How We Evolve

From Seed Magazine:

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing. It was as though, having achieved its aim by the seventh day, evolution rested. "That was the stereotype that I learned," says population geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending. "We showed up 45,000 years ago and haven't changed since then."

The idea makes a rough-and-ready kind of sense. Natural selection derives its power to transform from the survival of some and the demise of others, and from differential reproductive success. But we nurse our sick back to health, and mating is no longer a privilege that males beat each other senseless to secure. As a result, even the less fit get to pass on their genes. Promiscuity and sperm competition have given way to spiritual love; the fittest and the unfit are treated as equals, and equally flourish. With the advent of culture and our fine sensibilities, the assumption was, natural selection went by the board.

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Extending The Life Of Fresh Cranberries

Cranberry harvest in New Jersey. (Credit: Photo by Keith Weller)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2008) — Cranberries are tart, tiny fruits packed with powerful antioxidants. The small, red berries offer a wide variety of health benefits. Not only are cranberries a healthy, low-calorie snack, but they can also play a significant role in preventing urinary tract infections, reducing the risk of gum disease and much more. In fact, studies show that the significant amounts of antioxidants in cranberries may help protect against heart disease, cancer, and other diseases.

The good news about cranberries is spreading, resulting in growing consumer demand for fresh cranberries and cranberry products. This demand has led to increased interest in finding ways to extend the shelf life of the popular fruit. Setting out to determine the optimum conditions for storing fresh cranberries, Charles F. Forney. a research scientist in Postharvest Physiology at the Atlantic Food and Horticulture Research Centre in Nova Scotia, Canada, conducted a study of fresh cranberries and their postharvest life. Forney's study was published in the April 2008 issue of HortScience.

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Promising New Material Could Improve Gas Mileage

Up to three-quarters of the potential energy you are paying at the gas pump for is wasted. A good deal of it goes right out the tailpipe instead of powering your car. (Credit: iStockphoto/Rich Legg)

From Space Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2008) — With gasoline at high prices, it's disheartening to know that up to three-quarters of the potential energy you are paying for is wasted. A good deal of it goes right out the tailpipe instead of powering your car.

Now a Northwestern University-led research team has identified a promising new material that could transform a technology that currently cools and heats car seats -- thermoelectrics -- into one that also efficiently converts waste heat into electricity to help power the car and improve gas mileage.

The researchers discovered that adding two metals, antimony and lead, to the well-known semiconductor lead-telluride, produces a thermoelectric material that is more efficient at high temperatures than existing materials. The results are published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

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Animals Have Personalities, Too

From Live Science:

We know our siblings and in-laws have personalities — sometimes to a fault. But science recently has revealed that such individual differences are widespread in the animal kingdom, even reaching to spiders, birds, mice, squid, rats and pigs.

Now a new mathematical model helps to explain how and why such animal temperaments develop over time.

The model explains a central question of both animal and human personality — why certain individuals are more rigid or flexible than others, and why some change their behavior in response to changes in their environment while others do not.

The answer, says Franz Weissing of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, comes down to costs and benefits. A group in which both rigid and flexible personality types co-exist makes for an optimal system, his model shows.

The field of animal-personality study is starting to gain some substance and credibility, said University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling, who does research in this field.

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A New Explosive

A high-energy-density nitrate ester (1) with unique properties was synthesized in good yield in a three-step process. Destructive stimuli studies and explosive performance calculations show that (1) has similar performance properties to those of well-characterized explosives.

From E! Science News:

Since the discovery of nitroglycerin in 1846, the nitrate ester group of compounds has been known for its explosive properties. A whole series of other nitrate esters have been subsequently put to use as explosives and fuels. A research team led by David E. Chavez at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) has now developed a novel tetranitrate ester. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the compound has a particularly interesting characteristic profile: it is solid at room temperature, is a highly powerful explosive, and can be melt-cast into the desired shape. Nitrate esters are organic nitric acid compounds that can contain enormous explosive force. However, their liquid physical state makes handling very difficult. By mixing in various other components, Alfred Nobel developed dynamite, a distinctly safer and easier to handle nitroglycerine-based explosive. The only solid nitrate ester used as an explosive before is nitropenta. Because of its high melting point of about 140 °C, nitropenta must be pressed into the desired form.

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New Spacecraft to Explore Interstellar Boundary -- Popsci

IBEX Mounted on Pegasus: Photo courtesy NASA

NASA's IBEX craft is heading out this month to map the edges of the solar system

The "termination shock" sounds like the stuff science fiction movies are made of. In reality, it marks the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. The invisible "shock" forms as our sun's solar winds begin to encounter the gases and magnetic fields of outer space, which slows the winds down abruptly.

On October 19, NASA will launch the first spacecraft designed to image and map the interactions that take place in this boundary zone. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, will be propelled from the Kwajalein Atoll into a high-altitude orbit that will eventually take it about 200,000 miles from Earth, where it will capture images of processes taking place in the termination shock and beyond.

"The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," said David J. McComas, principal investigator of the IBEX mission and senior executive director the Space Science and Engineering Division at the Southwest Research Institute.

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Sea Ice Extent Recovering Quickly

(Click To Enlarge)
(Photo from Watts Up With That)

From Watts With That:

As many readers know, the predictions for record low sea ice minimums in 2008 were not met, and 2008 ended up about 9% higher than in 2007 at the end of the season. See the report here.

Now in looking at AMSR-E satellite data, the red line on the graph below, one can see that the recovery is at a significantly faster rate than in recent years.

I’m not one to read much into this, as to do so would be to make the same mistake as was done earlier this year when the NSIDC melt trend led one researcher there to conclude that we’d see an “ice free north pole”.

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Babies Know Happy From Sad Songs

(Photo from Baby Pictures Photos)

From Live Science:

Babies as young as 5 months can distinguish an upbeat tune, such as "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, from a lineup of gloomy tunes.

Researchers displayed an emotionally-neutral face for the baby while sad music played. When the baby looked away from the face, the music stopped and a new sad song would start. When the happier "Ode to Joy" played, the babies stared at the face three to four seconds longer, suggesting they were interested in the shift.

By 9 months old, babies can do the opposite, picking out the sorrowful sound of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from a pack of happy pieces.

The finding is another example of how babies make sense of the world long before they can talk, said Brigham Young University psychology professor and study author Ross Flom.

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Blood Test Finds Coronary Disease

(Photo from NHLBI)

From The New Observer:

A simple blood test could soon replace expensive and invasive exams to detect coronary artery disease.

The test, announced Wednesday by doctors at Duke, is being developed after the discovery of genetic markers that show the presence and intensity of blockage in coronary artery disease, said a Duke cardiologist who co-authored research on the link.

Such a blood test could save millions of dollars annually by allowing some patients to avoid risky procedures in which catheters are inserted into patients' arteries.

"I think it is a big deal," Dr. William E. Kraus, a Duke cardiologist, said in an interview Wednesday. "What we want is a test that tells us the status of your disease today and if what you have is heart disease." Kraus' research was published in the medical journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics.

Current detection of the disease -- the leading cause of death in the United States and a top killer in North Carolina, with 23,610 deaths in 2006 -- can require expensive tests such as echocardiograms, stress tests and imaging techniques that use radiation.

"A blood-based test to diagnose coronary artery disease would be less invasive and risky and would prevent patients from [receiving] radiation exposure," Kraus said in a statement.

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In Puppy Play, It's Ladies First

She's the Boss: During puppy play, young males sometimes put themselves in a position where they can be taken advantage of by their female playmates. The early behavior could serve them well later in life, say researchers. (Photo: From Discovery)

From Discovery:

Oct. 9, 2008 -- It may not be such a dog-eat-dog world after all, at least among puppies. A new study has found that young male dogs playing with female pups will often let the females win, even if the males have a physical advantage.

Male dogs sometimes place themselves in potentially disadvantageous positions that could make them more vulnerable to attack, and researchers suspect the opportunity to play may be more important to them than winning.

Such self-handicapping has been documented before in red-necked wallabies, squirrel monkeys, hamadryas baboons and even humans, all of which frequently take on defensive positions when playing with youngsters, in particular.

The gentlemanly dog behavior is even accompanied with a bow.

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E-Science: Massive Experiments, Global Networks

Supercomputers: European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists work in the control center of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The massive amount of information collected by the collider will be shared across an international computer network.
(Fabrice Coffrini/AP/File). (Photo from Christian Science Monitor).

From Christian Science Monitor:

Worldwide computer grids mean even small-timers can contribute to ‘big science.’

Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina is not the first name that pops up in conversations about centers of polar science.

Tucked at the tip of a branch of Albemarle Sound, along the state’s northeast coast, the well-regarded, historically African-American university focuses largely on undergraduate education. But it’s also taking part in cutting-edge Arctic and Antarctic science as a key player in PolarGrid – a powerful, sophisticated computer network researchers use to analyze images of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and model their behavior.

It’s part of the burgeoning world of e-Science – a realm where the questions are big, cutting across once-disparate disciplines. And the answers often demand enormous amounts of number crunching through networks of interconnected computing centers at universities and laboratories around the world – a process known as grid computing.

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Hawking: If We Survive The Next 200 Years, We Should Be OK

Stephen Hawking, here delivering a lecture in May, spoke recently to CNN about his vision of the future. (Photo from CNN)

From CNN:

CAMBRIDGE, England (CNN) -- Professor Stephen Hawking, one of the world's great scientists, is looking to the stars to save the human race -- but pessimism is overriding his natural optimism.

Hawking, in an exclusive CNN interview, said that if humans can survive the next 200 years and learn to live in space, then our future will be bright.

"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," said Hawking, who is almost completely paralyzed by the illness ALS.

"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

Hawking is one of the few scientists known to a wide audience outside academia thanks to his best-selling books, a guest spot on "The Simpsons" and an ability to clearly explain the complexities of theoretical physics.

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Nobel Prize For Physics Announced

(Photo From The International Herald Tribune)

From left, Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Masukawa and Yoichiro Nambu. (Reuters)

2 Japanese, 1 American Share Physics Nobel -- CBS News

Prize Won For Subatomic Theories In Field Of Elementary Particle Physics

(AP) Two Japanese citizens and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries in the world of subatomic physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.

American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

In its citation, the academy said that this "year's Nobel laureates in physics have presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter."

Turning to Nambu, it said that his work in "Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface," the academy said in its citation. "Nambu's theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory."

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More News On The Nobel Prize For Physics

Three Physicists Share Nobel Prize -- New York Times
1 American and 2 Japanese share Nobel physics prize -- International Herald Tribune
Nobel physics prize goes to 2 Japanese, 1 American -- Myway/AP
2 Japanese, 1 American Share Nobel Physics Prize -- American Scientist
Nobel Prize in Physics winners voice joy -- Daily Yomiuri
3 Win Physics Nobel for Subatomic Particle Research -- Live Science
U.S. scientist, Japanese pair share Nobel physics prize -- Mercury News
Nobel Honors Glimpse Into Universe's Design -- NPR
Nobel Prize for Physics Honors Subatomic Breakthroughs -- National Geographic
Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa Win Physics Nobel -- Scientific American
Nobel Prize in physics shared for work that unifies forces of nature -- Science News
Shy Japanese Nobel laureate has no passport: wife -- AFP
Physics Nobel snubs key researcher -- New Scientists

Nobel Prize For Chemistry Announced

Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Roger Y. Tsien of UC San Diego will share the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry.(Photo from L.A. Times)

Three Chemists Win Nobel Prize -- New York Times

One Japanese and two American scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow green and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology to watch the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.

Osamu Shimomura, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. and Boston University Medical School, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, will share the $1.4 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short, was observed in 1962 in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America.

Dr. Shimomura was able to identify the protein and showed that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.

Dr. Chalfie showed how the protein could be used as a biological identifier tag by inserting the gene that produces the protein into the DNA of an organism.

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More News On The Nobel Prize For Chemistry

Chemistry Nobel Prize Awarded for Glowing Protein Work -- National Geographic
Scientists Go for the Glow in Fluorescent Proteins -- Wired News
Three U.S.-based scientists share Nobel chemistry prize -- L.A. Times
Japanese, American Scientists Win Nobel Chemistry Prize -- Voice Of America
Green jellyfish protein scientists win Nobel -- Reuters
Chemistry Nobel Glows Fluorescent Green -- Scientific American
A Nobel for Illuminating Biology -- Technology Review
How Green Was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry -- Scientific American
Cell Illuminators Win Chemistry Nobel -- Wired News
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Beauty of Fluorescent Protein -- Wall Street Journal
Nobel Prize in chemistry commends finding and use of green fluorescent protein -- Science News
Nobel prize for chemistry illuminates disease -- The Guardian
Chemistry Nobel Prize Awarded to Scientists Who Discovered and Developed GFP Fluorescent Protein -- GEN
Nobel won after 50 yrs, 100,000 jellyfish -- Daily Yomiuri
Nobel winners recall postwar struggles -- Japan Times
Nobel prize laureate finds winning news on internet -- AFP
Glowing Gene's Discoverer Left Out Of Nobel Prize -- NPR
Nobel Predictions: Score! -- Newsweek
US takes 2008 chemistry prize, Nobel league lead - October 08, 2008 -- Nature
Recent winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and their research, according to the Nobel Foundation -- AP

'Unbreakable' Encryption Unveiled

From The BBC:

Perfect secrecy has come a step close with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.

Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack, but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.

But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

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Asteroid Near-Miss Prompts Calls For Astronomy Funding

Scientists say the world has been 'lucky' no asteroids have crashed into the earth in recent years.
(Reuters: NASA)

From ABC News (Australia):

Astronomers have calling for more funding to watch southern skies, after an asteroid took sky-gazers by surprise and entered the earth's atmosphere over Africa yesterday.

Yesterday morning astronomers in Arizona reported seeing a tiny asteroid, which they described as a new but routine fast-moving object.

Before long, scientists at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Massachusetts had calculated the object was likely to pass within one Earth's radius of the centre of the planet.

That means it would have struck the surface of the Earth if had been big enough.

Gareth Williams, associate director of the MPC, spoke to AM shortly before the asteroid entered the earth's atmosphere.

"We estimate that it's about two metres across with a probable range of one to five metres. Something that small will not survive passage through the atmosphere intact," he predicted.

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Your DNA Will Reveal Your Surname

The Y chromosome confers maleness and is passed, like surnames, from father to son. Scientists believe that a link could exist between a man's surname and the type of Y chromosome he carries. (Credit: iStockphoto/Mark Evans). (Photo from Science Daily)

DNA Could Reveal Your Surname -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2008) — Scientists at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester – where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys -- are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone's surname from the DNA alone.

Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.

On Wednesday 8th October Dr King will present the key findings of her Ph.D. research in which she recruited over two and a half thousand men bearing over 500 different surnames to take part in the study. Carried out in Professor Mark Jobling's lab, Dr Turi King's research involved exploring this potential link between surname and Y chromosome type.

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Why Tokyo Gets Bad Earthquakes

The ruins of the Ginza after the 1923 Great Kanto (Tokyo) Earthquake and fire. (Photo from Geography Department Hewett School)

What Is Giving Tokyo A Headache? -- IOL

Paris - A massive slab of rock lurking beneath the Kanto Plain on the central Japanese island of Honshu is a major source of the earthquake threat that dogs Tokyo, scientists said on Sunday.

Around 100 kilometres wide and 25km thick, the chunk is jammed between tectonic plates that converge beneath the flat, densely-populated plain.

The giant fragment is a potent trigger for a hugely destructive kind of quake, for it wedges between two of the plates and prevents them from sliding smoothly over one other.

As a result, tensions build up until the stored energy is released catastrophically, rather than in smaller, safer movements, the experts say.

Tokyo is built atop the Eurasian plate, one of the two dozen or so tectonic plates that, like jostling pieces on a jigsaw puzzle, comprise earth's surface.

Around 100km to the northwest of the city, on the Kanto Plain, the local geology becomes complex, turning into a triple-layer subterranean sandwich.

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Death, A Cultural And Historical Look

Death Rituals Reveal Much About Ancient Life -- Live Science

Cultures around the world and through time have had wildly varying ways of dealing with the dead. And since death weighs so heavy on a culture and is ultimately so mysterious, records of these practices, or "deathways," are often more abundant than other ancient cultural accounts and provide illuminating windows into other cultures.

"Deathways illuminate religious meaning and the social life of cultures about which we may know little else," says Erik Seeman, Ph.D., associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo and author of the forthcoming "Death in the New World."

Cremation, grave cairns, funeral mounds, mummification, air burial, and belief in life after death are just some of the practices which, though sacred to one culture, often seem odd or even terrifying to another, Seeman says. The Greeks, for example, were fascinated with the historian Herodotus' description of the ancient Issedonians chopping up their dead into a mixed grill and devouring them in a communal barbeque, something entirely contrary to the Greeks' treatment of their own dead.

"Much of my research looks at how deathways marked cultural self-definition and the definition of 'other' in the New World," Seeman said.

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Stars Stop Forming When Big Galaxies Collide

(Photo from National Geographic)

From e! Science News:

Astronomers studying new images of a nearby galaxy cluster have found evidence that high-speed collisions between large elliptical galaxies may prevent new stars from forming, according to a paper to be published in a November 2008 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Led by Jeffrey Kenney, professor and chair of astronomy at Yale, the team saw a spectacular complex of warm gas filaments 400,000 light-years-long connecting the elliptical galaxy M86 and the spiral galaxy NGC 4438 in the Virgo galaxy cluster, providing striking evidence for a previously unsuspected high-speed collision between the galaxies. The view was constructed using the wide-field Mosaic imager on the National Science Foundation telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

"Our data show that this system represents the nearest recent collision between a large elliptical galaxy and a large spiral galaxy," said Kenney, who is lead author of the paper. "This discovery provides some of the clearest evidence yet for high-speed collisions between large galaxies, and it suggests a plausible alternative to black holes as an explanation of what turns off star formation in the biggest galaxies."

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