Autonomous Submarine 'Bot Plans Experiments, Navigates Without Human Help

One of MBARIs Automatic Underwater Vehicles Gulper is a high-tech update to this earlier-generation sister research vessel, which was used for seafloor mapping. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

From Popular Science:

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are done spending valuable time heading out to sea on routine monitoring missions, and they have the autonomous underwater robot to prove it. A team of marine researchers there has developed what they are calling the Gulper automatic underwater vehicle (AUV) that operates autonomously far out to sea, planning its own experiments and negotiating ocean depths without human input.

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Is The Bloom Energy Server Cost, Scale Prohibitive?

From Channel Web:

The unveiling of the Bloom Energy Server, a power generating device that lets home and business users meet their own electricity needs with clean energy while taking them off of the power grid, was met with great fanfare this week.

But solution providers say the $700,000 to $800,000 price tag along with its ability to generate 100 kilowatts of electricity could make it a difficult sell.

"The price point I believe is going to be the difficult thing," said Darryl Parker, CEO of Parker Web Services, a North Carolina solution provider.

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America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples In New Estimate

From Wired Science:

The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources.

Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

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The Great Filament

From Watts Up With That?

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is tracking an enormous magnetic filament on the sun. It stretches more than one million kilometers from end to end, which makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. For the seventh day in a row, an enormous magnetic filament is hanging suspended above the surface of the sun’s southern hemisphere. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has a great view. How long can it last? Solar filaments are unpredictable. If this one collapses and hits the stellar surface, the impact could produce a powerful Hyder flare.

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Amazing Facts And Figures About The Evolution Of Hard Disk Drives

Above: Three decades of shrinkage.

From Pingdom:

It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1 TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000 GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.

This article looks back at how hard disk drives have evolved since they first burst onto the scene in 1956. We’ll examine the radical changes over time for three different aspects of HDDs: Size, storage space, and price.

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Genetic Link Between Misery and Death Discovered; Novel Strategy Probes 'Genetic Haystack'

Interaction between nerves (red) and tumor cells (blue) in an ovary provides one way by which stress biochemistry signals can be distributed to sites of disease in the body. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 25, 2010) — In ongoing work to identify how genes interact with social environments to impact human health, UCLA researchers have discovered what they describe as a biochemical link between misery and death. In addition, they found a specific genetic variation in some individuals that seems to disconnect that link, rendering them more biologically resilient in the face of adversity.

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Brain's 'Fairness' Spot Found

Humans tend not to like unequal situations, and now scientists have found the first evidence that this behavior is reflected in the human brain. Here, an fMRI scan of a human brain showing activity in the striatum and prefrontal cortex, regions of the brain thought to be involved in how people evaluate rewards. Credit: Elizabeth Tricomi, Rutgers University.

From Live Science:

At some point in our lives, we've all cried "It's not fair!" In fact, it's human nature for us to dislike unequal situations, and we often try to avoid or remedy them. Now, scientists have identified the first evidence of this behavior's neurological underpinnings in the human brain.

The results show that the brain's reward center responds to unequal situations involving money in a way that indicates people prefer a level playing field, and may suggest why we care about the circumstances of others in the first place.

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Hearts Actually Can Break

From New York Times:

Dorothy Lee and her husband of 40 years were driving home from a Bible study group one wintry night when their car suddenly hit the curb. Mrs. Lee looked at her husband, who was driving, and saw his head bob a couple of times and fall on his chest.

In the ensuing minutes, Mrs. Lee recalls, she managed to avoid a crash while stopping the car, called 911 on her cellphone and tried to revive her husband before an ambulance arrived. But at the hospital, soon after learning her husband had died of a heart attack, Mrs. Lee's heart appeared to give out as well. She experienced sudden sharp pains in her chest, felt faint and went unconscious.

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From Ocean To Ozone: Earth's Nine Life-Support Systems

(Click Image To Enlarge)
We have already overstepped three of nine planetary boundaries and are at grave risk of transgressing several others.

From New Scientist:

UP TO now, the Earth has been very kind to us. Most of our achievements in the past 10,000 years - farming, culture, cities, industrialisation and the raising of our numbers from a million or so to almost 7 billion - happened during an unusually benign period when Earth's natural regulatory systems kept everything from the climate to the supply of fresh water inside narrow, comfortable boundaries.

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EU Launches Antitrust Inquiry Into Google 'Dominance'

The internet search engine has dismissed the complaints. (Reuters/Robert Galbraith)

From Times Online:

The European Commission has launched a preliminary antitrust inquiry into Google after three companies complained that the US giant's dominant search engine penalises potential competitors and keeps advertising prices artificially high.

The European Commission has written to Google to find out how its search functions work, following allegations from the UK price comparison site Foundem, an online French guide to legal services, ejustice.fr and the Germany-based shopping portal Ciao, owned by Microsoft.

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Enceladus: Nasa Spacecraft Records Dramatic Pictures Of Saturn's Moon 'Spitting'

This mosaic was created from two high-resolution images that were captured by the narrow-angle camera. Photo: NASA/JPL/SSI

From The Telegraph:

Dramatic pictures captured by a Nasa spacecraft of Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, “spitting” out water have left scientists astounded.

The space agency’s Cassini spacecraft fly-by has captured new evidence that Saturn's sixth-largest moon is “bursting at the seams”.

The pictures, taken about 1,000 miles from the moon's surface, a forest of more than 30 individual icy plumes of water – including 20 that have never been recorded – can be seen erupting, or “spitting”, from fractures around its southern pole surface.

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Met Office To Re-Examine 150 Years Of Temperature Data In The Wake Of The Climategate Scandal

Division: An iceberg breaks off in the Antarctic. Some experts say sights like this prove the world is heating up but others believe it was hotter in medieval times

From The Daily Mail:

Temperature records dating back more than 150 years are to be re-examined by the Met Office because public belief in global warming has plummeted.

The re-analysis, which was approved at a conference in Turkey this week, comes after the climate change email scandal which dealt a severe blow to the credibility of environmental science.

The Met Office says that the review is 'timely' and insists it does not expect to come to a different conclusion about the progress of climate change.

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Six Tricks That Alien Trackers Could Use

Earth's cities are visible at night from space because of their artificial lights, so populated exoplanets might give off light pollution of their own. But finding it might not be easy. Even if all the world's electricity were used to produce light, it would still be thousands of times fainter than a glint of sunlight reflected off the Earth's surface. (Image: NASA/GSFC)

From New Scientist:

So far, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has focused on listening for radio signals deliberately sent our way. But even if alien civilisations are not trying to get our attention, their activities could produce detectable signs. Here are a few things we might detect, most of which are discussed in a recent paper by Richard Carrigan of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

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NSF Puts Up $25 Million To Research Biological Machines

The Crossroads of Biology and Engineering MIT

From Popular Science:

What would you do with $25 million? If you answered "create a center to research the development of programmable, highly sophisticated biological machines," we regret to inform you the National Science Foundation and MIT have beaten you to the punch. The Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Center (EBICS), will not only advance research in the emerging experimental discipline of engineered biological systems, but will lay an extensive educational groundwork for research in the field going forward.

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Brain 'Hears' Sound Of Silence

Although more research needs to be done, the work carried out by Wehr and his team could lead to new treatments for impaired hearing. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

While we think of silence as the absence of sound, the brain detects it nonetheless.

THE GIST:

* The brain responds not only to sound but also to silence, according to a new study.
* Different pathways in the brain respond to the onset and the offset of sounds.
* Better knowing how the brain organizes and groups sounds could lead to more effective hearing therapies and devices.

While we characterize silence as the absence of sound, the brain hears it as loud and clear as any other noise.

In fact, according to a recent study from the University of Oregon, some areas of the brain respond solely to sound termination. Rather than sound stimuli traveling through the same brain pathways from start to finish as previously thought, neuron activity in rats has shown that onset and offset of sounds take separate routes.

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Grizzly Bears Move Into Polar Bear Habitat In Manitoba, Canada

This is a grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos), photographed in Wapusk National Park, Manitoba, Canada, on August 9, 2008. (Credit: Linda Gormezano)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 23, 2010) — Biologists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and City College of the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat -- and into the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary data was recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist and shows that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.

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Gulp! Long-Necked Dinosaurs Didn't Bother Chewing

Sauropod dinosaurs like this newly discovered Abydosaurus had heads that were just one two-hundredth of the total body volume. That small size might explain why they didn't chew their food, the researchers say. Credit: Michael Skrepnick.

From Live Science:

A mom's wise words about chewing your food likely got lost on a giant, long-necked dinosaur that lived about 105 million years ago in North America. That's according to analyses of four skulls from a newly identified dinosaur species.

"They didn't chew their food; they just grabbed it and swallowed it," said study team member Brooks Britt, a paleontologist at Brigham Young University.

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Plastic Rubbish Blights Atlantic Ocean

From The BBC:

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.

The region is said to compare with the well-documented "great Pacific garbage patch".

Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been "largely ignored" in the Atlantic.

She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.

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More About Cheney's Heart Attack. How Many Can One Person Have?

From The L.A. Times:

The news that former Vice President Dick Cheney suffered his fifth heart attack Monday and was admitted to a hospital, where apparently he is recovering nicely, naturally raises the question of how many heart attacks one person can have.

Five heart attacks may seem like a lot, but it really isn't, experts said. Physicians have become better at diagnosing very small heart attacks that might have passed by unobserved in the past, and improvements in therapy have made large, killer heart attacks less common.

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Experts Warn Of Catastrophy From Cyberattacks

Photo: Vice Admiral Michael McConnell, who works for Booz Allen Hamilton and used to be director of national security and intelligence for the U.S. government. (Credit: U.S. Senate)

Experts Warn Of Catastrophy From Cyberattacks -- CNET

Computer-based network attacks are slowly bleeding U.S. businesses of revenue and market advantage, while the government faces the prospect of losing in an all-out cyberwar, experts told Senators in a hearing on Tuesday.

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