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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Study casts doubt on water on Mars surface
Post Date: 2008-03-01 02:51:07 by farmfriend
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Study casts doubt on water on Mars surface By Will Dunham, Reuters Fri Feb 29, 4:34 PM EST It made a big splash when scientists announced in 2006 that images from a NASA spacecraft indicated water apparently had flowed on the surface of Mars in the past decade but new research casts doubt on that finding. Other scientists on Friday said new images and computer simulations strongly indicate that a landslide of sand and gravel is a more likely explanation for the bright deposits in gullies previously touted as evidence of recent water flow. "We started off not thinking that we were going to debunk anything. I absolutely thought it was going to be liquid," Jon Pelletier, a ...
Particle Collider's Last Big Piece Set
Post Date: 2008-03-01 02:36:54 by farmfriend
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Particle Collider's Last Big Piece Set By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, AP Fri Feb 29, 8:19 PM EST Engineers on Friday fitted the last major piece into what they say will be the world's largest scientific instrument — a nuclear particle accelerator in a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border. The wheel-shaped piece of equipment, with a diameter of about 30 feet, was lowered down a 330-foot shaft and fitted with other equipment known as detectors in an underground room the size of a cathedral. "It's exciting but at the same time there is a feeling of relief," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as he watched. ...
Climate orthodoxy perpetrates a hoax
Post Date: 2008-02-28 20:10:46 by farmfriend
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Climate orthodoxy perpetrates a hoax Monday, February 25, 2008 GORDON FULKS Gov. Ted Kulongoski's successful purge of George Taylor -- Oregon's former state climatologist and soon-to-be former director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University -- has a clear message for scientists: agree with the governor or you too will disappear. Don't hint that man-made global warming is the greatest scientific hoax of our time. It offends the governor. Many, like Taylor, are unwilling to support political agendas at odds with good science but also too polite to play the role of the little boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes." They will quietly say, ...
Housecat's Genes Traced to the Middle East
Post Date: 2008-02-28 18:28:06 by Tauzero
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Housecat's Genes Traced to the Middle East Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Jan. 31, 2008 -- The roots of the domesticated cat's family tree all converge in the Middle East, with many surprising ancestral twists and turns along the way, reveals a new genetic study on house kitties that included purebreds, mutts and even feral felines. The study, one of the most extensive of its kind, used 39 genetic identity markers identified in 11,100 cats. Like branches on a person's family tree, these were used to determine the heritage of today's cats. The DNA evidence adds to earlier archaeological findings and research that suggested the mother of all housecats was Middle Eastern. ...
Gene Expression Differences Affect Drug Response
Post Date: 2008-02-28 18:00:16 by Tauzero
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Gene Expression Differences Affect Drug Response Thursday, February 28, 2008; 12:00 AM THURSDAY, Feb. 28 (HealthDay News) -- People of European and African ancestry have differences in gene expression levels that affect how they respond to certain kinds of drugs and fight off specific types of infections, says a new U.S. study. Researchers studied 30 white families from Utah and 30 Yoruban families from Nigeria, and found significant variations in nearly 5 percent of the 9,156 genes they analyzed. The findings were published online in theAmerican Journal of Human Geneticsand are expected to be published in the March 7 print issue of the journal. "Our primary interest is the genes ...
A FIRE RAINBOW
Post Date: 2008-02-28 14:14:50 by farmfriend
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THIS IS A FIRE RAINBOW - THE RAREST OF ALL NATURALLY OCCURRING ATMOSPHERIC PHENOMENA THE PICTURE WAS CAPTURED THIS WEEK ON THE IDAHO/WASHINGTON BORDER. THE EVENT LASTED ABOUT 1 HOUR CLOUDS HAVE TO BE CIRRUS, AT LEAST 20K FEET IN THE AIR, WITH JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF ICE CRYSTALS AND THE SUN HAS TO HIT THE CLOUDS AT PRECISELY 58 DEGREES.
Nature: red in tooth & politics
Post Date: 2008-02-27 18:31:16 by farmfriend
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Nature: red in tooth & politics Peter Foster, Financial Post Published: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 The journal Nature is one of the most-cited scientific publications in the world, but a recent editorial attacking Canada's Conservative government is outrageously biased. Indeed, it could easily have been written by David "Off with their heads" Suzuki. Maybe it was. Nature's attack, published last week, suggests that while Canada's scientific researchers rank among the best in the world, "their government's track record is dismal by comparison." The editorial goes on to claim that "Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in ...
Blind Irishman sees with the aid of son's tooth in his eye
Post Date: 2008-02-27 18:16:07 by angle
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DUBLIN (AFP) - An Irishman blinded by an explosion two years ago has had his sight restored after doctors inserted his son's tooth in his eye, he said on Wednesday. Bob McNichol, 57, from County Mayo in the west of the country, lost his sight in a freak accident when red-hot liquid aluminium exploded at a re-cycling business in November 2005. "I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life," McNichol told RTE state radio. After doctors in Ireland said there was nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in ...
Teenage anger linked to brains: study
Post Date: 2008-02-27 18:08:59 by angle
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HONG KONG (Reuters) - Aggression in some teenage boys may be linked to overly large Amygdalas in their brains, a study by scientists in Australia and the United States has found. In an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, they said these boys may also be unable to control their emotions because other parts of the brain that normally control strong emotions don't mature till the early 20s. "It is important for parents to bear in mind that while their teenage child looks like an adult and does very complicated work at school, parts of their brain are still developing really until the 20s," Nicholas Allen at the University of Melbourne's psychology ...
Doomsday Vault safeguards Harrow soybean seeds
Post Date: 2008-02-27 12:55:11 by Fred Mertz
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HARROW -- Soybeans grown in Harrow have been locked in the Doomsday Vault along with seeds from around the world, preserved and protected in case of disaster. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault that's been dubbed the Doomsday Vault opened Tuesday on a snowy Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle. Canada sent 5,936 seed samples representing 94 different species from the national seed bank located in Saskatoon, including 109 varieties of soybeans that were grown at the Greenhouse and Processing Crops Research Centre in Harrow. "It was grown under the sun of Ontario," Axel Diederichsen, curator and research scientist of the Plant Gene Resources of Canada Centre in Saskatoon, said ...
The cold truth about climate change
Post Date: 2008-02-26 23:38:55 by robin
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The cold truth about climate change Deniers continue to insist there's no consensus on global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations. By Joseph Romm Feb. 27, 2008 | The more I write about global warming, the more I realize I share some things in common with the doubters and deniers who populate the blogosphere and the conservative movement. Like them, I am dubious about the process used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to write its reports. Like them, I am skeptical of the so-called consensus on climate science as reflected in the IPCC reports. Like them, I disagree with people who say "the science ...
Centuries-old Maya Blue mystery finally solved
Post Date: 2008-02-26 18:00:14 by farmfriend
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Centuries-old Maya Blue mystery finally solved Production of the renowned, extremely stable pigment was part of ritual sacrifices at Chichén Itzá Contact: Greg Borzo gborzo@fieldmuseum.org 312-665-7106 Field Museum CHICAGO—Anthropologists from Wheaton College (Illinois) and The Field Museum have discovered how the ancient Maya produced an unusual and widely studied blue pigment that was used in offerings, pottery, murals and other contexts across Mesoamerica from about A.D. 300 to 1500. First identified in 1931, this blue pigment (known as Maya Blue) has puzzled archaeologists, chemists and material scientists for years because of its unusual chemical stability, ...
Attack on computer memory reveals vulnerability of widely used security systems
Post Date: 2008-02-26 17:49:13 by farmfriend
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Attack on computer memory reveals vulnerability of widely used security systems Contact: Steven Schultz sschultz@princeton.edu 609-258-3617 Princeton University, Engineering School A team of academic, industry and independent researchers has demonstrated a new class of computer attacks that compromise the contents of “secure” memory systems, particularly in laptops. The attacks overcome a broad set of security measures called “disk encryption,” which are meant to secure information stored in a computer’s permanent memory. The researchers cracked several widely used technologies, including Microsoft’s BitLocker, Apple’s FileVault and Linux’s ...
Earth's Final Sunset Predicted [it's not too late but time's running out]
Post Date: 2008-02-26 17:20:59 by a vast rightwing conspirator
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Earth's Final Sunset Predicted Clara Moskowitz Staff Writer SPACE.com Tue Feb 26, 6:45 AM ET "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice," wrote the poet Robert Frost. Astronomers, it turns out, are in the former camp. A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun's gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not. Other theorists have predicted that our planet will fry as the sun expands in its old age. But the time estimates have varied by a couple billion years. "Although people have looked at these ...
Fresh Tests on The Shroud of Turin
Post Date: 2008-02-26 06:03:54 by Ada
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The Oxford laboratory that declared the Turin Shroud to be a medieval fake 20 years ago is investigating claims that its findings were wrong. The head of the world-renowned laboratory has admitted that carbon dating tests it carried out on Christendom's most famous relic may be inaccurate. The Turin Shroud on display in Turin's Cathedral Carbon dating tests carried out 20 years ago on the Shroud of Turin suggested that the relic was a forgery Professor Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said he was treating seriously a new theory suggesting that contamination had skewed the results. Though he stressed that he would be ...
CHAPTER 7: Introduction to the Atmosphere - Causes of Climate Change
Post Date: 2008-02-25 22:03:19 by robin
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CHAPTER 7: Introduction to the Atmosphere Causes of Climate Change Figure 7y-1 illustrates the basic components that influence the state of the Earth's climatic system. Changes in the state of this system can occur externally (from extraterrestrial systems) or internally (from ocean, atmosphere and land systems) through any one of the described components. For example, an external change may involve a variation in the Sun's output which would externally vary the amount of solar radiation received by the Earth's atmosphere and surface. Internal variations in the Earth's climatic system may be caused by changes in the concentrations of atmospheric gases, mountain building, ...
Honey bee invaders exploit the genetic resources of their predecessors
Post Date: 2008-02-25 17:56:01 by Tauzero
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Honey bee invaders exploit the genetic resources of their predecessors Like any species that aspires to rule the world, the honey bee, Apis mellifera, invades new territories in repeated assaults. A new study demonstrates that when these honey bees arrive in a place that has already been invaded, the newcomers benefit from the genetic endowment of their predecessors. The findings appear online the week of Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers, University of Illinois entomology professor Charles Whitfield and postdoctoral researcher Amro Zayed, analyzed specific markers of change in the genes of honey bees in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. ...
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2008-02-25 17:02:23 by angle
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Posted by angle at the request of Cynicom: Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average." China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too ...
Jekyll-Hyde neutron star discovered by researchers
Post Date: 2008-02-24 00:03:37 by farmfriend
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Contact: Mark Shainblum mark.shainblum@mcgill.ca 514-398-2189 McGill University Jekyll-Hyde neutron star discovered by researchers NASA and McGill scientists find star which morphs from pulsar to magnetar Like something out of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, researchers at NASA and McGill University discovered an otherwise normal pulsar which violently transformed itself temporarily into a magnetar, a stellar metamorphosis never observed before. Powerful X-ray bursts from the pulsar in the Kes 75 supernova remnant were discovered by former McGill PhD Dr. Fotis Gavrill, currently assigned to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in collaboration with Dr. ...
A Fresh Look Inside Mount St. Helens
Post Date: 2008-02-23 23:48:18 by farmfriend
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A Fresh Look Inside Mount St. Helens Email: Jennifer Donovan February 19, 2007--Volcanoes are notoriously hard to study. All the action takes place deep inside, at enormous temperatures. So geophysicists make models, using what they know to develop theories about what they don’t know. Research led by Gregory P. Waite, an assistant professor of geophysics at Michigan Technological University, has produced a new seismic model for figuring out what’s going on inside Mount St. Helens, North America’s most active volcano. Waite hopes his research into the causes of the earthquakes that accompany the eruption of a volcano will help scientists better assess the hazard of a ...
CCTV Busting Infra-Red Headset Makes You Invisible
Post Date: 2008-02-22 11:57:59 by gengis gandhi
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CCTV Busting Infra-Red Headset Makes You Invisible By Charlie Sorrel EmailFebruary 21, 2008 | 8:10:31 AMCategories: Hacks, Hacks, Security, Security iredeye.jpg A German art project could help the British avoid the oppressive proliferation of surveillance cameras in their country. The I-R.A.S.C is simple, consisting of a circle of infra-red LEDs mounted on a headband. The infra red is invisible to The Man, but will cause CCTV cameras to flare out over the face of the wearer, obscuring his identity and making this the digital equivalent of a hooded sweatshirt. This is not a production unit, but given that you'd only need a hat, a battery and a few LEDs, you could easily knock one up ...
Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future?
Post Date: 2008-02-21 14:04:45 by gengis gandhi
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Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future? Print Paranormal & Unexplained, Written by Danny Penman images-1 Deep in the basement of a dusty old library in Edinburgh lies a small black box that churns out random numbers. At first glance the box looks profoundly dull, but it is, in fact, the ‘eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future. The machine apparently sensed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened, and appeared to forewarn of the Asian Tsunami. "It's Earth shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, Emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the USA. "But ...
Lunar eclipse going on right now
Post Date: 2008-02-20 22:41:49 by Jethro Tull
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It should be the last one for a couple years. If you can brave he cold (us Northern folk at least) it's worth a peek.
Rogue Satellite's Rotten, $10 Billion Legacy
Post Date: 2008-02-20 21:12:52 by robin
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That satellite that's due to be shot down this week was bad news, even before it got off the ground. The failed orbiter, USA-193, is widely believed to be part of a classified surveillance in space program known as Future Imagery Architecture, or FIA. And FIA is known as one of the biggest defense-technology boondoggles in recent history -- "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects," The New York Times once wrote. FIA was originally supposed to be a constellation of satellites using electro-optical and radar sensors to "gather clearer and more-frequent images -- even at night and when there is a cloud ...
Weather May Delay Shootdown of Satellite [Best Military Weapons Money Can Buy...LOL!!!]
Post Date: 2008-02-20 11:47:37 by Brian S
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Weather May Delay Shootdown of Satellite By ROBERT BURNS – 1 hour ago WASHINGTON (AP) — High seas in the north Pacific may force the Navy to wait another day before launching a heat-seeking missile on a mission to shoot down a wayward U.S. spy satellite, the Pentagon said Wednesday. Weather conditions are one of many factors that U.S. military officers are taking into account as they decide whether to proceed with the mission Wednesday or to put it off, according to a senior military officer who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on condition that he not be identified. The officer said the assumption had been that the mission would go forward Wednesday night, unless conditions ...
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