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Latest Articles: Science/Tech
HAPPY DARWIN DAY (February 12)
Post Date: 2007-02-10 15:03:48 by robin
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Happy Darwin Day Posted: Friday, February 09, 2007 6:48 PM by Alan BoyleThe calendar boasts plenty of religious holidays, but how many scientific holidays can you name? One of the red-letter days is coming up on Monday, when more than 850 events around the globe will mark Darwin Day, the 198th anniversary of the evolutionary theorist's birth. You can hear about Charles Darwin and the revolution he sparked from hundreds of church pulpits this weekend, as part of a program called Evolution Sunday.AP fileCharles Darwin in an 1875 photo. Are those godless secularists trying to take on the trappings of religion? Not at all, says Robert Stephens, one of the organizers behind Darwin Day. ...
The brain scan that can read people's intentions
Post Date: 2007-02-10 11:08:31 by innieway
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A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act. The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future. The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way. "Using the scanner, we ...
Cosmic 'DNA': Double Helix Spotted in Space
Post Date: 2007-02-09 12:35:14 by Tauzero
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Cosmic 'DNA': Double Helix Spotted in Space By Bjorn Carey http://SPACE.com Staff Writer posted: 15 March 2006 01:00 pm ET Magnetic forces at the center of the galaxy have twisted a nebula into the shape of DNA, a new study reveals. The double helix shape is commonly seen inside living organisms, but this is the first time it has been observed in the cosmos. "Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm," said the study's lead author Mark Morris of UCLA. "Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas—space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order." These ...
Strange lights over the Midwest: are they meteors, UFO’s or the glow of global warming?
Post Date: 2007-02-09 12:17:13 by Tauzero
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Strange lights over the Midwest: are they meteors, UFO’s or the glow of global warming? Dan Brawner February 6, 2007 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of more than 2,500 of the world’s top environmental scientists from 130 nations, meeting in Paris announced that there is a “90 percent” chance that the earth is getting warmer. Oh, really. I wish I had known that heart-warming bit of news earlier this week as I was wriggling across the dirt-floor crawl space under the house with a heat gun to THAW OUT MY FROZEN WATER PIPES! Okay, okay. I’m calm now. But all this talk about how the Midwest could turn into some kind of steamy, equatorial ...
The Mysteries of Mental Age (The parents of a severely disabled 9-year-old Seattle girl have stunted her growth)
Post Date: 2007-02-08 15:06:22 by Jethro Tull
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By Randy Dotinga 02:00 AM Feb, 07, 2007 The parents of a severely disabled 9-year-old Seattle girl have stunted her growth and had her breasts and uterus removed in what they say is an effort to keep her comfortable, happy and portable. She does, after all, have the mind of a three-month-old baby. Or does she? No one is arguing that an intellectual mind is hidden inside the now-famous girl known only as "Ashley." But determining mental age is not a precise science. While assigning a mental age may give Ashley's parents some comfort, determining that number is based largely on guesswork. "How do we know how a three-month-old thinks? We don't," said Cory ...
The Alarm Clock as a Moving Target. Catch It if You Can.
Post Date: 2007-02-07 22:31:47 by Morgana le Fay
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If a screeching buzzer is not enough to get you moving in the morning, consider Clocky. This alarm clock doesn’t just make noise, it breaks the snooze-button habit: after the first snooze period, Clocky rolls off the nightstand and runs away. Clocky generated Internet buzz in 2005 when it was just a conceptual design project by Gauri Nanda, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is now an actual product, available for $50 at http://www.nandahome.com. The clock can survive a two-foot drop and the alarm beeps randomly, ensuring that its frantic squalling won’t be easily forgotten. It comes in white, light blue and light green. The snooze time ...
Hackers Stage Massive Internet Attack; Briefly Overwhelm Some Key Internet Traffic Computers
Post Date: 2007-02-06 18:06:40 by Brian S
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(AP) Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002. Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted for hours but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the resiliency of the Internet. Behind the scenes, computer scientists worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines. Experts said the hackers appeared to disguise their origin, but vast amounts of rogue data in the attacks were traced to South Korea. The attacks appeared to target UltraDNS, ...
American Experience: The Living Weapon
Post Date: 2007-02-05 15:58:10 by Kamala
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American Experience: The Living Weapon Monday, February 5, 9:00pm Central PBS “The Living Weapon” explores the history of America's biological-weapons program, which began in 1942 with a group that worked parallel to the Manhattan Project, and continued to 1969, when President Nixon terminated it.
Arcade extinction is almost upon us
Post Date: 2007-02-04 18:28:45 by orangedog
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It's difficult to write a eulogy for the arcade, that once ubiquitous quarter-eating staple of malls, bowling alleys and college campuses everywhere. Like Saturday morning cartoons and the NHL, it still exists, but has been slowly fading from the American consciousness since its 1980s heyday. But it's hard not to wax poetic about one of the last of the old neighborhood arcades -- the kind of place Norman Rockwell would have painted had he been a Gen-X-er who felt romantic notions about Double Dragon. For many teens in the late '70s and '80s (before the advent of Xbox, cellphones and MySpace), arcades were actually prime destinations. It wasn't just that my generation was ...
46 Nations Back New Environmental Body
Post Date: 2007-02-03 20:54:31 by robin
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46 Nations Back New Environmental Body 46 Nations, Minus U.S., Sign on to Call for New World Body to Protect Warming Planet By ANGELA CHARLTON The Associated Press PARIS - Forty-five nations answered France's call Saturday for a new environmental body to slow inevitable global warming and protect the planet, perhaps with policing powers to punish violators. Absent were the world's heavyweight polluter, the United States, and booming nations on the same path as the U.S. China and India. The charge led by French President Jacques Chirac came a day after the release of an authoritative and disturbingly grim scientific report in Paris that said global warming is "very ...
Top energy scientists agree, Bush wrong on alternative fuels
Post Date: 2007-02-02 21:19:12 by DeaconBenjamin
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Published on Thursday, February 1, 2007 by Global Public Media Washington, DC--At an all-day Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee conference on "renewable biofuels," witnesses from three of America’s premier energy research institutions cast grave doubt on the feasibility of reaching President Bush’s State of the Union goal of manufacturing 35 billion gallons a year of alternative fuels by 2017. The witnesses agreed that DOE’s spending on alternative fuels was far, far below what was necessary to meet the president’s goal, much less the more critical goals of increasing the country’s energy security while decreasing carbon emissions. ... ...
Russia probes smelly orange snow
Post Date: 2007-02-02 21:06:21 by robin
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Russia probes smelly orange snow Russia has flown a team of chemical experts to a Siberian region to find out why smelly, coloured snow has been falling over several towns. Oily yellow and orange snowflakes fell over an area of more than 1,500sq km (570sq miles) in the Omsk region on Wednesday, Russian officials said. Chemical tests were under way to determine the cause, they said. Residents have been advised not to use the snow for household tasks or let animals graze on it. "So far we cannot explain the snow, which is oily to the touch and has a pronounced rotten smell," said Omsk environmental prosecutor Anton German, quoted by the Russian news agency Itar-Tass on ...
Unsettled Scores
Post Date: 2007-02-02 13:14:20 by Tauzero
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Unsettled Scores HAS THE BLACK-WHITE IQ GAP NARROWED? BY MARINA KRAKOVSKY This much is uncontested: for most of the 20th century, blacks worldwide have scored, on average, 15 points lower on most IQ tests than whites have. What scientists cannot agree on is why. Most attribute the gap to differences in education, health and other environmental influences. Hereditarians, on the other hand, view the black-white difference as largely genetic in origin. They note, among other indirect evidence, that the disparity persists across time and around the world — a permanence that is crucial to the debate over what explains group differences. “If black-white differences converged—if ...
The scientific verdict is in: Earth no longer hangs in the balance. It is in extremis.
Post Date: 2007-02-02 10:51:54 by robin
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February 2-4, 2007 -- WMR previously reported that LNG and oil tankers were reporting that their methane sensors were being tripped by methane bubbling up from deep on the ocean floor -- a sign that rising ocean temperatures are resulting in methane hydrate being turned from ice into gaseous form, a deadly addition to the greenhouse gases already in the earth's atmosphere. A recent paper written by nine American and Canadian scientists (Paull, C. K., W. Ussler III, S. R. Dallimore, S. M. Blasco, T. D. Lorenson, H. Melling, B. E. Medioli, F. M. Nixon, and F. A. McLaughlin) and published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) provides further confirmation about the escape of methane ...
Dinosaurs say: Gravity was weaker in the past!
Post Date: 2007-02-02 07:37:50 by YertleTurtle
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THE IMPOSSIBLE DINOSAURS Ted Holden A careful study of the sizes of the giant dinosaurs creatures and of what it would take to deal with such sizes in our world, the felt effect of gravity being what it is now, indicates that something was massively different in the world which these creatures inhabited. A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossil finds dating from the 1970's dwarf him. The Avon field Guide to Dinosaurs shows a brachiosaur (larger than a brontosaur), a supersaur, and an ultrasaur juxtaposed, and the ultrasaur dwarfs ...
Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study
Post Date: 2007-02-02 00:15:14 by robin
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Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study Ian Sample, science correspondent Friday February 2, 2007 Guardian Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. The UN report was written by ...
The Saga Of the Lost Space Tapes
Post Date: 2007-01-31 11:45:52 by Indrid Cold
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As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his "one small step" onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander's door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. The ghostly images of the astronaut's boot touching the soil record what may be the most iconic moment in NASA history, and a major milestone for mankind. Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even mesmerized. What they didn't know was that the Apollo 11 camera had actually sent back video far crisper and more dramatic -- spectacular images that, remarkably, only a handful of people have ever ...
Scientists: Flores island "Hobbit" is new species
Post Date: 2007-01-30 08:16:10 by Ada
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The tiny woman dubbed the Hobbit who lived 18,000 years ago on a remote Indonesian island deserves to be deemed a new human species and not a deformed modern human as skeptics assert, researchers said on Monday. In the latest salvo in a heated scientific shootout, an international team led by Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk compared the Hobbit's skull to those of nine people with microcephaly, a rare condition in which the head is abnormally small due to improper brain development. They concluded the 3-foot-tall (1-meter) adult woman had a highly evolved brain, unlike that of a microcephalic person, confirming she belongs to the proposed ...
Chip companies entering their metal period
Post Date: 2007-01-29 15:39:43 by Tauzero
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Chip companies entering their metal period By Tom Krazit, >http://CNET.com, January 29, 2007 The chip industry is changing the recipe for its transistors to continue improving performance for another generation. For almost 40 years, chipmakers have been building transistor gates--the basic switch in a transistor--out of silicon. But Intel, IBM and Advanced Micro Devices now plan to introduce new materials for transistor gates that significantly cut power leakage while dramatically improving performance, company executives said this week in separate announcements. Silicon Valley will not have to be renamed, as silicon remains the basic material for the chip and that's not changing ...
Study: Surface of Mars Devoid of Life
Post Date: 2007-01-29 14:25:57 by richard9151
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This story was updated at 11:50 am EST. The last refuge for Martian life, if it exists, might be deep below the planet's surface and beyond the reach of any currently planned missions, according to a new study. After mapping cosmic radiation levels at various depths on Mars, researchers have concluded that any life within the first several yards of the planet's surface would be killed by lethal doses of cosmic radiation. The finding will be detailed in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Unlike Earth, Mars is no longer protected by a global magnetic field or thick atmosphere. As a result, the planet has been vulnerable to radiation from space for ...
Gordon Novell Interview
Post Date: 2007-01-28 23:26:18 by Simmering Frog
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http://www.projectcamelot.net/gordon_novel.wmv The choosen category for this document is much broader than "Science/Tech"
Key study of global warming prepared
Post Date: 2007-01-28 15:34:28 by robin
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Scripps, UCSD scholars contribute to document By Bruce Lieberman UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER January 28, 2007 Veerabhadran Ramanathan doubted for years that greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels were warming the planet. No longer. Mario MolinaVeerabhadran Ramanathan Richard SomervilleLynne Talley “The (scientific) community has come around, not because of anything intangible. It's just that the data is so overpowering,” said Ramanathan, a climate scientist at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. Researchers are more confident than ever about the causes of global warming, how they're changing Earth and what might be ...
Windows Vista Is Okay. Pity About Third Party Drivers
Post Date: 2007-01-26 21:16:36 by robin
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MICROSOFT ¦ From ($199 If Upgrading) ¦ Microsoft.com.au For: Slick looking. Easy to navigate. Improved speed with new PCAgainst: Third party drivers missingVerdict: Great piece of software that takes Microsoft OS computing to the next level Late in November I configured a brand new duel core BenQ notebook with the new Windows Vista operating system. I also loaded a full version of the new Microsoft Office 2007.And if that was not enough I then trotted off to the CES Expo in Las Vegas to cover the show. And you know what, almost everything that Microsoft had promised worked.However there were a few exceptions one of them being web mail. I know find out that a patch has to be ...
Fanning Fears of a Space War
Post Date: 2007-01-26 10:44:55 by tom007
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Fanning Fears of a Space War [Print story] [E-mail story] [Rants + Raves] Page 1 of 1
India, Russia For Axis With China
Post Date: 2007-01-25 22:45:15 by Brian S
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New Delhi, January 25 India and Russia today supported their trilateral axis with China, but opposed Beijing’s January 11 testing of an anti-satellite missile saying that they were against militarisation of space. President Putin went on to the extent of saying that some powers (read the USA) were trying to militarise space. “We should not let the genie out of the bottle. That is our position,” Mr Putin said at a joint press interaction with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after their formal talks. As Russian President Vladimir Putin held the seventh Indo-Russian summit with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Hyderabad House here this afternoon, it was clear that the two giant ...
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