On DARPA's List: A Real-Time, 3-D Picture Of The Earth Beneath Our Feet

Peering Inside the Earth DARPA's "Transparent Earth" would give both the military and civil authorities a real-time, 3-D view of processes in the Earth's crust, possibly allowing us to predict natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. NASA

From Popular Science:

DARPA wants to know what's happening in the skies overhead and seeks full situational awareness on the ground, so we suppose it's no surprise that now it wants full, real-time surveillance of what's happening beneath the surface. As part of the agency's fiscal 2011 budget, $4 million will go toward creating a system of sensors and algorithms that will create real-time 3-D maps displaying "the physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 km depth, including natural or man-made structures at militarily- relevant spatial scales."

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Anticipating Unrest, Iran Disrupts Internet Communications

Anticipating Protests, Iran Disrupts Internet Communications -- New York Times

In an effort to disrupt communications and head off huge opposition demonstrations planned for Thursday, the Iranian authorities on Wednesday drastically slowed Internet service in Iran and shut down text messaging services, and an official said that Gmail, the Google e-mail service, would be blocked.

It was not immediately clear if Gmail would be blocked permanently, but users inside Iran said that because of the extremely slow speed of Internet service, they had been unable to open Gmail or the Yahoo e-mail service for the last week.

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Update: Iran to Suspend Google's Email -- Wall Street Journal

My Comment:The message, videos, and the news will still get out.

Another Blizzard: What Happened To Global Warming?

From Time Magazine:

As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming.

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Dramatic Images Of World Trade Centre Collapse On 9/11 Released For First Time

Click Image To Enlarge
The moment one of the World Trade Centre towers begins to crumble in New York

From The Daily Mail:

We have seen the Twin Towers collapse hundreds of times on TV. The steel and glass skyscrapers exploding like a bag of flour, the dust and smoke pluming out across Manhattan. But never like this, from above.

Nine years after the defining moment of the 21st century, a stunning set of photographs taken by New York Police helicopters forces us to look afresh at a catastrophe we assumed we knew so well.

You know but cannot see the 2,752 men, women and children who died at the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. None is visible here.

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Thirty-Eight Percent Of World's Surface In Danger Of Desertification

This is the Guadalquivir River as it passes through Seville, one of the areas most at risk of desertification in Spain. (Credit: Nesta Vázquez)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 10, 2010) — Researchers have measured the degradation of the planet's soil using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a scientific methodology that analyses the environmental impact of human activities, and which now for the first time includes indicators on desertification. The results show that 38 percent of the world is made up of arid regions at risk of desertification.

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Why Advertised Broadband Speeds Lag Behind Reality

From Live Science:

Downloading music from the Internet, streaming video or even browsing most websites nowadays requires fast broadband Internet connections such as a digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable. But slower-than-advertised connection speeds caused by growing network congestion and artificial restrictions by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have left broadband consumers frustrated at times, and for good reason.

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Hacker 'Mudge' Gets DARPA Job

Photo: Peiter "Mudge" Zatko
(Credit: BBN Technologies)

From CNET:

Peiter Zatko--a respected hacker known as "Mudge"--has been tapped to be a program manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to protect against cyberattacks, CNET has learned.

Zatko will become a program manager in mid-March within the Strategic Technologies Office at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is the research and development office for the Department of Defense. His focus will be cybersecurity, he said in an interview with CNET on Tuesday.

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Genes Reveal 'Biological Ageing'

Photo: Telomeres at the end of chromosomes shorten with age.

From The BBC:

Gene variants that might show how fast people's bodies are actually ageing have been pinpointed by scientists.

Researchers from the University of Leicester and Kings College London say the finding could help spot people at higher risk of age-related illnesses.

People carrying the variant had differences in the "biological clock" within all their cells.

The British Heart Foundation said the findings could offer a clue to ways of preventing heart disease.

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Valium 'Works Like Heroin'

From The Telegraph:

Valium, the tranquilliser once known as "mother's little helper", works by boosting the same brain chemical as heroin and cannabis, a study shows.

Diazepam, better known by the defunct brand name Valium, increases "feel good" dopamine levels which are typically targeted by other addictive drugs.

The finding, published in Nature, helps explain why people get hooked on the drug - nick-named "blues" or "vallies" - and may aid the design of safer alternatives.

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Google Buzz Launched In Bid To Topple Facebook And Twitter

Google Buzz will enable Gmail users to create status updates and read and comment on the updates posted by their friends

From The Daily Mail:

Google has launched a new social network in a bid to take on community giants Facebook and Twitter.

Called Google Buzz, the new media tool allows users to share messages, web links, photos and videos with friends and colleagues directly within the popular email system Gmail.

The new social networking features are also compatible with smartphones based on Google's Android operating system.

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Scientists Seek Better Way To Do Climate Report

REFORM CLIMATE: Is there any need for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to continue its work of assessing the global environmental threat? NASA

From ABC News:

Scientists call for better way to do climate report; errors tarnish Nobel Prize-winning effort.

A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling "the weaker link" in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.

The flaws — and the erosion they've caused in public confidence — have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday's issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Mediterranean Diet May Lower Risk of Brain Damage That Causes Thinking Problems

Click Image to Enlarge

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 9, 2010) — A Mediterranean diet may help people avoid the small areas of brain damage that can lead to problems with thinking and memory, according to a study that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto April 10 to April 17, 2010.

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Frozen Hair Yields First Ancient Human Genome

A reconstruction of what Inuk, a member of the ancient extinct Saqqaq culture of Greenland, might have looked like, based on DNA sequencing of his hair frozen for thousands of years in the snow. Credit: Nuka Godfredtsen

From Live Science:

A few tufts of hair frozen in the permafrost of Greenland for more than 4,000 years have allowed scientists to sequence the genome of an ancient human for the first time.

The hairs belonged to a member of the ancient Saqqaq culture of Greenland, the first humans known to inhabit the icy island. Scientists have long wondered where the Saqqaq came from and whether or not they were the ancestors of today's modern Inuit and Greenlanders. The new findings, detailed in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Nature, have helped to settle that question.

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Apple Has Room To Drop iPad Price, Says iSuppli

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

From Wall Street Journal:

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--The components that make up Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) iPad media tablet cost between $219 and $335 depending on the model, according to research firm iSuppli Corp., which leaves room for Apple to lower the gadget's price if it wants.

LG Display (034220.SE LPL), Broadcom Corp. (BRCM), Samsung Electronics Co. (005930.SE) and Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN) are some of the likely winners in terms of suppliers, iSuppli said.

The firm conducted its analysis without the benefit of actually having an iPad, which goes on sales sometime in March or April.

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Google Subsidizing Ultrafast Broadband Test

From CNET:

Google, never satisfied with the pace of change, plans a test that will provide 50,000 to 500,000 people with fiber-optic broadband Internet access with a network speed of a gigabit per second starting as soon as this year.

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Strategy To Grow UK Space Sector

From The BBC:

The UK space industry can become a much bigger global player, employing thousands more highly skilled workers and turning over perhaps £40bn a year.

The projection is made in a report prepared jointly by industry, government, and academia.

The Space Innovation Growth Strategy identifies key market opportunities - from the delivery of internet services by satellite to space tourism.

The report says greater investment will position the UK for future success.

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Obesity In Kids: Three Lifestyle Changes That Help

Getty

From Time Magazine:

To curb the childhood-obesity epidemic, health experts have long urged parents to make healthy changes to their family's lifestyle — such as eating nutritiously, reducing TV time, exercising and getting a good night's sleep.

Individually, these behaviors have been linked to a lower risk of obesity in kids, but researchers at Ohio State University were interested in learning whether their effect might be cumulative — that is, whether families who adopted not just one but two or more of these behaviors could reduce their children's risk of obesity even further.

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Google Takes On Facebook, Twitter With ‘Buzz’

From Epicenter:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google says there’s already plenty of social networking information out there, and what the world really needs is a way to wrangle Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to tame information overload. If its “solution” guts the existing players, so much the better for the search giant.

Google has largely failed in its attempts to build a social networking site before, so it’s taking a different tack: With the Tuesday launch of Google Buzz, the company is pushing a new way to organize by building on a “destination” that millions of people already visit constantly, every day: Gmail.

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Botox May Deaden Not Just Nerves, But Emotions, Too

From Discover Magazine:

Sure, Botox can banish crows feet, smooth those wrinkles, and lift those frown lines, making the client look more youthful–and somewhat expressionless. But the treatment may have effects that are more than skin deep. A new study suggests that by paralyzing the frown muscles that ordinarily are engaged when we feel angry, Botox short-circuits the emotion itself [Newsweek].

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U.S. Solar Market To Double In The Next Year

Powering up: Workers help construct a solar power plant built by the Pasadena, CA-based eSolar. The mirrors focus light on a tower, generating heat for producing electricity. Credit: eSolar

From Technology Review:

Government incentives and lower solar prices are starting to pay off.

In a few years, the United States is likely to be the world's largest market for solar power, eclipsing Germany, which has taken the lead as a result of strong government incentives in spite of the relative paucity of sunlight in that country. A number of factors could make growth possible in the United States--especially changes in legislation that give utilities incentives to create large solar farms.

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