Brute Force: Humans Can Sure Take A Punch

A boxer punching. Credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

The human body can take a remarkable amount of punishment, given bones made of one of the strongest materials found in nature. At the same time, even an unarmed person can inflict an astonishing amount of damage with the proper training.

So how much does it take to crack a bone? And how much mayhem can a person deal out? In an era when "extreme fighting" has become a popular phenomenon, scientists are testing the extremes that athletes at the peak of their game can reach in order to help the rest of us.

Read more ....

Whales Get Support On Sonar Ban

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

NOAA May Limit Sonar Tests, though Another Case Heads to Court.

Whales and the U.S. Navy have tangled repeatedly over the past years over charges that the Navy’s sonar exercises disorient or injure whales and other marine mammals. Now, whales in the Pacific appear to have a new champion: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is considering limiting the Navy’s sonar tests in certain marine mammal “hot spots.”

Read more ....

Monitoring Cell Death Could Help Cancer Treatment

Image: Death of a tumor: This PET scan, taken just days after radiation therapy, shows a hot spot of cell-death activity in a brain tumor--a good indication that the therapy is working. Credit: Aaron Allen, Davidoff Comprehensive Cancer Center, Rabin Medical Center

From Technology Review:

An earlier measure of treatment could improve patients' prognosis.

When it comes to aggressive cancers, in the brain or lung for example, oncologists know that the sooner they can determine whether a treatment is unsuccessful, the sooner they can reevaluate and, if necessary, prescribe a new course of action. But typically, it takes two months or more to do the before-and-after comparisons that help determine whether a tumor is shrinking. Now an Israeli company called Aposense says it may have found a way to drastically speed up the process: an imaging marker that, when used with PET scans, indicates the presence of dying cells.

Read more ....

Police Want Backdoor To Web Users' Private Data

From CNET News:

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.

But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.

Read more ....

No (Primordial) Soup For You: Origins Of Life Were Not What You Think

From Discovery News:

The predominant theory of the origin of life would make a terrific setting for a space horror movie, or a particularly tense episode of Star Trek: picture early Earth, a noxious place devoid of oxygen, its young oceans choked with some kind of indiscernible ooze.

Depending on how you like your origin stories, a thunderstorm passes overhead, and lightning crackles into the broth, pouring forth ever bigger organic molecules until -- presto! -- virus-sized strands of RNA and the first replicating life is formed.

Read more ....

Slate Showdown: iPad vs. HP Slate vs. JooJoo vs. Android Tablets & More

From Gizmodo:

Everybody's talking about tablets, especially those single-pane capacitive touchscreen ones more specifically known as "slates." The iPad is the biggest newsmaker, but there are lots headed our way (most with built-in webcams). Here's how they measure up, spec-wise:

Read more ....

DARPA's Robotic Ghost Ships Will Stalk Submarines

Robot Frigates Now imagine this ship without the people U.S. Navy/Scott Taylor

From Popular Science:

Ships that appear in perfect working order except for a missing human crew would normally raise suspicions that something has gone terribly wrong, possibly in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle. Yet an unmanned frigate is exactly what DARPA's mad scientists at the Pentagon have ordered, according to The Register. The automated ships' mission would have it spending months cruising the seas unmanned, on the hunt for ghostly enemy submarines.

Read more ....

Amazon Acquires Touch Screen Startup; Souped Up Kindle Being Planned?

From ZDNet:

Amazon is reportedly buying Touchco, a start-up focused on touch screen technology, in a move that may signal a multi-touch Kindle in the future.

According to the New York Times, Amazon is acquiring Touchco, a New York-based company with a handful of employees and technology that was never commercialized.

Touchco was a project at New York University’s Media Research Lab. Terms of the deal weren’t available, but it doesn’t appear to be material enough to warrant much disclosure.

What does this deal mean?

Read more ....

Exoplanet Gas Spotted From Earth

Photo: The team used Nasa's Nasa's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii

From The BBC:

Astronomers have used a new ground-based technique to study the atmospheres of planets outside our Solar System.

The work could assist the search for Earth-like planets with traces of organic, or carbon-rich, molecules.

Astronomers spotted evidence of methane gas in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

Gases have previously been discerned on exoplanets before, but only by using space-based telescopes.

Read more ....

NASA's New Mission: Space To Thrive

From The Economist:

A plan to overhaul America’s space agency is long overdue.

IN 2004 George Bush announced a plan for America’s space agency, NASA, to return to the moon by 2020, land there, explore the surface and set up a base. The moon would then serve as a staging post for a journey to Mars. It was, unfortunately, unclear how this modest proposal would be paid for and, as work began and costs spiralled, the “vision” seemed more science fiction than science.

Read more ....

Twitter Forces Password Reset to Protect Some Accounts

From PC World:

Twitter required some users to reset their passwords on Tuesday after discovering that their log-in information may have been harvested via security-compromised torrent Web sites, the company said.

For years, a malicious hacker has been setting up file-sharing torrent sites that appear legitimate and then selling them to well-meaning buyers who want to own their own download site, explained Del Harvey, Twitter's director of trust and safety, in a blog post.

Read more ....

Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Odd X-Pattern Of Trailing Debris

This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture a comet-like object called P/2010 A2, which was first discovered by the LINEAR (Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research program) sky survey on January 6. The object appears so unusual in ground-based telescopic images that discretionary time on Hubble was used to take a close-up look. This picture, from the January 29 observation, shows a bizarre X-pattern of filamentary structures near the point-like nucleus of the object and trailing streamers of dust. The inset picture shows a complex structure that suggests the object is not a comet but instead the product of a head-on collision between two asteroids traveling five times faster than a rifle bullet (5 kilometers per second). Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never before been seen. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA))

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 2, 2010) — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

Read more ....

The 'New' NASA Will Look Back At Earth

An artist's concept of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Credit: NASA

From Live Science:

NASA's new proposed budget will in part shift the space agency's focus from landing people on the moon back to Earth, with more money slated to go to projects that will help us understand our planet's climate and even plans to re-launch the carbon observatory that failed to launch last year.

The 2011 proposed budget for NASA, announced on Monday, cancels the Constellation program to build new rockets and spacecraft optimized for the moon, but increases NASA's overall budget by $6 billion over the next five years. Of that $6 billion, about $2 billion will be funneled into new and existing science missions, particularly those aimed at investigating the Earth sciences, particularly climate.

Read more ....

Paper Linking Vaccine To Autism Retracted

There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Medical journal The Lancet has withdrawn a 1998 study linking autism with inoculation against three childhood illnesses, a paper that caused an uproar and an enduring backlash against vaccination.

"We fully retract this paper from the published record," The Lancet's editors said in a statement published online.

The 1998 paper suggested there might be a connection between autism and a triple vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).

Read more ....

"Twitteros" Are Mexico's Latest Outlaws

From CBS News:

GlobalPost: From Drug Cartels to Breathalyzer Tipsters, Twitter Users Are Fast Becoming Public Enemy No. 1.

Mexico has racked up its fair share of menacingly named outlaws in a three-year drug war: the Zetas, Aztecas and even a band of female assassins called the Panthers.

Now, if the government gets its way, another name will also make the wanted list: los Twitteros.

Read more ....

iPad Rattles The E-Bookshelves

Bestseller: The iPad features iBook, an application for buying and reading books.
Credit: Apple

From Technology Review:

But Amazon's e-book dominance may be hard to change.

Over the weekend, a massive disappearing act took place on the virtual shelves of Amazon.com. In a dispute over e-book pricing, the online retailer blocked customers from buying titles--e-book or print--from Macmillan, a publisher whose imprints include Nature Publishing Group, the literary line of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and the science fiction and fantasy line Tor.

Read more ....

Google Shows Off Chrome OS Tablet Ideas

A mock-up of a Chrome OS tablet from Google's Chromium developer site.
(Credit: Google)

From CNET News:

Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple's iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS.

On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google's Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, "Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed."

The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS.

Read more ....

The Pursuit Of Intelligence In Computer Science

What actually constitutes an objective pattern of cognition in machines that we will recognize as intelligent is extremely vague and constantly being rewritten. Steve Dunning/Getty Images

From Discovery News:

We can’t give machines intelligence until we can figure out what roles creativity, inspiration and curiosity should play.

Since the dawn of high tech electronics and robotics, we’ve heard an awful lot about artificial intelligence and countless tales about how it may just decide to enslave us all one of these days, or fuse with humanity into an unrecognizable homunculus of men, women, children and machines as in the end of Isaac Asimov’s classic short story The Last Question, which is probably my favorite science fiction tale for it’s amazing scope and it’s bizarre climax. But when we actually drill down to the actual requirements for making machines endowed with the kind of computing abilities we’d call intelligence, we’ll find that the definition of what actually constitutes an objective pattern of cognition we will recognize as intelligent is extremely vague and constantly being rewritten.

Read more ....

NASA Budget Creates Uncertainty In Clear Lake

From Houston Chronicle:

Change came to Washington a year ago with the election of President Barack Obama, and one year later it is thundering through Houston's space community like a shuttle's sonic boom.

The totality of impacts from Obama's proposed NASA budget for Houston, the Clear Lake community surrounding Johnson Space Center and even for the astronauts themselves is still far from certain.

Space agency officials declined Tuesday to even confirm that NASA's astronaut corps would continue after the space shuttle retires within the next year.

Read more ....

China's Power Boom Means West May Swap Oil Dependency For Green Tech Dependency

A Wind Power Field Near Xinxiang, China Chris Lim

From Popular Science:

President Obama made it clear in his State of the Union Address last week that he fears the American economy is on the brink of missing out on a green tech boom that could propel us out of our current financial mess and into the coming century, and it appears his concern is well-placed. China leapfrogged Denmark, Germany, Spain and the U.S. to become the world's largest maker of wind turbines last year, and 2010 is shaping up to be another banner year. For China that is, not for the West.

Read more ....