No There, There

Astronomers Puzzled by Cosmic Black Hole - The Huffington Post: "WASHINGTON — Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years away. But what the Minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that's far bigger than scientists ever imagined..."

Levitation Revealed

The Raw Story | Scientists reveal secret of levitation: "Scientists have discovered a ground-breaking way of levitating ultra small objects, which may revolutionise the design of micro-machines, a new report says.

Physicists said they can create 'incredible levitation effects' by manipulating so-called Casimir force, which normally causes objects to stick together by quantum force..."

Cat of Death

"This sort of thing makes one wonder if the personification of Death should in fact be a cat, although, oddly enough, not a black cat..."; click Respectful Insolence: The Kitty of Doom.

UFOs Are Real

The flying wing concept aircraft takes flight | NetworkWorld.com Community: "The flying wing concept aircraft takes flight
Submitted by Layer 8 on Thu, 07/26/2007 - 5:32pm.

Looking a little bit too much like an F-117 Night Hawk fighter on steroids Boeing's blended wing unmanned test aircraft flew for the first time last week.

Designed and engineered by Boeing, NASA and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the aircraft are said to be able to carry greater amounts of equipment, burn less fuel and run quieter than traditional aircraft..."

Greek Mastodon Found

BBC NEWS | Europe | Greek mastodon find 'spectacular': "The remains of a prehistoric mastodon - a mammoth-like animal - have been found in northern Greece, including intact long tusks.

A Dutch scientist at the site, Dick Mol, says the find near Grevena should help explain why mastodons died out in Europe two to three million years ago."

Robot Air Attack Squadron Bound for Iraq

Robot Air Attack Squadron Bound for Iraq - The Huffington Post: "BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq — The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It's outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.

The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.

The arrival of these outsized U.S. 'hunter-killer' drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill."

Water World Spied

Guardian:"British astronomers have detected water in the atmosphere of an enormous, fiery planet that circles a distant star far beyond our own solar system.

The discovery raises hopes that the substance considered most vital for life may be ubiquitous throughout the galaxy and wider universe.

The finding, described in Nature today, proves scientists can overcome what has long been thought one of the greatest hurdles in the search for extraterrestrial life - the ability to analyse atmospheres of distant worlds for signs of living organisms."

Small Earth

ScienceDaily: Earth smaller than thought: "Earth smaller than thought

BONN, Germany, July 6 (UPI) -- German researchers say their discovery that the Earth is smaller than originally thought may have serious ramifications for climate change.

The difference is minute -- all of five millimeters -- but that is crucial to studying how climate changes the Earth, said researchers at Bonn University.

Five millimeters (0.2 inches) is less than half the width of an average finger, which may seem negligible in comparison to the earth's diameter of 7,926.3812 miles."

Tunguska Crater

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Team makes Tunguska crater claim: "Scientists have identified a possible crater left by the biggest space impact in modern times - the Tunguska event.

The blast levelled more than 2,000 sq km of forest near the Tunguska River in Siberia on 30 June 1908..."

Cold Life

Drifting icebergs are hotspots of life | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "WASHINGTON — Icebergs that break off Antarctica and drift away turn out to be hotspots of life in the cold southern ocean, researchers report. Climate warming has led to an increase in the number of icebergs breaking away from the Antarctic in recent years, and a team of researchers set out to study the impact the giant ice chunks were having on the environment.

Turns out, the melting ice also dumps particles scraped off Antarctica into the ocean, providing a pool of nutrients that feed plankton and tiny shrimplike creatures known as krill..."

Fruit Power

Fruit-based fuel could beat out corn-based rival | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle: "MILWAUKEE, WIS. — A simple sugar found in fruit and a variety of other sources could be converted to fuel for cars and trucks.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers said last week they have found a better way of converting fructose, a common sugar, into a fuel called 2,5-dimethylfuran, or DMF.

The biofuel has a higher energy content than ethanol, the only renewable liquid fuel currently produced on a large scale. It also doesn't absorb water from the atmosphere, a shortcoming of ethanol, said James Dumesic, one of the researchers and a professor of chemical and biological engineering at the university."

The Real Big Bird

Remains of Giant Dinosaur Found in China - The Huffington Post: "BEIJING — The remains of a giant, birdlike dinosaur as tall as the formidable tyrannosaur have been found in China, a surprising discovery that indicates a more complicated evolutionary process for birds than originally thought, scientists said Wednesday.

Fossilized bones uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China's Inner Mongolia region show that the specimen was about 26 feet long, 16 feet tall and weighed 3,000 pounds, said Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

The height is comparable to the meat-eating tyrannosaurs. But the dinosaur, called Gigantoraptor erlianensis, also had a beak and slender legs and likely had feathers. It was 35 times larger than its likely close relation, the Caudiperyx, a small, feathered dinosaur species, Xu said.

That puts the Gigantoraptor's existence at odds with prevailing theories that dinosaurs became smaller as they evolved into birds and that bigger dinosaurs had less birdlike characteristics, he said..."

Broadcast Power

NewsFactor Business | MIT's 'WiTricity' Makes Power Cords Obsolete: "The MIT researchers who developed the 'WiTricity' wireless power technology haven't set their sights on global broadcast power just yet, but the team is already envisioning wirelessly transmitting power to laptops or cell phones across an office or inside a house. Because the power stream can be consistent, the devices would not even need batteries..."

Warm Finns

Simply Left Behind: The Non-Rapturist's Guide To The Galaxy: "HELSINKI (Reuters) - Global warming is bringing more warmer-climate creatures to Finland, including moths that feast on human blood, according to nature researchers.

Insect-watchers are spotting more and more calpe moths in the Nordic country, which used to be considered too cold for the insects from southeast Asia, Finnish nature magazine 'Suomen Luonto' (ed. note. Literally, 'Nature of Finland') reported in its June edition..."

New Critters

Discovery Channel :: News - Animals :: 24 New Species Found in Suriname: "June 4, 2007 — A frog with fluorescent purple markings and 12 kinds of dung beetles were among two dozen new species discovered in the remote plateaus of eastern Suriname, scientists said Monday.

The expedition was sponsored by two mining companies hoping to excavate the area for bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminum, and it was unknown how the findings would affect their plans..."

Altair Mapped

Discovery Channel :: News - Space :: Star Surface Map Reveals Hot Poles: "May 31, 2007 — The star known as Altair is no longer just a point of twinkling light in the sky, thanks to a new image of its surface. The first-ever star surface map reveals a rapidly rotating giant orb with hot poles and a cooler, thickened equator that is radically different from our sun..."

Tracking Users

BBC NEWS | Technology | Anger over DRM-free iTunes tracks: "The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them.

Some fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on file-sharing sites..."

Tree Walking

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Upright walking 'began in trees': "The ancestors of humans began walking upright while they were still living in trees - not out on open land, according to a new theory.

The traditional view is of bipedalism evolving gradually from the four-legged 'knuckle-walking' displayed by chimpanzees and gorillas today.

Now, a study published in the journal Science disputes this idea.

The British authors of the study say that upright walking was always a feature of great ape behaviour..."

Nessie Returns

Man Says He's Got a New Loch Ness Video | The Huffington Post: "EDINBURGH, Scotland — The Loch Ness monster is back _ and there's video. A man has captured what Nessie watchers say is possible footage of the supposed mythical creature beneath Scotland's most mysterious lake.

'I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water,' said Gordon Holmes, the 55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, who took the video Saturday..."

More Planets

Mad In The Middle: "28 New Exoplanets Discovered | LiveScience: 'HONOLULU--Astronomers have discovered 28 new planets outside of our solar system, increasing to 236 the number of known exoplanets, revealing that planets can exist around a broad spectrum of stellar types--from tiny, dim stars to giants.

'We added 12 percent to the total in the last year, and we're very proud of that,' said one of the study team members Jason Wright of the University of California at Berkeley. 'This provides new planetary systems so that we can study their properties as an ensemble...''"

Black Holes

Merging Black Holes Observed in New Detail - Yahoo! News: "Scientists have pinpointed the precise locations of a pair of supermassive black holes at the centers of two colliding galaxies 300 million light-years away..."

Never Lost Training

The Daily Dish: Creating New Senses: "For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

'It was slightly strange at first,' Wächter says, 'though on the bike, it was great.' He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. 'I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,' he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, 'I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place...'"

Terra Nova

Potentially habitable planet found - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for 'life in the universe.'

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a 'red dwarf,' is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun..."

Top 10 Strangest Things in Space

Click the link.
SPACE.com -- Top 10 Strangest Things in Space

Black Hole Emits Plasma

Black Hole Cluster Breathes Out Enormous Gas Cloud - Yahoo! News: "Astronomers have spotted a giant cloud of superheated gas 6 million light years wide that might be generated by a cluster of supermassive black holes.

The plasma cloud, detailed in April 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal, might be the source of mysterious cosmic rays that permeate our universe..."

InformationWeek Weblog: The Year 2000 As Predicted In 1900: Did They Anticipate Wireless Phones And TV?

InformationWeek Weblog: The Year 2000 As Predicted In 1900: Did They Anticipate Wireless Phones And TV?
It is always interesting to see what people in the past thought "the future" would be like. Predictions usually say more about the people in the age they were made than they do about the future. But sometimes, a few of these predictions really hit home.

I came across this article from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900 entitled, "Predictions of the Year 2000" on Andrew Sullivan's blog. While most of these predictions seem totally out of date, more than a few are not that off the mark. Take this one, for example:

Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and
telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic
will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We
will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York
to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their
locality without the intervention of a "hello girl".

Perfect Nebula

Ker Than
Staff Writer
SPACE.com

"If symmetry is a sign of splendor, then the newly discovered Red Square nebula is one of the most beautiful objects in the universe.

Seen in the infrared, the nebula resembles a giant, glowing red box in the sky, with a bright white inner core. A dying star called MWC 922 is located at the system's center and spewing its innards from opposite poles into space. (A nebula is an interstellar cloud of gas, dust and plasma where stars can both emerge and die...)"

Eye Contact

Study finds holding eye contact is critical when police confront hysterical citizens: "New research relies on footage from TV show 'COPS'

DURHAM, N.H. -- Holding eye contact, or 'gaze,' with hysterical citizens is one of the most effective methods police officers can use to calm them down, according to new research conducted by the University of New Hampshire that relies on footage of the FOX TV show 'COPS.'

The study by Mardi Kidwell, assistant professor of communication, '�Calm Down!�: the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the police,' was published recently in Discourse Studies.

According to Kidwell�s research, regulating gaze is central to face-to-face interaction. For police officers, it�s an important factor in gaining compliance from and calming hysterical citizens..."

Signs of water seen on planet outside solar system - Yahoo! News

Signs of water seen on planet outside solar system - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Evidence of water has been detected for the first time in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer said on Tuesday, a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth.


Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b..."

3D Land

New 3-D movies more than a gimmick - CNN.com: "LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- By the end of the decade, Darth Vader could be rattling sabers with his enemies above the heads of moviegoers, and Buzz Lightyear could be flying off the screen on his way to infinity and beyond.

A growing number of blockbuster, live-action films and animated movies are expected to be offered in 3-D in the next few years, as thousands of theaters around the country are outfitted with the special projectors and screens needed to show the films..."

Magnetic Flyers

SCI FI Tech SCIFI.COM: "Future spacecrafts may use the magnetic fields around Earth and other planets to bounce around the Solar System, providing a completely new method of space travel. It's all very complicated if you aren't some sort of rocket scientist, but the basic idea involves using radioactively charge particles to propel a craft with no rocket boosters required..."

Mind Scanners

Wired News: Pentagon Preps Mind Fields: "The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking..."

Croc Unearthed in Oregon

LiveScience.com - Jurassic Crocodile Unearthed in Oregon: "The fossil of an ancient amphibious reptile with a crocodile's body and a fish's tail has been unearthed in Oregon. Scientists believe the creature's remains were transported by geologic processes nearly 5,000 miles away from where it originally died more than 100 million years ago.

The new fossil is the oldest crocodilian ever unearthed in Oregon and one of the few to be unearthed on this side of the Pacific. The “hybrid” animal is thought to be a new species within the genus Thalattosuchia, a group of crocodilians living during the age of dinosaurs."

Fat Plastic

Chemicals May Play Role in Rise in Obesity - washingtonpost.com: "Too many calories and too little exercise are undeniably the major factors contributing to the obesity epidemic, but several recent animal studies suggest that environmental exposure to widely used chemicals may also help make people fat.

The evidence is preliminary, but a number of researchers are pursuing indications that the chemicals, which have been shown to cause abnormal changes in animals' sexual development, can also trigger fat-cell activity -- a process scientists call adipogenesis..."

Smart Germs

LiveScience.com - New Technique Stores Data in Bacteria: "
Artificial DNA with encoded information can be added to the genome of common bacteria, thus preserving the data. The technique was developed at Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. If you think those USB flash memory 'thumbdrives' are small, check this data storage out.

According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism. Scientists successfully encoded and attached the phrase 'e=mc2 1905' to the DNA of bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacteria.

One early use for the technique would be to create special markers to identify legitimate versions of pharmaceuticals. However, the bacillus itself creates new copies of the data every time it reproduces itself, thus making it an ideal archival storage system..."

Gamers Good At Unreal Surgery

Unreal Surgery: Gamers score on laparoscopic surgery tests: "Laparoscopic surgery, in which instruments and cameras are inserted into patients via small incisions, has played a key role in the development of minimally invasive surgery. But the technique involves a distinct set of skills, including reconstructing a three-dimensional environment from a two-dimensional projection, and manipulating instruments indirectly. The parallels between that skill set and gaming have not escaped the medical community, as evidenced a study that will appear in the Archives of Surgery later today...."

Mummy TV

Mummified body found in front of blaring TV - CNN.com: "NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Police called to a Long Island man's house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set.

The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, identified as Vincenzo Ricardo, appeared to have died of natural causes. Police said on Saturday his body was discovered on Thursday when they went to the house to investigate a report of a burst water pipe..."

Antarctica Lakes

Big lakes detected under Antarctica - CNN.com: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Lasers beamed from space have detected what researchers have long suspected: big sloshing lakes of water underneath Antarctic ice.

These lakes, some stretching across hundreds of square miles, fill and drain so dramatically that the movement can be seen by a satellite looking at the icy surface of the southern continent, glaciologists reported in Thursday's editions of the journal Science.

Global warming did not create these big pockets of water -- they lie beneath some 2,300 feet of compressed snow and ice, too deep to be affected by temperature changes on the surface -- but knowing how they behave is important to understanding the impact of climate change on the Antarctic ice sheet, study author Helen Fricker said by telephone..."

No Deep Impact

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Action plan for killer asteroids: "A draft UN treaty to determine what would have to be done if a giant asteroid was on a collision course with Earth is to be drawn up this year.

The document would set out global policies including who should be in charge of plans to deflect any object..."

"We Have The Technology..."

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Trials for 'bionic' eye implants: "A bionic eye implant that could help restore the sight of millions of blind people could be available to patients within two years.

US researchers have been given the go-ahead to implant the prototype device in 50 to 75 patients.

The Argus II system uses a spectacle-mounted camera to feed visual information to electrodes in the eye..."

Saving Indian Dolphins

Acoustic device may save India's river dolphins - CNN.com: "NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Japanese technology to track and monitor the behavior of India's endangered Ganges River Dolphins using underwater acoustics will play a vital role in efforts to conserve the freshwater mammals, the WWF-India said.

The Gangetic cetaceans are one of only four species of dolphins in the world which inhabit rivers and lakes and are much less common than their marine counterparts, numbering only around 2,000 in India, according to the conservation group.

Over the last 25 years, their numbers have halved -- trapped in fishing nets, hunted for oil, dead from pollution or the construction of dams along the Ganges river which stretches from the northern Himalayas to India's east..."

Space Junk Danger

Space Junk: Orbiting Debris, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat - New York Times: "For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens..."

Space Slide Show

Space Slide Show - View Pictures from Space, Including Images from the Hubble Telescope & Space Shuttle - MSNBC.com - MSNBC.com: "Cosmic light show
See a comet's flare, rings of light, astronauts at work and other highlights from January 2007. • SEE THE SLIDE SHOW"

Cancer Killer

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 20 January 2007 - New Scientist: "IT SOUNDS almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their 'immortality'. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks..."

Don't Eat Orange Snow

The Raw Story | (eca 131) Russian officials say orange snow poses no threat: "Moscow (dpa) - Russian authorities said Friday that yellow and
orange snow that fell in a number of Siberian villages posed no
health hazards, though the cause was unclear, with officials blaming
mud from Kazakhstan and ecologists blaming fertilizer factories.
'According to preliminary results, no chemically dangerous, toxic
or radioactive substances have been found,' Viktor Beltsov, a
spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry, told Interfax.

The snow fell January 31, and details of its appearance in three
West Siberian regions - the industrial Omsk, Tomsk and Tyumen regions
- were made public Friday after residents of the remote areas
contacted health officials."

Before Stonehenge

Ancient complex discovered near Stonehenge - Los Angeles Times: "Archeologists working near Stonehenge in England have discovered an ancient religious complex containing a treasure trove of artifacts that may finally illuminate the lives and religious practices of the people who built the mysterious monument 4,600 years ago, British archeologists said Tuesday..."

Chips II

BBC NEWS | Technology | Chips push through nano-barrier: "Critical leaks

...The development means the fundamental 'law' that underpins the development of all microchips, known as Moore's Law, remains intact.

The proposition, articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, states that the number of transistors on a chip could double every 24 months.


After more than 10 years of effort, we now have a way forward
Tze-chiang Chen, IBM
The new Intel processors, codenamed Penryn, will pack more than four hundred million transistors into a chip half the size of a postage stamp.

Like current processors, they will come in dual-core and quad-core versions, meaning they will have two or four separate processors on each chip. The company has not said how fast the new devices will run.

The production of 45nm technology has been the goal of chip manufacturers ever since they conquered 65nm transistors..."

Chips I

BBC NEWS | Technology | Chips push through nano-barrier: "Chips push through nano-barrier
45 nanometre test wafer

New materials have had to be developed to shrink the transistors
The next milestone in the relentless pursuit of smaller, higher performance microchips has been unveiled.

Chip-maker Intel has announced that it will start manufacturing processors using transistors just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide..."

Chips 0

Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power - New York Times: "By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: January 27, 2007

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors..."

Earth's Moon Destined to Disintegrate - Yahoo! News

Earth's Moon Destined to Disintegrate - Yahoo! News: "SPACE.com
Earth's Moon Destined to Disintegrate

David Powell
Special to SPACE.com
SPACE.com Mon Jan 22, 10:15 AM ET

The Sun is midway through its stable hydrogen burning phase known as the main sequence. But when the Sun enters the red giant phase in around 5 billion years things are going to get a lot rougher in the Earth-Moon system.


During the red giant phase the Sun will swell until its distended atmosphere reaches out to envelop the Earth and Moon, which will both begin to be affected by gas drag-the space through which they orbit will contain more molecules.

The Moon is now moving away from Earth and by then will be in an orbit that's about 40 percent larger than today. It will be the first to warp under the Sun's influence..."

Rare sight of ancient shark | Reuters.com

Rare sight of ancient shark | Reuters.com: "Jan. 24 - A shark with the ugly proportions of the pre-historic era has surfaced near Japan offering a rare view of this denizen of the deep.

The 'Frilled Shark' is hardly ever seen because its habitat is 600 metres or more below the ocean surface.

Jennifer Marostica reports.

Pictures of the Frilled shark courtesy of Awashima Marine Park http://www.marinepark.jp

© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved."

Rail Gun

U.S. Navy Invents Railgun

The mighty railgun, that hitherto-unfeasible weapon most beloved of gamers and geeks the world over, is now a functional reality thanks to the U.S. Navy, which has produced a working 8-megajoule electromagnetic mass driver.

Spotted at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, the navy's new weapon of choice fires but a single shot at once, unlike the hypothetical counterpart featured in classic FPS Quake. But what a shot is is, offering a 250 nautical-mile range (with an apogee of 95 miles from the Earth's surface!) and enough kinetic energy to equal the destructive power of a million-dollar missile.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Flying dinos had bi-plane design

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Flying dinos had bi-plane design: "Flying dinos had bi-plane design
Microraptor Image: PNAS
Microraptor was a small, feathered dinosaur
The first flying dinosaurs took to the air in a similar way to a World War I bi-plane, a study shows.

A fresh analysis of an early feathered fossil dinosaur suggests that it dropped its hind legs below its body, adopting a bi-plane-like form.

This contrasts with earlier reconstructions showing the dinosaur maintaining its wings in a tandem pattern, a bit like a dragonfly.

Details appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal..."

Comet Maker

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Dwarf planet 'becoming a comet': "An unusual dwarf planet discovered in the outer Solar System could be en route to becoming the brightest comet ever known.

2003 EL61 is a large, dense, rugby-ball-shaped hunk of rock with a fast rotation rate.

Professor Mike Brown has calculated that the object could be due a close encounter with the planet Neptune.

If so, Neptune's gravity could catapult it into the inner Solar System as a short-period comet.

'If you came back in two million years, EL61 could well be a comet,' said Professor Brown, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

'When it becomes a comet, it will be the brightest we will ever see.'"

New Eye In The Sky

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | First stars in telescope's sights: "he Hubble Space Telescope is a hard act to follow.

Since it was launched in 1990, the telescope has become one of the most important instruments in the history of astronomy, making critical discoveries that have vastly enriched our understanding of the cosmos.

John Mather is only too aware of this legacy. He is senior project scientist on Hubble's designated successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Dr Mather, 60, has been involved with JWST from the start and is busy directing construction of it at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland..."

Reverse Mars Attacks!

Scientist Says NASA Found Alien Life (and killed it)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.

The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch presented his theory in a paper delivered at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

The paper was released Sunday...

The Real End Times

"White Dwarf Hints At Our Solar System's End
Andrea Thompson
Staff Writer
SPACE.com Sat Dec 23, 7:30 AM ET

A debris disk spied recently around a distant dead star is likely the remains of an asteroid that was vaporized when the star died, scientists say.

The discovery, detailed in the Dec. 22 issue of the journal Science, could be a sign of what will happen in our own solar system in a few billion years. Because the crushed asteroid was probably gravitationally lassoed in by one or more planets, the finding also provides evidence that planetary systems can form around massive stars. . ."

Juvenile Giant Squid Caught

Click here for video.

52 New Species

'WWF: 52 new species discovered on Borneo

By ELIANE ENGELER Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

GENEVA — Scientists have discovered at least 52 new species of animals and plants on the southeast Asian island of Borneo since 2005, including a catfish with protruding teeth and suction cups on its belly to help it stick to rocks, WWF International said Tuesday.

"The more we look the more we find," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International coordinator for the study of the "Heart of Borneo," a 85,000-square-mile rain forest in the center of the island where several of the new species were found. "These discoveries reaffirm Borneo's position as one of the most important centers of biodiversity in the world . . ."'

On Evolving

Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution - New York Times: "Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution

Article Tools Sponsored By
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: December 10, 2006

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.

Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on. . ."

Brazil Scores One For Environment

ABC News: Brazil Protects Great Swath of Amazon: "RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil Dec 4, 2006 (AP)— A swath of Amazon rain forest the size of Alabama was placed under government protection Monday in a region infamous for violent conflicts among loggers, ranchers and environmentalists.

Known as the Guayana Shield, the 57,915-square-mile area contains more than 25 percent of the world's remaining humid tropical forests and the largest remaining unpolluted fresh water reserves in the American tropics."

On. . . Everything

The Blog | Deepak Chopra: The God Delusion? Part 7 | The Huffington Post: ". . .It's hard for materialists not to thump their chests, as Dawkins so brazenly does. Unfortunately, the Theory of Everything has hit a brick wall. Quantum physics lacks the power to cross the border into the invisible world that lies beyond subatomic particles, the so-called virtual domain. Not only is this the realm of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'--mysterious shadows of the matter and energy we see around us--but all possible universes also lie across the same boundary, as well as the 'zero point' where space and time are born.

Genetics seems to be riding higher, but behind the display of public triumph, biology has not solved the existence of mind, and therefore the same obstacle faces both fields. An invisible world lies sealed off from investigation, leaving us to trace its footprints and echoes. MRIs and CAT scans are impressive but limited. As someone once commented, brain research is like putting a stethoscope to the outside of the Astrodome and trying to figure out the rules of football. Dawkins finds consciousness (as well as quantum physics) totally irrelevant, a comment on his own intellectual limitations rather than reality. If God is going to become viable again, he will have to be a God who solves some key mysteries in the virtual domain:

--What separates life from inert matter?
--What part does the observer play in creating reality?
--How does the infinite quantum field organize and govern every event in the universe?
--How does chaos relate to order? Are they enemies or secret allies?
--How did evolution overcome entropy, the ceaseless march of the physical universe toward chaos and the deep freezer of "heat death"?
--Why is the universe so amazingly hospitable to human life?

This last question is the most pressing one, for both believers and non-believers. . ."

Good Dogs

Science Blog | Think. It's not illegal yet.: "Infants Wheeze Less in Homes With Multiple Dogs
Submitted by BJS on Thu, 2006-11-30 09:55. animal kingdom

Living in a home with multiple dogs may help reduce an infant’s risk for developing wheezing in the first year of life, according to new research from the University of Cincinnati (UC). Cincinnati researchers, led by David Bernstein, MD, have found that infants living in homes with high levels of endotoxins (bacterial contaminants) and multiple dogs were more than two times less likely to wheeze than other infants."

Dino Gone

Single massive asteroid wiped out dinosaurs: study - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A single, gigantic asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs and many other species, scientists said on Thursday in a new study rebutting theories that multiple impacts did the deed.
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An examination of rock sediments drilled from five sites at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean strongly supports the notion that one massive hunk of space rock caused the mass extinction, a research team led by University of Missouri-Columbia geology professor Ken MacLeod found.

'It's a completely straightforward, single-impact scenario,' MacLeod, whose findings appear in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, said in an interview. 'It was a haymaker that nobody saw coming. One shot, and that's all you need to explain it.'

Scientists believe that an asteroid about 6 miles wide hurtled to Earth 65.5 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period, plunging into what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to carve out the Chicxulub (pronounced CHIK-shu-loob) crater measuring about 110 miles across.

To put it mildly, it was a bad day to live on Earth."

LiveScience.com - Scientists Levitate Small Animals

LiveScience.com - Scientists Levitate Small Animals: "
Scientists Levitate Small Animals
By Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
posted: 29 November 2006
10:28 am ET


Scientists have now levitated small live animals using sounds that are, well, uplifting.

In the past, researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, China, used ultrasound fields to successfully levitate globs of the heaviest solid and liquid—iridium and mercury, respectively. The aim of their work is to learn how to manufacture everything from pharmaceuticals to alloys without the aid of containers. At times compounds are too corrosive for containers to hold, or they react with containers in other undesirable ways."

Monsters of the Deep

Bizarre deep-sea creatures imaged off New Zealand - life - 27 November 2006 - New Scientist

Enlarge image

Vestimentiferan worms - a type of tube worm widely seen at the methane seeps - were sampled from the "Builder's Pencil" site. Builder’s Pencil, which covers 180,000 square metres, is one of the largest seep sites in the world (Image: NOAA/NIWA)

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Enlarge image

The furry filaments on this hermit crab’s claws are thought to allow it to feed off the energy-rich chemicals from the seep (Image: NOAA/NIWA)

Enlarge image

Glass sponges and tube worms poke through the seafloor (Image: NOAA/NIWA)

"The weird and wonderful creatures living by methane vents in the southwest Pacific have been photographed for the first time (see images right and below).

The deep-sea communities live around methane seeps off New Zealand’s eastern coast, up to 1 kilometre beneath the sea surface. The team of 21 researchers from the US and New Zealand, who spent two weeks exploring the area, have just returned to shore. See video footage recorded by the researchers here, here and here.

“It's the first time cold seeps have been viewed and sampled in the southwest Pacific, and will greatly contribute to our knowledge of these intriguing ecosystems,” says Amy Baco-Taylor from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US.

Cold seeps are areas of the seabed where methane or hydrogen sulphide gas escape from stores deep underneath. Like hydrothermal vents, the gases support unique life forms that can convert the energy-rich chemicals into living matter in the absence of any sunlight.

Sheer extent

Animals living around methane seeps off Chile and Japan have been observed before, but not near New Zealand. “The seeps here are remarkable in the sheer extent of their chemosynthetic communities,” says Baco-Taylor, whose team visited eight such sites between 750 and 1050 metres beneath the surface.

They used sonar to map the seafloor and to detect plumes of water rich in methane, then lowered a video and stills camera system over each site.

This allowed them to record images of tube worms between 30 cm and 40 cm in length as they emerged from beneath limestone boulders. They also recorded corals, sponges and shell beds covered with various types of clam and mussel..."

What if you could erase your memory? - The Stanford Daily Online

What if you could erase your memory? - The Stanford Daily Online: "...Pitman’s research suggests that if a patient undergoes treatment with propanolol within the hours following a traumatic episode, negative memories would not be as deeply embedded in the brain. By extension, McGough suggests that the drugs could also be taken in anticipation of a disturbing experience, such as paramedics scraping bodies off the highway or a mother visiting the morgue to identify a dead son.

A recent article in The New York Times expressed concern that if the use of propanolol becomes routine, people who would not have developed PTSD will be taking the medication unnecessarily. However, neither McGaugh nor Pitman are concerned with this possibility because of the lack of serious side effects associated with the medication.

Even so, some find the manipulation of memory formation troubling.

While not wanting to appear insensitive to those suffering from PTSD, junior Erin Lashnits remarked, “I think that memories make up an important part of a person’s identity . . . even if the memories don’t change, you’re changing the intensity of that memory or of the reaction to an event. [The drug] has the potential to have much more serious complications with a person’s personality than just making life a little easier...”"

Climate Change

Science Blog | Think. It's not illegal yet.: "Climate change sceptics 'out of step, out of arguments and out of time'
Submitted by BJS on Wed, 2006-11-15 13:57. energy & environment

Climate change must be taken as seriously as the issues that have traditionally monopolized first-order political attention such as conflict, poverty and the proliferation of deadly weapons, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a United Nations conference on the issue in Nairobi today. “Instead of being economically defensive, let us start being more politically courageous,” he said. “The Nairobi conference must send a clear, credible signal that the world’s political leaders take climate change seriously. The question is not whether climate change is happening, but whether, in the face of this emergency, we ourselves can change fast enough.”"

Tribbles

Science Blog | Think. It's not illegal yet.: "'Tribbles' Implicated in Common and Aggressive Form of Leukemia
Submitted by BJS on Thu, 2006-11-16 11:06. bioscience & medicine

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have identified a new protein associated with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Several lines of evidence point to a protein called Tribbles, named after the furry creatures that took over the starship Enterprise in the original 'Star Trek' series. Tribbles was first described in fruit flies."

NASA NanoTech

Science Blog | Think. It's not illegal yet.: "NASA Nanotechnology Comes to Market
Submitted by BJS on Wed, 2006-11-15 15:20. nanotech & materials

Finding affordable ways to make technology available to everyone is a common challenge. Now, NASA has done that with the process that creates 'nanotubes.' A nanotube is a tiny, hollow, long, thin and strong tube with an outside diameter of a nanometer that is formed from atoms such as carbon. A hair from a person’s head is around 50,000 nanometers wide. If you split a hair into 50,000 strands, that would be the width of a nanometer."

Sky News: Goblins And Giants: Humans To Split

Sky News: Goblins And Giants: Humans To Split: "Haves' And 'Have-Nots'
Updated: 20:39, Tuesday October 17, 2006

Social division might split humans into two sub-species 100,000 years from now, an evolution expert has claimed.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative.

They would be a far cry from the 'underclass' humans, who will have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

The forecast was made by Dr Oliver Curry, who spent two months investigating the ascent and descent of man over the next 100 millennia.

He said, within a thousand years, humans will evolve into coffee-coloured giants between 6 and 7ft tall.

But Dr Curry said centuries of sexual selection - being choosy about one's partner - was likely to create more and more genetic inequality.

The logical outcome would be two sub-species, 'gracile' and 'robust' humans.

Dr Curry said: 'Things could get ugly, with the possible emergence of genetic 'haves' and 'have-nots'.'"

Teleporting

Mad In The Middle: "Scientists teleport two different objects
CNN.com - Scientists teleport two different objects - Oct 4, 2006: 'LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Beaming people in 'Star Trek' fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.

Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.

But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

'It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,' Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further."

Sun Jar

Cool and hot.
SCI FI Tech

Junk Woes

The Blog | Bill Maher: Drug War Allowed To Get In The Way of Terror War | The Huffington Post:

". . . But I noticed in the recent drug survey - the same one that said baby boomers were getting high while their children say 'no' - about 6 percent of people said they had used marijuana in the past month. About 4 percent of people surveyed said they had used methamphetamine. 2.6 percent said they had abused prescription drugs. Just about 1 percent said they had used cocaine.

Heroin? Only 0.1 percent used heroin.

So why worry so much about the opium crop in Afghanistan when Americans don't really have a heroin problem? We're sacrificing the war on terror in the vain hope of one day helping Courtney Love kick her smack habit?"

Defense Tech: Area 51: Hype vs. Reality

Defense Tech: Area 51: Hype vs. Reality: "Area 51: Hype vs. Reality
In the October Popular Science, veteran aviation journo Bill Sweetman writes about secret airplanes he believes might be under development at the Air Force's remote Groom Lake test facility in Nevada, a.k.a. Area 51. Sweetman describes three demonstrators unveiled in recent years -- the Northrop Grumman Tacit Blue and Boeing Bird of Prey manned stealth planes and the Lockheed Martin Polecat drone -- but insists these are just consolation prizes offered up by a military that is keeping its major black airplane programs under wraps.
Not that he has a ton of proof. 'Hint[s]' and guesswork, mostly. The new construction at Groom Lake must mean something, he figures. And then there are those 'obvious... significant gaps in the military’s known aviation arsenal -- gaps that the Pentagon can reasonably be assumed to be actively, if quietly, trying to fill . . .'"

Funeral Strippers

BlondeSense: Now THAT'S a funeral!!: "Now THAT'S a funeral!!
China acts on funeral strippers

Chinese villages are being told to end the practice --
Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say.

'Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers,' Xinhua agency said.

'Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured.'

It seems officials want to put an end to this, so now 'funeral plans have to be submitted in advance' "

'Hybrid Mutant' Found Dead in Maine - AOL News

'Hybrid Mutant' Found Dead in Maine - AOL News: "Hybrid Mutant' Found Dead in Maine
Mysterious Creature May Be Subject of Longtime Local Legend

TURNER, Maine (Aug. 17) - Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.



A man who saw the animal described it as 'something out of a Stephen King story.'

The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat. The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.

Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a 'hybrid mutant of something.'

'It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget,' she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. 'We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it. . .' "

Mad In The Middle: Maher Swings Hammer, Hits Nail

Mad In The Middle: Maher Swings Hammer, Hits Nail

Mad In The Middle

Mad In The Middle: "Like the mistreatment of terrorist prisoners, it all revolves around expectation. We expect our people to not torture, to not murder. We have higher expectations of them than we do of the enemy. We also have higher (perhaps, too high) expectations of Israel. Since Israel is the 'civilized' participant, our expectations for restraint and reason are, unfairly, set much higher.

And that is, maybe, our problem."

Random

Random: "Philadelphia Daily News | 06/28/2006 | Annie's media enablers: 'But the questions raised by Coulter's prominence aren't so much about her as they are about the news organizations that create that prominence.

If it weren't for the magazines, newspapers, and television programs that give Coulter a forum for her repellent views, she'd be just another extremist throwing darts in all directions.

But there she was on the 'Today' show - where she has appeared three times in the last eight months - and on the 'Tonight' show, and on Fox News, and on MSNBC. Not to mention the glowing profile that graced the cover of Time magazine a few months back.

Every time a producer or editor turns their megaphone over to someone like Ann Coulter, they debase our discourse.

And the fact is that the mainstream media have a tolerance for extremism on the right, but not on the left. People like Coulter, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage are taken seriously by news organizations despite purveying some of the most hateful rhetoric imaginable.

Can you think of a liberal who gets half the attention Coulter does, and is half as inflammatory? After all, we're talking about someone who routinely advocates the murder of people with whom she disagrees politically.'

Uh, no. Any liberal advocating such stuff in a public forum would be pursued by the Evil Empire until their eyeballs exploded."

Philadelphia Daily News | 06/28/2006 | Annie's media enablers

Philadelphia Daily News | 06/28/2006 | Annie's media enablers: "But the questions raised by Coulter's prominence aren't so much about her as they are about the news organizations that create that prominence.

If it weren't for the magazines, newspapers, and television programs that give Coulter a forum for her repellent views, she'd be just another extremist throwing darts in all directions.

But there she was on the 'Today' show - where she has appeared three times in the last eight months - and on the 'Tonight' show, and on Fox News, and on MSNBC. Not to mention the glowing profile that graced the cover of Time magazine a few months back.

Every time a producer or editor turns their megaphone over to someone like Ann Coulter, they debase our discourse.

And the fact is that the mainstream media have a tolerance for extremism on the right, but not on the left. People like Coulter, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage are taken seriously by news organizations despite purveying some of the most hateful rhetoric imaginable.

Can you think of a liberal who gets half the attention Coulter does, and is half as inflammatory? After all, we're talking about someone who routinely advocates the murder of people with whom she disagrees politically."

Uh, no. Any liberal advocating such stuff in a public forum would be pursued by the Evil Empire until their eyeballs exploded. Ask Ward Churchill.

New Scientist Breaking News - ‘Big Brother’ eyes make us act more honestly

New Scientist Breaking News - ‘Big Brother’ eyes make us act more honestly: "
Coffee room drinkers pay more when watched by a pair of “Big Brother” eyes (Image: Newcastle University)
Enlarge image
Coffee room drinkers pay more when watched by a pair of “Big Brother” eyes (Image: Newcastle University)
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Subscribe to New Scientist

We all know the scene: the departmental coffee room, with the price list for tea and coffee on the wall and the “honesty box” where you pay for your drinks – or not, because no one is watching.

In a finding that will have office managers everywhere scurrying for the photocopier, researchers have discovered that merely a picture of watching eyes nearly trebled the amount of money put in the box."

Sploid: Bosnian pyramid's the real thing!

Sploid: Bosnian pyramid's the real thing!: "Bosnian pyramid's the real thing!
[Amazing proof that people piled up some rocks!]

A mysterious hill in a Bosnian town is actually an ancient pyramid built by some unknown civilization, according to an Egyptian geologist who examined the site.

'In my opinion, it is a type of pyramid, probably primitive pyramid [that] we did not know until now,' said Aly Abd Barakat, who was sent by the Egyptian government to examine Visocica hill in the central Bosnian town of Visoko.

A local pyramid fanatic has been pushing his theory that the big hill and two smaller pyramid-shaped landforms were constructed by ancient people. . ."

Last chromosome in human genome sequenced - May 18, 2006

CNN.com - Last chromosome in human genome sequenced - May 18, 2006: "Last chromosome in human genome sequenced

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world's most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome, the so-called 'book of life'.

Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight percent of the human genetic code.

It is packed with 3,141 genes and linked to 350 illnesses including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

'This achievement effectively closes the book on an important volume of the Human Genome Project,' said Dr Simon Gregory who headed the sequencing project at the Sanger Institute in England.

The project was started in 1990 to identify the genes and DNA sequences that provide a blueprint for human beings.

Chromosome 1 is the biggest and contains, per chromosome, the greatest number of genes. . ."

Sploid: British military says 'UFOs exist!'

Sploid: British military says 'UFOs exist!': "British military says 'UFOs exist!'
[British Military says 'UFOs Exist!']

In a shocking announcement, the British Ministry of Defence has revealed 'UFOs Exist: It's Official!' The revelation comes in the wake of a request by UFO researchers for the Ministry of Defence to release information about its secret investigations into strange sightings over Britain."

Human Ancestors May Have Interbred With Chimpanzees

Human Ancestors May Have Interbred With Chimpanzees: "Human Ancestors May Have Interbred With Chimpanzees

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 18, 2006; Page A01

When the ancestors of human beings and the ancestors of chimpanzees parted ways 6.3 million years ago, it was probably a very long goodbye. Some of their descendants may even have gone back for a final tryst.

That is the conclusion a group of scientists has reached, using a comparison of the genes of humans and their closest animal relatives to sketch a picture of human origins far more detailed than what fossil bones have revealed."

Sploid: Amazonian Stonehenge

Sploid: Amazonian Stonehenge: "A 2,000-year-old astrological observatory has been discovered in the Amazon basin of Brazil, near French Guiana.

'Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a monument,' archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (IEPA), told O Globo newspaper.

The Amazonian Stonehenge is constructed of 127 rocks -- each standing about 10 feet high -- in groups of circles."

Toxic Burp in Pacific

Giant Deep-Sea Volcano With "Moat of Death" Found:
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
April 14, 2006

Beneath the waves of the South Pacific lies a volcanic realm nearly as strange as that featured in TV's hit drama Lost.

But instead of a mysterious island, scientists have found a bubbling submarine volcano whose weird features include a swirling vortex, a host of strange animals, and a fearsome zone of toxic waters dubbed the Moat of Death.

The volcano, described in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sits within the crater of a gigantic underwater mountain rising more than 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) from the ocean floor near the island of Samoa (see map).

The seamount, called Vailulu'u, is an active volcano, with a 2-mile-wide (3.2-kilometer-wide) crater. The cone rising within it has been dubbed Nafanua, for the Samoan goddess of war."

Massachusetts Health Insurance

Massachusetts to require health insurance: "April 13, 2006

FREE PRESS NEWS SERVICES

BOSTON -- Gov. Mitt Romney signed a groundbreaking measure Wednesday that makes Massachusetts the first state to mandate universal health care.

Supported by Democrats and Republicans in the state Legislature, the law requires residents to buy health insurance by July 1, 2007, just as drivers must have automobile coverage.

It aims to help low-income families buy private health insurance with subsidies and penalizes those who don't get coverage. It will help extend coverage to about 500,000 people in the state who lack health insurance, or about one in 13 residents."

More Missing Link

Xinhua - English: " LOS ANGELES, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Fossils discovered in eastern Ethiopian desert are a missing link between our ape-man ancestors some 3.5 million years ago and more primitive hominids a million years older, according to a new study released on Wednesday.

The fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as Au. anamensis, and date from about 4.1 million years ago, reported researchers from Ethiopia, Japan, France and the United States.

The findings were published in an April 13 issue of the journal Nature.

The hominid Australopithecus has often been called ape-man because it walked on two legs unlike the great apes although it was short-statured, small-brained and big-toothed.

More primitive hominids in the genus Ardipithecus date from between 4.4 million and 7 million years ago and were much moreape-like, though they walked on two legs, too."

CNN.com - Could Ethiopian skull be missing link? - Mar 25, 2006

CNN.com - Could Ethiopian skull be missing link? - Mar 25, 2006: "ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) -- Scientists in northeastern Ethiopia said Saturday that they have discovered the skull of a small human ancestor that could be a missing link between the extinct Homo erectus and modern man."

Super Earth

Top News | Reuters.co.ca: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A cold, heavy 'super-Earth' has been found orbiting a distant star, using a method that holds promise for detecting faraway planets that closely resemble our own, astronomers said on Monday.

The planet weighs 13 times as much as Earth and is orbiting a star about 9,000 light-years away. But instead of circling close to its star, as Earth does, this 'super-Earth' is about as distant from its star as Jupiter and Saturn are from the Sun.

An international team of scientists figured the new planet probably has a temperature of minus 330 degrees F (minus 201 C), making it one of the coldest planets detected outside our solar system.

The discovery is billed as a super-Earth because it is thought to be a rocky, terrestrial planet like Earth, even though it is much more massive.

The planet was detected by astronomers using a project called OGLE -- short for Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment -- which looks for changes in light coming from distant stars."

Goat Repellent

CNN.com - Tiger poo, the new black gold - Feb 17, 2006: "Tiger poo, the new black gold

Friday, February 17, 2006; Posted: 12:19 p.m. EST (17:19 GMT)

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) -- A tiger's roar might be scary, but Australian researchers have found that the predator's poo is just as potent.

Researchers at the University of Queensland said on Friday they had successfully trailed a tiger poo repellant, warding off wild goats for at least three days.

'Goats wouldn't have seen a tiger from an evolutionary point of view for at least 15 generations but they recognize the smell of the predator,' repellent creator Peter Murray said in a statement.

'If we can show this lasts weeks ... we've just tapped into probably a billion-dollar marke"

Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Levels

Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Levels: "Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Levels
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 17, 2006; Page A01
Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.
The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide."

�Lost World� of wildlife found in Indonesia - Environment - MSNBC.com

�Lost World� of wildlife found in Indonesia - Environment - MSNBC.com: ": 11:49 a.m. ET Feb. 7, 2006
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Describing it as the discovery of a �Lost World,� conservation groups and Indonesia on Tuesday said an expedition to one of Asia�s most isolated jungles had found several dozen new species of frogs, butterflies, flowers and birds.
�It�s as close to the Garden of Eden as you�re going to find on Earth,� Bruce Beehler, a Conservation International scientist who led the expedition, said in a statement.
�The first bird we saw at our camp was a new species,� he added. �Large mammals that have been hunted to near extinction elsewhere were here in abundance. We were able to simply pick up two Long-Beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal that is little known.�"

Man "Descends" From Bird?

CNN.com - Fossil hunters make rare find in basement - Jan 26, 2006: "Fossil hunters make rare find in basement

Thursday, January 26, 2006; Posted: 3:02 p.m. EST (20:02 GMT)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A toothless, two-legged crocodile ancestor that walked upright and had a beak instead of teeth was discovered in the basement of New York's American Museum of Natural History, according to a report published on Wednesday.

The 210 million-year-old fossil had sat in storage at the museum for nearly 60 years and was found only by accident, the paleontologists said.

The animal is interesting because it closely resembles a completely unrelated dinosaur called an ostrich dinosaur that lived 80 million years later, they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British science journal.

'A lot of people, from seeing (the film) Jurassic Park know what an ostrich dinosaur looked like,' said museum curator Mark Norell. 'This is a case of convergence with the ostrich dinosaur. It evolved more than once.'

"

Greenhouse Plants?

Science News Online:Vegetation may produce methane: Science News Online, Jan. 14, 2006:

"Greenhouse Plants? Vegetation may produce methane
Sid Perkins
Lab tests suggest that a wide variety of plants may routinely do something that scientists had previously thought impossible--produce methane in significant quantities.


Methane, like carbon dioxide, traps heat in Earth's atmosphere. Scientists have been studying natural sources of methane for decades but hadn't pegged plants as a producer, notes Frank Keppler, a geochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Previously recognized sources of methane include bacterial action in the digestive systems of ruminants such as cows and in the saturated soils of swamps and rice paddies. "

"NASA Probe Discovers Rolling Rocks, Gullies, Shifting Sands on Mars

Space - Discover magazine science:

"Sightings of shifting sand dunes, rolling boulders, and a dwindling polar ice cap in the past year demonstrate that the Red Planet is a far more dynamic world than scientists suspected.

Recently released images from the Mars Global Surveyor show before (left) and after views of the same crater, taken 13 months apart. During that time, falling boulders carved at least a dozen new tracks into the fine-grained material that lines the crater's wall.

NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor revealed fresh gullies as long as three football fields on a dune west of the Hellas Basin. The same slope was smooth and unblemished in 2002. Scientists suspect that carbon dioxide trapped beneath the surface during winter vaporized when temperatures rose, releasing gas and causing sand to pour down the dune's face. The probe also snapped photos of boulders that had tumbled down a five-mile-wide crater, gouging shallow troughs not seen a year before. Possible causes include wind and seismic activity, although Mars's atmosphere is one-hundredth as dense as Earth's, and researchers have not yet found reliable evidence of Marsquakes. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide ice at the south pole has dwindled for three consecutive summers, suggesting long-term climate change is under way."

Are Incan Knots A Crackable Code?

Archaeology - Discover magazine s:

"The Incas didn't leave any written words behind, but they did leave behind khipus:knotted, colored, and twisted textile strings that seemed to serve as a record-keeping system for the largest state in the ancient New World. Until this year, the function of khipus was more presumed than proven. In August Harvard University anthropologist Gary Urton and his colleague Carrie Brezine reported the first clear signs of shared information embedded in 7 of 21 khipus from Puruchuco, an Incan palace and administrative center on the coast of Peru. 'For the first time we've been able to see khipus that are communicating with each other,' says Urton."

Hopping,uh,er,Mad?

That's no jack rabbit ... it's an artist in chains - Peculiar Postings - MSNBC.com:

"That's no jack rabbit ... it's an artist in chains Man has to hop 12 hours across desert after binding legs for realistic picture ..."

Uh, ok. Kinda embarrassing.