Neuron Breakthrough Offers Hope On Alzheimer’s And Parkinson’s

From Times Online:

Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time, in a remarkable study that suggests that our biological makeup is far more versatile than previously thought.

If confirmed, the discovery that one tissue type can be genetically reprogrammed to become another, could revolutionise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, opening up the possibility of turning a patient’s own skin cells into the neurons that they need.

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Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam

From Wired Science:

Close scrutiny of the iPad which Steve Jobs presented at Apple’s special event last week shows what may be webcam, tucked away in the black screen bezel just like it is on the MacBook Pro.

A screen-grab from the official video of the event shows nothing but a small dot above the screen, opposite the home button. Taken alone, this isn’t much, but compare this with the picture of the iPad leaked just hours before the event (below). If you remember, these showed an iPad locked down in a security frame, and you could clearly see the camera in the bezel. I even pointed out the cutout in the frame that let us see the webcam.

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Save the Ozone Layer, Give Global Warming A Boost?

Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

From The National Geographic:

While most of the world has warmed, parts of the southern hemisphere have remained stubbornly cold—oddly enough because of a gaping hole in the ozone layer. Now new research shows that all the efforts made by scientists and environmental advocates to close the hole may actually increase warming throughout the entire southern hemisphere.

That's because, for decades, brighter summertime clouds, created by the hole, have reflected more of the sun's rays, acting as a shield against global warming.

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Digital Doomsday: The End Of Knowledge

Information is stored in many forms, but will it be readable in the future?
(Image:WesternWolf/Flickr/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

"IN MONTH XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the sky it stayed away. In month XI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible."

What's remarkable about these observations of Venus is that they were made about 3500 years ago, by Babylonian astrologers. We know about them because a clay tablet bearing a record of these ancient observations, called the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, was made 1000 years later and has survived largely intact. Today, it can be viewed at the British Museum in London.

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DARPA Gives $32 Million For A Bigger Big Dog From Boston Dynamics

LS3- The Bigger Dog via Boston Dynamics

Popular Science:

After years of development and several creepy videos, Boston Dynamics' Big Dog robot is scheduled to get bigger. Working off a $32 million request from DARPA and the Marine Corps, Boston Dynamics has developed a supped-up version of the quadrupedal Big Dog robot called the the Legged Squad Support System (LS3). This new robot will have a longer range, heavier carrying capacity, and more agility than its predecessor.

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Spray-On Miracle Could Revolutionise Manufacturing

Fantasy becomes reality: Alec Guinness starred in the 1951 satire
The Man in the White Suit. GETTY

From The Independent:

Liquid glass sounds like the stuff of sci-fi. But can it really live up to the hype?

It sounds too good to be true: a non-toxic spray invisible to the human eye that protects almost any surface against dirt and bacteria, whether it is hospital equipment and medical bandages or ancient stone monuments and expensive fabrics.

But true it is. The spray is a form of "liquid glass" and is harmless to living things and the wider environment. It is being touted as one of the most important, environmentally-friendly products to emerge from the field of nanotechnology, which deals in objects at the molecular end of the size scale.

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Cat Predicts 50 Deaths In RI Nursing Home

The tortoiseshell and white cat spends its days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live Photo: AP

From The Telegraph:

A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book.

Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death.

The cat, now five and generally unsociable, was adopted as a kitten at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which specialises in caring for people with severe dementia.

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So All These Climate Revelations Were A Dastardly Foreign Plot -- A Commentary

Matt Murphy

From The Independent:

It hasn't occurred to King that the emails might have been leaked by an insider

It was the Russians. Or possibly the Chinese. No, wait, it was the Americans. Yes, our very own version of Inspector Clouseau is on the case of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

Yesterday Sir David King, Tony Blair's former chief scientific advisor, told this newspaper: "It was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies... there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency." However, King goes on to suggest that the expense of such an operation would be too great for the entire Russian state to undertake: "In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system, which is a very likely source of finance, so the finger must point to them."

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Stratospheric Water Vapor Is A Global Warming Wild Card

Water vapor and radiative processes. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 1, 2010) — A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth's surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Trees Growing Faster As Planet Warms

Parker uses diameter tape or 'd-tape' to measure the trees. The tape is calibrated to convert the tree's circumference, the measurement used to determine a tree's biomass. Photo: Kirsten Bauer.

From Live Science:

Trees in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the last two centuries in response to Earth's warming climate, a new study finds.

For more than 20 years forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker, based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center outside Washington, D.C., has tracked the growth of 55 stands of mixed hardwood forest plots in Maryland.

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How To Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive

From Popular Mechanics:

You're six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale. Here's PM's 120-mph, 35,000-ft, 3-minutes-to-impact survival guide.

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

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The Brain: What Is The Speed Of Thought?

iStockphoto

From Discover Magazine:

Faster than a bird and slower than sound. But that may be besides the point: Efficiency and timing seem to be more important anyway.

When Samuel Morse established the first commercial telegraph, in 1844, he dramatically changed our expectations about the pace of life. One of the first telegraph messages came from that year’s Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, where the delegates had picked Senator Silas Wright as their vice presidential nominee. The president of the convention telegraphed Wright in Washington, D.C., to see if he would accept. Wright immediately wired back: No. Incredulous that a message could fly almost instantly down a wire, the delegates adjourned and sent a flesh-and-blood committee by train to confirm Wright’s response—which was, of course, the same. From such beginnings came today’s high-speed, networked society.

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Charting The Winners And Losers In Obama’s Science Budget

From Wired Science:

President Obama’s administration revealed its new budget Monday, and it increases funding for nearly all areas of science.

The largest raise went to the National Institutes of Health, which added $1 billion dollars to an already hefty budget. With the boost, the NIH would receive $32.1 billion in total funding. Only the Centers for Disease Control would receive less money than last year, although the cut is small. NASA, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Science Foundation, as well as smaller research efforts at the National Institute for Standards and Technology and Department of Agriculture, would also get bumps.

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Volcanoes 'Destroyed Ancient Ocean Life'

Volcanic activity led to marine life being wiped out millions of years ago,
a study suggests Photo: Reuters

From The Telegraph:

Volcanic activity may have led to nearly a third of marine life being wiped out around 100 million years ago, research suggests.

It is thought that sulphur produced by volcanoes erupting led to oxygen disappearing from large areas of the oceans.

This caused up to 27 per cent of ocean life being destroyed, according to a report published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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IE8 Is Now The World's Top Browser, Says NetApps, As XP Falls

NetApps' chart for browser trends to January 2010

From The Guardian:

IE8 has just taken the "most used" spot from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP, on Net Applications' market share figures for January 2010. Meanwhile, Windows 7 use has just hit 10%.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 has finally become the world's most-used browser, according to Net Applications' figures based on monitoring website usage. IE8 has taken over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP.

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Amazon Capitulates In E-Books Battle As It Gives In To Macmillan's Pricing Demands

'Does this make me cool?': Political satirist Stephen Colbert whips out an Apple iPad during his opening speech at the Grammy Awards last night

From The Daily Mail:

Amazon has given in to publisher Macmillan's pricing demands that will lead to the online retailer raising prices on some of its e-books.

Following Apple's iPad launch last week, Amazon's Kindle has entered into a battle of supremacy with the new gadget.

Apple has said publishers can set their own price for e-books - although it will take 30 per cent, while Amazon currently charges $9.99 for the e-book version of most new releases and bestsellers.

Macmillan wants Amazon to increase their charges to nearer $15.

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NASA Budget: Constellation Officially Canned, But The Deep-Space Future Is Bright

The Ares I-X The Constellation Program rockets will fly no more, but "aggressive" research into heavy-lift rockets should take us closer to manned missions in deep space. NASA

From Popular Science:

Rumors circulated last week, but now it’s official: NASA won’t be sending manned missions back to the moon any time soon. But in what may seem like a gutting of NASA moon- and Mars-based ambitions there is a silver lining: a $6 billion investment in helping private industry bring their space launch vehicles up to human-rated capacity and a smattering of modest robotic precursor missions to the moon, Mars, Martian moons or the Lagrange points that should set the stage for later manned missions far beyond low-earth orbit.

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Google Phases Out Support For IE6

From BBC News:

Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine.

The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work "properly" with the browser.

It recommended individuals and firms upgrade "as soon as possible".

Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the "sophisticated and targeted" attacks, which it said originated in China.

Hackers used a flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser to target the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

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Sea Level In Israel Has Been Rising And Falling Over The Last 2,500 Years

Rising and falling sea levels over relatively short periods do not indicate long-term trends. An assessment of hundreds and thousands of years shows that what seems an irregular phenomenon today is in fact nothing new," explains Dr. Dorit Sivan, who supervised the research. The Templar palace in Acre, seen here, is one of the sites where this study was carried out. (Credit: Amir Yurman, Director of the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies Maritime Workshop at the University of Haifa; Courtesy of the University of Haifa)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 1, 2010) — The sea level in Israel has been rising and falling over the past 2,500 years, with a one-meter difference between the highest and lowest levels, most of the time below the present-day level. This has been shown in a new study supervised by Dr. Dorit Sivan, Head of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. "Rises and falls in sea level over relatively short periods do not testify to a long-term trend. It is early yet to conclude from the short-term increases in sea level that this is a set course that will not take a change in direction," explains Dr. Sivan.

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Fight, Fight, Fight: The History Of Human Aggression And Weapon Development

From Live Science:

The use of weapons may date back well before the rise of humanity, given evidence that even our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, can use spears to hunt other primates. To see how fighting evolved from hand-to-hand combat to world war, here are 10 major innovations that revolutionized combat.

--Charles Q. Choi

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