Life On Mars, Continued

This photomicrograph focuses on a large "biomorph" from a Mars meteorite
fragment known as Nakhla e4150ed. Its chemical spectrum appears to be primarily
iron oxide but with a carbon content slightly greater than the underlying matrix. David McKay / NASA

From MSNBC/Cosmic Log:

Do rocks from Mars bear the tiny fossilized signs of life? Scientists who think so say they'll subject meteorites from the Red Planet to a new round of high-tech tests in hopes of adding to their evidence.

For years, only one meteorite has figured in the controversy: ALH84001, a rock that was blasted away from Mars 16 million years ago, floated through space and fell through Earth's atmosphere onto Antarctica about 13,000 years ago. Scientists reported in 1996 that the rock contained microscopic structures that looked like "nano-fossils," but skeptics said the structures could have been created by chemical rather than biological reactions.

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Social Networking Promises A New Era Of Watching TV With Friends

TV Family "Ah, the times we had in 2010"

From Popular Science:

Someone wants to bring back the golden era of TV, when entire families watched the tube with microwave dinners balanced carefully on their laps. Motorola, Intel and UK-based BT envision a TV viewing experience that uses social networking to make you feel fuzzily connected to friends and family. According to Technology Review the goal is to "make TV social again."

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How Winning Can Mean Losing In Poker And Life

Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

You can learn a lot about gambling if you're willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don't have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you're likely to lose — and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards.

Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record.

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OLED Could Be Apple Tablet’s Secret Solution For E-Reading

From Gadget Lab:

An OLED display would be a pricey, but perfect, screen for e-book reading on a tablet, like the one Apple is rumored to be announcing later this month.

OLEDs are serious power drainers, but if Apple were to implement a reading mode with a black background and light-colored text, then an OLED screen would consume far less energy. That’s because OLEDs consume power differently than LCDs; they only use power when pixels are turned on. That means blacks won’t consume any energy, and such a reading mode would substantially preserve battery life, an analyst told Wired.com.

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Nasa Photographs 'Trees' On Mars

The "trees" are really trails of debris caused by landslides
as ice melts in Mars's spring Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

A Nasa probe has sent back photographs of what appears to be trees on the planet's surface.

The images appear to show rows of dark "conifers" sprouting from dunes and hills on the planet surface. But the scene is actually an optical illusion.

The photographs actually show sand dunes coated with a thin layer of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, less than 240 miles from the planet's north pole.

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Wind Chill Blows: It's Time To Get Rid Of A Meaningless Number.

From Slate:

Wind chill dropped as low as 52 below zero in parts of the Midwest on Thursday, with similar conditions expected for early Friday. Meanwhile, parts of northern Texas may be hit with a wind chill of between minus-1 and minus-9 degrees—the coldest local weather in 12 years. In this column, first published in 2007 and reprinted last winter, Daniel Engber explains that "wind chill" is little more than shameless puffery.

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No Needle In A Haystack Too Small For DARPA's Dream Goggles

Future Goggles Will DARPA's magic 3D goggles improve on this night vision spec? U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

Defense agency demands that metaphors become reality, stat.

DARPA's dreamers and brainiacs have set their sights on a new technology for the U.S. military -- high-tech binoculars or goggles that would supposedly have the ability to find the not-so-proverbial needle in a haystack. The Register pointed out the U.S. Department of Defense proposal issued last week.

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My Comment: My girlfriend now knows what I want for my birthday.

Bering Strait's Ups And Downs Alter Climate

Gatekeeper. The Bering Strait seems to regulate sea level during ice ages.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/JPL/MISR team

From Science Now:

The Bering Strait, the 80-kilometer-wide stretch of ocean between Russia and Alaska, can strongly influence the climate of the entire Northern Hemisphere, researchers have calculated. The findings answer a question that has dogged scientists for the past decade, and they demonstrate how seemingly slight changes in certain factors can impact global climate.

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Women With Full Lips 'Look Younger'

Marilyn Monroe had full lips

From The Telegraph:

Women who have plump full lips look younger than their years, scientists have said.

Devotees of collagen injections and silicone implants have long believed it and now research has backed their theory that a bee stung pout can belie their true age.

Even if the woman in question has wrinkles, eye bags, sagging jowels and greying hair, a rosy and firm set of lips will make them appear younger.

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NASA Feels 'Plutonium Pinch' Earlier Than Expected

Plutonium-238's high heat-production rate and 89-year half-life makes it a good power source for long space missions (Image: US Department of Energy)

From New Scientist:

NASA is feeling the pinch in its plutonium supplies.

Many spacecraft are powered by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238, but the US no longer produces the material. Instead, NASA relies on its shrinking stockpile, topped up with purchases from Russia.

Previous estimates suggested the decline would not affect solar-system exploration until after 2020, but NASA is already tightening its belt. Candidates for NASA's next "New Frontiers" mission, which aims to launch an exploratory spacecraft by 2018, will not be allowed to rely on plutonium for power, effectively limiting the candidate probes to solar power only.

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'Wet' Computing Systems To Boost Processing Power

Sketch of artificial wet neuronal networks.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 12, 2010) — A new kind of information processing technology inspired by chemical processes in living systems is being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.

Dr Maurits de Planque and Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are working on a project which has just received €1.8 from the European Union's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Proactive Initiatives, which recognises ground-breaking work which has already demonstrated important potential.

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Doomsday Clock To Change This Week

DOOMSDAY CLOCK ANNOUNCEMENT from TurnBackTheClock.org on Vimeo.

From Live Science:

The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock is set to move this Thursday, and for the first time, anyone with Internet access can watch. Which way the hand will move and by how much have not been made public.

The event will take place at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) on Jan. 14 at the New York Academy of Sciences Building in New York City. While the actual clock is housed at the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences offices in Chicago, Ill., a representation of the clock will be changed at Thursday's news conference. (You can watch the live Web feed at www.TurnBackTheClock.org.)

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My Comment: My prediction .... the clock is going to move closer to midnight by one minute.

Dark Matter 'Beach Ball' Unveiled

Image: The trail of matter left by an orbiting galaxy hints at the dark matter's shape

From The BBC:

The giant halo of dark matter that surrounds our galaxy is shaped like a flattened beach ball, researchers say.

It is the first definitive measure of the scope of the dark matter that makes up the majority of galaxies' masses.

The shape of this "dark matter halo" was inferred from the path of debris left behind as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy slowly orbits the Milky Way.

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'Earth-Like' Exoplanet Is Intensely Volcanic

The planet, called Corot-7b, was detected by French astronomers in 2009. Credit: ESO

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: The first rocky planet found outside of our Solar System is likely to be a volcanic wasteland inhospitable to life, scientists have found.

The planet, called Corot-7b, was detected by French astronomers in 2009. It has a similar density to Earth and has a diameter around 70% larger.

Last week astronomers led by Rory Barnes at the University of Washington in Seattle, presented new data on Corot-7b's orbit to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC.

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SpoofCard Phone Case: Messing With Caller ID Isn't Always Funny

Newscom

From Christian Science Monitor:

Prosecutors pursue New York case alleging illegal phone tampering via SpoofCard.

The service has a fun name – SpoofCard – but it can land its users in hot water if they employ it for purposes that aren't funny.

New Yorker Ali Wise appeared in court in New York City this week on charges stemming from alleged misuse of the SpoofCard service may be the latest case in point. Ms. Wise, a former publicity director for fashion house Dolce & Gabbana, is alleged to have used the service to invade and tamper with the phone accounts of four women who dated her ex-boyfriends.

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On The Street: Future of Dating: CBS News

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Mystery Object On Course To Whiz Past Earth

The near-Earth object known as 2010 AL30 appears as a spot against the background streaks of stars in this image from the Skylive-Grove Creek Observatory in Australia. E. Guido and G. Sostero / AFAM / CARA

From MSNBC/Discovery News:

It will not hit the planet, but scientists aren't sure what it is, exactly.

A near-Earth object that could be human-made has just been discovered hurtling toward us. On Wednesday, the object called 2010 AL30 will fly by Earth at a distance of just 80,000 miles (130,000 kilometers). That's only one-third of the way from here to the moon — that is, very close.

It will miss us, and if it did hit us, it wouldn't do any damage anyway, but I managed to pick up on some chatter between planetary scientists and found out that the "asteroid," or whatever it is, gives us a new standard: A 10-meter-wide (33-foot-wide) asteroid can be detected two days before it potentially hits Earth. A pretty useful warning, if you ask me.

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Tombs Of The Pyramid Builders Discovered In Giza, Egypt

Bones and pottery inside one of the tomb shafts. Images courtesy the SCA
(Supreme Council of Antiquities)

From The Independent:

An archaeological team led by Dr. Zahi Hawass has discovered several new tombs that belong to the workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre. “This is the first time to uncover tombs like the ones that were found during the 1990s, which belong to the late 4th and 5th Dynasties (2649-2374 BC),” said Dr. Hawass.

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Stonehenge On 'Most Threatened' World Wonders List

Traffic at Stonehenge has put Britain's most famous prehistoric monument on a list of the world's most threatened sites. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett /Reuters

From The Guardian:

Britain's failure to deal with road traffic around the prehistoric stone circle is condemned as 'a national disgrace'.

The traffic-choked roads still roaring past Stonehenge in Wiltshire have earned the world's most famous prehistoric monument a place on a list of the world's most threatened sites.

The government's decision to abandon, on cost grounds, a plan to bury roads around Stonehenge in a tunnel underground and the consequent collapse of the plans for a new visitor centre, have put the site on the Threatened Wonders list of Wanderlust magazine, along with the 4x4-scarred Wadi Rum in Jordan, and the tourist-eroded paths and steps of the great Inca site at Machu Picchu in Peru.

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Brain 'Entanglement' Could Explain Memories

Mirror image: neurons in the brain begin to clone after reaching a
'tipping point' of activity (Image: Stone/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance", could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as phase locking. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.

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