The Big El Niño That Nobody Saw

From Discovery News:

One of the biggest, meanest El Niño episodes of the 20th Century came and went and almost nobody noticed. It was 1918, a year when many people had their hands full just staying alive. The first World War was ravaging Europe, and an influenza pandemic of Biblical proportions was killing more than 50 million around the world.

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Feds Still Unhappy With Google Deal

From CBS News:

Book Battle Continues As DOJ Frets About Threat to Stifle Competition, Undermining of Copyright Laws.

(AP) The U.S. Justice Department still thinks a proposal to give Google the digital rights to millions of hard-to-find books threatens to stifle competition and undermine copyright laws, despite revisions aimed at easing those concerns.

The opinion filed Thursday in New York federal court is a significant setback in Google's effort to win approval of a 15-month-old legal settlement that would put the Internet search leader in charge of a vast electronic library and store. A diverse mix of Google rivals, consumer watchdogs, academic experts, literary agents, state governments and even foreign governments have already urged U.S. District Judge Denny Chin to reject the agreement.

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Pluto's Dynamic Surface Revealed By Hubble Images

The maps of Pluto reveal a mottled brown and charcoal surface.

From The BBC:

The icy dwarf planet Pluto undergoes dramatic seasonal changes, according to images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The pictures from Hubble revealed changes in the brightness and the colour of Pluto's surface.

Mike Brown, from the California Institute of Technology, suggested Pluto had the most dynamic surface of any object in the Solar System.

Hubble will provide our sharpest views of Pluto until the New Horizons probe approaches in 2015.

The researchers note that Pluto became significantly redder in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002.

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Solar Flares Back, But Oddly Small

Sun activity rises and falls in an 11-year-long cycle, such as this cycle from top left taken in early 1997 to bottom right, taken in early 2000. Credit: NASA

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: After a long silence, the Sun erupted in an unusual pattern of small solar flares, said an Australian astrophysicist, which may provide a unique opportunity to predict when bigger solar flares will erupt.

Solar flares are explosions in the Sun's atmosphere marked by a burst of X-rays. They increase or decrease in a roughly 11-year cycle — larger flares can reach tens of millions of degrees Celsius and interfere with communications satellites and affect astronauts' health.

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Ancient Human Teeth Show That Stress Early in Development Can Shorten Life Span

Teeth from a site near Cuzco, Peru, show grooves of enamel damage.
(Credit: Valerie Andrushko)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2010) — Ancient human teeth are telling secrets that may relate to modern-day health: Some stressful events that occurred early in development are linked to shorter life spans.

"Prehistoric remains are providing strong, physical evidence that people who acquired tooth enamel defects while in the womb or early childhood tended to die earlier, even if they survived to adulthood," says Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos.

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Bees See Your Face As A Strange Flower

From Live Science:

Bees can learn to recognize human faces, or at least face-like patterns, a new study suggests.

Rather than specifically recognizing people, these nectar-feeding creatures view us as "strange flowers," the researchers say. And while they might not be able to identify individual humans, they can learn to distinguish features that are arranged to look like faces.

The results suggest that, even with their tiny brains, insects can handle image analysis. The researchers say that if humans want to design automatic facial recognition systems, we could learn a lot by using the bees' approach to face recognition.

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Are Iran's New Anti-Helicopter Missiles A Real Threat to Apaches?

AH-64A Apache Helicopter (Photo by Getty Images/Don Farrall)

From Popular Mechanics:

A new Iranian missile and the Pentagon's funding illustrate the importance, and the vulnerabilities, of helicopters in modern battlefields.

Call it a case of defense-press diplomacy: An Iranian colonel this week spoke publicly about a "special weapon" that was tailor-made to destroy U.S. Apache attack helicopters. The government-run Iranian news agency also released images of the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.

In the photo, the launcher is to the left, in green, and the grey missile is also to the left, with a white cap covering the seeker at the tip. The straight black piece sticking out is a simple aiming device

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This Week, Cybersecurity Efforts Advance On Several Fronts

Tic-Tac-Toe's Not On The List! via PC Museum

From Popular Science:

Google teams up with the NSA, the DoD invests in cyberdefense, smart-grid defense costs add up, and more.

For cybersecurity wonks who see Chinese agents or al Qaeda hackers lurking behind every email from a Nigerian prince, this was one hell of a busy week. With fallout continuing from the recent attack against Google, Director of National Intelligence, National Security Agency, House of Representatives, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and Department of Defense all shifted their attention to the many threats against our Internet infrastructure.

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First Breath: Earth's Billion-Year Struggle For Oxygen

The complex story of oxygen's rise (Image: Reso/Rex Features)

From The New Scientist:

OXYGEN is life. That's true not just for us: all animals and plants need oxygen to unleash the energy they scavenge from their environment. Take away oxygen and organisms cannot produce enough energy to support an active lifestyle, or even make them worth eating. Predation, an essential driver of evolutionary change, becomes impossible.

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Great (and Not So Great) Spaced Out Super Bowl Ads

From Discovery News:

As the Super Bowl weekend begins, excitement (or dread) is building for the infamous Super Bowl commercials that will grace our screens at half time. I'm hoping there might be one or two space-themed ads.

Last year, the tire company Bridgestone knocked it out of the park with astronauts dancing to House of Pain's hit tune "Jump Around" on an alien planet/moon only to return to their rover to find its tires had been stolen by thieving aliens.

Unfortunately, the Bridgestone effort is more of an exception than a rule, because some of the other space-themed Super Bowl ads can be on the wrong side of "cheesy" (but don't worry, I doubt there will be any ill effects from bad-ad exposure).

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Facebook Redesigns, New Microsoft Deal

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

(CBS) Facebook is redesigning its site yet again, this time to better emphasize applications, games and search.

Links and items have moved around the home page as Facebook tries to streamline navigation and make games and apps stand out more.

The latest evolution continued Friday after Facebook started rolling the changes out late Thursday, the company's sixth birthday. The changes were being made in stages, so not all users were seeing them right away.

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Last Speaker Of Ancient Language Of Bo Dies In India

From The BBC:

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.

Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end.

She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.

The islands are often called an "anthropologist's dream" and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

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Solar Activity Intensifies After Long Period Of Calm

From The BBC:

New photographs taken by space telescopes show activity on the surface of the sun has intensified in recent weeks.

Scientists say solar flares and regions of powerful magnetic fields known as sun-spots have increased markedly after a period of the lowest activity for almost a century.

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Wind Power Growth Limited By Radar Conflicts

From CNET:

WASHINGTON--The most well-known obstacles to installing wind turbines are complaints over their visual impact and the potential for bird and bat deaths. But conflict with radar systems have derailed over 9,000 megawatts worth of wind capacity--nearly as much as was installed in the U.S. last year.

"We're not going to put up more wind (in many locations) without conflict because radar systems and wind systems love exactly the same terrain...which is where the wind is at," said Gary Seifert, a program manager for renewable energy technologies at the Idaho National Laboratories, during a presentation at the RETECH conference here on Thursday. "It's really causing a challenge to meeting long-term goals."

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Altitude Causes Weight Loss Without Exercise

From Wired Science:

Just a week at high altitudes can cause sustained weight loss, suggesting that a mountain retreat could be a viable strategy for slimming down.

Overweight, sedentary people who spent a week at an elevation of 8,700 feet lost weight while eating as much as they wanted and doing no exercise. A month after they came back down, they had kept two-thirds of those pounds off. The results appear in the Feb. 4 Obesity.

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Microsoft’s Creative Destruction -- A Commentary

From The New York Times:

AS they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.

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Arm Chief Hints Over iPad Technology

From The Guardian:

The chief executive of Arm has given the strongest hint yet that the company's technology is inside Apple's iPad.

The Cambridge-based technology group - whose microchip designs are to be found in more than nine out of every 10 mobile phones sold across the world - already has chips in the iPhone and iPod. That has led intense speculation that Apple's A4 chip, which powers the iPad, incorporates an Arm Cortex-A9 MPCore - the same processor as Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip, which powers Google's Nexus One.

In an interview with the Guardian, Arm's chief executive, Warren East, hinted that the mystery would soon be over.

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Flawed Autism Study Won't Stop Vaccine Critics

A medical assistant draws an MMR vaccination at the
Spanish Peaks Outreach Clinic in Walsenburg, Colo. John Moore / Getty

From Time Magazine:

More than any other research, it was a study published in British medical journal the Lancet in 1998 that helped foster the persisting notion that childhood vaccines can cause autism. On Tuesday, that flawed study, led by gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was officially retracted by the journal's editors — a serious slap and rare move in the world of medicine.

"It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation," wrote the Lancet editors in a statement issued online.

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Sony Wants To Build An iPad Clone

From Gadget Lab:

Sony wants to make an iPad clone, according to the company’s CFO Nobuyuki Oneda. Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo, Oneda said of the iPad “That is a market we are also very interested in. We are confident we have the skills to create a product.”

It’s certainly no surprise that Apple’s long-expected announcement last week would spur a slew of copycat designs — one of the trends at this year’s CES, which came *before* the iPad event, there were plenty of iSlate announcements, notably from Dell and also Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (nice guess on the name by the way, guys).

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Quantum Mechanics At Work In Photosynthesis: Algae Familiar With These Processes For Nearly Two Billion Years

Phytoplankton. (Credit: NOAA MESA Project)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 4, 2010) — A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

"There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

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