Brain Scans Predict Video Gamers Success

A screen shot of the video game "Space Fortress" which was used to measure performance and learning rates. Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: The size of three specific regions of the brain can predict performance in video games, and may show the way forward for education, said American psychologists.

Participants in the study had to play the video game "Space Fortress", and submit to brain scans to measure the volume of three parts of the 'striatum', located deep in the forebrain and thought to be responsible for picking up skills and behavioural habits.

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Environmental Cleanup Starts Amid Haiti Rubble

From Discovery News:

Experts have started assessing how to deal with the masses of rubble and hazardous waste left in the wake of the Haiti quake.

Just a week after Haiti's catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake, getting aid to victims remains a top priority, but experts are also now starting to assess how to coordinate the sorting and disposing of building rubble.

So far, no large industrial spills have been found. The biggest environmental issue, according to the United Nations Environment Program, is dealing with all of the building waste generated by the earthquake, which destroyed at least 40-50 percent of the buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and devastated other towns in the area.

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The Global Shipping Network Is Finally Revealed

From Technology Review:

Despite carrying 90 percent of the planet's trade, nobody has mapped the network of links between the world's ports. Until now.

The International Maritime Organization based in London estimates that 90 percent of the world's trade is moved around the planet by sea. Given the fascination that complexity scientists have with rail, air and road networks, it seems strange that so little attention has been paid to the maritime network.

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Queen Berenike's Cat Goddess Temple Discovered In Alexandria, Egypt

A limestone statue of the Goddess Bastet discovered at Kom el Dikka.

From The Independent:

The remains of a temple of Queen Berenike - wife of King Ptolemy III - have been discovered by archaeologists in Alexandria, Egypt.

Dr. Zahi Hawass said the remains discovered are 60 meters by 15 meters, and extend under Ismail Fahmy street. About 600 Ptolemaic statues - amongst which are beautiful depictions of the cat goddess Bastet - were also unearthed.

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The Internet's Irregular Troops -- A Book Review

From The New Scientist:

It's 8 August 2008. Russian tanks roll into Georgia. Over the next two days, Russian jets and warships bomb the former Soviet republic's cities and block its ports. The familiar images of war - bloodied civilians and ruined buildings - hit TV screens around the world.

Meanwhile, a less well-known form of conflict was also under way - in cyberspace. Georgian government servers were flooded with incoming signals, rendering many websites useless, including those of the parliament and foreign ministry. It was the first time that online attacks had coincided so clearly with a real-world conflict.

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Ban Butter To Save Our Hearts, Says Doctor

Adjusting your diet by replacing butter with a healthy spread or margarine
is a very simple thing to do Photo: CORBIS

From The Telegraph:

Butter should be banned in a bid to save thousands from heart disease, a leading heart surgeon claims.

Dr Shyam Kolvekar said that he is "increasingly concerned" about the nation's eating habits as he is seeing patients as young as 30 in need of heart bypass surgery due to a diet "overloaded" with saturated fat.

According to a national diet survey, nine out of 10 of children, 88 per cent of men and 83 per cent of women in Britain eat too much saturated fat, consuming a fifth too much each day.

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China's Loongson Processor Could Power First Natural-Born Chinese Supercomputer

The Loongson "Godson 2-C" An earlier generation of the Loongson – also known as "Dragon Core" or "Godson" – used in some netbooks and PCs. The next-gen Loongson 3 should be able to power China's first home-grown supercomputer. Konstantin Lanzet

From Popular Science:

As technological tensions run high between the U.S. and China these days (see Google's recent dust-up with the party, etc.), the People’s Republic has unveiled more details on its quest to phase U.S.-made processors from its microchip diet. China’s next supercomputer – a Linux-running machine known as the Dawning 6000 – will run purely on Chinese processors, possibly before the end of this year.

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Earthquake Risk: Seismic Gap South of Istanbul Poses Extreme Danger

Geoscientists expect an earthquake along the North Anatolian Fault. (Credit: Copyright GFZ)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 19, 2010) — The chain of earthquakes along the North Anatolian fault shows a gap south of Istanbul. The expected earthquakes in this region represent an extreme danger for the Turkish megacity. A new computer study now shows that the tensions in this part of the fault zone could trigger several earthquakes instead of one individual large quake event.

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Tough Snail Shell Could Inspire Better Body Armor

The shell of the "scaly-foot" snail, shown here, has a unique structure that may provide clues for designing improved body armor, a new study suggests. Credit: Anders Warén, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden.

From Live Science:

A snail's shell that protects it from attacks underwater could provide clues for designing improved body armor to guard human soldiers, a new study suggests.

The research involved an unusual sea snail, the so-called "scaly-foot" snail which was first reported in 2003 and makes its home in the harsh environment of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent in the Indian Ocean. Past studies of the snail, a type of sea mollusk, revealed its foot was covered in plates of iron-sulfide minerals, and it is now the only known animal today to employ iron sulfides as a structural material.

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My Comment: The applications in the military are multiple .... the people who researched this need to be commended.

Apple Tablet: Content Will Be Key

From PC World:

On January 27, Apple is holding an event to unveil its "latest creation," which is expected to be a 10-inch touchscreen tablet. Apple's rumored device has been generating a lot of buzz and excitement, but it's not clear yet whether tablet excitement -- assuming that Apple really is unveiling a tablet, of course -- will turn into tablet dollars at the cash register.

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The Mythical Apple Tablet: Rounding Up the Rumors

From PC World:

As you probably already know by now, Apple is holding a product event in later this month. The big question on everyone's mind: Are tablets on the table? There have been countless rumors flying around about the so-called "iSlate/iPad/iTablet" (or whatever Apple decides to call it). Read on for a slew of rumors, along with ratings on their perceived validity.

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Undersea Internet Cables Could Detect Electromagnetic Tsunami Signals

From Wired Science:

Tsunamis may be detectable with underwater fiber-optic cables, according to a new detailed model of the electrical fields the moving water generates.

The charged particles in the ocean water interact with Earth’s magnetic field to induce voltage of up to 500 millivolts in the cables that ferry internet traffic around. With relatively simple technology, those voltage spikes could serve as a tsunami-warning system for nations that can’t afford large arrays of other types of sensors.

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How Settler Farmers Fathered Europe's Males

From The Independent:

They came, they saw, they farmed and then they stole our women. Stone age farmers from the middle east not only brought their agricultural know-how with them to western Europe, they settled down with the local womenfolk and had children.

A genetic analysis of present-day male Europeans has revealed that the first farmers spread both their agricultural technology and their genes across the continent, out-competing the resident hunter-gatherer males for female attraction.

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Ares I Is 'Safest Choice' To Replace Shuttle

The future of NASA's Ares I rocket has been up in the air (Illustration: NASA/MSFC)

From New Scientist:

It has been a whipping boy for its critics, but NASA's Ares I rocket has received a rare boost.

Despite budget and technical concerns, NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) believes Ares I is the best bet for flying astronauts to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires, because it has been designed from the outset with the safety of its crew in mind.

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Siblings As Important As Parents In Child’s Behaviour

From The Telegraph:

Children can learn as much from their brothers and sisters as they do from their parents, new research suggests.

The influence siblings have on each has a considerable impact on a child's development and shouldn't be underestimated, say scientists.

While parents are better role models in formal settings, such as table manners, siblings have more influence in how kids behave 'on the street', the researchers say.

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A Dangerous Pastime for Teens: The Choking Game

A hand around the neck cuts off blood supply to the brain
Patrick Ryan / Getty

From Time Magazine:

When Françoise Cochet saw the cord around her son's neck, she knew that he was dead. Fully clothed and still wearing his sneakers, 14-year-old Nicolas had strangled himself sometime after dinner in their apartment in Nice, France. His mother found him the next morning. "I shut the door so my other two children couldn't see and I didn't touch the body," she says. "I thought that I couldn't live anymore. I thought I needed to die too."

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Israel Developing Semi-Lethal Sonic Cannon To Control Rioters

LRAD Sonic Weapon The LRAD, another sonic weapon, has been used successfully
to disperse protestors via Discovery.com

From Popular Science:

A desert people have developed a new weapon that uses sound instead of bullets. But this time, it will be used to control crowds instead of fighting giant worms or devious members of House Harkonnen. The Israeli Defense Ministry has contracted for the production of sonic-boom stun-guns called "Thunder Generator cannons," which they hope to use in crowd-control situations.

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The Science Of Sniffer Dogs

From Cosmic Log/MSNBC:

Rescuers from all around the world are converging on Haiti in the wake of this week's earthquake - and not all of them are human. Finding survivors amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince is a job tailor-made for dogs and devices.

The search-and-rescue operation "appears to be unprecedented in scale," Discovery.com reports.

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Tipping Point? West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Become Unstable As World Warms

Airborne view of the Pine Island glacier, Antarctica. (Credit: NASA/Jane Peterson)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 18, 2010) — A new study examines how ice sheets, such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, could become unstable as the world warms.

The team from Oxford University and Cambridge University developed a model to explore how changes in the 'grounding line' -- where an ice sheet floats free from its base of rock or sediment -- could lead to the disintegration of ice sheets and result in a significant rise in global sea level.

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World's Smallest Hot Rod Made Using Nanotechnology

The molecular motorcar on the left, called a "nanodragster," could spur new nanotechnologies such as factories that build products atom-by-atom. Credit: American Chemical Society

From Live Science:

Researchers have built a new super-small "nanodragster" that improves on prior nanocar designs and could speed up efforts to craft molecular machines.

"We made a new version of a nanocar that looks like a dragster," said James Tour, a chemist at Rice University who was involved in the research. "It has smaller front wheels on a shorter axle and bigger back wheels on a longer axle."

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