Farm Aid From Space

A Kenyan Masai farmer stands next to his three cows exhausted by lack of nutrition near Kajiado, south of Nairobi. A NOAA environmental satellite was launched in February (below). Its images will be used in an index that helps determine payouts for climate insurance. Antony Njuguana/Reuters/File

From Christian Science Monitor:

Dusty northern Kenya doesn't look like a laboratory, but across its dry plains, cattle herders are pioneering a new way to fend off poverty and teaming up with unlikely partners – insurance agents.

The two groups have been brought together by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), headquartered in Kenya's capital, Nairobi. A few years ago, scientists at ILRI wondered if a new innovation, called weather-indexed insurance, might help impoverished cattle farmers survive the loss of their cows during times of drought.

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Ancient DNA Teased From Fossil Eggshells

Fragments of ancient moa eggshells. Eggshells are surprisingly good at protecting ancient DNA, and are often found at archaeological sites. Credit: University of Otago

From Cosmos:

PARIS: DNA from the fossilised eggshells of extinct birds - including iconic giants such as the moa and elephant bird - have been extracted for the first time, Australian scientists have reported.

The achievement marks a major step towards drafting the genome of birds wiped out by human greed, although the scientists warn this does not mean an extinct species should - or even can - be resurrected in the style of Jurassic Park.

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Scientists Discover 'Catastrophic Event' Behind The Halt Of Star Birth in Early Galaxy Formation

Artist’s representation showing outflow from a supermassive black hole inside the middle of a galaxy. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 10, 2010) — Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early Universe.

The researchers, led by Durham University's Department of Physics, observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared just three billion years after the Big Bang when the Universe was a quarter of its present age.

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Effort To Map Human Brain Faces Complex Challenges

The wiring diagram of connections between neurons and the interscutularis muscle of a mouse ear. Credit: Lu et al., 2009 PLoS Biology: The Interscutularis Connectome

From Live Science:

Mapping the connections among brain cells could someday prove as revolutionary as mapping the human genome. But tracing each synaptic connection between neurons — essentially a manual effort so far — has proven painstakingly slow. To approach a thorough mapping, researchers will have to develop a computer-automated process.

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Obama's Plans For NASA Changes Met With Harsh Criticism

From Washington Post:

Harrison Schmitt's credentials as a space policy analyst include several days of walking on the moon. The Apollo 17 astronaut, who is also a former U.S. senator, is aghast at what President Obama is doing to the space program.

"It's bad for the country," Schmitt said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."

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E-Books Are Largest Category In App Store

From Mac World:

Steve Jobs once dismissed the Kindle by declaring that “people don’t read anymore.” That may or may not be true, but either way, people definitely still sell books. As The Guardian reports, e-books are now more plentiful on the App Store than any other kind of app—including games.

The Guardian cites a report from mobile advertising company Mobclix, which identified 27,000 e-book apps, as opposed to 25,400 games. (Surprisingly, “novelty fart apps” didn’t even rank in the top five.)

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Cryptographers Voice Their Concerns On The Security Of Cloud Computing

Cryptographers Warn About Security Dangers in the Cloud at RSA -- Redmond Magazine (Microsoft IT Community News)

Researcher says read the fine print before connecting to the cloud.

Government intervention in cloud computing is "the big elephant in the room that no one will talk about," said Adi Shamir, professor of mathematics and computer science at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, who spoke at the recent RSA Conference as part of the event's annual Cryptographers' Panel.

Shamir added that once most people move their IT operations into the cloud, "it's going to be the wet dream of government."

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My Comment: If you are concerned about cyberwar, cyber security, and cyber attacks .... this article will increase your concerns exponentially.

US Still Responsible For Most CO2 Emissions

From New Scientist:

Europeans import nearly twice as much carbon dioxide per head as US citizens – but the US still holds the dubious distinction of being the world's largest emitter.

The Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, reports that in 2004 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions – some 6.2 gigatonnes – went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries. Some countries, such as Switzerland, "outsourced" over half of their carbon dioxide emissions in this way because they have a high import-to-export ratio of such energy-intensive goods as consumer electronics, motor vehicles and machinery.

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Google Tests TV Search Service

From The Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.

The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google's YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.

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Super-Small Microphone Detects Motion Of Air Particles To Pinpoint Gunfire In Battle

The Microflown via Dvice

From Popular Science:

Wait, don't call it a microphone -- it's an acoustic vector sensor.

Between the yelling of sergeants, the rumble of jet engines, and the deafening pop of gunfire, a soldier's sense of hearing rapidly deteriorates in the heat of battle. Luckily, the Dutch company Microflown has designed a special microphone that can do a soldier's listening for him. By measuring the mechanical movement of individual air particles, as opposed to sound waves as a whole, the device can not only pinpoint the origin of sniper fire or approaching aircraft, but detail their make and model, as well.

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Cruise-Ship Disaster: How Do 'Rogue Waves' Work?

From Time Magazine:

It was like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie. On March 3, a sudden wall of water hit a cruise ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea off the northeastern coast of Spain, killing two people, injuring 14 and causing severe damage to the vessel.

According to Louis Cruise Lines, the owner of the vessel, the Louis Majesty was hit by three "abnormally high" waves, each more than 33 ft. (10 m) high, striking in clear weather and without warning. "We heard a loud noise, and it was the wave that hit us," Claudine Armand, a passenger from France, told the Associated Press Television News. "When we came out of [our room], we saw the wave had flooded everything."

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Decision-Makers Betrayed By Their Wide Eyes

Dither no more (Image: Adam Hart-Davis/SPL)

From New Scientist:

WHY can't teachers keep a secret? Because their pupils give them away. It turns out that when people make decisions, their pupils dilate, a subtle cue that could be used to predict a person's intentions, or even converse with people with locked-in syndrome.

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Most Extreme White Dwarf Binary System Found With Orbit Of Just Five Minutes

Graphic of HM Cancri. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Warwick)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Mar. 9, 2010) — An international team of astronomers has shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri definitely revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes. This makes HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period. It is also the smallest known binary. The binary system is no larger than 8 times the diameter of the Earth which is the equivalent of no more than a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

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Even A 3-Year-Old Understands The Power Of Advertising

From Live Science:

Having the "right" brand of jeans or the latest gadget isn't just an annoying trait of teenagers (not to mention their parents). New research found that even preschoolers are brand-conscious and can recognize kiddie brand logos and products.

"Children as young as three are feeling social pressure and understand that consumption of certain brands can help them through life," said lead researcher Anna McAlister of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Findings like this show us that we need to think about materialism developing in very young children."

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How To Save And Share Ridiculously Large Files

From CNET:

A few years ago it was a big deal to find a place that would let you share 1 gigabyte of files.

Things change, though. Bandwidth keeps growing, and the cost of Web storage keeps shrinking. That's good news for people looking to share increasingly large files, be it an HD video recording or an archive of several files that tops out at over a gig.

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Drinking Alcohol Could Help Women Stay Slim

The best drink for keeping the pounds off was red wine, but all four types of tipple included in the study -- red or white wine, beer and spirits -- showed similar results. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

A glass a day could keep excessive weight gain at bay.

Women who drink a couple of glasses of red wine, beer or spirits a day are better at keeping the pounds off than women who do not drink at all, according to a study published Monday.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston asked more than 19,000, average-weight U.S. women aged 39 or older how many alcoholic beverages they typically drank in a day, and then tracked the women for around 13 years.

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Grrr… What's 'Step Away From The Bone' In Dog?

From The New Scientist:

The canine phrase book has collected its first entries. Dogs understand the meaning of different growls, from a rumble that says "back off" to playful snarls made in a tug-of-war game.

Proving that animal vocalisations have specific meanings – and what they could be – is challenging. In 2008, Péter Pongrácz, a behavioural biologist at Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, monitored dogs' heart rates to show that they seem to notice a difference between barks aimed at strangers and those directed at nothing in particular. Now he has gone a step further and shown that dogs respond differently to different vocalisations.

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Could The Mono Lake Arsenic Prove There Is A Shadow Biosphere?

California, USA --- Rock Formations in Mono Lake. (Micha Pawlitzki/Corbis)

From Times Online:

Do alien life forms exist in a Californian lake? Could there be a shadow biosphere? One scientist is trying to find out.

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

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A Computer That Processes Faster Than The Speed of Light

Pushing the Limits of Physics Exceeding the speed of light opens one up to all kinds of theoretical problems, but two Austrian researchers claim there's no reason we can't build a computer that processes information at superluminal speeds.

From Popular Science:

How fast is too fast? According to the laws of physics, the speed of light is a good boundary, as going beyond it opens you up to all sorts of paradoxes and space-time phenomena that are usually the stuff of sci-fi. But a couple of researchers in Austria have come up with a way to compute information faster than the speed of light.

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How Safe Is Your Cell Phone?

Illustration by Jane Hong for TIME

From Time Magazine:

It takes a little extra work to get in touch with Andrea Boland. The Maine state representative answers e-mails and lists her business and home phone numbers on the Web. But unlike many politicians surgically attached to their BlackBerrys, she keeps her cell switched off unless she's expecting a call. And if she has her way, everyone in Maine — and perhaps, eventually, the rest of the U.S. — will similarly think twice before jabbering away on their mobiles.

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