Obama's Climate Guru: Paint Your Roof White!

Houses with white roofs, like these in Greece, would be able to reflect light back through the atmosphere, according to Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy. ALAMY

From The Independent:

Some people believe that nuclear power is the answer to climate change, others have proposed green technologies such as wind or solar power, but Barack Obama's top man on global warming has suggested something far simpler – painting your roof white.

Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy and a Nobel prize-winning scientist, said yesterday that making roofs and pavements white or light-coloured would help to reduce global warming by both conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. It would, he said, be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

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5 Myths About Women's Bodies

From Live Science:

Historically research has focused on men, but in recent years, women have been getting increased attention. (Don't blame the delay on sexism; women's hormone fluctuations are, well, complicated and can confound basic findings.) Still, much misinformation about the female body circulates in mainstream consciousness.

-- Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience

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Geography And History Shape Genetic Differences In Humans

Global allele frequencies and haplotype patterns at three genes with signals of positive selection. (Credit: Coop G, Pickrell JK, Novembre J, Kudaravalli S, Li J, et al.. The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation. PLoS Genetics, 2009; 5 (6): e1000500 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000500)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 7, 2009) — New research indicates that natural selection may shape the human genome much more slowly than previously thought. Other factors -- the movements of humans within and among continents, the expansions and contractions of populations, and the vagaries of genetic chance – have heavily influenced the distribution of genetic variations in populations around the world.

The study, conducted by a team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the University of Chicago, the University of California and Stanford University, is published June 5 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

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Is Solar Power Dead In The Water?

From The Washington Post:

Congress's rush to embrace solar power is having some unintended consequences. It will turn over a large chunk of federal land to private energy companies, and it may involve withdrawing billions of gallons of water from sensitive desert habitat.

By 2015, Congress wants the Interior and Energy Departments to place, on federal land, renewable energy projects that can generate at least 10,000 megawatts of electricity. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has set off a frantic land grab as solar and wind energy companies rush to obtain permits for projects in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

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Berners-Lee: We No Longer Fully Understand The Web -- A Commentary

Image: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says its size and power over society have become so great that we no longer fully comprehend how it works (Image: Catrina Genovese / WireImage)

From New Scientist:

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve

Why did you decide to subject the web itself to scientific scrutiny?

Web science is already happening. People are studying the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law. Our Web Science Research Initiative aims to bring that research together. There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.

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How to Clean House: Top 10 Dirt-Dispelling Tips

(Photograph by Zach Desart)

From Popular Mechanics:

Chances are you own a shop vacuum, and maybe a pressure washer. These tools—plus a few more—will help you get started getting rid of the dirt on your house’s siding, shop floor, basement corners and fences and decks. Here is the ultimate guide to putting grime in its place.

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Bing Is Pretty, But Is it Any Good?

From Popsci.com:

The Grouse takes a chance on Microsoft's Google-killer

Heard of Bing yet? If not, you soon will. Backed by a reported $100-million-dollar promotional campaign, Bing is Microsoft's latest grasp at double digits in the war for search engine market share, of which Redmond now owns between 5 and 6 percent (according to Net Applications' Market Share report). After months of beta testing followed by a public preview, Bing officially took over this week as THE search engine powering all of MSN. So, if you use any Microsoft services with even limited frequency, you'll be getting friendly with Bing whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not.

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Long Distance Space Travel Leaves You Short, Fat And Ugly, Claim Scientists

Image: Making long space journeys, like those envisaged in the future, will not be good for your looks or figure, claim scientists who believe they will leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald. Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

Going boldly where no man has gone before is likely to leave you going bald, claims scientists – not to mention fat and ugly.

Making long space journeys, like those envisaged in the future, will not be good for your looks or figure, claim scientists who believe they will leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald.

They believe living permanently in space for many years, perhaps even for many generations, adversely affects human's looks because they will not require any effort to move or keep warm.

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Cloned Species:

Recipe for a Resurrection

From National Geographic:

Bringing extinct species back to life is no longer considered science fiction. But is it a good idea?

Each new woolly mammoth carcass to emerge from the Siberian permafrost triggers a flurry of speculation about resurrecting this Ice Age giant. Researchers have refined at least some of the tools needed to turn that hope into reality. Last November, when a team led by Teruhiko Wakayama, a reproductive biologist based in Kobe, Japan, reported it had cloned mice that had been frozen for 16 years, the scientists conjectured that the same techniques might open the door to cloning mammoths and other extinct species preserved in permafrost. Talk of cloning surged again a few weeks later when a group at Pennsylvania State University, led by Webb Miller and Stephan C. Schuster, published 70 percent of the mammoth genome, laying out much of the basic data that might be required to make a mammoth.

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Email 17 Great Historical Moments Ruined by Modern Technology

From Cracked:

Back in the days before the internet, if a man wanted to learn something, he had to open a newspaper. If he needed to kill Germans, he did it with his bare hands. And if he wanted some milk ... well, he had it delivered right to his door.

Yes, everything other than milk acquisition was much more difficult without modern technology. But does that make it worse? We asked you to show us how some famous historic moments would have been ruined if modern technology had existed at the time. The winner is below, but first the runners up ...

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Hat Tip Geek Press.

Scientists Trace Laughter Back 16million Years... By Tickling Apes

Amusing research: By analysing the reactions produced by gently tickling ape feet, palms, necks and armpits, Dr Davila Ross has concluded that laughter can be traced back 16million years

From The Daily Mail:

As science experiments go, it was real hoot.

Researchers mapping the evolution of laughter gently tickled the feet, palms, necks and armpits of baby humans and apes.

By analysing the sounds the animals made - giggles, hoots, grunts and pants - they concluded that laughter can be traced back some 16million years, and that it evolved along the same pathway as our evolution.

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Ancient Creatures Survived Arctic Winters

From Live Science:

Flowering plants and hippo-like creatures once thrived in the Arctic, where the tundra and polar bears now prevail.

New research, detailed in the June issue of the journal Geology, is shedding light on the lives of prehistoric mammals on Canada's Ellesmere Island 53 million years ago, including how they survived the six months of darkness during the Arctic winter.

Today, Ellesmere Island, located in the high Arctic (about 80 degrees north latitude), is a polar desert that features permafrost, ice sheets, sparse vegetation and a few mammals. Temperatures there range from minus 37 degrees Fahrenheit (-38 Celsius) in winter to plus 48 degrees F (9 Celsius) in summer. It is one of the coldest and driest places on Earth.

But 53 million years ago, the Arctic had a completely different look.

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Meet The Real 40-Year-Old Virgins

From New Scientist:

Contrary to Hollywood notions, the 40-year-old virgin is not an awkward yet funny and endearing electronics salesman played by Steve Carell.

He is a church-going teetotaller who has neither been to jail nor served in the military, according to a new survey of more than 7000 people. He also represents an estimated 1.1 million American men and 800,000 women aged 25 to 45 who have never had sex.

The study, led by urologist Michael Eisenberg of the University of California, San Francisco, will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

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High Population Density Triggers Cultural Explosions

New research suggests that increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalyzed the emergence of modern human behavior. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 5, 2009) — Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science.

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

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PICTURES: New Cloud Type Discovered?

From National Geographic:

An "asperatus" cloud rolls over New Zealand's South Island in an undated picture.

This apparently new class of clouds is still a mystery. But experts suspect asperatus clouds' choppy undersides may be due to strong winds disturbing previously stable layers of warm and cold air.

Asperatus clouds may spur the first new classification in the World Meteorological Organization's International Cloud Atlas since the 1950s, Gavin Pretor-Pinney said.

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How Antarctica Got Its Ice

The large glaciated valley of Nant Francon, Snowdonia. This valley is similar in relative dimensions (though smaller in size) to the main glaciated valley beneath the ice in central Antarctica. Credit: Martin Siegert

From Live Science:

Antarctica is a massive block of ice today, but it used to more simply be a range of glacier-topped mountains like those found in Alaska and the Alps.

The strange continent's thick ice sheets formed tens of millions of years ago against an Alpine-style backbone of mountains during a period of significant climate change, a new study finds.

The Antarctic continent now is covered almost entirely by ice that averages about a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick.

Scientists have known for some time that the Antarctic Ice Sheet formed around 14 million years ago, "but we didn't know how it formed," said study team member Martin Siegert of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

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Diving Robots Could Recover Air France 447's Black Box

From Popular Mechanics:

As details of the telemetry sent by Air France 447 in its final minutes become known, deep-sea technology experts are saying that the recovery of the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder and digital flight data recorder—the black boxes—will be difficult, but not impossible, with the help of deep-sea-diving robots.

After officials pinpointed the location of Air France's Airbus A330 crash site, they turned to the difficult task of recovering the black boxes, which hold the official recordings of events that happened before the plane went down. Black boxes, which are actually painted orange, can give investigators the missing bits and pieces of data needed to determine an accident's probable cause. To help officials find the boxes, embedded technology sends sonarlike signals, which can be detected for up to 30 days provided listening equipment can get within approximately 1 mile of the box, according to a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board. In the case of Flight 447, the crash area in the Atlantic Ocean is too deep for divers to reach.

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Do Dinosaurs Still Exist?

Conan Doyle's "Lost World," near Angel Falls in the jungles of Venezuela, in a 2007 photo. It was his visit to this area that inspired him to write about the idea that dinosaurs may still exist in places like this. Credit: Benjamin Radford

From Live Science:

The idea of still-living dinosaurs has captured the public imagination for well over a century.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, published a 1912 novel called "The Lost World," set in the remote Venezuelan jungle where dinosaurs still survive in modern times. Films such as "Jurassic Park" and "Land of the Lost," which opens Friday, were inspired by Conan Doyle's vision — in fact the sequel to "Jurassic Park" was titled "The Lost World."

The animated film "Up" (currently No. 1 at the box office) also takes place in this lost world, the plot involving the discovery of an unknown, multicolored dinosaur.

For most of us, fiction is good enough. Yet some believe that giant dinosaurs still exist today, just beyond the reach of scientific proof.

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Lost In Space: The Science Of Battlestar Galactica

From New Scientist:

Sci-fi TV show Battlestar Galactica has been much praised for its gritty realism – despite being the story of space-borne refugees fleeing genocidal robots. Its treatment of subjects like suicide bombing and torture have won it plaudits from all corners; its cast and creators were even invited to address the UN earlier this year.

But does the series "do" science as convincingly as it does politics? We spoke to Kevin Fong, lecturer in space medicine at University College London and a keen advocate of manned space travel, about the series' depiction of space travel and the challenges facing astronauts on long space journeys.

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NASA Goddard Study Suggests Solar Variation Plays A Role In Our Current Climate

From Watts Up With That:

NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming

Report indicates solar cycle has been impacting Earth since the Industrial Revolution
From the Daily Tech, Michael Andrews. (h/t to Joe D’Aleo)

Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes. They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation. Skeptics, though, argue that there’s little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.

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