The Royal Society Puts Historic Papers Online

From BBC News:

One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.

The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.

Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.

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Birth Control Pill for Men? Scientists Find a Hormonal on-and-Off Switch For Male Fertility

Artist's rendering of swimming spermatozoa. (Credit: iStockphoto/David Marchal)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 30, 2009) — A new research report published in the December 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal could one day give men similar type of control over their fertility that women have had since the 1960s. That's because scientists have found how and where androgenic hormones work in the testis to control normal sperm production and male fertility. This opens a promising avenue for the development of "the pill" for men.

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Bendable Antennas Could Reshape Electronics

The bendable antenna consists of liquid metal injected into tiny channels within the silicon elastomer. The antenna can be deformed and snap back to its original shape. Credit: Ju-Hee So, North Carolina State University

From Live Science:

Tiny antennas that can bend, twist and stretch, before snapping back to their original shapes, could some day find themselves in flexible electronics and equipment that needs to be rolled up before deployment.

The shape-shifting antennas are still in the lab and the researchers from North Carolina State University are not sure when the invention would hit the market.

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The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate

From Reason.com:

Can climate change science recover from the damage done by leaked emails?

Climategate. What a hot mess. Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and their colleagues around the globe may have fiddled with historical climate data and possibly the peer review process to ensure that publicized temperature trends fit the narrative of man-made global warming—then they emailed each other about it. Now those emails and other documents have been splashed all over the Web. Revelations contained in the leaked emails are roiling the scientific community and the researchers may be in pretty serious trouble. But the real tragedy of the Climategate scandal is that a lack of confidence in climate data will seriously impair mankind's ability to assess and react properly to a potentially huge problem.

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Microsoft Windows 7 Problem 'Could Affect Millions'

Security experts have warned that millions of computer users could be affected by a software problem that causes Windows operating systems to crash Photo: EPA

From The Telegraph:

Microsoft said it is looking in to reports that some computers running Windows 7 crash as soon as the user logs on.

Users have been complaining on internet forums about the "black screen of death", which causes the screen of their Windows 7 machine to turn black and the computer to crash when a user logs on.

Microsoft confirmed that it was investigating the possibility that a security update, released on Thursday, could be the root of the problem.

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The Loneliness Of Three Degrees Of Separation

From New Scientist:

John Cacappio of the University of Chicago and his colleagues reckon that loneliness can spread through society like an infection.

Their study, published in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, draws on a large group of people living in a town in Massachusetts that had already been assigned as part of a heart health study.

This group of around 5,000 were given questionnaires to assess their loneliness every four years or so, enabling the researcher to track any "spread" in this gloomy emotion.

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Genetics Rather Than Stress To Blame For Grey Hair

From The Telegraph:

Women who find themselves going grey should blame their parents rather than their stressful lifestyles, research has found.

Scientists studied more than 200 identical and non-identical twins between the ages of 59 and 81. They found that there was little difference between the greyness of identical twin sisters, implying that their varying lifestyles or upbringing had little impact.

Among non-identical siblings that did have differing levels of grey hair, 90 per cent of cases could be attributed to differing genetic factors, researchers from Unilever, who conducted the research published it in US journal PLoS ONE, found.

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Windows 7 Users Facing 'Black Screens Of Death'

The Sugababes are fronting an advertising campaign for Microsoft's Windows 7. The operating system has been hit by a 'black screen of death'

From The Daily Mail:

Frustrated Windows 7 users are facing 'black screens of death' after logging on to their computers, Microsoft have confirmed.

The software giant said they were investigating a disabling glitch that seems to particularly affect its latest operating system.

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Barnes & Noble May Not Deliver Nooks Ordered Early in Time for Christmas

From Daily Tech:

B&N is trying "everything" it can to get Nook to buyers who ordered before Nov 20 on time

The eReader market is hot right now and the gadgets have become some of the most popular gifts to give this holiday season. That means some freshman offerings that are new to the market are very hard to find.

One of these new offerings is the Nook from Barnes & Noble. The Nook is an eReader that sells for $259 and sports the typical e-ink display for reading along with a color screen that is touch sensitive on the bottom for browsing the B&N digital bookstore.

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Space Station Crew Lands In Kazakhstan

From Space.com:

A Canadian, a Russian and a Belgian astronaut left the International Space Station and landed on the icy steppes of Kazakhstan Tuesday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Belgian astronaut Frank DeWinne, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk touched down in their Soyuz TMA-15 crew capsule at 2:15 a.m. EST (0715 GMT) after heavy parachutes slowed the craft's descent.

The landing went smoothly, though the subzero temperatures in Kazakhstan prevented helicopters from flying to retrieve the crew as usual. Instead, the Russian Federal Space Agency sent teams in all-terrain vehicles to recover the spaceflyers.

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'Global Surge' In Rhino Poaching

From BBC:

Rhino poaching around the world is on the rise despite efforts to protect the animals, a report warns.

The global surge in the illegal trade has been driven by demands from Asian medicinal markets, the study by conservationists concluded.

It suggests that a decline in law enforcement is the main reason for the rise in poaching in Africa.

The report found that 95% of rhino poaching in Africa since 2006 had occurred in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

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Copenhagen: The Era Of Climate Stability Is Coming To An End

A man rides his bicycle through the flood on River Street, Ballinasloe in County Galway which is under 3ft of water after the river Suck burst its banks. Photograph: PA

From The Guardian:

After 400 generations of stable weather, the world is on the brink of violent climate change. But there is good news too.

For about 10,000 years, our climate on Earth has been stable. Remarkably stable, in fact. Since the end of the last ice age, we humans have spent 400 generations taking advantage of this stability to build our civilisation.

We have had warm periods and little ice ages; but the changes have been small. We have always known pretty much when it will rain, what the temperature will be each summer and winter, and how high the rivers will flow.

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New Brain Connections Form Rapidly During Motor Learning

New connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task, according to a new study. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 30, 2009) — New connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task, according to a study published recently in Nature. Led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study involved detailed observations of the rewiring processes that take place in the brain during motor learning.

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Exercise Prevents Aging of Cells

From Live Science:

Exercise is known to have a bounty of health benefits that can ward off age-related diseases, but a new study shows that regular physical activity has an anti-aging effect at the cellular level.

The research found that intensive exercise prevents the shortening of telomeres — the DNA that bookends chromosomes and protects the ends from damage — much like the cap on the end of a shoelace.

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Antarctica Protected From Global Warming By Hole In Ozone Layer

From The Scotsman:

A HUGE hole in the ozone layer has protected Antarctica from the impacts of global warming, according to scientists.
The temperature across Antarctica has not risen over the past 30 years and there has been a 10 per cent increase in the amount of sea ice appearing during winter.

Climate change sceptics regularly cite the lack of warming in Antarctica as evidence
global warming is not happening.

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Buried Treasure

Face from a Coffin. Egypt, Third Intermediate Period, 1075-656 B.C. Coffin sculptures such as this were first covered with gesso as a primer before being painted. The gesso and most of the paint have worn off, revealing the wood underneath. Three thousand years later, you can still see the sculptor's hand in the carving marks.

From Archaeology News/Forbes:

The Brooklyn Museum scours its archives for a show on ancient Egypt.

Besides ensuring tourism and providing storylines for scores of feature films, the mystique of ancient Egypt also launched a specific sort of museum show that has become de rigueur for large institutions: the blockbuster. When the traveling exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979, it broke all the museum's previous attendance records and became famous enough to merit a spoof on Saturday Night Live.

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Is The Once-Stable Part Of Antarctica Starting To Melt?

From Discover Magazine:

Climate change doesn’t affect all places equally, and while Greenland and West Antarctica’s glaciers have started slipping into the sea at an alarming rate, East Antarctica was actually gaining ice. But now that could be changing, as a Nature Geoscience study done with data from NASA’s gravity-measuring satellites called GRACE suggests that the area could now be losing mass.

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Why Do NASA Launch Times Depend On Lighting Conditions?

The International Space Station photographed from Space Shuttle Discovery in March 2009. (NASA)

From The Air & Space Smithsonian:

It's all about the solar beta angle.

While it was a hydrogen leak on the pad that forced NASA to scrub the launch of space shuttle mission STS-127 on June 17, one main reason the agency had to wait several weeks to try again was something called a “solar beta angle cut-out.”

Solar what?

Before sending a shuttle aloft, mission planners carefully calculate the angle defined by its orbital plane around Earth and a line drawn from the center of Earth to the center of the sun. This “solar beta angle” changes constantly as Earth moves around the sun and the shuttle’s orbital plane precesses, or slowly shifts, due to the gravitational tug from Earth’s equatorial bulge.

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Astronauts Want A Next-Gen Ride 10 Times Safer Than The Shuttle

A Safer Space Ride NASA's next-gen Ares I-X test rocket launches
within sight of the aging space shuttle. NASA

From Popular Science:

Astronauts say the next crew launch vehicle should have disaster odds of just 1 in 1,000.

Spaceflight continues to represent one of the more extreme and hazardous undertakings for humans, even if it's just about getting off the ground. But the men and women of NASA's astronaut corps say that the U.S. space agency can improve on the odds that faced the doomed shuttle crews of Challenger and Columbia. Florida Today has obtained the documents that show just where NASA's astronauts stand regarding their next-gen vehicle's safety.

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Drowned Cities: Myths And Secrets Of The Deep

From New Scientist:

The idea that great cities, rich in forgotten knowledge and treasure, lie hidden beneath the sea holds immense appeal. Scarcely a year goes by without someone claiming to have found Atlantis. But what's really out there under the waves?

Jo Marchant looks at some of the sunken towns and cities discovered worldwide, and separates the facts from the myths.

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