The Link Between Parkinson Disease And Farming

From Live Science:

Although genetics is very important in Parkinson disease (PD), many researchers believe that environmental exposures also increase a person's risk of developing the disease. There are studies that show that farmers and other agricultural workers have an increased risk of getting PD.

PD was first described in 1817 by Dr. James Parkinson, a British physician. It affects 1 in 100 people over the age of 60. It can also affect younger people. The average age of onset is 60. Research suggests that PD affects at least 500,000 people in the United States.

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Gallery: Let the X-Planes Begin

From Autopia:

Few aircraft are as storied as the experimental series known as the X-Planes. These flying laboratories date to the mid-1940s and took us ever higher, further and faster.

The first, the Bell X-1, was developed to explore transonic flight after fighter pilots began experiencing control problems as they approached the speed of sound in dives. Since then, a long list of X-Planes — and other test aircraft lacking the official ‘X’ moniker — have explored the unknown edge of aerodynamics and aviation. From the early days of supersonic flight and speed records to the possibilities of unmanned combat aircraft, X-Planes have, as their pilots say, pushed the edge of the envelope.

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Modern Man 'A Wimp', Says Anthropologist

Neanderthal man, as reconstructed by French scientists.

From The Independent:

Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 metres record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

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Marine Plant Life Holds The Secret To Preventing Global Warming

Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds, above, cover less than 1 per cent of the world's seabed, but lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor

From Times Online:

Life in the ocean has the potential to help to prevent global warming, according to a report published today.

Marine plant life sucks 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, but most of the plankton responsible never reaches the seabed to become a permanent carbon store.

Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are a different matter. Although together they cover less than 1 per cent of the world’s seabed, they lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor. They are estimated to store 1,650 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year — nearly half of global transport emissions — making them one of the most intense carbon sinks on Earth.

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Gene Linked To Better And Faster Decision Making

From The Telegraph:

Decision-makers are born not made, say scientists, as they discover people inherit a decisive gene.

The researchers found that people with a particular gene made quicker and more accurate decisions.

They were also better at learning tasks that require rapid and flexible decision-making compared to those with a different genetic make-up.

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Kellogg's Will Use Laser To Burn Logo On To Individual Corn Flakes To Stamp Out Fakes

A proportion of Kellogg's flakes will be branded with the trademark using a laser

From The Daily Mail:

According to the advertising slogan, if you see Kellogg's on the box then you know it's Kellogg's in the box.

But now the company has become so concerned about similarly packaged supermarket cereals, it has developed a laser to burn its logo on to individual Corn Flakes.

The concentrated beam of light creates a toasted appearance without changing the taste.

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Dolphins, Sharks And Birds Team Up For One Of Nature's Most Spectacular Annual Feeding Frenzies

Feeding frenzy: Up to 1,000 common dolphins arrive from the open ocean to drive sardines shoals towards the surface during the sardine run

From The Daily Mail:

It’s been billed as the greatest natural predatory show on earth and from these stunning images it is easy to why.

An underwater photographer was there to capture the action as dolphins, sharks, whales and birds teamed up for one of nature's most spectacular annual feeding frenzies – the sardine run.

New York born Jason Heller took the amazing pictures when he travelled to the wild coast of South Africa this July.

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Jupiter Moon’s Ocean Is Rich In Oxygen

The strange striations on Europa's surface are thought to have been caused by tidal stresses from Jupiter as the ice cracks and warmer layers come to the surface. The same process may be responsible for transporting oxygen below the surface. Credit: NASA

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: The globe-spanning ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all Earth’s oceans combined, says a new study, which finds it’s packed with oxygen which could support life.

Research completed by Richard Greenberg a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA, suggests that there could be as much as 100 times the amount of oxygen previously estimated. The findings were presented last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.

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Finger Points To New Da Vinci Art

From BBC:

A new Leonardo da Vinci portrait may have been discovered after a fingerprint found on it seemed similar to another discovered on his work.

A Paris laboratory found the fingerprint is "highly comparable" to one on a da Vinci work in the Vatican.

Antiques Trade Gazette reported that the work, previously catalogued as "German, early 19th Century", could be worth tens of millions of dollars.

The work previously changed hands for around $19,000 (£12,039).

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Bizarre Galaxy Is Result Of Pair Of Spiral Galaxies Smashing Together

Not surprisingly, interacting galaxies have a dramatic effect on each other. Studies have revealed that as galaxies approach one another massive amounts of gas are pulled from each galaxy towards the centre of the other, until ultimately, the two merge into one massive galaxy. NGC 2623 is in the late stages of the merging process, with the centres of the original galaxy pair now merged into one nucleus, but stretching out from the centre are two tidal tails of young stars, a strong indicator that a merger has taken place. During such a collision, the dramatic exchange of mass and gases initiates star formation, seen here in both the tails. (Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Evans (Stony Brook University, New York & National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, USA))

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Oct. 14, 2009) — A recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures what appears to be one very bright and bizarre galaxy, but is actually the result of a pair of spiral galaxies that resemble our own Milky Way smashing together at breakneck speeds. The product of this dramatic collision, called NGC 2623, or Arp 243, is about 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer (the Crab).

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Flying Reptile May Have Snatched Dinosaurs In Midair

The newly discovered remains of the flying reptile, now called Darwinopterus modularis, suggest the animals may have been an aerial predator, hunting small feathered dinosaurs (such as the one depicted here) and tiny gliding mammals some 160 million years ago. Credit: Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth.

From Live Science:

A crow-sized reptile sporting a lengthy tail likely soared through the skies some 160 million years ago, snatching feathered dinosaurs and tiny flying mammals from the air, suggest fossils of a newly identified pterosaur.

While paleontologists can't go back in time to watch the in-flight meal capture, the reptile's fossils, discovered recently in China's Liaoning Province, left behind compelling clues, the researchers say this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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The Real Impact of America's Oil Crisis -- An Interview

Image: The book Power Trip, by Amanda Little

From Time Magazine:

Esoteric climate-science warnings about America's oil dependence can make even the most well-meaning of eyes glaze over. Amanda Little, author of Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to the Renewable Future, took a different approach. She traveled from an offshore oil rig to the halls of the Pentagon, from NASCAR racetracks to the office of a pricey plastic surgeon in order to tell a more human side of the energy story. TIME talked to Little about how fossil fuels saturate our lives and why taking personal responsibility is the key to pulling out of this mess.

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Backslash: Web Creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee Apologises For HisStrokes

From Times Online:

A light has been shone on one of the great mysteries of the internet. What is the point of the two forward slashes that sit directly infront of the “www” in every internet website address?

The answer, according to the British scientist who created the world wide web, is that there isn’t one.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the web two decades ago, has finally come clean about the about the infuriating // that internet surfers have cursed so frequently.

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Plumes Of Fire And Gas Erupting From The Sun Have Been Captured By Nasa Spacecraft

From The Telegraph:

Great balls of gas erupting from the Sun have been captured in rare footage by two Nasa spacecraft.

Filmed over two days, the images show huge plumes of gas bursting from the Sun's surface and held aloft by its magnetic field.

These gas bursts - known as solar prominences - are several times larger than the Earth and travel at enormous speed.

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Astronomers Clash With US Air Force Over Laser Rules

The Gemini North observatory in Hawaii fires a laser into the sky as part of its adaptive optics system (Image: Gemini Observatory)

From New Scientist:

Could astronomers accidentally blind Earth-observing satellites? That seems to be the worry of the US air force, which restricts the use of lasers pointed at the sky to help focus telescopes. But some astronomers warn they will miss key observations under the rules, which have tightened in recent years.

Many of the world's largest observatories, including Lick, Gemini North, Palomar and Keck in the US, shine lasers into the sky to measure atmospheric turbulence, which distorts images.

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My Comment:This is probably a bigger problem than what the U.S. Air Force is willing to admit.

Extra-Powerful Military Sonar 'Is Killing Britain's Last Wild Dolphins'

Naval exercises will threaten bottlenose dolphins in the Moray Firth (pictured), according to wildlife campaigners who say the animals will deafened by the sonar

From The Daily Mail:

Conservationists fear a major naval exercise due to start today will put Britain’s wild dolphins in danger.

They say the latest generation of military sonar being used in the Nato exercise threatens the North Sea’s last remaining bottlenose dolphins.

The warning from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society comes after an unusually high number of deep sea whales have been stranded or spotted in shallow waters around the coast.

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Australian Plate: Cause Of Indonesian And Pacific Earthquakes?

This graphic provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows tsunami travel times following an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 rocked the island nation of Samoa, causing a tsunami. Credit: NOAA/AFP

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: Following seismic activity in Vanuatu, researchers have suggested that the motion of the Australian tectonic plate may be responsible for recent earthquakes in both Indonesia and and the South Pacific.

They argue that the earthquake and tsunami, that took place in Samoa just over a week ago, may have a common cause to a quake in Sumatra and the three quakes near Vanuatu.

This is despite the fact that Samoa and Sumatra are more than 6,000 km apart.

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Microsoft Security Holes Hit Record High

From CBS:

Software Maker Patches 34 Holes, Designating Most as "Critical".

(AP) Microsoft Corp. issued a record number of security patches for its software Tuesday as part of its regular monthly update.

The software maker plugged 34 holes and designated most of them "critical," Microsoft's most severe rating. Among them are fixes for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and even Windows 7, which doesn't go on sale to consumers until Oct. 22 but has been in use by early testers and software developers.

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Australia Fails To Plug Oil Leak

From BBC:

A second attempt to stop oil pouring into Australian waters after a rig accident in the Timor Sea has failed.

It is almost two months since oil began flowing from the West Atlas drilling platform that lies about 200km (125 miles) off the West Australian coast.

The rig's operators have said that plugging the leak is an "extraordinarily complex" task.

Environmental groups have warned that the slick is threatening wildlife, including endangered turtles.

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Fundamental Quantum Limit on Computing Speed of Any Information Processing System

The Next Big Future:

Physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have calculated a quantum speed limit on computing.

In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Levitin and Toffoli present an equation for the minimum sliver of time it takes for an elementary quantum operation to occur. This establishes the speed limit for all possible computers. Using their equation, Levitin and Toffoli calculated that, for every unit of energy, a perfect quantum computer spits out ten quadrillion more operations each second than today's fastest processors.

(A quadrillion is 10^15 or 1000 trillions)

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