Dogs Better Than Human Walking Companions

From Future Pundit:

No surprise here. Oh, and cats aren't getting you any exercise.

Is it better to walk a human or to walk a dog?

New research from the University of Missouri has found that people who walk dogs are more consistent about regular exercise and show more improvement in fitness than people who walk with a human companion. In a 12-week study of 54 older adults at an assisted living home, 35 people were assigned to a walking program for five days a week, while the remaining 19 served as a control group. Among the walkers, 23 selected a friend or spouse to serve as a regular walking partner along a trail laid out near the home. Another 12 participants took a bus daily to a local animal shelter where they were assigned a dog to walk.

Click thru to read the details. Suffice to say, dogs rule.

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Engage The X Drive: Ten Ways To Traverse Deep Space

The VASIMR ion engine could - if powered by an onboard nuclear reactor - take astronauts to Mars in just 39 days (Illustration: Ad Astra Rocket Company)

From New Scientist:

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to reach outer space. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made it to the surface of the moon. And that is as far as any of us has ventured.

Apart from the mundane problems of budgets and political will, the major roadblock is that our dominant space-flight technology – chemically fuelled rockets – just isn't up to the distances involved. We can send robot probes to the outer planets, but they take years to get there.

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Europe's Mars Missions Get Final Go-Ahead

From The BBC:

Member-states of the European Space Agency (Esa) have given final approval to revised plans to explore Mars.

There have been protracted discussions on what Europe could do at the Red Planet and how much it might cost.

The Council of Esa has given the green light to a two-mission endeavour that would see the launch of an orbiter in 2016 and a rover in 2018.

The exploration projects will be undertaken in partnership with the US space agency (Nasa).

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Nathan Myhrvold's Anti Global Warming Scheme

From Associated Content:

Nathan Myhrvold is a former technology officer for Microsoft who has found his own company, Intellectual Ventures, which is involved in a number of technology development programs, including new forms of energy generation.

Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world's economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves Nathan Myhrvold's Anti Global Warming Scheme running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun's heat just enough to counteract the effects of global warming. The estimated cost would be about two hundred and fifty million dollars.

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The Air Force's Next-Gen Bomber

The B-2 It's bad, but the brass wants something badder. The next-generation of bombers will conduct extensive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, as well as carry directed-energy and other non-kinetic weapons.

Air Force's Next-Gen Bomber Will Be More Spy Plane Than Strike Aircraft -- Popular Science

It turns out the Air Force's next-gen bomber really isn't much of a bomber at all. While the next iteration of stealth bombers is still but a sketch on the drawing board, the DoD and top Air Force command know what the wars of the next century will call for: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as the ability to deploy non-kinetic weapons to disrupt enemy operations, all while reserving the ability to drop the occasional ordinance -- and do it all at the same time with a single, stealthy super-weapon.

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17 Movies We're Geeked Out For in 2010

From Popular Mechanics:

If you thought 2009 was a great year for movies, look out for 2010: From high-tech spy thrillers to mind-melters to VFX masterpieces, the upcoming season is filled with flicks for geeks. Here are the movies we're most looking forward to.

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Over 50% Of The USA Is Now Covered In Snow

UPDATE: The East coast snowstorm seen from space

From Watts Up With That?:

The Mid-Atlantic states were completely white on Sunday, December 20, 2009, in the wake of a record-breaking snow storm. The storm deposited between 12 and 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. on December 19, according to the National Weather Service. For many locations, the snowfall totals broke records for the most snow to fall in a single December day.

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Black Holes In Star Clusters Stir Up Time And Space

An artist's representation of the burst of gravitational waves resulting from the collision of a colliding pair of black holes. (Credit: LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) / NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 21, 2009) — Within a decade scientists could be able to detect the merger of tens of pairs of black holes every year, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Bonn's Argelander-Institut fuer Astronomie, who publish their findings in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Dinosaur Packed Venom In Fangs

Caption: The dinosaur Sinornithosaurus (left) might have used venom delivered with its teeth to help it hunt birds. Credit: Robert DePalma.

From Live Science:

Using snake-like fangs, saber-toothed dinosaur relatives of velociraptors likely subdued their prey with venom, scientists now suggest.

Paleontologists analyzed the skulls of Sinornithosaurus, whose name means "Chinese bird lizard." This narrow-snouted raptor was the fifth and most bird-like dinosaur species ever to be discovered, and lived roughly 125 million years ago in the warm, moist forests of northeastern China during the late Cretaceous.

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Crowd-Sourcing Comes Of Age In The DARPA Network Challenge

Photo: M.I.T. MEDIA LAB'S RED BALLOON CHALLENGE: From left to right: Anmol Madan, Galen Pickard, Riley Crane, Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, Wei Pan and Manuel Cebrian.
© MIT

Inflated Expectations: Crowd-Sourcing Comes of Age in the DARPA Network Challenge -- Scientific American

The M.I.T. and Georgia Tech teams proved most successful in using social networks to pinpoint the locations of 10 red weather balloons scattered throughout the U.S.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Network Challenge earlier this month demonstrated that social networks, more than being platforms for self-promotion, can be also be highly effective tools for rapidly gathering and disseminating very precise information. With the help of Facebook, Twitter and a homemade Web site, a winning team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) was able to within nine hours identify the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 of DARPA's red weather balloons, which were lofted 30.5 meters into the air at locations scattered throughout the U.S.

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Australian Government Plans Internet Censorship

From New Scientist:

Australians will soon find their internet access routed through a government-run filter designed to block access to a secret blacklist of sites, including those that disseminate child pornography.

Google slammed the move as "heavy-handed" and one Australian politician called it a "move towards censorship".

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Czech Zoo Sends Rare Northern White Rhinos To Kenya

From the BBC:

Four rare Northern White rhinos have been flown from a Czech zoo to Kenya, in a desperate attempt to save the species from extinction.

Animal experts hope the rhinos - two males and two females - will breed in their natural habitat in Africa.

Only eight Northern White rhinos are known to survive worldwide, all of them in captivity: six in the Czech Republic and two in the US.

The last four living in the wild in Africa have not been seen since 2006.

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7-Eleven Hack From Russia Led to ATM Looting in New York

From Threat Level:

Flashback, early 2008: Citibank officials are witnessing a huge spike in fraudulent withdrawals from New York area ATMs — $180,000 is stolen from cash machines on the Upper East Side in just three days. After a stakeout, police arrest one man walking out of a bank with thousands of dollars in cash and 12 reprogrammed cards. A lucky traffic stop catches two more plunderers who’d driven in from Michigan. Another pair are arrested after trying to mug an undercover FBI agent on the street for a magstripe encoder. In the end, there are 10 arrests and at least $2 million dollars stolen.

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Exxon, DNA Pioneer Join On Algae Biofuels

Image: Algae as biomass for biofuel are become more attractive to investors and developers.

From CNN:

(CNN) -- ExxonMobil is teaming up with the biotech research company run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter to produce algae-based biofuels.

The world's second largest company announced on Tuesday that it will invest at least $300 million in biotechnology research with Venter's Synthetic Genomics Inc to help develop biofuels made from algae, as it looks to diversify its energy portfolio.

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Winter Solstice 2009: What It's All About

A statue greets the 2003 winter solstice sunrise in San Juan Bautista, California. Newscom/FIle

From Christian Science Monitor:

Winter solstice 2009 falls Monday, marking the shortest day in the year for the Northern Hemisphere.

Ah, another winter solstice come and gone.

At 5:47 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (that's 12:47 p.m. Eastern Standard Time) Monday, the Northern Hemisphere marked the mid-point of another year, as measured by the sun's highest position each day above the horizon. It marked the day with the fewest hours of sunlight this year.

Yes, this is showing a Northern Hemisphere bias. South of the equator, the day marks the most hours of sunlight of the year. So enjoy the austral summer, those of you below the equator. The rest of us? We'll be rooting for longer, warmer days.

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World's Oldest Known DNA Discovered

DNA from 419-million-year-old bacteria may have belonged to the descendants of
the world's first life forms (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

It won't make Jurassic Park a reality, but scientists have discovered 419 million-year-old DNA intact inside ancient salt deposits.

The genetic material, the oldest ever found, belongs to salt-loving bacteria whose ancestors may have been among the first life forms on Earth.

Scientists have previously recovered similar genetic material from the Michigan Basin, the same region where the latest discovery was made. But the DNA was so similar to that of modern microbes that many scientists believed the samples had been contaminated.

Not so this time around.

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Obama Pledges Billions For Rural Broadband

President Obama has pledged billions to extend America's rural broadband access.
Photo: AFP

From The Telegraph:

President Barack Obama has pledged £2 billion in loans and grants to fund the expansion of America’s broadband network to help better serve rural areas and urban communities.

The details of the spending plan were announced last week by Joe Biden, the vice president, and will see an initial $183 million invested in broadband projects in 17 states.

The funding is also expected to create “tens of thousands of jobs”. However, Mr Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein could not say precisely how many jobs will emerge, according to a Reuters’ report.

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Rethinking Artificial Intelligence

From R&D:

The field of artificial-intelligence research (AI), founded more than 50 years ago, seems to many researchers to have spent much of that time wandering in the wilderness, swapping hugely ambitious goals for a relatively modest set of actual accomplishments. Now, some of the pioneers of the field, joined by later generations of thinkers, are gearing up for a massive “do-over” of the whole idea.

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Computer Algorithm Identifies Authentic Van Gogh

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 21, 2009) — Igor Berezhnoy of Tilburg University in the Netherlands has developed computer algorithms to support art historians and other art experts in their visual assessment of paintings. His digital technology is capable of distinguishing a forgery from an authentic Van Gogh based on the painter's characteristic brush work and use of colour.

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The Real Reason Cell Phone Use Is Banned On Airlines

From Live Science:

Airline passengers who sneak in cell phone calls, play with gaming devices or listen to their mp3 players during takeoff or landing probably won't cause a plane crash, but they may risk a confrontation with flight attendants. Federal agencies and airlines typically err on the side of caution — even though researchers and aircraft companies have found almost no direct evidence of cell phones or other electronic devices interfering with aircraft systems.

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