Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Russia Plans to Save Earth From Rogue Asteroid; ‘No Nuclear Explosions,’ Space Chief Promises (Updated)
From The Danger Room:
Vlad Putin, we’re sorry we ever made fun of you. In an interview today with Voice of Russia radio, Russia’s space agency chief said discussions would begin soon over a plan to save the world from a collision with a massive asteroid.
It’s not clear how, exactly, the Russians plan to deflect Apophis, a chunk of rock the size of two and a half soccer fields that was first discovered by astronomers in 2004. Anatoly Perminov, the space agency head, promised that there would be “no nuclear explosions” and that everything would be done “on the basis of the laws of physics.”
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The US Virtual Economy Is Set To Make Billions
Photo: Ten of the top 15 apps on Facebook are social games.From BBC:
Virtual goods such as weapons or digital bottles of champagne traded in the US could be worth up to $5bn in the next five years, experts predict.
In Asia, sales are already around the $5bn mark and rapidly growing.
For many, virtual goods are one of the hottest trends in technology and are fuelling huge growth in the social gaming sector.
"This is just an exploding part of the gaming business right now, said venture capitalist Jeremy Liew.
"It is the most exciting area in gaming," he said.
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Convert An Address To Latitude And Longitude
From Wired/How To Wiki:
You can pinpoint any place on Earth using a single set of coordinates: latitude and longitude.
These coordinates, often called a lat-long or latlon, look like a string of numbers. At first glance, it's confounding that anyone would take a human-readable address and turn it into a bunch of numbers that are nonsensical to most people outside the field of cartography. But once you have those numbers, you'll be able to plug them into a web map, GPS or other mapping device and find what you're looking for in an instant -- no matter where on the planet it is.
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What Happened To The Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?
A sketched reconstruction if the Boskop skull done in 1918. Shaded areas depict recovered bone. Courtesy the American Museum of Natural HistoryFrom Discover Magazine:
The Boskops had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.
In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.
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Eight Spin-Offs From Space
Credit: NASAFrom Cosmos:
SYDNEY: Sending people and high-tech robots into space is not cheap and NASA gets through vast sums of money. This financial year alone the U.S. space agency requested more than A$20 billion in funding. How do they justify the expense? One way is to highlight the many technologies developed for the space program, but which now benefit society.
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The Year In Energy
Credit: Roy RitchieFrom The Technology Review:
Liquid batteries, giant lasers, and vast new reserves of natural gas highlight the fundamental energy advances of the past 12 months.
With many renewable energy companies facing hard financial times ("Weeding Out Solar Companies"), a lot of the big energy news this year was coming out of Washington, DC, with massive federal stimulus funding for batteries and renewable energy and programs such as Energy Frontier Research Centers and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy ("A Year of Stimulus for High Tech").
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HMS Ark Royal Becomes First Royal Navy Ship To Sign Up To Twitter
Messages posted online includes information about a chemical training exercise, complete with images of the crew in protective suits and respiratorsFrom The Daily Mail:
It was a Government warning to loose-lipped members of the British public during the Second World War: 'Careless Talk Costs Lives'.
The slogan was the centrepiece of a high-profile campaign to warn people about the danger of unwittingly giving titbits of valuable information to enemy sympathizers.
But it appears Royal Navy sailors today are less likely to heed the message.
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Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Cockroaches Offer Inspiration For Running Robots
Researchers at Oregon State University are using studies of guinea hens and other animals such as cockroaches to learn more about the mechanics of their running ability, with the goal of developing robots that can run easily over rough terrain. (Credit: Image courtesy of Oregon State University)From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Dec. 29, 2009) — The sight of a cockroach scurrying for cover may be nauseating, but the insect is also a biological and engineering marvel, and is providing researchers at Oregon State University with what they call "bioinspiration" in a quest to build the world's first legged robot that is capable of running effortlessly over rough terrain.
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The 9 Strangest News Stories Of 2009
From Live Science:
Weirdness takes many forms, and 2009 had its share of weird events. Here's a look back at the strangest news stories of the year drawn from the realms of pseudoscience, the paranormal, media hype, outright lies and the just plain strange.
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More Attacks Expected On Facebook, Twitter In 2010
From CNET News:Social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can expect more attention from cybercriminals in 2010, according to a new report (PDF) released Tuesday by McAfee Labs. Also at risk are users of Adobe Systems products including Acrobat Reader and Flash. And move over Microsoft; the security firm predicts that Google's Chrome OS will "create another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users."
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9 Astronomy Milestones In 2009
An artist's impression shows the smallest and fastest-orbiting exoplanet known, CoRoT-7b, which was the first known exoplanet with a density similar to that of Earth. HO / AFP - Getty ImagesFrom MSNBC/Space:
Among the discoveries: most massive black hole and water on the moon.
This year provided plenty of cosmic eye-openers for astronomers and casual stargazers alike.
Neighborhood planets such as Mercury and Jupiter received makeovers in both a scientific and literal sense. The discovery of water on the moon and Mars provided clues to the past, not to mention hints for the future of space exploration. A class of newly-detected "Super-Earth" planets around alien stars may ultimately prove more habitable than Earth. And a growing fleet of existing, new and revived space telescopes promises another stellar year ahead.
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How Algal Biofuels Lost A Decade In The Race To Replace Oil
From Wired Science:
For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil.
But now that collection has largely been lost.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction ditches, seasonal desert ponds and briny mashes across the country in a major bioprospecting effort to find the best organisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel for cars.
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Near The Edge Of The Solar System, Voyager 2 Finds Magnetic Fluff
From Discover Magazine:After three-plus decades of exploring the gas giants, passing the orbit of Pluto, and reaching points beyond, Voyager 2 has found something interesting near the edge of the solar system: surprisingly magnetic fluff. Researchers document their findings in this week’s Nature.
Of course, this fluff isn’t made from the dust bunnies you find under your bed, the ‘Local Fluff’ (a nickname for the Local Interstellar Cloud) is a vast, wispy cloud of hot hydrogen and helium stretching 30 light-years across [Discovery News]. Astronomers already knew this fluff was out there near the boundary area between our solar system and interstellar space. What surprised them is that the fluff is much more magnetized than they’d expected.
How To Create A Designer Baby
From Popular Mechanics:
Increasingly sophisticated genetic tests make it possible for parents to choose their baby’s traits. Here are three ways babies are born to specifications.
For just an extra few thousand dollars, women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) could one day choose to have a baby boy with perfect vision, an aptitude for sports and a virtual lock on avoiding colon cancer. Fertility clinics in the U.S. currently offer not only to screen for diseases, but also to choose gender. They are not yet offering any further customization, but that could change as genetic mapping gets faster and easier.
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The Lithium Rush
From Technology Review:
In the Bolivian Andes lies a vast salt flat that may shape the future of transportation.
Nearly four kilometers above sea level in the Bolivian Andes lies the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. But there is more to this surreal, moonlike landscape than meets the eye. Flowing in salt-water channels beneath the surface is the world's largest supply of lithium--and, possibly, the future of transportation. Lithium is the key ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that will power the electric vehicles that will soon be rolling off production lines worldwide. Demand for the metal is expected to double in the next 10 years, and Bolivia, with an untapped resource estimated at nine million tons by the U.S. Geological Survey, is being called a potential "Saudi Arabia of lithium."
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Top Scientists Share Their Future Predictions
Neo (Keanu Reeves) in a still from The MatrixFrom Times Online:
From virtual brains and Matrix-like thought connections to disease-making bacteria, what the next decade could bring.
Nothing much is going to happen in the next 10 years. Of course, that’s not counting the diesel-excreting bacteria, the sequencing of your entire genome for $1,000, massive banks of frozen human eggs, space tourism, the identification of dark matter, widespread sterilisation of young adults, telepathy, supercomputer models of our brains, the discovery of life’s origins, maybe the disappearance of Bangladesh and certainly the loss of 247m acres of tropical forest.
As I said, just another decade really.
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Would You Be Happy To Take The 'Naked' Body Scan?
From The Daily Mail:
Fears over airport security could leave millions of passengers facing the indignity of a 'naked' body scan and paying higher fares to fund it.
Hi-tech body scanners can see through clothes to detect hidden weapons or explosives such as those used in the failed Christmas Day plot.
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A Decade Of Scientific Discovery
Dr Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature Magazine, holding the only cast of the Homo FloresiensisPhoto: Abbie Trayler-Smith
From The Telegraph:
What were the most exciting scientific developments of the past 10 years – and what comes next?
Colin Blakemore - Professor of Neuroscience at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick and president of the Motor Neurone Disease Association
"My scientific moment of the last decade came on February 12, 2001, when the journal Nature published the 'working draft' of the entire three-billion-letter sequence of human DNA. One third of that massively expensive international enterprise – comparable in its significance to splitting the atom, or discovering radioactivity – was produced at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, near Cambridge.
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Why Some Continue To Eat When Full: Researchers Find Clues
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Dec. 28, 2009) — The premise that hunger makes food look more appealing is a widely held belief -- just ask those who cruise grocery store aisles on an empty stomach, only to go home with a full basket and an empty wallet.
Prior research studies have suggested that the so-called hunger hormone ghrelin, which the body produces when it's hungry, might act on the brain to trigger this behavior. New research in mice by UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists suggest that ghrelin might also work in the brain to make some people keep eating "pleasurable" foods when they're already full.
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Why Men Cheat: A Year Of Philandering
Photo: Tiger Woods and WifeFrom Live Science:
Like years past, this one has been a whopper for high-profile philanderers. Psychologists aren't surprised, as guys are wired to want sex, a lot, and are more likely than gals to cheat. The behavior may be particularly likely for men with power, researchers say, though they point out that despite the genetic propensity to sleep around, cheating remains a choice, not a DNA-bound destiny.
The list of powerful individuals whose marital transgressions came out this year includes Tiger Woods, David Letterman, former senator John Edwards and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
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