China's Internet Users Top 384 Million

From Xinhuanet:

BEIJING, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- China reported 384 million Internet users by the end of 2009, up 28.9 percent, or 86 million, from a year ago, said a report from the China Internet Network Information Center on Friday.

Internet users surfing through mobile phones increased by 120 million to top 233 million, about 60.8 percent of the total Internet population, thanks to expanding third-generation (3G) business, said the report.

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Overcoming Blindness: Other Senses Compensate in Just 10 Minutes

From ABC News:

New Study on 'Neuroplasticity' Shows How Quickly Brain Adapts When Sight, Hearing Cut Off.

Four bikers headed off down a street in Southern California, safely navigating through traffic and past parked cars, and turned onto a narrow bike path leading up a steep hillside. None of them veered off the dirt path, and all safely avoided boulders along the way, always conscious of their surroundings and any possible obstacles.

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FCC Broadband Plan Promises High-Speed Internet For 100 Million More Americans By 2015

A Series of Tubes At Terremark's Miami headquarters, undersea Internet cables emerge from the Atlantic and connect to the rest of the country John B. Carnett

From Popular Science:

Today the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its plan to expand broadband Internet access to 100 million more Americans within the next five years. The plan calls both for the expansion of wired networks in under-serviced areas, and for the dedication of more wireless spectrum for Internet use as opposed to television. Largely deficit-neutral, the plan has bipartisan support in the current Congress, in part because contentious issues of net neutrality and privacy were not tackled by the FCC's plan. As you remember, PopSci called for an improvement to the nation's broadband infrastructure last year

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Seven Alternatives To The Apple iPad

From Crunch Gear:

Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers.

Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it’s not like you’re dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?

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Methane May Be Building Under Antarctic Ice

From Wired News/Science News:

BALTIMORE — Microbes living under ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could be churning out large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane, a new study suggests.

sciencenewsIn recent years scientists have learned that liquid water lurks under much of Antarctica’s massive ice sheet, and so, they say, the potential microbial habitat in this watery world is huge. If the methane produced by the bacteria gets trapped beneath the ice and builds up over long periods of time — a possibility that is far from certain — it could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas.

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Golden Bullet For Cancer? Nanoparticles Provide Targeted Version Of Photothermal Therapy For Cancer

Infrared images made while tumors were irradiated with a laser show that in nanocage-injected mice (left), the surface of the tumor quickly became hot enough to kill cells. In buffer-injected mice (right), the temperature barely budged. This specificity is what makes photothermal therapy so attractive as a cancer therapy. (Credit: WUSTL)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 16, 2010) — In a lecture he delivered in 1906, the German physician Paul Ehrlich coined the term Zuberkugel, or "magic bullet," as shorthand for a highly targeted medical treatment.

Magic bullets, also called silver bullets, because of the folkloric belief that only silver bullets can kill supernatural creatures, remain the goal of drug development efforts today.

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Video Games May Hinder Learning For Boys

Video games could hinder academic performance for boys, a new study finds.
Credit: Dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Parents who buy their children a video game system might want to be careful that all the fun doesn't interfere with their learning. A new study suggests owning a game system could hinder academic development, at least for young boys.

The results show that boys given a PlayStation II are slower to progress in their reading and writing skills and have more learning problems reported by their teachers than those not given a system.

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Hurtling Star On A Path To Clip Solar System

Heading our way (Image: ESO)

From New Scientist:

A star is hurtling towards us. It will almost certainly clip the outskirts of the solar system and send comets towards Earth – though not for a while.

Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, Russia, modelled the paths of neighbouring stars using data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite and from ground-based measurements of the speeds of stars.

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Startups Focus On AI At South By Southwest

From Technology Review:

A new crop of startups aims to bring artificial intelligence to the masses.

South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive has a reputation as being the place for social Web startups to hit the headlines. Twitter found one of its first big audiences at the event in 2007, and attendees are among the most eager adoptees of new social Web tools.

To harness this cutting-edge mood, last year the event's organizers launched the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator, a competition showcasing 32 Web-focused startups. This year's competition starts today.

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Iceberg Forensics: Predicting The Planet's Future With Antarctic Ice

From Popular Mechanics:

In the last million years, the North American ice sheet has formed and completely melted about 10 times. Ice is melting once again—simultaneously, across the globe—and the science research vessel and drilling ship JOIDES Resolution has been seeking out clues to how ice sheets may respond to a warming climate. Onboard in Antarctica, Trevor Williams reports on the role that ice has played throughout geologic history and what a new iceberg in the Southern Ocean can tell us about the future for the planet.

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Rolling Martian Avalanche Greets The Spring

Martian Avalanche Keep those red rocks rolling NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

From Popular Science:

Springtime on Mars means the thaw of carbon dioxide ice in the northern hemisphere. And when the dry ice goes, the party's over for any trapped debris that then goes tumbling down Martian cliffs in spectacular images such as this.

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Metal Nano-Particles Suspend Human Cells In Magnetic Scaffolding For Easy Organ Manufacturing

Image: Cells Floating In a Magnetic Field: Nano3D Biosciences, via Technology Review

From Popular Science:

While scientists have become rather adept at transforming generic skin cells into specialized organ cells, crafting the organs themselves has proven far more difficult. Since the 3-D architecture of most organs is as important to their function as their cellular makeup, 2-D cell cultures are not very useful for building a replacement heart from scratch. To solve that problem, most organ makers create a scaffolding for the cells to grow on.

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Heat: A Visual Tour of What's Hot

From Cool Infographics:

Our friend, Jess Bachman from WallStats.com, created Heat: A Visual Tour of What’s Hot or Not in the Universe for Rasmussen College. This fun infographic lines up real-life examples across the entire scale of temperature.

I really like this one, its fun. Basically it a huge ordered list of temperatures. Sometimes it just helps to see everything all in one go, to add some perspective. Also there are cool factoids and such scattered about. To support my work please digg it and tweet it or otherwise spread the good word! Thanks y’all.

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Why Drugs Don't Help Diabetes Patients' Hearts

From Time Magazine:

Doctors at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta on Sunday got some surprising news on their first day of sessions. Researchers presented three studies revealing that some of the most widely prescribed medications to reduce the risk of heart disease in Type 2 diabetes patients appeared not to provide much benefit at all.

People with diabetes are twice as likely as nondiabetics to suffer a heart attack — most diabetes patients die of heart disease — and for years, physicians have used aggressive drug treatments to lower that risk. To that end, the goal has commonly been to lower blood sugar or control blood-sugar spikes after eating, lower triglycerides and reduce blood pressure in diabetes patients to levels closer to those of healthy, nondiabetic individuals. By using medication to treat these factors, which are linked to a higher risk of heart attack and stroke in other patients, doctors assumed they would also be reducing the risk in people with diabetes.

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SEC: Hacker Manipulated Stock Prices

From Threat Level/Wired:

U.S. regulators are moving to freeze the assets and trading accounts of a Russian accused of hacking into personal online portfolios and manipulating the price of dozens of stocks listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and New York Stock Exchange.

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Can You Alter Your Memory?

Image: Douglas Jones

From The Wall Street Journal:

Doctors Try New Therapy for Phobias; Taking the Sting Out Of Childhood Upsets.

Is it possible to permanently change your memories? A group of scientists thinks so. And their new techniques for altering memories are raising possibilities of one day treating people who suffer from phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety-related conditions.

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Super Supernova: White Dwarf Star System Exceeds Mass Limit

Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae, like the one visible in the lower left corner of this galaxy, to explore the past and future expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy. (Credit: High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 16, 2010) — An international team led by Yale University has, for the first time, measured the mass of a type of supernova thought to belong to a unique subclass and confirmed that it surpasses what was believed to be an upper mass limit. Their findings, which appear online and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, could affect the way cosmologists measure the expansion of the universe.

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7 Ways To Raise Your Risk Of Stroke

From Live Science:

Stroke is the number three killer in the United States, affecting almost 800,000 people each year, according to the National Stroke Association. These "brain attacks" occur when blood flow to the brain is interrupted (an ischemic stroke) or when a blood vessel in the brain leaks or bursts (a hemorrhagic stroke). For 144,000 people each year, the result is death. Hundreds of thousands of others are left with long-term disabilities.

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Sudan's Forgotten Pyramids

An archaelogical site 300 kms north of the Sudanese capital Khartoum. The pyramids form one of the most spectacular sights in Sudan with about fifty small ruinous pyramids – the tombs of the rulers of Kush from about 250 BC to 350 AD. The pyramids lie on the tops of two rocky ridges blanketed by sand dunes about three miles east of the Nile. Credit: AFP

From Cosmos/AFP:

Archaeologists say the pyramids, cemeteries and ancient palaces of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan hold mysteries to rival ancient Egypt.

There is not a tourist in sight as the Sun sets over sand-swept pyramids at Meroe, in northern Sudan.

"There is a magic beauty about these sites that is heightened by the privilege of being able to admire them alone, with the pyramids, the dunes and the sun," says Guillemette Andreu, head of antiquities at Paris' Louvre museum.

"It really sets them apart from the Egyptian pyramids, whose beauty is slightly overshadowed by the tourist crowds."

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Evidence For Life On Mars May Be Staring Us In The Face

Sulphur in silence (Image: NASA/SPL)

From New Scientist:

THE footprint of life on Mars may have been plain to see all along in the sulphurous minerals that litter the planet's surface. What's more, the next Mars lander should be able to detect the evidence.

No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built. But sulphur is everywhere on Mars - it is more abundant there than on Earth - and it could contain one of the signatures of life. On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides. The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34. Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars. Now the prospects for this technique look better than ever.

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