests they are much more active about their knowledge-gathering than previously thought.

"Even from really early on when they start asking these how and why questions, they are asking them in order to get explanations," lead researcher Brandy Frazier of the University of Michigan told Live Science.

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How Long Can a Nuclear Reactor Last?

OLDIE BUT GOODIE: Extending the life span of aging nuclear power plants could be essential to meet the nation's energy needs. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/GREUDIN

From Scientific American:

Industry experts argue old reactors could last another 50 years, or more.

Could nuclear power plants last as long as the Hoover Dam?

Increasingly dependable and emitting few greenhouse gases, the U.S. fleet of nuclear power plants will likely run for another 50 or even 70 years before it is retired -- long past the 40-year life span planned decades ago -- according to industry executives, regulators and scientists.

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High-Fliers Swear A 5am Start Is The Key To Success

Photo: Yawn chorus: Is 5am a productive time to begin the day?

From The Daily Mail:

But how do you do it all, I asked my high-powered friend Fiona, who had just reeled off her latest long list of projects. 'Oh, I get up at 5am,' she said. 'So by breakfast time, I've cleared emails, been through the diary and can hit the ground running.'

That did it. For years, I've heard people proclaim the advantages of early rising. Yoga teachers, life coaches and exercise gurus swear by its benefits for the body.

Over-achievers find it's the best time to get things done because their brains are fresh and ready for action.

Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, famously rises at 5am to fit in an hour's tennis before her 6am blow-dry each day.

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Sophisticated Hunters Not To Blame For Driving Mammoths To Extinction

Giant animals such as the woolly mammoth were already facing extinction by the time humans had developed more lethal weapons. Photograph: Corbis/Royal BC Museum, British Columbia

From The Guardian:

Woolly mammoths and other giant ice-age mammals faced extinction 2,000 years before deadly speartips were invented.

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say.

The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

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Blood And Guts: On The Brink Of A Revolution

Susie Colbert, 33, has a prominent 5in scar as the result of breaking her arm in two places while whitewater rafting in 2006. 'I've accommodated the scar into my self-image now, but other people are still taken aback by it,' she says. Jason Alden

From The Independent:

Scientists will soon be able to manufacture body tissue to order if clinical trials continue to yield promising results.

The future of British medical science looks bright, brilliant and very, very bold. Scientists have taken giant steps towards being able to manufacture new skin, blood and even new bones.

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Atlantis Astronaut Becomes A Father

NASA said it is the second time a baby has been born to
a US astronaut during a space flight Photo: AP/NASA

From The Telegraph:

An astronaut on the space shuttle Atlantis has become a father while in orbit, when his wife back on Earth gave birth to their baby daughter, NASA announced.

Randy Bresnik who ventured out on his first spacewalk on Saturday, became a father for the second time when his wife, Rebbeca Burgin, gave birth.

"Abigail Mae Bresnik arrived at 12.04am Sunday, November 22," the US space agency said in a statement posted on its website, adding that mother and child are "doing well".

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Google Chrome OS: Why Should People Switch?

Google Chrome OS isn't scheduled to arrive for another year, but Google has a lot to do before then to make the project attractive to the average user. (Google Chrome OS screenshot)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Google Chrome OS has buzz now, but a number of stars will have to align for many folks to migrate to it.

Will you be using Chrome OS a year from now?

At the Web-based operating system’s coming-out party at Google headquarters on Thursday, Google presented its vision of Chrome, and a huge amount of information on what the browser and operating system are based on, how they run, and the safeguards in place to ensure they run well. But missing in all of that, at least to this observer, was a clear exposition of how Google plans to get users onboard – in essence, the hook.

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U.S. Exhausted Oil And Gas Supplies — Repeatedly -- A Commentary

From The Houston Chronicle:

What city contributed most to the making of the modern world? The Paris of the Enlightenment and then of Napoleon, pioneer of mass armies and nationalist statism? London, seat of parliamentary democracy and center of finance? Or perhaps Titusville, Pa.

Oil seeping from the ground there was collected for medicinal purposes — until Edwin Drake drilled and 150 years ago — Aug. 27, 1859 — found the basis of our world, 69 feet below the surface of Pennsylvania, which oil historian Daniel Yergin calls “the Saudi Arabia of 19th-century oil.”

For many years, most oil was used for lighting and lubrication, and the amounts extracted were modest. Then in 1901, a new well named for an East Texas hillock, Spindletop, began gushing more per day than all other U.S. wells combined.

Since then, America has exhausted its hydrocarbon supplies.

Repeatedly.

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IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain

Simulating Cat Minds Can I haz brainz? IBM

From Popular Science:

Using 144 terabytes of RAM, scientists simulate a cat's cerebral cortex based on 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses.

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

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Large Hadron Collider: Beams Are Back on at World's Most Powerful Particle Accelerator

Repairs being made in March 2009 to the damaged section of the LHC. (Credit: Courtesy of CERN)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 20, 2009) — Particle beams are once again zooming around the world's most powerful particle accelerator -- the Large Hadron Collider -- located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. On November 20 at 4:00 p.m. EST, a clockwise circulating beam was established in the LHC's 17-mile ring.

After more than one year of repairs, the LHC is now back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

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