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..."