Hexapod Robot Moves In The Right Direction By Controlling Chaos

From Scientific American:

Given that robots generally lack muscles, they can't rely on muscle memory (the trick that allows our bodies to become familiar over time with movements such as walking or breathing) to help them more easily complete repetitive tasks. For autonomous robots, this can be a bit of a problem, since they may have to accommodate changing terrain in real time or risk getting stuck or losing their balance.

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World Misled Over Himalayan Glacier Meltdown

The west Himalayan range includes 15,000 glaciers. (Simon Fraser/Science Photo Library)

From Times Online:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

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China Also Targets India's Computer Networks

China Tried To Hack Our Computers, Says India’s Security Chief M.K. Narayanan -- Times Online

Chinese hackers are believed to have attempted to penetrate India’s most sensitive government office in the latest sign of rising tensions between the two rival Asian powers, The Times has learnt.

M. K. Narayanan, India’s National Security Adviser, said his office and other government departments were targeted on December 15, the same date that US companies reported cyber attacks from China.

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My Comment: It seems that China's hackers are targeting everyone .... and I mean everyone.

Another Sign That America's Science Position In The World Is Changing

U.S. Keeps Science Lead, But Other Countries Gain -- Wall Street Journal

The U.S. remains the world's science and technology leader, but other countries are gaining ground, the National Science Board said Friday in its biennial report on science and engineering.

The U.S. accounted for nearly a third of $1.1 trillion spent on research and development globally in 2007, minted more science and engineering doctorates than any other country, and led the world in innovative activity. Efforts by China and other developing Asian countries to boost their science and engineering capabilities are bearing fruit, however, and the gap between them and the U.S., though still wide, is narrowing.

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More News On America's Declining Role In Science

Worrisome Trends Show Eroding U.S. Competitive Advantage in World Science and Engineering Environment -- Science Daily
New Science "Indicators" Data From NSF Captures China's Rise -- Science Insider
Asia Ascending in Science and Engineering -- Physorg
U.S. Scientific Inventory Shows Asia, EU Gaining in R&D Status -- BioWorld
Is America competing? -- The Scientist

Search For An Artificial Blood Substitute

Professor Chris Cooper showing the changes in blood color.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Essex)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2010) — If the current wave of vampire stories is to be believed, humans can peacefully co-exist with vampires.

The Twilight book trilogy has 'vegetarian' vampires living on animal blood, and in the TV series True Blood, Japanese scientists have developed a synthetic blood substitute. However, in the most recent blockbuster movie Daybreakers, vampires suffer a horrific fate when attempting to drink their blood substitute.

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Weekends Are Good For You, Study Finds

From Live Science:

Just about everybody – even workaholics – should look forward to the weekend, when most people get a mood boost, a new study suggests.

Participants in the study often reported better moods, greater vitality, and fewer aches and pains from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon as compared with the rest of the week.

"Workers, even those with interesting, high-status jobs, really are happier on the weekend," said study researcher Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.

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Another Indonesian Earthquake Set To Strike

The island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Darker blue indicates deeper waters (up to 5,000 m); light blue/white indicated shallow waters and sea level. Not far from the western coast of Sumatra, the Australian Plate is sliding under the Sunda plate. Marked in red is the city of Padang, which may yet see worse Earthquakes. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

From The Cosmos:

PARIS: A huge earthquake, capable of generating a tsunami as deadly as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is set to strike off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, according to seismologists.

Led by John McCloskey, a professor of the Environmental Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, who predicted a 2005 Sumatran quake with uncanny accuracy, the seismologists issued the warning in a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience.

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History In A Hurry: The First Book About Climategate Is Published

From Watts Up With That?:

Electronic publishing has revolutionized the art of writing, now less than two months since it happened, we have the very first book about Climategate. My first story on Climategate appeared on November 19th, 2009: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

I’ve read the book, and it appears to be an accurate and detailed portrayal of the history not only of the Climategate events and the players, but also of the events leading up to it. I’m flattered that this book mentions me and my surfacestations project several times. I was interviewed for the book, and this website is featured prominently–and they borrowed liberally from both the posts and the comments.

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Only Humans 'Use Laughter To Mock Or Insult Others'

From The Telegraph:

Humans are the only creatures to use laughter to mock or insult others, scientists have found.

Our animal ancestors, and most of their descendants, laughed simply because they were enjoying themselves, according to a new study.

But over millions of years humans have perfected how to use the sound to wound as well.

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Space Station Toilet Clogged With Calcium Deposits; Could Astronauts' Bone Loss Be The Culprit?

The ISS, Captured By Discovery September 2009 NASA

From Popular Science:

It's a bit cliché to kick off a story about NASA with "Houston, we have a problem," but seriously, they've got a problem: the plumbing on the International Space Station is clogged, and NASA isn't exactly sure why, or how to fix it. To clarify, it's not the actual toilet component that's broken, but the $250 million system designed to recycle astronauts' urine, sweat, and exhaled vapor into clean, potable water.

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Caribbean At Risk Of More Large Earthquakes

More to come? (Image: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

Earthquake experts are warning that the devastating quake that struck Haiti on Tuesday could be the first of several in the region. They say historical records suggest that not all the energy that has built up in the faults running through the Caribbean region was released in this week's tragedy.

Their fear is that enough energy remains in the fault system to trigger another earthquake of the same scale as Tuesday's.

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Edutainment: Is There A Role For Popular Culture In Education?

Nile barge docked at Amarna, King Tut Virtual. Loki Popinjay

From The Independent:

Popular interest in history is peaking like perhaps never before in the 21st century. Films such as Spartan gore-fest 300 have proven big hits at the box office in recent years, and many more ancient world movies – including Centurion, Clash of the Titans and Valhalla Rising – are set to arrive in 2010.

TV historians such as Simon Schama and David Starkey are household names. Dan Brown's Lost Symbol dominated the fiction chart in the past year and all of the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2009 were set against historical backdrops, with the winner – Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England-based Wolf Hall – proving the most popular Booker prize winner of all time.

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Google, Yahoo, Adobe And Who?

Photograph: Phillipe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Google says at least 20 other large companies have been targeted in cyber attacks, but none of them has come forward.

Yahoo and Adobe appear to be among the companies that suffered the sort of cyberattack that led Google to threaten to withdraw from China. In its original announcement, Google said that "at least 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses – including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors – have been similarly targeted".

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Google Lifts The Veil On Tiananmen Massacre Images In China As Censorship Row Continues

Tank Man: One of the most iconic images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, that of a man standing alone and defenceless in a face off against four tanks, now appears on Google.cn

From The Daily Mail:

Google has stopped censoring images of the Tiananmen Square massacre on its Chinese website.

Users on Google.cn's image search can now see the iconic picture of Tank Man, among other images from the massacre in the Beijing square in 1989 - just as users on Google's other country portals, such as Google.co.uk, can.

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Mound Of Ash Reveals Shrine To Zeus

The Greek god Zeus was honored by the ancients at an open-air sanctuary atop Mount Lykaion, new research shows. iStockPhoto

From Discovery News:

An altar dedicated to the king of the gods was used for ritual ceremonies by the ancient Greeks.

Excavations at the Sanctuary of Zeus atop Greece's Mount Lykaion have revealed that ritual activities occurred there for roughly 1,500 years, from the height of classic Greek civilization around 3,400 years ago until just before Roman conquest in 146.

"We may have the first documented mountaintop shrine from the ancient Greek world," says project director David Romano of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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Higher Temperatures Can Worsen Climate Change, Methane Measurements From Space Reveal

Researchers made use of the methane concentrations determined by SRON on the basis of measurements from the Dutch-German space instrument SCIAMACHY (on board ESA's environmental satellite Envisat). (Credit: Image courtesy of SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 16, 2010) — Higher temperatures on the earth's surface at higher latitudes cause an increase in the emission of methane, a greenhouse gas that plays an important role in global warming. Therefore, higher temperatures are not just a consequence of climate change but can also worsen cause of it, conclude climate researchers in an article published in Science.

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Weekends Are Good For You, Study Finds

From Live Science:

Just about everybody – even workaholics – should look forward to the weekend, when most people get a mood boost, a new study suggests.

Participants in the study often reported better moods, greater vitality, and fewer aches and pains from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon as compared with the rest of the week.

Read more ....

Scientists Scramble to Analyze Haiti’s Seismic Risk

(Click to Enlarge)

From Wired Science:

Since the ground shook Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12 and sent the densely populated city into chaos, scientists have been harnessing every possible tool to quickly assemble a detailed picture of a region in which scientific research had already been difficult to conduct.

The question we are trying to address right now is if there could be other faults nearby or perhaps other portions of the fault to the east or west that could go,” says Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who has used GPS stations to monitor the area since 2003.

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‘No Such Thing As Safe Cocaine Use’

From Times Online:

Researchers warned that there is no 'safe' amount of cocaine to use, after a study found that up to 3 per cent of all sudden deaths are linked to the drug.

Taking even small amounts of cocaine at weekends can increase the risk of suddenly dying from heart problems.

The study, published in the European Heart Journal, analysed a series of post-mortem reports in south-west Spain, where toxicology tests are routinely carried out after any violent or unexpected deaths.

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Haiti Earthquake, Deforestation Heighten Landslide Risk

The border between Haiti (left) and the Dominican Republic highlights the relative deforestation of Haiti. Photograph courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

From The National Geographic:

The combination of widespread deforestation and the recent earthquake in Haiti could lead to more landslides in the already hard-hit country, scientists say (Haiti map).

(Read "Haiti Earthquake 'Strange,' Strongest in 200 Years.")

Many of Haiti's people, the poorest in the Americas, routinely cut down trees for fuel—either to burn "raw" or turn into charcoal.

As a result, the destruction of Haiti's natural forests is almost total, making the Caribbean country one of the most deforested in the world.

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