Space Rock Contains Organic Molecular Feast

Photo: The Murchison meteorite came down in Australia in 1969

From The BBC:

Scientists say they have confirmed that a meteorite that crashed into earth 40 years ago contains millions of different organic compounds.

It is thought the Murchison meteorite could be even older than the Sun.

"Having this information means you can tell what was happening during the birth of the Solar System," said lead researcher Dr Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin.

The results of the meteorite study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Nanoparticles To Clean Drinking Water

Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

BEIJING: Scientists have developed nanotechnology that purifies water using only visible light, it continues working in the dark and it kills the tougher microbes to boot.

Light is often used as a water purifier and existing methods rely on processes stimulated by ultraviolet (UV) light.

But UV accounts for just 5% of daylight so a method using visible light — which accounts for almost half — is more desirable.

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Scientists Synthesize Unique Family of Anti-Cancer Compounds

Image of one of the kinamycin compounds synthesized by Yale researchers destroying ovarian cancer cells (the spherical objects) in less than 48 hours in lab tests. (Credit: Gil Mor)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2010) — Yale University scientists have streamlined the process for synthesizing a family of compounds with the potential to kill cancer and other diseased cells, and have found that they represent a unique category of anti-cancer agents. Their discovery appears in this week's online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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Year Of The Tiger: All About The Chinese Zodiac

From Live Science:

This Sunday, Feb. 14, marks a new year according to the Chinese calendar, which will be moving from the reign of the Ox to the year of the Tiger.

Each year on the Chinese calendar is assigned an animal from the Chinese zodiac, which rotates on a 12-year cycle. People born during a specific year are thought to have attributes of their animal — tigers are confident, daring and unpredictable, for example.

The Chinese calendar is thought to have been formulated around 500 B.C., though elements of it date back at least to the Shang Dynasty around 1,000 B.C.

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Mobile Operators Join Forces To Develop Open Apps Platform

From Wall Street Journal:

BARCELONA—Twenty-four mobile operators Monday said they had formed an alliance to build an open platform to deliver applications to all mobile phone users, in an attempt to emulate the runaway success of Apple Inc.'s App Store.

The initiative shows how even fierce rivals are coming together to try to capture the mass market in mobile Internet services.

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Climategate Academic Professor Phil Jones Admits He 'Lost Track' Of Vital Data

Professor Phil Jones from the Climate Researh Unit University of East Anglia

From The Telegraph:

Professor Phil Jones, the academic at the centre of the “climategate” scandal, has admitted he had difficulty “keeping track” of vital data used to back up global warming claims.

Prof Jones stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s climate change unit in December after leaked emails appeared to show academics were manipulating data to bolster claims that global warming is caused by humans.

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CSI Cairo: How Science Will Solve The Mystery Of Tutankhamun

DNA samples have been taken from Tutankhamun and other mummies from the 18th dynasty of rulers in an attempt to establish his family lineage. Getty Images

From The Independent:

New technology is helping answer the riddles in the life, and death, of the boy pharaoh. And it's cracked other historical puzzles too.

His golden funeral mask with its striped headdress has become the symbol of Egypt's ancient grandeur. Yet for all the fame that surrounds the boy King Tutankhamun, no one really knows who he was.

Now, the mystery of King Tut's lineage has finally been solved. It will be revealed to the world on Wednesday, more than 30 centuries after the pharaoh was sealed in a gold coffin.

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Online Voyeurs Flock to The Random Thrills Of Chatroulette

From The Guardian:

An addictive new website that links strangers' webcams is gaining popularity – and notoriety.

A new website that has been described as "surreal", "addictive" and "frightening" is proving a sensation around the world – and attracting a reputation as a haven for no-holds-barred, explicit material.

Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with ­random strangers.

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There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995

Click Image to Enlarge

From The Daily Mail:

* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

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Robot Hand Could Protect Soldiers On The Battlefield

The 'intelligent' substance d3o at the display

From The Telegraph:

A robot hand that could defuse bombs, luminous goo that flows around soldiers’ moving bodies but hardens to protect them if they are hit and a uniform that conducts electricity are among the first fruits of the Ministry of Defence’s version of the Dragons’ Den.

The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is an initiative that aims to harness British scientific innovation for rapid use on the battlefield. Ministers also hope to temper the MoD’s reputation for laborious and costly procurements that arrive in service years after they have ceased to be useful.

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Google Shuts Down Music Blogs Without Warning

Music blog Gorilla Vs Bear was concerned by Google's actions

From The Guardian:

Bloggers told they have violated terms without further explanation, as years of archives are wiped off the internet.

In what critics are calling "musicblogocide 2010", Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google's Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

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Hubble Telescope Captures Saturn's Eerie Twin Aurorae

Astronomers had a rare chance to view Saturn with its rings edge on. It meant they could study the planet's Northern and Southern lights

From The Daily Mail:

A spectacular light show on Saturn has been captured in unique new photos of the ringed planet.

The aurora images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) were made possible by a rare chance to see the planet with its rings edge-on and both poles in view.

It takes Saturn almost 30 years to orbit the Sun, and during that time such a picture opportunity occurs only twice.

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How Transformers Can Explode

With a surge of power and corroded wiring, transformers can explode, causing extensive damage. (Photo from Iceman9294/Flicker)

From Popular Mechanics:

On February 12, an underground electrical transformer exploded in front of a Radio Shack on 6th Avenue, in New York City, emitting a fireball seven stories high and damaging nearby buildings. Here's how this could have happened.

A transformer from Consolidated Edison (Con Ed), New York City's sole electricity supplier, exploded from beneath the sidewalk in an underground vault yesterday, creating a fiery blast that shattered windows multiple stories high. Though no injuries were reported, offices and stores at the corner of 20th Street were left smoldering.

Investigators are still trying to answer the question: Just what lead this transformer to explode?

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New Camera System Takes The Guesswork Out Of Baseball Stats

Keeping an Eye on the Ball Up to four cameras mounted on the light towers along each foul line send a live feed to a computer, where object-recognition software identifies each player and the ball and records their every movement as the play unfolds. Here, a sample data stream from a pop fly to left field. Graham Murdoch

From Popular Science:

This could be the year that baseball-stat freaks finally crack the “Derek Jeter enigma.” A panel of coaches has awarded the New York Yankees’ shortstop four of the past six Gold Glove awards for fielding excellence. That drives statisticians nuts, because nearly every statistical model ranks Jeter’s defense below average.

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Study Hints At Dark Matter Action

Image: Some scientists believe dark matter (in pink) is everywhere in the universe

From The BBC:

Researchers in the US say they have detected two signals which could possibly indicate the presence of particles of dark matter.

But the study in Science journal reports the statistical likelihood of a detection of dark matter as 23%.

Deep underground in a lab in Minnesota experiments to detect WIMPS, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles have been going on since 2003.

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Models of Sea Level Change During Ice-Age Cycles Challenged

Data researchers collected on speleothem encrustations, a type of mineral deposit, in coastal caves on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca indicate that sea level was about one meter above present-day levels around 81,000 years ago. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Iowa)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 12, 2010) — Theories about the rates of ice accumulation and melting during the Quaternary Period -- the time interval ranging from 2.6 million years ago to the present -- may need to be revised, thanks to research findings published by a University of Iowa researcher and his colleagues in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science.

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4 Myths of Online Dating Photos Revealed

From Live Science:

Guys hoping to get noticed on online dating sites should take off their shirts, at least those with six-pack abs, according to new survey results by one online matchmaker that also provide advice for gals' profile pics.

"We were sitting on a treasure trove of data," said Sam Yagan, co-founder and CEO of OkCupid. ''There are millions of experiments essentially happening on our site every day."

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General Relativity: In Pretty Good Shape

From Discovery Magazine:

If we celebrate provocative new experimental findings, we should also celebrate the careful null results (experiments that agree with existing theories) on which much of science is based. Back in October we pointed to a new analysis that used observations of gravitational lensing by large-scale structure to test Einstein’s general relativity on cosmological scales, with the intriguing result that it didn’t seem to fit. And the caveat that it probably would end up fitting once we understood things better, but it’s always important to follow up on these kinds of clues.

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Astronomers Back Chile To Host World's Biggest Telescope

A view of a telescope, operated by the European Southern Observatory, in Chile. Photo: Reuters/VICTOR RUIZ CABALLERO

From The Telegraph:

For astronomers, it appears that not only does size really matter but so does an eye-opening location.

That is why an international group of four professional star gazers have banded together to back Chile's Atacama desert as home to the world's biggest telescope, to be built in 2018 based on its geographical advantages.

The high-altitude Armazones mountain in the desert in northern Chilean desert is the perfect place for the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) to be set up, because of skies that are cloud-free 360 nights a year, they say.

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MoD's Vanguard: A Mix Of Robot Bomb Defusers And Kneepad Goo

Rich Walker of Shadow Robot Company with a robotic hand that could be used by army bomb disposal personnel. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Innovative technology at the Centre for Defence Enterprise

A robotic hand that could defuse bombs remotely, a camera with the ability to detect minute changes in the landscape and a mysterious orange goo that absorbs the impact of bomb blasts are among new battlefield technologies unveiled by the Ministry of Defence.

The innovations, designed to make life safer for frontline troops, are being funded by grants from the MoD's Centre for Defence Enterprise, which encourages private companies to bring their products straight to the government for development.

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