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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Chimps gain smarts from hanging with humans
Post Date: 2007-06-27 13:29:16 by Tauzero
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Chimps gain smarts from hanging with humans Study shows those raised by humans more likely to learn how to use tools Studies have shown that chimps have culture, cooperate intelligently, and may also be altruistic. Now scientists learn that those enculturated by humans have greater capacity for learning. By Charles Q. Choi Updated: 11:57 a.m. CT June 19, 2007 A bit of human nature can apparently rub off on chimpanzees. Chimps nurtured by humans since birth have a far better chance of figuring out how to use new tools, a new study shows. The findings highlight untapped potential within chimpanzees that can get uncovered "by studying them when they have been raised under very ...
Crustaceans eating away island off Hiroshima
Post Date: 2007-06-26 22:22:46 by Zipporah
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Crustaceans eating away island off HiroshimaA photograph of Hoboro Island taken between about 1955 and 1965. (Photo courtesy of Hiroshima University emeritus professor Yuji Okimura) A recent photograph of Hoboro Island. (Photo courtesy of Yuji Okimura)Nanatsuba-kotsubumushi crustaceans dig holes in the rock on the island. (Photo courtesy of Yuji Okimura) HIGASHIHIROSHIMA, Hiroshima -- An island off the coast of Higashihiroshima is crumbling away due to countless crustaceans that have made holes in its rocks and caused its highest peak to completely disappear.The rocky Hoboro Island has become a breeding ground for huge numbers of creatures known in Japanese as nanatsuba-kotsubumushi, a ...
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming The Deniers -- Part IX
Post Date: 2007-06-26 17:50:18 by richard9151
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Look to Mars for the truth on global warming The Deniers -- Part IX Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Friday, February 02, 2007 Climate change is a much, much bigger issue than the public, politicians, and even the most alarmed environmentalists realize. Global warming extends to Mars, where the polar ice cap is shrinking, where deep gullies in the landscape are now laid bare, and where the climate is the warmest it has been in decades or centuries. "One explanation could be that Mars is just coming out of an ice age," NASA scientist William Feldman speculated after the agency's Mars Odyssey completed its first Martian year of data collection. "In some ...
Will the sun cool us? The Deniers -- Part VII
Post Date: 2007-06-26 17:43:50 by richard9151
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Will the sun cool us? The Deniers -- Part VII Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Friday, February 02, 2007 Apology To Dr. Nigel Weiss The science is settled" on climate change, say most scientists in the field. They believe that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are heating the globe to dangerous levels and that, in the coming decades, steadily increasing temperatures will melt the polar ice caps and flood the world's low-lying coastal areas. Don't tell that to Nigel Weiss, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, past President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a scientist as ...
'Butt dialing' and the nine new deadly sins of cell phone use
Post Date: 2007-06-25 18:42:56 by Zipporah
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'Butt dialing' and the nine new deadly sins of cell phone useDavid Haskin June 22, 2007 (Computerworld) Like many people these days, Sara Winkler dreads being the butt of "butt dialing." That's the name given to unintentional dialing that occurs when keys are inadvertently pressed on cell phones stowed in pants pockets or purses. "It's happened to me twice in the last three months," says Winkler, who lives in Winter Haven, Fla., and is a leadership development specialist at a large insurance company. "I had three-minute messages of shuffling and background noise on my answering machine." "I've done that to my husband, and ...
The Deniers -- Part III & Part IV
Post Date: 2007-06-25 14:50:12 by richard9151
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The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science The Deniers -- Part III Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Friday, February 02, 2007 December 8, 2006 You're a respected scientist, one of the best in your field. So respected, in fact, that when the United Nations decided to study the relationship between hurricanes and global warming for the largest scientific endeavour in its history -- its International Panel on Climate Change -- it called upon you and your expertise. You are Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. You were a contributing author for the UN's second International Panel on Climate Change in 1995, writing ...
Statistics needed
Post Date: 2007-06-25 14:42:54 by richard9151
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The Deniers -- Part I Lawrence Solomon, National Post Published: Friday, February 02, 2007 Tuesday, November 28, 2006 In the global warming debate, there are essentially two broad camps. One believes that the science is settled, that global warming is serious and man-made, and that urgent action must be taken to mitigate or prevent a future calamity. The other believes that the science is far from settled, that precious little is known about global warming or its likely effects, and that prudence dictates more research and caution before intervening massively in the economy. The "science is settled" camp, much the larger of the two, includes many eminent scientists with ...
Science, not politics
Post Date: 2007-06-25 14:32:23 by richard9151
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Published: Friday, April 13, 2007 (I got it, farmy!) Of all the scientists who are labelled "deniers" because they don't support the orthodoxy of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, none comes in for more vilification than Eigil Friis-Christensen. For understandable reasons. Dr. Friis-Christensen questions the very premise that man-made activities explain most of the global warming that we see, and through his work he has convinced much of an entire scientific discipline to explore his line of inquiry. With his 1991 paper in Science, showing a startling correlation between global warming and the activities of the sun, Dr. Friis-Christensen unleashed ...
I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train
Post Date: 2007-06-25 01:55:16 by richard9151
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See the post; The Case Against Anthropogenic Global Warming I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical. In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions caused global warming: 1. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago. 2. Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. ...
CO2 levels as Responsible for Climate Change - True or False?
Post Date: 2007-06-25 01:46:02 by richard9151
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Thanks to sourcery, who found the info! The ice-core man Once upon a time, and for millennia before then, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were low and stable. Then came the industrial revolution and CO2 levels began to rise. The more man industrialized, the more that CO2 -- and the temperature -- rose. In the last half century, with industrialization at unprecedented levels, CO2 reached levels unprecedented in the human history. This is the story of global warming. This story is a fable, says Zbigniew Jaworowski, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International ...
The Case Against Anthropogenic Global Warming
Post Date: 2007-06-25 01:05:06 by sourcery
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Lawrence Solomon's "The Deniers" (a series of articles on the view of scientists who have been labelled "Global Warming Deniers"): Science, not politicsStatistics neededThe original denier: into the coldEnd the chillThey call this a consensus?The limits of predictabilityUnsettled scienceThe ice-core manThe hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk sciencePolar scientists on thin iceThe sun moves climate changeBright sun, warm Earth. Coincidence?Look to Mars for the truth on global warmingRead the sunspotsForget warming - beware the new ice ageLittle Ice Age is still with usFighting climate 'fluff' Other References: Father of Climatology Throws Up at the ...
Will a Disruptive Technology Mothball Therapeutic Cloning?
Post Date: 2007-06-24 20:40:15 by farmfriend
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Will a Disruptive Technology Mothball Therapeutic Cloning? By Michael Cook : BIO| 19 Jun 2007 The global grandees of therapeutic cloning recently gathered in sun-soaked Cairns, the gateway to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, for their annual conference. They have serious strategic issues to deal with along with their scientific papers and posters: persuading governments to open their wallets, ensuring that the Bush Administration's restrictions on their work are lifted, allaying the public's qualms about creating embryos solely for research. But hovering over the buzz of morning coffee has been a dark cloud: as governments everywhere promote it, is therapeutic cloning going to ...
NVIDIA (Tesla) Takes Direct Aim at High Performance Computing
Post Date: 2007-06-24 15:06:54 by robin
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NVIDIA Takes Direct Aim at High Performance Computing by Michael Feldman HPCwire Editor For the past year and half, NVIDIA has been putting together the product strategy for the company's high performance computing platform. On Wednesday, NVIDIA announced Tesla, a GPU product line targeted squarely at HPC customers. The new NVIDIA products are designed to act as computational accelerators for workstations and servers that host high performance technical computing applications. Tesla represents an evolution of NVIDIA's thinking about serving HPC customers. Last year, the company entered the arena of general-purpose computing with GPUs (GPGPU) in earnest with their high-end GeForce ...
The future of cars in America.....
Post Date: 2007-06-24 14:04:27 by richard9151
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Cheap cars allow Indians to jump off motorcycles MUMBAI (AFP) - Trading a motorcycle for a car in India has long been too expensive for many, but manufacturers plan to offer models at 3,000 dollars or less to attract new buyers, analysts say. The push by Nissan Renault, Tata Motors and Global Automobiles -- a subsidiary of the Kolkata-based Xenitis group and China's Guangzhou Motors -- comes as car sales in India fell in April and May to a combined 1.52 million from 1.6 million a year earlier. It was the first back-to-back monthly decline in three years, a period of annual double-digit growth. But a new sales strategy is about to be unleashed. "TataÂ’s small car is ...
Rising sea levels could divide and conquer Antarctic ice
Post Date: 2007-06-24 01:11:11 by robin
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Rising sea levels could divide and conquer Antarctic ice EARTH'S largest ice sheet has till now seemed well able to withstand the effects of climate change, but it may have a hidden weakness. While models predict the air over the East Antarctic ice sheet will remain chilly enough to prevent significant melting for at least a century, a new study suggests that rising sea levels - caused by melting elsewhere - could be its undoing (Geology, vol 35, p 551). A team led by Andrew Mackintosh at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, gauged the ice sheet's past thickness by measuring how high the ice had deposited boulders in Antarctica's Framnes mountains during a period ...
Amazon Longer Than Nile River, Scientists Say
Post Date: 2007-06-23 19:06:48 by Ada
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The Amazon River, not the Nile, is the longest in the world, a team of Brazilian scientists claims. The scientists claim to have traced the river's source to a snow-capped mountain in southern Peru, adding a new twist in the swirling debate over the longest river label. (See a map of the region.) The Amazon is considered the world's largest river by volume, but scientists have believed it is slightly shorter than Africa's Nile. The Brazilian scientists' 14-day expedition extended the Amazon's length by about 176 miles (284 kilometers), making it 65 miles (105 kilometers) longer than the Nile. According to the team's results, which have not been published, the ...
The K7RA Solar Update
Post Date: 2007-06-22 22:14:40 by Tauzero
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The K7RA Solar Update June 23-24 is ARRL Field Day, and it follows a week with no sunspots. As expected, there was a mild geomagnetic upset on Thursday, June 21 when a solar wind stream pushed against Earth's magnetic field. The planetary A index went to 14, a moderate level, but the mid-latitude A index, which affects most of us more directly, was only 8. That number comes from the Fredericksburg Geomagnetic Center near Corbin, Virginia, which is at 38.2 degrees north latitude. Boulder, Colorado provides the mid-latitude A index that we hear on WWV at 18 minutes after each hour, and at 40 degrees north latitude, it produced an A index of 12 for June 21. For the weekend, we might see ...
Firstborns found to have higher intelligence
Post Date: 2007-06-22 12:16:02 by robin
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Firstborns found to have higher intelligence A study of 240,000 Norwegian men says eldest children have IQs 2 to 3 points greater than younger siblings'. By Denise Gellene, Times Staff Writer June 22, 2007 Wading into an age-old debate, researchers have found that firstborn children are smarter than their siblings — and the reason is not genetics, but the way their parents treat them, according to a study published today. The study of 240,000 Norwegian men in the journal Science found the IQs of firstborns were 2 to 3 points higher than that of younger siblings. (The average IQ is 100.) Though that may not sound like a lot, experts said even a few IQ points could make a big ...
Forget warming - beware the new ice age
Post Date: 2007-06-21 22:06:56 by rack42
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In the 1970s, leading scientists claimed that the world was threatened by an era of global cooling. Based on what we've learned this decade, says George Kukla, those scientists - and he was among them -- had it right. The world is about to enter another Ice Age. Dr. Kukla, in 1972 a member of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences and a pioneer in the field of astronomical forcing, became a central figure in convincing the United States government to take the dangers of climate change seriously. In January of that year, he and another geologist, Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened what would become a historic conference of top European and American investigators in ...
Another step toward a liquid telescope on the moon
Post Date: 2007-06-21 17:03:13 by farmfriend
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Contact: Jean-François Huppé Jean-Francois.Huppe@dap.ulaval.ca 418-656-7785 Université Laval Another step toward a liquid telescope on the moon Quebec City, June 20, 2007 – An international team including researcher Ermanno Borra, from Université Laval’s Center for Optics, Photonics, and Laser, has taken another step toward building a liquid telescope on the moon. The researchers have found a combination of materials that allows the creation of a highly reflective liquid mirror capable of functioning even under harsh lunar conditions. The details of the discovery made by Borra and his colleagues will be published in the June 21 edition of Nature. ...
Newton's fourth law: apocalypse
Post Date: 2007-06-21 06:34:04 by Ada
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RENOWNED British scientist Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics and astronomy, predicted the world would end in 2060 in a 1704 letter that went on show in Jerusalem today. A famed rationalist, who secured a royal exemption so that he would not have to follow the teachings of the Church of England, Newton nonetheless based his prediction on a Biblical text. Working from verses in the Book of Daniel, the elaborator of the classical laws of gravity, motion and optics argued that the world would end 1260 years after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire in western Europe in 800 AD. The letter, on show at Jerusalem's Hebrew University as part of an exhibition entitled ...
Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight
Post Date: 2007-06-21 00:50:50 by robin
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June 19, 2007 Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent. Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites. Now there are 5.5 million. Compared to the hundred-some condors presently in the wild, 5.5 million bobwhites sounds like a lot of birds. But what matters is the 25.5 million ...
we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling
Post Date: 2007-06-20 20:23:04 by Horse
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Read the sunspots The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling R. TIMOTHY PATTERSON, Financial Post Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that "the science is settled." At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world ...
Duckon 2007 Singing Tesla Coil
Post Date: 2007-06-20 19:40:25 by Zipporah
1 Comments
see video here This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear. What's not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it's firing.
Poster Comment:this is cool
Weizmann Institute scientists develop a general 'control switch' for protein activity
Post Date: 2007-06-19 11:39:25 by farmfriend
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Weizmann Institute scientists develop a general 'control switch' for protein activity The method may be used in biomedical research, and in the future could be used in gene therapy and in genetic engineering of plants Contact: Jennifer Manning jennifer@acwis.org 212-895-7952 American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science Our bodies could not maintain their existence without thousands of proteins performing myriad vital tasks within cells. Since malfunctioning proteins can cause disease, the study of protein structure and function can lead to the development of drugs and treatments for numerous disorders. For example, the discovery of insulin’s role in diabetes ...
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