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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Are Chimps People?
Post Date: 2008-10-15 09:04:44 by Hypocrisy Cop
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Chimps: Not Human, But Are They People? By Brandon Keim October 14, 2008 As a population of West African chimpanzees dwindles to critically endangered levels, scientists are calling for a definition of personhood that includes our close evolutionary cousins. Just two decades ago, the Ivory Coast boasted a 10,000-strong chimpanzee population, accounting for half of the world's population. According to a new survey, that number has fallen to just a few thousand. News of such a decline, published today in Current Biology, would be saddening in any species. But should we feel more concern for the chimpanzees than for another animal — as much concern, perhaps, as we might feel for ...
Deep magma matters in volcanic eruption cycle
Post Date: 2008-10-14 22:23:14 by farmfriend
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Contact: A'ndrea Elyse Messer aem1@psu.edu 814-865-9481 Penn State Deep magma matters in volcanic eruption cycle Although the Soufriere Hills volcano on Montserrat exhibits cycles of eruption and quiet, an international team of researchers found that magma is continuously supplied from deep in the crust but that a valve acts below a shallower magma chamber, releasing lava to the surface periodically. "Continuous records of surface deformation are available for only a few volcanoes," says Derek Elsworth, professor of energy and geo-environmental engineering, Penn State. "The Soufriere Hills volcano has been erupting since 1995 and provides a peek into the processes ...
Iowa State researchers developing wireless soil sensors to improve farming
Post Date: 2008-10-14 22:19:36 by farmfriend
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Iowa State researchers developing wireless soil sensors to improve farming AMES, Iowa -- Ratnesh Kumar keeps his prototype soil sensors buried in a box under his desk. He hopes that one day farmers will be burying the devices under their crops. Kumar is leading an Iowa State University research team that's developing transceivers and sensors designed to collect and send data about soil moisture within a field. Eventually the researchers are hoping the sensors will also collect data about soil temperature and nutrient content. A major goal is to build small sensors (the prototypes are about 2 inches wide, 4 inches long and less than an inch thick) that can do their work entirely ...
MONSTER FISH STORY!
Post Date: 2008-10-13 02:41:04 by HOUNDDAWG
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7 June 2006 The largest Atlantic Halibut, Hippoglossus hippoglossus, ever recorded was caught and landed by professional net fisherman Rolf Larsen (62 years old), at Stamsund, Lofoten, Norway (within the Arctic Circle but with seas warmed by the Gulf Stream) This massive fish weighed 282 kg (that's ruffly 621.7035793617 lbs, folks!) and would have probably weighed 290 kg when first caught. The difference was because of the loss of blood after capture. Its total length was 262 cm. The fish was sold for display. *AND ANOTHER* A 39.25 stone (550 lb) Halibut caught by Arthur D. Campbell (d. 2006) at the East Horns Iceland on 18th May 1963. Fish landed in Aberdeen, Scotland by the Ben ...
Ultrasound machine 'turns cheap plonk into fine wine in 30 minutes'
Post Date: 2008-10-12 10:45:57 by angle
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An entrepreneur claims to have invented a machine that turns a cheap bottle of plonk into a vintage-tasting wine in a matter of minutes. The machine recreates the effects of decades of ageing by colliding alcohol molecules in the bottle Photo: CATERS Inventor Casey Jones says the £350 gadget uses ultrasound technology to recreate the effects of decades of ageing by colliding alcohol molecules inside the bottle. The Ultrasonic Wine Ager, which looks like an ordinary ice bucket, takes 30 minutes to work and has already been given the thumbs up by an English winemaker. Mr Jones, 53, said: "This machine can take your run-of-the-mill £3.99 bottle of plonk and turn it into ...
Persian wind catcher inspires US Inc.
Post Date: 2008-10-12 10:42:23 by angle
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A modern wind-powered machine inspired by Persian wind catchers is to warranty a high quality wind electricity generating system. Windation Energy Systems, a California-based company, says that their wind appliance resembles more or less like the modern heating and cooling equipment. Mark Sheikhrezai, CEO and founder of Windation, explains that there is a 8-by-8-foot frame around a 10-foot-high cylinder. Wind blows in the top, directed to the bottom and turns a turbine to make up to 5 kilowatts of electricity. A single unit wouldn't be capable of generating enough power for an entire office building but could develop a significant portion. Sheikhrezai, who was born in Iran, got the ...
Nobel physics prize goes to 2 Japanese, 1 American
Post Date: 2008-10-07 21:53:50 by farmfriend
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Nobel physics prize goes to 2 Japanese, 1 American By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Two Japanese scientists and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for theoretical advances that help explain the behavior of the smallest particles of matter. The American, Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half the $1.4 million prize for mathematical work he did nearly a half-century ago. "I had almost given up" on getting the Nobel, Nambu said. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half for a 1972 theory that forecast the later discovery of a new family of subatomic particles. The insights of the three scientists ...
No Virgina, evolution isn't ending
Post Date: 2008-10-07 11:34:55 by Tauzero
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No Virgina, evolution isn't ending Category: Evolution Posted on: October 7, 2008 3:20 AM, by Razib I've already the covered Steven-Jones-evolution-is-ending story at my other weblog. I notice that John Wilkins has also objected to Jones' exaggerations. When I initially read the quotes from Jones in The Times I was alarmed, but wondered if his position was being taken out of context or misinterpreted. I emailed a prominent evolutionary biologist who I suspected would know Jones well enough to clarify this issue. My correspondent responded that Jones really does believe this, and he finds Jones' ideas as ludicrous as I do (adding for good measure he doesn't get the ...
Genes may explain racial disparities in asthma
Post Date: 2008-10-07 11:16:52 by Tauzero
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Genes may explain racial disparities in asthma Mon Oct 6, 2008 1:57pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Asthma patients who are black tend to have more severe disease than asthma patients who are white, leading to more asthma control problems, higher rates of emergency department visits, and overall worse quality of life. These findings point to genetic differences that lead to poor responses to drug therapy as the source of these racial disparities. Based data obtained from The Epidemiology and Natural History of Asthma: Outcomes and Treatment Regimens (TENOR) study, Dr. Tmirah Haselkorn and colleagues undertook an in-depth analysis in an attempt to explain the differences between black ...
Asian mom, white dad: C-section more likely
Post Date: 2008-10-06 12:59:26 by Tauzero
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Asian mom, white dad: C-section more likely ZOSIA BIELSKI From Wednesday's Globe and Mail October 1, 2008 at 9:26 AM EDT Researchers have found that Asian women pregnant with white men's babies are more likely to deliver by cesarean section, and are now recommending that doctors factor in both a mother and father's race when they consider the risk of birth complications. Thirty-three per cent of couples consisting of an Asian mother and white father had C-sections. By comparison, 23 per cent of couples with a white mother and Asian father had cesareans. The researchers speculate this is because Asian women tend to be "smaller people" than Caucasians, and that ...
Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age
Post Date: 2008-10-02 20:07:06 by farmfriend
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Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age Sept. 30, 2008: Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the "blankest year" of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times. "Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "We're experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle." A spotless day looks like this: The image, taken by the Solar and Heliospheric ...
Love is blind for fish in murky waters
Post Date: 2008-10-02 11:20:21 by Tauzero
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Love is blind for fish in murky waters 18:03 01 October 2008 NewScientist.com news service Ewen Callaway Some female fish have eyes for their man only. Colourful African cichlids have evolved into new species because females are partially blind to others. But even as that discovery is made, the species are under threat because the polluted waters they live in are causing them to interbreed. Among several closely related species of cichlids living in Lake Victoria, males come in either red or blue. Brighter males tend to get the girls, but new research suggests that both sexes have evolved to preferentially see only one colour, creating new species of fish in the process. "Reds ...
Heroic ants pay the ultimate price to safeguard nest
Post Date: 2008-09-30 13:36:38 by Tauzero
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Heroic ants pay the ultimate price to safeguard nest 11:15 29 September 2008 NewScientist.com news service Andy Coghlan Ants in Brazil have provided the first example of insects sacrificing themselves to pre-empt a threat. At sunset, the ants seal up the entrance to their nest, but in doing so a few remain outside to kick sand over the entrance hole until it becomes invisible. These ants then die due to the cold, or get blown away in the wind. There are many examples in nature of insects sacrificing themselves when a colony or nest is under attack, such as when bees use their stings to defend the hive and die in the process. But the door-sealing activities of these 2-millimetre ants ...
Invisibility cloaks could take sting out of tsunamis
Post Date: 2008-09-30 13:15:38 by Tauzero
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Invisibility cloaks could take sting out of tsunamis 12:31 29 September 2008 NewScientist.com news service Colin Barras Invisibility cloaks that are able to steer light around two dimensional objects have become reality in the last few years. But the first real-world application of the theories that made them possible could be in hiding vulnerable coastlines and offshore platforms from destructive tsunamis. The first working invisibility cloak, built in 2006, guided microwaves around a small, flat copper ring as if it wasn't there. By October 2007, a device repeated the trick for harder-to-handle visible light, and some progress is reported on the yet more complex task of making ...
Lucky for some: Science of superstition
Post Date: 2008-09-29 12:20:25 by Tauzero
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Lucky for some: Science of superstition Black cats, broken mirrors; superstitions may seem silly, but, asks Sanjida O'Connell, could they be the secret of our survival? Barack Obama played basketball the morning of his victory in the Iowa primary, and continued the tradition in every subsequent primary. The athlete Kelly Holmes laid her kit out in an exact order the night before a race. Superstitious habits are common; who doesn't cross their fingers, start at the sight of a black cat, touch wood and avoid walking under ladders? Superstitions seem irrational, but they pervade human life. The evolutionary biologist Dr Kevin Foster, from Harvard University, and Dr Hanna Kokko, ...
Genetics of Coat Colour in Dogs May Help Explain Human Stress and Weight
Post Date: 2008-09-29 12:13:51 by Tauzero
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Genetics of Coat Colour in Dogs May Help Explain Human Stress and Weight A discovery about the genetics of coat colour in dogs could help explain why humans come in different weights and vary in our abilities to cope with stress, a team led by researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine reports. The study, published in the Nov. 2 issue of Science, answers a longtime mystery: What determines coat color in dogs? While researchers have known since the 1900s that most mammals share the same genetic mechanism to determine coat color, by the 1950s they began to suspect that dogs were different. Now after swabbing the inner cheeks of hundreds of dogs and analyzing the DNA in the ...
ISPs: We Swear, We Won't Watch Your Every Move
Post Date: 2008-09-26 15:59:32 by a vast rightwing conspirator
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ISPs: We Swear, We Won't Watch Your Every Move By Michele Masterson, ChannelWeb 12:41 PM EDT Fri. Sep. 26, 2008 Responding to increasing Internet privacy concerns, AT&T (NYSE:T), Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), the country's largest ISPs, told a Senate committee during a hearing Thursday that they don't engage in online consumer tracking and want to self-regulate such practices in the future. The hearing focused on whether ISPs are tracking their customers' Internet usage and selling that information to advertisers, an industry practice known as behavioral targeting. To be sure, controversy regarding consumer privacy on the Internet and Web ad tracking ...
New clickjacking affects all browsers; cause remains unknown
Post Date: 2008-09-26 15:43:22 by a vast rightwing conspirator
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New clickjacking affects all browsers; cause remains unknown By Joel Hruska | Published: September 26, 2008 - 01:41PM CT Jeremiah Grossman and Robert "Rsnake" Hansen initially planned to reveal details on a new browser-agnostic clickjacking exploit at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) in New York City this week, but voluntarily pulled the presentation after discovering that the 0-day flaw affected an Adobe product. The term "clickjacking" refers to a process by which a user is forced to click on a link without his or her knowledge—the link itself may be nearly invisible or visible for only a fraction of a second. Clickjacking isn't a new attack ...
NMap 4.75 now maps the network graphically
Post Date: 2008-09-25 22:11:44 by Split
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Zenmap lays out your network Nmap, the popular network scanner and mapper, has been updated to version 4.75 and gained the ability to graphically display the network topology it scans and maps. The update also includes hundreds of new OS signatures and new scripting engine modules. The mapping facility is incorporated in the Zenmap GUI for nmap. It lays out the detected nodes in concentric circles based on how many hops away from the scanning system that node is. Details, screenshots and a guide to reading the maps have been added to the nmap documentation. After Fyodor spent the summer scanning tens of millions of IP addresses, the results of his work have provided empirical data which ...
Perfectly Personalized Internet Radio with Pandora and the Music Genome Project
Post Date: 2008-09-25 16:21:48 by Tauzero
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Perfectly Personalized Internet Radio with Pandora and the Music Genome Project Kev Kitchens - 2008.09.25 The other day, I was busily helping the newspaper editor at school put together the headlines and layouts for the latest issue. He was listening to an internet radio station that I had never heard of, Pandora Radio. He explained the basics of the concept behind the Musical Genome Project, the technology which powers the service, and encouraged me to try it. When I logged on, I was simply amazed at this wonderful service. Plus, it's free! Music Has Genes? The Musical Genome Project (MGP) was started in early 200 by a group of people who were attempting to decode the ...
Top 5 right-click extensions
Post Date: 2008-09-25 15:08:32 by Split
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One thing that most Windows users can’t do without is their right mouse button. As one user who switched to Mac once said, “Losing the right mouse button is like losing a limb”. No amount of shortcuts or launchers in the world can make up for that sweet right-click that facilitates everything from downloading to quick cutting and pasting. However, if you’re only using the default options that Windows offers when you right click then you’re not getting the most out of your mouse’s right click button. Here’s 5 top ways to quite literally, add more power to your elbow. DownThemAll! - Add downloads instantly to your download manager in Firefox Rightload - ...
Barracuda opens up spam blocking list
Post Date: 2008-09-25 11:40:19 by Split
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Filtering software offered to businesses for free Barracuda Networks is to open its spam blocking list for companies to use free of charge. The Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL) is a dynamically updated list of known spam servers that can be used to block spam at the gateway. This means that companies do not have to run all incoming email though antivirus scanners and other filtering technologies, according to the firm. "Most IP addresses are listed as a result of directly sending spam or viruses to the Barracuda Reputation System detectors," said the company in a statement. "The system detects spam by using 'honey-pots', special addresses created to receive ...
Mysterious 'Dark Flow' Found in Space
Post Date: 2008-09-24 18:29:12 by freepatriot32
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(Sept. 23) -- As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered. Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow." The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude. When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there's a fundamental limit to ...
Swiss man to fly channel without plane
Post Date: 2008-09-24 17:19:04 by Split
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'Solo' flight on jet-powered wing and prayerIs it a bird? No, clearly a nutterZoom 1 2 Yves Rossy plans to fly the channel on a jet-powered wing, tomorrow. Weather permitting, the 49-year-old former airline pilot will drop out of an aeroplane at 2,500m over Calais around midday. From there he hopes to reach Dover around ten minutes later depending on how quickly he can decelerate from speeds of up to 300kph. The 3m wing has no moving parts so presumably pointing in the right direction is a priority at such speeds. The event will be streamed live on the National Geographic channel. Although not formally trained in this discipline, the Swiss man, self-styled quite reasonably as ...
Solar Wind Loses Power, Hits 50-year Low
Post Date: 2008-09-24 10:33:28 by farmfriend
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Solar Wind Loses Power, Hits 50-year Low Sept. 23, 2008: In a briefing today at NASA headquarters, solar physicists announced that the solar wind is losing power. "The average pressure of the solar wind has dropped more than 20% since the mid-1990s," says Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "This is the weakest it's been since we began monitoring solar wind almost 50 years ago." McComas is principal investigator for the SWOOPS solar wind sensor onboard the Ulysses spacecraft, which measured the decrease. Ulysses, launched in 1990, circles the sun in a unique orbit that carries it over both the sun's poles and equator, giving ...
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