A Science News Aggregator That Covers Stories in the World Of Science And Technology.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Concrete Phase Of Runway Begins At Spaceport America
From Space Daily:
The first batch of concrete was poured Thursday, February 11, marking the start of the final concrete finish phase of the runway construction at Spaceport America, the world's first purposebuilt commercial spaceport. The runway project, which began in August 2009, is expected to be completed this summer, according to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA).
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Particle May Be Leading Candidate For Mysterious Dark Matter
(Credit: DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 16, 2010) — Physicists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive.
A 9-year search from a unique observatory in an old iron mine 2,000 feet underground has yielded two possible detections of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. But physicists, who include two University of Florida researchers, say there is about a one in four chance that the detections were merely background noise -- meaning that a worldwide hunt involving at least two dozen different observatories and hundreds of scientists will continue.
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Why People Fake Illness
In 2008, a Baltimore woman named Dina Leone shared shocking news with her friends and family: she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. She wrote blogs and Facebook notes, updating everyone on her treatment and progress. The 37-year-old mother of two received more than an outpouring of support and get-well cards; she also got money to help pay for her treatments and fulfill her dying wishes.
It was all very tragic – and it was also a hoax. Police investigated her claims and soon her story unraveled when the hospitals she claimed to have visited had no record of her. Leone eventually admitted that she had pretended to be sick for over three years. She was recently indicted on charges of theft and conspiracy.
But why would someone lie about having cancer?
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Digital Handcuffs For Apple Ebooks?
Apple's old digital rights management software (DRM), FairPlay, is slated to make a comeback with the e-books it will be selling on its iBook Store. While music users have been free of these "digital handcuffs" for the last year, Alex Pham reports that readers will not be.
When Apple launches its iBook store to sell titles for its new iPad device in March, many of its titles are expected to come with a set of handsome digital locks designed to deter piracy....
Next month, Apple will be dusting off those digital cuffs for books, according to sources in the publishing industry.
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Adam Aims To Take Bite Out Of Apple In iPad War
From Times Online:
It has already brought the world a £1,400 car, now India is set to release an “iPad for the masses” — a new tablet computer that technology experts say could mount a challenge to Apple’s latest gadget.
The new device, called the Adam, has been designed by Notion Ink, a start-up based in the technology hub of Hyderabad. The company was founded by three 24-year-old graduates from India’s elite technical universities who have relied on family and friends for seed funding.
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How The MP3 Became A Combat Weapon
Aditya Chakrabortty on the platoons' playlists on the Iraq frontline.
CJ Grisham and his friends used to love Eminem – especially his song, Go To Sleep. "We'd blare that and we'd all scream the lyrics." An all-American ritual – except that Grisham was a sergeant in the US offensive on Fallujah, and Eminem was his anthem for facing the Iraqis. As he puts it: "I'm going to have to shoot at someone today, so might as well get pumped up for it." And so his platoon would shriek along: "Go to sleep, bitch/Die, motherfucker, die/Time's up, bitch, close your eyes."
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Parents To Blame For Women 'Unlucky In Love', Claim Scientists
remain unlucky in love. Photo: Reuters
From The Telegraph:
The reason why some women remain without a long-term boyfriend appears to have been solved by Australian scientists.
Researchers from the University of Western Australia reportedly claim some of the secrets of attraction appear to be hidden in certain immune system genes inherited from our parents.
They found that a woman's appearance or sweat contains clues to the genetic make-up of her immune system.
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Mystery Of The Giant Honeycomb Built In A Wood By Thousands Of Bees In Freezing February
freezing weather at Holly Hill, Fareham, Hampshire
From The Daily Mail:
If you go down to these woods today you are sure of a sweet surprise - bees swarming in sub-zero temperatures around a giant honeycomb.
Even Sir David Attenborough would be stumped by the discovery as thousands of bees have constructed the comb in an oak tree at Holly Hill Country Park, Fareham, Hants.
The hardy workers have created the giant two-foot long structure and have been spotted by walkers and winter wildlife spotters more used to seeing deer and badgers at this time of year.
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Nasa Rides 'Bucking Bronco' To Mars
It weighs almost a tonne, has cost more than $2bn and, in 2013, it will be lowered on to the surface of Mars with a landing system that has never been tried before.
The Mars Science Laboratory will "revolutionise investigations in science on other planets", says Doug McCuistion, director of Nasa's Mars exploration programme.
It will, he says, lay the foundations for future missions that will eventually bring pieces of the Red Planet back home to Earth.
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US Networks And Power Grid Under (Mock) Cyber-Attack
From New Scientist:
Unknown hackers have taken out US cellphone networks in an ongoing cyber-attack that will soon knock out parts of the nation's electricity grid – say the officials who helped plan today's mock assault on the nation's defences.
The 3-hour event began at 10 am EST (3 pm GMT) and will quickly escalate from cellphone networks to attack the US power supply by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in smart grid technologies, says Matthew Stern, head of cyber accounts for defence contractor General Dynamics.
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Are Criminals Born Bad?
The field of neurocriminology is reviving some controversial ideas. Can criminal urges really be blamed on the brain?
We are used to hearing talk of “the criminal mind”. In future we can expect to hear more about “the criminal brain”. Recent scientific research suggests that criminality may be a trait tha t some people are born with or acquire very early in life. It’s an unsettling thought: examine the prefrontal cortex in the brain of a gurgling infant and you may see the signs of a potential future murderer.
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
New Supercomputer Uses Water-Cooled Technology To Save Energy
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Feb. 16, 2010) — Nanyang Technological University (NTU) February 11 opens its much-anticipated High Performance Computing (HPC) Centre to support the university's growing international research profile and capacity, especially in the area of sustainability.
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Happiest States: Hawaii Moves Into First Place
From Live Science:
If you needed an extra twist of the arm to set off on a Hawaii vacation, here it is: The big-wave state was the happiest place to live in 2009, according to a newly released national survey.
Topping the well-being list among all 50 states, Hawaii pulled ahead of the 2008 leader Utah. But Utah and its neighbors still have plenty to smile about. Nine of the top 10 well-being states reside in the Midwest and the West. The south didn't fare so well, taking seven of the 11 lowest well-being spots on the list.
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Super Velcro
From Technology Review:
A novel adhesive is extremely strong, and its stickiness is reversible.
General Motors researchers have made an extremely strong adhesive that comes apart when heated. The adhesive is 10 times stickier than Velcro and the reusable gecko-inspired glues that many research groups have been trying to perfect.
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Life From A Test Tube? The Real Promise Of Synthetic Biology
From Scientific American:
Scientists are closing in on the ability to make life from scratch, with potential consequences both good and bad.
I have seen the future, and it is now.
Those words came to mind again as I recently listened to Craig Venter, one of those leading the new areas of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology. Every time I hear a talk on this subject, it seems a new threshold in the artificial manipulation and, ultimately, creation of life has been passed.
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Scientists Get Closer To Understanding Why We Age
From Time Magazine:
Time waits for no man, the old truism goes, but in recent years scientists have shown that it does seem to move more slowly for some. Molecular biologists have observed that people's cells often age at different rates, leading them to make a distinction between "chronological" and "biological age."
But the reason for the difference remains only vaguely understood. Environmental factors such as smoking, stress and regular exercise all seem to influence the rate at which our cells age. Now, for the first time, researchers have found a genetic link to cellular aging — a finding that suggests new treatments for a variety of age-related diseases and cancers.
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In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break A Law Of Nature
From The New York Times:
Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.
The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.
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'Star Wars' Is A Mere Phantom Menace To Missiles
From New Scientist:
The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has finally shot down a moving missile with an airborne laser – but military experts say the system is not good enough for combat.
A liquid-fuelled rocket – thought to be a Scud-B, similar to those being developed by Iran and North Korea – was fired from a ship off the coast California on 11 February.
Within the next 20 seconds, the "airborne laser testbed" onboard a modified Boeing 747 locked-on to it with two low-powered tracking lasers, then a laser beam of several megawatts, to heat-damage the missile's skin. If such damage is done while booster rockets are still firing, the stresses caused by the acceleration can destroy the missile, as this clip of the test shows.
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Special Ops Gunships To Get Pain-Inducing Weapons
2. As the beam meets the magnetic field, the electrons bunch up and gyrate, producing high-power microwaves at set frequencies.
3. Mirrors steer the microwaves through a window made of diamond. The gem is used for its resistance to heat and for its clarity.
4. The electron beam’s excess energy is deposited in the coils of a collector.
From Popular Mechanics:
Nonlethal energy-beam blasters that cause pain without killing their targets could finally find a home—inside special operations gunships. Here's how they work.
The Pentagon has been researching nonlethal pain rays since the mid-’90s, but finding a vehicle to carry them has proven to be a challenge. Researchers have mounted these microwave weapons—which repel people by heating water molecules just under the skin, reportedly without damaging tissue—on trucks, guard towers and Humvees, but the U.S. military has never deployed them for real-world use. (Using such weapons on civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan is not seen as a good way to win hearts and minds.)
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My Comment: Ouch.
E-Books: Publishers Poised For Victory In Latest Battle
From Times Online:
Publishers look set to win the latest round in the battle for supremacy on electronic books, with Google ready to offer major concessions as it prepares to enter the increasingly competitive e-book market.
Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, which will feature an electronic bookstore when it launches next month, and Amazon’s humiliation last week by a book publisher in a prices row, Google is thought to have given in to the book industry by offering it a higher share of the sale of e-books.
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