We May All Be A Little Bit Neanderthal As Study Finds Species Interbred Twice With Humans

A new study suggests that most of us have some Neanderthal genes in our DNA. Scientists believe our ancestors may have bred twice with the extinct species

From The Daily Mail:

It won't come as a surprise to anyone wandering around Britain's city centres late on a Friday night. But scientists have discovered that most people have a little bit of Neanderthal man in them.

A major DNA study suggests that our ancestors interbred with the Neanderthals at least twice tens of thousands of years ago - and that their genes have been carried down the millennia ever since.

Read more .....

Embracing Silence In A Noisy World -- A Book Review

From New York Times:

What is silence? I am profoundly deaf in my left ear (I have a cochlear implant). The ear is useless for hearing, though it makes a pleasant decorative ornament and serves as a place to display earrings and anchor glasses; no sound can penetrate it. You would think that profound deafness is as silent as it gets. And yet it is not quiet in there. I hear deep space sounds, a hollow hum that washes in and fades away, changes in pitch and volume.

Read more ....

Smell Your Way to a Longer Life? Odors That Represent Food or Indicate Danger Can Alter An Animal's Lifespan

New research reveals that specific odors that represent food or indicate danger are capable of altering an animal's lifespan and physiological profile by activating a small number of highly specialized sensory neurons. (Credit: iStockphoto/Jodi Jacobson)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2010) — What does the smell of a good meal mean to you? It may mean more than you think. Specific odors that represent food or indicate danger are capable of altering an animal's lifespan and physiological profile by activating a small number of highly specialized sensory neurons, researchers at the University of Michigan, University of Houston, and Baylor College of Medicine have shown in a study in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology.

Read more ....

Naps And Dreams Boost Learning, Study Finds

From Live Science:

Scientists have long wondered why we sleep and why we dream. A new study provides evidence for some long-held notions that sleep and dreams boost learning and help us to make sense of the real world. Even naps can help, the researchers found.

Test subjects who dreamt about a challenging task performed it better than those who didn't have such dreams.

Read more ....

Second, More Powerful Icelandic Volcano Likely To Explode Soon

Lava spews from a volcano as it erupts this week near Eyjafjallajokull, whose explosion last week caused the major airspace shutdown. REUTERS

From The Independent:

Despite grounding 100,000 flights across Europe, battering a beleaguered airline industry, stranding hundreds of thousands of travellers, disrupting schools and businesses, and giving homes under flight paths their first peace and quiet in decades, the current volcano eruption may be only a teaser of chaos to come.

Read more ....

What Facebook's Latest Means For The Web

From CNET News:

SAN FRANCISCO--It can't be explained as succinctly as "a widget platform" or "a universal log-in," but Facebook's panoply of announcements on Wednesday at the company's F8 developers conference reveal some of the social network's most audacious moves yet.

Facebook has now built deeper, stronger pipes that will pull in more information from partner sites and push more social-media capabilities out to them in turn--Open Graph, which integrates third-party data into Facebook in a far more complex way than its Facebook Connect predecessor; Social Plugins, which add a smattering of social features to those publishers; and the revamped Graph API, which overhauls Facebook's platform code to make it simpler and more flexible.

Read more ....

The Air Force 'Baby Space Shuttle,' Secret And Reusable

From ABC News:

The Air Force’s “baby space shuttle” is ready for launch Thursday night from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. The X-37B looks like a smaller version of the shuttle, and will be America’s second re-usable spacecraft, except it’ll be run by the military and be piloted by remote control. The 29 foot-long craft is designed to stay in orbit as long as 270 days (9 months) and it carries a secret payload of experiments.

"Secret" is the operative word. The Air Force isn’t saying how long it will be in orbit beyond saying that it won’t be a quick up-and-down test. It won’t describe what experiments will be aboard. They’re also touchy about media descriptions that it’s going to usher in the weaponization of space.

Read more ....

Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

From Discovery News:

There are safety-warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol. Now some groups are advocating that similar cautions be printed on cell phones.

Recently, a bill in the Maine state senate proposed a label warning users, especially children and pregnant women, of the risks of brain cancer from electromagnetic radiation emanating from the device.

But the Maine legislature voted down the bill in March, stating that the scientific evidence does not indicate a public health risk.

Yet, the debate rages on. Can cell phones really cause cancer?

Read more ....

Maxed out: How Long Could You Survive Without Food Or Drink?

David Blaine went without food for 44 days (Image: Scott Barbour / Getty)

From New Scientist:

How long can a human survive without food or water? In theory, when you finally run out of body fat, protein and carbohydrates, your body runs out of energy and stops functioning. Jeremy Powell-Tuck, a retired clinician who fed David Blaine after his starvation stunt in London in 2003, isn't so sure that this is the lethal point. "You're more likely to die before then," he says. Fat people would only be able to survive for longer if they had enough vital water-soluble B vitamins in their system to help metabolise fat stores. So it is possible that a person could die of starvation and still be fat.

Read more ....

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory Returns First Images

SDO sees the Sun's whole disc but can then zoom in to view fine detail

From The BBC:

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory has provided an astonishing new vista on our turbulent star.

The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas.

The observatory's super-fine resolution is expected to help scientists get a better understanding of what drives solar activity.

Launched in February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, SDO is expected to operate for at least five years.

Read more ....

NASA's Earth Day Gift Runs On a 56,832-Core, 128-Screen Climate Research Supercomputer

NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center This ain't NASA's first supercomputer.

From Popular Science:

Earth Week is upon us, and NASA has prepared a very special gift for the blue planet. Dwarfing the iPods that we customarily give each other to celebrate another year of existence, NASA put together NEX, a planetary data-crunching tool that uses a 56,832-core, 128-screen supercomputer to blend global satellite data and sophisticated modeling software with an online collaborative culture aimed at helping scientists work together toward better climate change research.

Read more ....

'Brain Training' Games Do Not Improve Mental Skills, Study Says

The results contradicted some of the claims of the brain-training industry.

From The Independent:

Brain training games do not work, according to a study into claims that it is possible to "exercise" the brain with computer tests.

A mass experiment involving nearly 11,500 members of the public failed to find any improvement in mental performance after people regularly used brain-training games on their computers for a period of six weeks.

Scientists said that the results contradicted some of the claims of the brain-training industry, which regularly promotes its computer games as a method of improving a person's mental skills through "exercising".

Read more ....

Global Temperatures Push March 2010 To Hottest March On Record

Temperature anomaly is the difference from average, which gives a more accurate picture of temperature change. In calculating average regional temperatures, factors like station location or elevation affect the data, but those factors are less critical when looking at the difference from the average. (Credit: NOAA/National Climatic Data Center/NESDIS)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — The world's combined global land and ocean surface temperature made last month the warmest March on record, according to NOAA. Taken separately, average ocean temperatures were the warmest for any March and the global land surface was the fourth warmest for any March on record. Additionally, the planet has seen the fourth warmest January -- March period on record.

Read more ....

Study: Bomb's Shock Waves May Electrify the Brain

A computer simulation showed how a shock wave from bomb blasts can make skulls generate electric fields. Credit: Karen K. Y. Lee.

From Live Science:

The blast waves from explosions could jolt the skull into generating electricity, potentially damaging the brain, scientists now suggest.

Although the burns and shrapnel wounds that explosions can inflict are their most obvious hazards, perhaps the greatest danger comes from a blast's shock wave. These rapidly generate ripples in a person's innards, potentially causing traumatic brain injuries with deleterious effects ranging from a simple concussion to long-term impaired mental function.

Read more ....

Lousy DNA Reveals When People First Wore Clothes

From Wired Science:

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexisco — For once lice are nice, at least for scientists investigating the origins of garments.

Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing.

Read more ....

Britain Heads Google’s European Censorship List

Google says it decided to make the figures available in the interests of transparency

From Times Online:

The British Government made more requests for content to be removed from Google last year than any other country in Europe, according to figures released by the company today.

Between July and December last year, Google received 1,166 data requests from British government agencies, of which 59 were requests for content to be removed. Google complied with 76.3 per cent of the removal requests.

France made 846 data requests, but fewer than ten removal requests, of which 66.7 per cent were successful.

Read more ....

School Lunch Helping Make Americans Too Fat To Enlist?

© Richard Hutchings/CORBIS

From Time Magazine:

More than a quarter of all Americans between the ages of 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military, according to a new report highlighted by the Associated Press. That many Americans are too tubby to meet the basic entry requirements for military service isn't new—in 2008 roughly 12,000 would-be soldiers failed the initial military physical because they were overweight, and last year the Pentagon lamented the fact that, between obesity, medical and physical problems, illegal drug use and other issues, 75% of military-age Americans were ineligible for service.

Read more ....

Google Map Reveals Britain Is Third In The World For 'Big Brother' Requests About Its Citizens

The Google Government Requests tool shows how many data and censorship demands the search giant receive every six month

From The Daily Mail:

The UK Government has made over 1,000 requests for information about its citizens from Google in the last six months, the internet search giant revealed today.

It came third out of roughly 100 countries where Google operates and was only ranked behind Brazil and the U.S.

The figures came to light as Google launched a new tool that reveals where it faces governmental pressure to censor material and turn over personal information about its users.

Read more ....

New iPhone Prototype Leaked?

From ABC News:

Technology Web Site Gizmodo Says It Got Its Hands on Lost Next Generation iPhone.

A prototype of the next generation of the iPhone -- scheduled for release this summer -- seems to have been left behind in a Northern California bar. Snapped up by patron who sold it to a tech news site, it has set off a game of corporate intrigue worthy of the Cold War.

Apple, which makes the iPhone, has built its towering technology reputation on secrecy. Last month, BusinessWeek reported that software developers testing the then-unreleased iPad had to promise to keep the device tethered to a fixed object in a room with blacked-out windows, and then send the company a photograph to prove compliance.

Read more ....

South Korea Developing Underwater Search-and-Rescue Robot Crawlers

Underwater swimmers and crawlers could speed up rescue efforts for incidents such as the recent sinking of a South Korean Navy frigate.

From Popular Science:

South Korea's flock of robotic teachers look and sound goofy, but the nation is deadly serious about its latest project: developing aquatic robots by 2016 which can swim and crawl their way across the seafloor several miles down for search and rescue purposes, according to the Korea Times.

Read more ....