US Lifts Web Sanctions On Cuba, Iran And Sudan

From The Guardian:

The US yesterday said it will allow export of instant messaging, web browsing and other communications technology to Cuba, Iran and Sudan, in an effort to facilitate the flow of information and promote freedom of speech.

The move by the US Treasury department comes after Iranian anti-regime protesters used Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other sites to great effect in the aftermath of the disputed June elections. In the months since, anti-regime forces have used the technology to organise demonstrations, spread news and communicate with the outside world, including western journalists largely barred from covering the protest movement.

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My Comment: Iran and Cuba have a tight lid on their citizens when it comes to having internet access, but if this can help spread the word .... I am all for it.

Amazon Is Building A Better Browser For Kindle

From Web Monkey:

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities.

But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website.

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Humans Driving Extinction Faster Than Species Can Evolve, Say Experts

The IUCN lists west African giraffes as an endangered species. Conservationists say the rate of new species is slower than diversity loss. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

From The Guardian:

Conservationists say rate of new species slower than diversity loss caused by the destruction of habitats and climate change.

For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world's experts on biodiversity has warned.

Conservation experts have already signalled that the world is in the grip of the "sixth great extinction" of species, driven by the destruction of natural habitats, hunting, the spread of alien predators and disease, and climate change.

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'Pain Gene' Discovery Could Lead To Less Suffering

From The Telegraph:

The reason some people can feel more pain than others may have been explained by scientists.

Docors have struggled to explain why some people are more sensitive to and less able to tolerate pain.

Now scientists have discovered that a gene may be responsible.

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Einstein's Manuscript Of Relativity Goes On Display

Professor Hanoch Gutfreund points to the manuscript of Einstein's theory of general relativity. RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS

From The Independent:

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang, yesterday went on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity, in which he demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time, is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of the association's 50th anniversary celebration.

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Could This Be The Robot Servant Who Will Serve You Breakfast In Bed?

From The Daily Mail:

Ever dreamed of having a robot servant who would do all the boring chores around the house? Well mechanised domestic staff have come one step closer, thanks to an android being developed in Japan.

Researchers at Tokyo University's JSK Robotics Laboratory, have created a humanoid called Kojiro, who is learning how to mimic how we walk.

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Green Groups To Cameron: Be King Of The Environment!

This ancient willow tree is the epicenter of the Na'vi people.
WETA / 20th Century Fox

From Time Magazine:

James Cameron: nature filmmaker? It's a title even the director himself — a self-described tree hugger — might not have expected. After all, in his budget-busting moviemaking career, Cameron has engineered a planet-killing nuclear holocaust (The Terminator), created acid-blooded extraterrestrials (Aliens) and made a villain out of an iceberg (Titanic). His latest film, Avatar, the record-setting sci-fi epic filmed mostly with motion-capture cameras and computer graphics, is about as unnatural as a movie can get.

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Tides, Earth's Rotation Among Sources Of Giant Underwater Waves

Scientists are gaining new insight into the mechanisms that generate huge, steep underwater waves that occur between layers of warm and cold water in coastal regions of the world's oceans. (Credit: iStockphoto/Hunor Tanko)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 7, 2010) — Scientists at the University of Rhode Island are gaining new insight into the mechanisms that generate huge, steep underwater waves that occur between layers of warm and cold water in coastal regions of the world's oceans.

David Farmer, a physical oceanographer and dean of the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, together with student Qiang Li, said that large amplitude, nonlinear internal waves can reach heights of 150 meters or more in the South China Sea, and the effects they have on surface wave fields ensure that they are readily observable from space.

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Ice Once Covered The Equator

Two ideas exist on the progression of glaciation on Earth from 716.5 to 630 million years ago. Current evidence suggests the top version: a dynamic snowball Earth in which at least two long-lived glaciations happened during which communication between the ocean and the atmosphere was cut off. In this scenario, as CO2 built up, a hot-house effect ensued resulting in an ice-free planet at 670 and 630 million years ago. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

From Live Science:

Sea ice may have covered the Earth's surface all the way to the equator hundreds of millions of years ago, a new study finds, adding more evidence to the theory that a "snowball Earth" once existed.

The finding, detailed in the March 5 issue of the journal Science, also has implications for the survival and evolution of life on Earth through this bitter ice age.

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Fat: The Sixth Taste

Some people are more sensitive to the taste of fat than others. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos/AFP:

SYDNEY: In addition to the five tastes already identified lurks another detectable by the palate, fat, and people's weight is linked to their ability to taste it.

"We know that the human tongue can detect five tastes - sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a savoury, protein-rich taste contained in foods such as soy sauce and chicken stock)," said Russell Keast, from Deakin University.

"Through our study we can conclude that humans have a sixth taste - fat."

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Ultra-Efficient Gas Engine Passes Test

Photo: Efficient exotic: Transonic Combustion put its new fuel-injection technology into this sports car, which weighs about as much as a Toyota Prius hybrid and has similar aerodynamics. It’s not a hybrid, but it gets better gas mileage than a Prius. Credit: Transonic Combustion

From Technology Review:

A novel fuel-injection system achieves 64 miles per gallon.

Transonic Combustion, a startup based in Camarillo, CA, has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. A test vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is far better than more costly gas-electric hybrids, such as the Prius, which gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway.

The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that "activates" it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion.

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Bacteria Rule Our Bodies, Our Planet

Image: The human gut is a virtual zoo, full of a wide variety of bacteria, a new study found. And scientists say that's a good thing. The first results of an international effort to catalog the millions of non-human genes inside people found about 170 different bacteria species thriving in the average person's digestive tract. (CBS/AP)

From CBS News:

Scientists Say the Human Gut is Full of Bacteria; Yes, That's a Good Thing.

(AP) The human gut is a virtual zoo, full of a wide variety of bacteria, a new study found. And scientists say that's a good thing.

The first results of an international effort to catalog the millions of non-human genes inside people found about 170 different bacteria species thriving in the average person's digestive tract. The study also found that people with inflammatory bowel disease had fewer distinct species inside the gut.

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Clues To Antarctica Space Blast

Image: The team's findings could help in the search for other ancient "airbursts" .

From The BBC:

A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.

The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.

Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.

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The US Is Lagging On Nuclear Reactor Technology

Backing old technologies (Image: Bloomberg/Getty)

From New Scientist:

IT SEEMS obvious: if you're planning a new generation of nuclear power stations, you should invest in the most advanced and efficient designs available. Yet that's not what seems to be happening in the US.

The first new nuclear power plants on American soil for 30 years could soon be under construction. President Barack Obama has promised tens of billions of dollars in loan guarantees for reactor builders, of which $8.3 billion was last month committed to back the construction of two Westinghouse AP1000 light water reactors.

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Mini Drones Built To Kill

Assassin Drone Aerovironment's new "Anubis" project sounds eerily similar to the Switchblade drone, seen here Aerovironment

Air Force's Flying Assassin Robot Enters Final Development Stage -- Popular Science

The deadly drone could find and dispatch single-person targets, with "very low collateral damage"

Missile strikes by Predators, Reapers, or other aerial drones usually result in messy explosions on the ground. Now the never-ending but perhaps futile quest to attain zero collateral damage may take another step forward, with a small micro-drone missile that can kill individual targets from afar. A new $1.18-million, Phase-III Air Force contract (Phase III is typically the final development phase) for the "Anubis" drone has been awarded to the firm Aerovironment, Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog reports.

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Can The iPad Tablet Be As Successful As The Apple iPhone?

The iPhone and iPod Touch (collectively) are the fastest-adopted gadget ever. Apple has sold many, many more iPods over the years, but the music players took about two years to pick up steam, as the chart shows. How will the iPad tablet fare? Source: Morgan Stanley / Art: Rich Clabaugh, Staff for The Christian Science Monitor

From Christian Science Monitor:

The iPhone and iPod Touch are the fastest-adopted gadgets in consumer-tech history. Apple hopes that with the iPad tablet, lightning will strike twice.

In about a month, Apple will release its much-anticipated iPad tablet. This new device falls somewhere in between a smart phone and a laptop – small enough to tote around town without exhausting your shoulders, but big enough to feel like you’re reading a magazine instead of staring at a playing card.

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"Hobbit" Skeleton Challenges Evolution

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

18,000-Year-Old Fossils of Dwarf Cavewoman in Indonesia Raises Doubt Whether All Evolutionary Answers Lie in Africa.

(AP) Hunched over a picnic table in a limestone cave, the Indonesian researcher gingerly fingers the bones of a giant rat for clues to the origins of a tiny human.

This world turned upside down may once have existed here, on the remote island of Flores, where an international team is trying to shed light on the fossilized 18,000-year-old skeleton of a dwarf cavewoman whose discovery in 2003 was an international sensation.

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Probe May Have Found Cosmic Dust

Photo: Stardust landed back on Earth in January 2006

From The BBC:

Scientists may have identified the first specks of interstellar dust in material collected by the US space agency's Stardust spacecraft.

A stream of this dust flows through space; the tiny particles are building blocks that go into making stars and planets.

The Nasa spacecraft was primarily sent to catch dust streaming from Comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for analysis.

But scientists also set out to capture particles of interstellar dust.

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New DNA Technique Gives Names To The Unknown Dead

We can now identify more of those lost
(Image: Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty)

From New Scientist:

RARE snippets of genetic material locked inside fragments of bone and teeth can help identify people who die at war or sea, even when little remains of their bodies. But often there simply isn't enough DNA to be sure. A new technique, recently used to identify the Titanic's "unknown child", could make it easier for bereaved families to get a positive ID.

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What Cyberwar?

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

U.S. Cybersecurity Czar Says "There Is No Cyberwar" -- Popular Science

Howard Schmidt wants U.S. cybersecurity efforts to refocus on education, information sharing, and better defense systems

Obama's new cybersecurity czar doesn't much like the term "cyberwar," calling it a "terrible metaphor" and a "terrible concept." But just in case his dislike of the term didn't get through, Howard Schmidt flat-out stated that "there is no cyberwar" during a Wired interview at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

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