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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Deforestation Unveils Lost Amazon Civilization [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2010-01-08 23:03:43 by buckeroo
96 Comments
Who would've thought deforestation had an upside? Satellite flyovers of newly cleared land in the Amazon have uncovered a vanished civilization that could rival the Incans or Aztecs in sophistication. Researchers found mysterious geometric trenches and other earthworks carved into the landscape as early as a decade ago, but satellites have paved the way for the discovery of over 200 giant structures. Writing in the journal Antiquity, the researchers say the the formations stretch for some 250 kilometers (155 miles) across the upper Amazon basin east of the Andes mountains and appear to be of a similar style throughout, suggesting one vast, united civilization that could have totaled ...
In the Swiss Army knife of the brain, the ability to recognize faces may be a specialized tool
Post Date: 2010-01-08 17:43:48 by Prefrontal Vortex
1 Comments
In the Swiss Army knife of the brain, the ability to recognize faces may be a specialized tool By Carina Storrs Some people seem to have it all, mentally speaking—strong math and verbal skills, a keen memory and good spatial sense. This gift could be chalked up to good "generalist genes," or genes that affect many cognitive abilities and, broadly speaking, determine intelligence. The downside of generalist genes is that, because their functions overlap, someone who falters at understanding algebra may also be more likely to have trouble learning a foreign language. But good news for Mensa rejects comes in a study published in the January 7 issue of Current Biology. ...
Climategate : UK MET office head gets a grilling and fails miserably
Post Date: 2010-01-08 01:45:16 by farmfriend
4 Comments
Coral condemned to extinction by CO2 levels, warns Attenborough
Post Date: 2010-01-07 20:48:44 by buckeroo
33 Comments
David Attenborough joined scientists yesterday to warn that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already above the level which condemns coral reefs to extinction in the future, with catastrophic effects for the oceans and the people who depend upon them. Coral reefs support a quarter of all marine life including more than 4,000 species of fish. They also provide spawning, nursery, refuge and feeding areas for creatures such as lobsters, crabs, starfish and sea turtles. This makes them crucial in supporting a healthy marine ecosystem upon which more than 1bn people depend for food. Reefs also play a crucial role as natural breakwaters, protecting coastlines from storms. Attenborough said ...
High Self-Perception, Low Brain Activity
Post Date: 2010-01-07 16:04:41 by Prefrontal Vortex
6 Comments
High Self-Perception, Low Brain Activity By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on January 7, 2010 Researchers have discovered the less you use your brain’s frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses. “In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes, the more accurate your view of yourself is,” says Jennifer Beer, a University of Texas assistant professor of psychology. “And the more you view yourself as desirable or better than your peers, the less you use those lobes.” Those findings are being published in the February edition of the journal NeuroImage. The natural human ...
Mobile phone use may stave off, reverse Alzheimer's: study
Post Date: 2010-01-07 11:31:32 by christine
8 Comments
Long suspected of causing brain tumors, mobile phones are now being eyed as key allies in the fight against Alzheimer's disease, US researchers said in a study. Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) found, to their surprise, that 96 mice they zapped twice daily for an hour each time with electromagnetic waves similar to those generated by US mobile (cellular) phones benefited from the exposure. Older mice saw deposits of beta-amyloid -- a protein fragment that accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer's sufferers to form the disease's signature plaques -- wiped out and their memories improved after long-term exposure to mobile phones, the study published in the ...
Retail space opens up as big chains shrink
Post Date: 2010-01-02 12:36:57 by DeaconBenjamin
3 Comments
Surges of large-scale retail bankruptcies such as Circuit City electronics and Mervyns department stores altered the shopping landscape in 2009 -- and experts say 2010 is likely to bring even more changes. Amid a still-tepid economic recovery, big retail chains are expected to continue closing their less productive stores and retrenching on expansion plans. But at the same time, others will be hurtling into the breach to take advantage of falling rents and vacancies in neighborhoods they couldn't get into a few years ago. "The prediction for next year is more re-sizing and relocating of retailers," said real estate broker Richard Rizika of CB Richard Ellis. There are ...
AP Caught Misleading On Climategate
Post Date: 2009-12-31 01:07:49 by farmfriend
7 Comments
AP Caught Misleading On Climategate Written by Alex Newman Wednesday, 30 December 2009 21:00 The Associated Press (AP) was caught misleading readers with biased and inaccurate coverage of the Climategate scandal in an article entitled “Science not faked, but not pretty” that was carried by hundreds of publications. The AP gave copies of the leaked e-mails to three scientists for the story. It then attempted to portray their views on the scandal in a dishonest manner. The international wire service selectively quoted the experts it interviewed to make it seem as though they did not think the leaked e-mails and data from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit ...
German Physicists Trash Global Warming “Theory”
Post Date: 2009-12-30 07:04:31 by Ada
11 Comments
For any non-scientist interested in the climate debate, there is nothing better than a ready primer to guide you through the complexities of atmospheric physics – the “hardest” science of climatology. Here we outline the essential points made by Dr. Gerhard Gerlich, a respected German physicist, that counter the bogus theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Before going further, it’s worth bearing in mind that no climatologist ever completed any university course in climatology–that’s how new this branch of science really is. Like any new science the fall-back position of a cornered AGW proponent is the dreaded “appeal to authority” where the ...
The Temperature of Science
Post Date: 2009-12-29 22:28:36 by buckeroo
11 Comments
The Temperature of Science James Hansen Background My experience with global temperature data over 30 years provides insight about how the science and its public perception have changed. In the late 1970s I became curious about wellknown analyses of global temperature change published by climatologist J. Murray Mitchell: why were his estimates for large-scale temperature change restricted to northern latitudes? As a planetary scientist, it seemed to me there were enough data points in the Southern Hemisphere to allow useful estimates both for that hemisphere and for the global average. So I requested a tape of meteorological station data from Roy Jenne of the National Center for Atmospheric ...
How Stanley Kubrick Faked the Apollo Moon Landings [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2009-12-29 17:44:34 by RickyJ
55 Comments
How Stanley Kubrick Faked the Apollo Moon Landings "There are great ideas, undiscovered breakthroughs available, to those who can remove one of truths protective layers"-Neil Armstrong, 'First Man on the Moon'. July 20 th 1994 It has now been forty years since the fabled moon landings by NASA and the Apollo gang. When it comes to the subject of the moon landings, people tend to fall into two belief groups. The first group, by far the bigger of the two groups, accepts the fact that NASA successfully landed on the moon six times and that 12 human beings have actually walked on the surface of the moon. The second group, though far smaller, is more vocal about their ...
Glacier Retreat Has Beneficial Impact on Climate Change [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2009-12-28 03:18:30 by buckeroo
86 Comments
ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2009) Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years. The retreat of glaciers since 1850 affects the availability of fresh water for irrigation and domestic use, mountain recreation, animals and plants that depend on glacier-melt, and in the longer term, the level of the oceans. Studied by glaciologists, the temporal ...
Girls on top
Post Date: 2009-12-27 14:00:47 by buckeroo
19 Comments
IT HAS been known for a while that stressful conditions such as famine result in more girls being born than happens in good times. The shift in the sex-ratio is tiny—around 1%—but in a large population that is still noticeable. A possible evolutionary explanation is that daughters are likely to mate and produce grandchildren regardless of condition, whereas weedy sons may fail in the struggle to have the chance to reproduce at all. In hard times, then, daughters are a safer evolutionary bet. Regardless of why the shift happens, though, it has long been argued that the moment when it happens is conception—or, more probably, implantation. A womb exposed to stress hormones, runs ...
Doctors see sign of highly drug-resistant TB
Post Date: 2009-12-27 06:53:55 by Disgusted
4 Comments
LANTANA, Florida — It started with a cough, a cool-season hack that refused to go away. Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood. I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad." It was really bad, and not just for him. Doctors say Juarez's incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — ...
Psychology experiment - Change blindness
Post Date: 2009-12-26 14:35:58 by A K A Stone
2 Comments
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2009-12-25 01:43:05 by farmfriend
65 Comments
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce By Alexander Cockburn December 24, 2009 The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost. Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by ...
CrossTalk on Climate: Dopenhagen?
Post Date: 2009-12-23 18:33:26 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Poster Comment:Piers looks a lot different than I had pictured him.
The "Science" Mantra
Post Date: 2009-12-22 10:08:14 by Eric Stratton
0 Comments
The "Science" Mantra Thomas Sowell Tuesday, December 22, 2009 Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own ...
Genetic predeterminants of diabetes in blacks identified
Post Date: 2009-12-18 16:25:52 by Prefrontal Vortex
0 Comments
Genetic predeterminants of diabetes in blacks identified Researchers identified inherited genetic variations between black and white Americans that may lead to less efficient glucose metabolism and predisposition to diabetes in blacks. “We found gene expression profiles that suggest carbohydrate metabolism should be different in [blacks] in our population compared [with whites],” Cam Patterson, MD, of the division of cardiology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said in a press release. Patterson and colleagues identified 151 differentially expressed genes between blacks and whites that were associated with glucose and glucose metabolism; the majority of the ...
Geologist caused quakes, faces 5 years
Post Date: 2009-12-18 07:41:25 by noone222
12 Comments
BASEL, Switzerland, Dec. 17 (UPI) -- A Swiss company geologist pleaded not guilty to knowingly causing $8.7 million in damage after his pioneering geothermal project caused earthquakes. Markus Haering, a project designer with Geopower Basel AG, said local people knew of the risks in his company's drilling 3 miles into the ground beneath Basel, Switzerland. But he admitted Geopower "had very little knowledge of seismicity" before drilling, The Times of London reported. The project caused a series of earthquakes, including one that measured 3.4 on the Richter scale. Basel, located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, sits on a fault line and was destroyed in a ...
Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming
Post Date: 2009-12-18 06:19:52 by Ada
10 Comments
Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages. Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North) A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global ...
Suppression of Science Within Science
Post Date: 2009-12-17 06:41:52 by Ada
15 Comments
I wasn’t as surprised as many others were, when it was revealed that climate-change "researchers" had discussed in private e-mails how to keep important data from public view lest it shake public belief in the dogma that human activities are contributing significantly to global warming. I wasn’t particularly surprised because just a few weeks earlier I had spoken at the Oakland Rethinking AIDS Conference about the dogmatism and strong-arm tactics that are rampant in a seemingly increasing range of fields of medicine and science. PowerPoint presentations of most of the talks at the Conference are available at the Conference website. Here’s a slightly modified, more ...
Historic First Flight of Boeing Dreamliner
Post Date: 2009-12-16 19:09:00 by tom007
3 Comments
Is Global Warming a Religion?
Post Date: 2009-12-16 12:02:37 by phantom patriot
1 Comments
http://video.foxnews.com/1255382...global-warming-a-religion
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up
Post Date: 2009-12-16 07:10:33 by Ada
0 Comments
Al Gore's office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row. Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski ...
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