Study: Running Shoes Could Cause Joint Strain

Running shoes may put more strain on your joints than running barefoot or even walking in high heels, a recent study suggests. Credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

Running shoes, decked out with the latest cushioning, motion control and arch support technologies, may not be as beneficial to your feet and joints as you might think.

A new study finds that running shoes, at least the kind currently on the market, may actually put more of a strain on your joints than if you were to run barefoot or even to walk in high-heeled shoes, and the increased pressure could lead to knee, hip and ankle damage. The scientists don’t recommend ditching your high-tech sneaks, however, as going barefoot on man-made surfaces could also prove harmful,

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China's Popular Search Engine Hacked By Iranian Hackers

Image: Visitors to the site were greeted with this message.

Baidu Hacked By 'Iranian Cyber Army' -- The BBC

China's most popular search engine, Baidu, has been targeted by the same hackers that took Twitter offline in December, according to reports.

A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army redirected Baidu users to a site displaying a political message.

The site was down for at least four hours on Tuesday, Chinese media said.

Last year's attack on micro-blogging service Twitter had the same hallmarks, sending users to a page with an Iranian flag and message in Farsi.

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Watching TV Shortens Life Span, Study Finds

From The L.A. Times:

Australian researchers find that each hour a day spent in front of television is linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and an 11% greater risk of all causes of death.

Watching television for hour upon hour obviously isn't the best way to spend leisure time -- inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease. But a new study quantifies TV viewing's effect on risk of death.

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Next 40 Years Key For Climate Change

Power from renewable sources such as wind farms will be important to fight climate change. Nevertheless, the study says that even if we do everything possible to reduce emissions between now and 2050, keeping overall temperature increases below 2ºC is "barely feasible". Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos/AFP:

WASHINGTON DC: World leaders should focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible over the next 40 years to avoid perilous warming, says a new study.

In the first research of its kind, analysts used a detailed energy system model to analyse the relationship between emissions levels in 2050 and chances of achieving end-of-century targets of 2 to 3ºC above the pre-industrial average.

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Camera Showdown: Nexus One Vs. iPhone 3GS

The Nexus One's 5-megapixel camera also has an LED-powered flash.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

From CNET:

Rumors cropped up last week that Apple had put down a big order for LED flashes, something useful for one thing, and one thing only: a digital camera. It doesn't take much to figure that the next iteration of the iPhone is likely to be packing one of these, since many of the latest cell phones--including HTC's recently released Nexus One, now have them included.

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Could Extinct Species Make a Comeback?

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News 60 Minutes:

Lesley Stahl Reports on Research that Could One Day Resurrect Extinct Species and Save Endangered Ones.

(CBS) It's difficult to imagine that 10,000 years ago, right here in North America, there lived giant animals that are now the stuff of legends - mammoths and mastodons, ground sloths and sabretooth cats. They, and thousands of other species, have vanished from the Earth. And today, partly due to the expansion of one species - ours - animals are going extinct faster than ever before.

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A New Theory On Why The Sun Never Swallowed The Earth

Illustration by Denis Scott / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

When astronomers began spotting planets around distant stars in the mid-1990s, they were baffled. Many of these early discoveries involved worlds as big as Jupiter or even bigger — but they orbited their stars so tightly that their "years" were just days long. Nobody could imagine how a Jupiter or anything like it could form in such a hostile location, where the radiation of the parent star would have pushed the light gas — which makes up most of such a planet's mass — out to the farthest reaches of the solar system before it could ever coalesce.

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Breezy Does It: How Wind Turbines Work

The great advantage of wind is that it is a free fuel, unlike gas, coal or oil. Britain is also a windy place, making supply relatively secure. GETTY IMAGES

From The Independent:

Wind farms generate electricity by capturing the kinetic energy of moving air.

The three blades of each turbine turn on a horizontal axis in the wind and the movement of this drive shaft spins an electricity generator, usually via a gearbox, so that power can be fed into the National Grid.

The wind farms being planned for sites off the coast of Britain will include some of the biggest wind generators ever built, with blades up to 60m long. These offshore wind generators will stand in water that is up to 30m deep and will be up to 220m tall from the base of their foundations to the tips of the turbine blades, about 40m taller than the "Gherkin" skyscraper in London.

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Quantum Computer Successfully Calculates Exact Energy Of Molecular Hydrogen

Cepheus B, a Molecular Hydrogen Cloud Try modeling the molecular hydrogen in this cloud with a conventional computer. Go ahead, we'll wait. NASA

From Popular Science:

Researchers at Harvard and the University of Queensland have come up with a novel, just-crazy-enough-to-work method for modeling and simulating quantum systems: use a quantum computer. Employing the superior computing power of a custom-built quantum computing system, the researchers were able to determine the precise energy of molecular hydrogen for the first time, an impossible feat using classical computing methods. By doing so, they've opened the box on what could be a computing breakthrough stretching across disciplines.

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More Evidence That Autism Is a Brain 'Connectivity' Disorder

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 11, 2010) — Studying a rare disorder known as tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), researchers at Children's Hospital Boston add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that autism spectrum disorders, which affect 25 to 50 percent of TSC patients, result from a miswiring of connections in the developing brain, leading to improper information flow. The finding may also help explain why many people with TSC have seizures and intellectual disabilities.

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Global Trade Fuels Invasive Species

Rose-ringed Parakeet is currently expanding its range across Western Europe. It can be a serious agricultural pest and competes with native birds for nesting cavities. Credit: Oregon State University

From Live Science:

The expansion of world trade has long been blamed for the rise of invasive species and the environmental havoc such hitchhikers have dealt to delicate ecosystems. Now new evidence may bolster the case for new policies to combat the problem.

A new study found a significant decline in the number of bird species introduced into Eastern Europe during the Cold War, a time when much of the trade and travel between the region and its western counterparts ceased.

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Google 'Censors Its Website So Anti-Islam Searches Fail To Appear'

Google has been accused of censoring offensive searches relating to Islam

From The Daily Mail:

Search engine Google has been accused of censoring its results after users discovered it never suggests search terms when it comes to Islam.

In a time-saving feature the internet phenomenon, whose motto is 'don't be evil', helpfully suggests common searches as people type in what they are looking for.

For example, if you type in 'Christianity is' in the search bar a whole range of options flash up including controversial suggestions such as 'Christianity is fake' and 'Christianity is a cult'.

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Artificial Leaf Could Make Green Hydrogen

Harnessing plant power (Image: Pasieka/SPL)

From New Scientist:

HIDDEN detail in the natural world could hold the key to future sources of clean energy. So say materials scientists who have created an artificial leaf that can harness light to split water and generate hydrogen.

Plant leaves have evolved over millions of years to catch the energy in the sun's rays very efficiently. They use the energy to produce food, and the central step in the process involves splitting water molecules and creating hydrogen ions.

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More Abundance by Owning Less

From Discovery News:

Less is more; let the music show you how. We've witnessed the progression: albums to compact discs to digital files a la iTunes, where each step takes less material and less effort to get the music to the listener. Now, internet radio (places like SOMA FM and Pandora) draws the material piece down to nothing (although maybe there's a greater bandwidth component if you're continuously piping music across the airwaves, instead of just once at purchase, as is the case with digital files).

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The 2010s: Freakin' Awesome-With Lasers

From CBS News:

Scientists Predict Some Uncertainty, Some Unbridled Optimism, and Some Warnings to the World to Make a Course Correction.

(CBS) This article was written by Discover's Andrew Moseman and Brett Israel.

There's nothing like the round number at the start of a new decade to get everyone prognosticating (yes, we know some of you are in the crowd that says the new decade doesn't begin until 2011; OK, fine). To predict what the scientific scene will be like in 2020, the journal Nature brought in experts from 18 fields. Though the collection doesn't encapsulate the "world of tomorrow" feel of, say, the old Omni magazine, it's still packed with sunny (and scary) forecasts. Some show lingering uncertainty, some unbridled optimism, and some give warnings to the world to make a much-needed course correction. Here are five we thought were particularly telling.

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Microsoft Word And Office 'Sales Ban' Begins

From BBC News:

A ban on Microsoft selling certain versions of its flagship products Word and Office has begun.

The software firm was made to change elements of the software by US courts after a patent dispute with Canadian firm i4i.

Microsoft said that it had complied with the court's ruling and would now offer "revised software" in the US.

The court ruling means that Microsoft must also pay i4i damages of $290m (£182m).

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Remembering The First Hydrogen Bomb Test

From Wired Science:

The long-distance scientific recordings of the blast wave from the first hydrogen bomb test have been rediscovered in a formerly classified safe at Columbia University.

On November 1, 1952, physicists created the second fusion explosion the solar system has ever known. The first occurred around 4.5 billion years ago and ignited the ongoing fusion reaction in the sun. The second, the Ivy Mike experiment, was shorter lived and detonated on an atoll in the South Pacific. This 10-megaton blast was five times more powerful than all the explosives used in World War II combined, including the nuclear-fission bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Yearlong Star Eclipse May Help Solve Space Mystery

Artist's conception of the dusty disk thought to eclipse the star Epsilon Aurigae. Illustration by Nico Camargo and courtesy www.citizensky.org

From The National Geographic:

While relatively few people were looking, an unusual eclipse darkened New Year's Day.

On January 1 a giant space object blotted out our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a yellow supergiant star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Based on studies of Epsilon Aurigae's previous eclipses, astronomers expect the star won't fully regain its bright shine until early 2011.

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Overwhelmed With Data Feeds, Military Turns To NFL Broadcast Tricks For Highlighting Drone Targets

Analyzing Targets Keeping watch on imagery intelligence.
U.S. Air Force/Tech. Sgt. Erik Gudmundson

From Popular Science:

War is no game, but it could learn a trick or two from football.

A growing swarm of drones keep watch on the battlefield, but military analysts struggle to watch every second of live surveillance footage so that they can quickly pass on warnings about ambushes or possible targets to warfighters. Now the U.S. military has turned to ESPN and Fox Sports to learn how to quickly identify and transmit the video highlights, the New York Times reports.

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The Coming Water Wars?

"Water: The Epic Struggle For Wealth, Power, And Civilization:" Water As The New Oil -- Seattle Times

Author Steven Solomon's "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization" documents the hunt throughout history to find sources of clean water, a task likely to become more fraught with conflict in the coming age of water scarcity.

There's a slick catchphrase in the air these days — "Water is the new oil" — that author Steven Solomon and others use when referencing water's newfound significance on today's geopolitical stage.

But if Solomon's outstanding survey, "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization," reveals anything, it is that oil, for maybe a century or so, was actually the new water, and now water has simply returned to the primacy it has always held throughout history.

In detailed but highly readable fashion, economics journalist Solomon ("Confidence Game," 1995) works through each major civilization — the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the early Romans, China, India, Islam, northern Europe, the New World — and shows the profound water challenges each faced and overcame in advancing human aspirations.

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My Comment: This book is on my "to read" list. For the past few years I have been commenting in this blog on the history of wars over water, and on how future wars may revolve on the scarcity of clean water. From what I have read in the preamble to this book .... author Steven Solomon is hitting all the bases.