Climate Science Must Be More Open, Say MPs

Photo: Professor Phil Jones' scientific reputation is "intact"

From The BBC:

MPs investigating the climate change row at the UK's University of East Anglia (UEA) have demanded greater transparency from climate scientists.

The Commons Science and Technology Committee criticised UEA authorities for failing to respond to requests for data from climate change sceptics.

But it found no evidence Professor Phil Jones, whose e-mails were hacked and published online, had manipulated data.

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Picking Our Brains: Nine Neural Frontiers

From New Scientist:

The human brain is the most astoundingly complex structure in the known universe. Yet we are starting to unravel some of its mysteries, thanks to advances in brain imaging, genetics, stem cell research and more. We explore the latest findings from the hottest topics in neuroscience.

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Genetic Shock A Surprising Court Ruling In America May Loosen The Drug Industry’s Grip On Important Genes

From The Economist:

PERSONALISED medicine has proved an elusive dream. Since the decoding of the human genome, biotechnology companies have claimed that by matching a person’s genetic make-up with specialised treatments, they can tailor drugs to maximise benefits and minimise side effects. Alas, researchers have discovered that the link between a given person’s genetic make-up and specific diseases is much more complex than they had hoped. The tantalising vision remains out of reach.

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A Slow Mind May Nurture More Creative Ideas

White matter writ large (Image: UCLA Lab of Neuro Imaging)

From New Scientist:

AS FAR as the internet or phone networks go, bad connections are bad news. Not so in the brain, where slower connections may make people more creative.

Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues had found that creativity correlates with low levels of the chemical N-acetylaspartate, which is found in neurons and seems to promote neural health and metabolism.

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Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content

From Threat Level:

A U.S. judge is ordering Isohunt, one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines, to remove all infringing content. Isohunt’s operator said Tuesday that the decision would likely shutter the site, which has 30 million unique monthly visitors.

The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance.

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Moral Judgments Can Be Altered

In a new study, researchers disrupted activity in the right temporo-parietal junction by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions -- for example, a failed murder attempt -- was impaired. (Credit: Graphic by Christine Daniloff)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2010) — MIT neuroscientists have shown they can influence people's moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region -- a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.

To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions -- an ability known as "theory of mind." For example, if a hunter shoots his friend while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the hunter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his friend for a duck?

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Mystery of Great Civilization's Destruction Revealed

The religious complex of Angkor Wat was center of a civilization that depended for irrigation on a vast network of canals, embankments and reservoirs. Credit: Charles J. Sharp.

From Live Science:

Climate change might have helped bring about the fall of the ancient Khmer civilization in Angkor, Cambodia, nearly 600 years ago, new research suggests.

Historians have given various explanations for the fall of the empire that stretched across much of Southeast Asia between the ninth and 14th centuries (801 to 1400), from land overexploitation to conflict with rival kingdoms. But the new study offers strong evidence that two severe droughts, punctuated by bouts of heavy monsoon rain, could have weakened the empire by shrinking water supplies for drinking and agriculture, and damaging Angkor's vast irrigation system, which was central to its economy.

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How It Works: Taser's Electrified Shotgun Slug

From Popular Science:

It’s midnight. You’re a cop patrolling the wrong side of town when you spot a mugging. The assailant is about 40 feet away, out of range of your stun gun. You shout, but he darts down an alley. It’s a dead end. The crook picks up a bottle, hurls it at your head, and makes a break for the street. You draw your gun.

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Assault Breacher Vehicles Beat Bombs In Afghanistan

From Popular Mechanics:

Marine corps engineers in Afghanistan have a new beast of a vehicle to help them defeat explosive booby traps.

The civilian mechanics at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama usually only fix vehicles for the Army, not design them for the Marine Corps. But as Marines push into contested areas of Afghanistan, their engineers face a persistent threat from roadside bombs. The mechanics at Anniston saw they could build a safe ride for these military engineers by adding off-the-shelf equipment to an M1A1 Abrams battle tank. The result, called the Assault Breacher Vehicle (ABV), maximizes the depot staff’s experience at fixing the M1A1 and their ability to mount heavy engineering equipment, including a 12-foot plough, onto its hull. The Army donated excess tank parts from its inventory to create the ABV.

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My Comment: This is a monster.

New iPhone Could End AT&T's U.S. Monopoly

From The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. plans to begin producing this year a new iPhone that could allow U.S. phone carriers other than AT&T Inc. to sell the iconic gadget, said people briefed by the company.

The new iPhone would work on a type of wireless network called CDMA, these people said. CDMA is used by Verizon Wireless, AT&T's main competitor, as well as Sprint Nextel Corp. and a handful of cellular operators in countries including South Korea and Japan. The vast majority of carriers world-wide, including AT&T, use another technology called GSM.

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Oceanology: Robot 'Gliders' Swim The Undersea World

Engage the wave drive (Image: Liquid Robotics)

From New Scientist:

THE way we study oceans could be transformed by a high-tech "surfboard" that generates its own power from sunlight and water waves. The device is capable of navigating at sea for months at a time and recently completed a 4000-kilometre trip from Hawaii to San Diego, California.

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Cern's Giant Collider Is Back – And The Hunt For Fundamental New Insights Is On

The Large Hadron Collider is set for record-breaking high-energy particle experiments after an 18-month delay for repairs. Photograph: Reuters

From The Guardian:

• Two beams of protons will be collided at record energy levels
• Large Hadron Collider may find Higgs boson, or 'God particle'

The largest, most complex scientific instrument in the world will begin its long-delayed hunt for new particles, forces and extra dimensions on Tuesday at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Organisation, on the outskirts of Geneva.

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Picking Our Brains: What Are Memories Made Of?

Want to forget a fright? (Image: WIN-Initiative/Getty)

From New Scientist:

MEMORIES are the basic stuff of thought. We access our stores of knowledge every time we perform a task, communicate through speech or formulate the simplest concepts. Yet the physical form of memory has long been mysterious. What changes occur in the brain when a new memory is encoded?

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Atom Smasher Will Help Reveal 'The Beginning'

Physicists gather at CERN to witness results of the LHC's first half-power particle collisions. Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN

From The Washington Post:

GENEVA -- The world's largest atom smasher threw together minuscule particles racing at unheard of speeds in conditions simulating those just after the Big Bang - a success that kick-started a megabillion-dollar experiment that could one day explain how the universe began.

Scientists cheered Tuesday's historic crash of two proton beams, which produced three times more energy than researchers had created before and marked a milestone for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

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US Marines Embrace Web 2.0

[Photo: USMC; Linker: MY]

In About-Face, Marines Embrace Web 2.0 -- The Danger Room

Last summer, the U.S. Marine Corps took a draconian approach to Web 2.0, issuing a sweeping ban on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks.

In an order issued yesterday, the service changed course, issuing guidelines to encourage “responsible and effective use” of social networking technology. “The Marine Corps embraces and strives to leverage the advances of internet-based capabilities,” the directive states. “Effective immediately, internet-based capabilities will be made available to all MCEN [Marine Corps Enterprise Network] users.”

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My Comment: I call this a positive direction. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. they all add to the morale and well being of our soldiers.

$500 Million Launcher Lacks One Thing: Rocket

The Constellation Program's Ares I-X test rocket roars off Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 28. At right is space shuttle Atlantis. Photo courtesy of Scott Andrews

From MSNBC:

Space industry tense over pending demise of Constellation program.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. - Anyone need a $500 million, 355-foot steel tower for launching rockets into space?

There's one available at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Brand new, never been used.

The mobile launcher has been built for a rocket called the Ares 1. The problem is, there is not yet any such thing as an Ares 1 rocket — and if the Obama administration has its way, there never will be.

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For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken A Law of Nature

This image of a full-energy collision between gold ions shows the paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced during the impact. (Credit: Image courtesy of Yale University)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2010) — For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook­haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.

Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.

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Mysterious Lead Coffin Found Near Rome

The lead coffin archaeologists found in the abandoned ancient city of Gabii, Italy could contain a gladiator or bishop. Credit: University of Michigan.

From Live Science:

Archaeologists found a 1,000-pound lead coffin while digging in the ruins of an ancient city near Rome last summer. The mission now is to determine who or what is buried inside.

The project – which is headed by Nicola Terrenato, a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan – is the largest American-led dig in Italy in the past 50 years.

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'Uranium-Eating' Bacteria To Clean-Up Radioactive Sites

Ranger Mine - a uranium mine in Kakadu National Park, Australia.

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: Some bacteria have the capacity to stabilise uranium contaminated sites, and if they are used they could reducing the chances of these sites contaminating major waterways and ecosystems, U.S. scientists have said.

Of the millions of tonnes of bacteria living within the Earth's subsurface, some are able to transform the oxidative state of uranium, which defines how the element with interact with oxygen to form various molecules. They change it from the radioactive, toxic and water soluble uranium (VI) to the less soluble, stationary and therefore less harmful uranium (IV) as part of their normal growth.

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With Processor Speeds Stagnating, Researchers Look Beyond Silicon Toward Computing's Future

Flexible Silicon More flexible circuits can help silicon stay relevant in the future of computing Science/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

From Popular Mechanics:

After a breathless race through the '80s and '90s, desktop computer clock speeds have spent the last decade languishing around the 3 gigahertz mark. That stagnation in processing speeds has prompted scientists to debate whether it's time to move beyond semiconductors -- and what better place to debate than in the journal Science? Ars Technica gives a top-down overview of several future paths laid out in the journal's latest issue by researchers such as Thomas Theis and Paul Solomon of IBM.

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