Science & TechnologyS


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New Model Predicts Fallout from Big Meteorite Strike


Space.com
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:57 UTC
Aorounga Impact Crater
© Astro_Clay/NASAAstronaut Clayton C. Anderson tweeted this picture from space, a view of Aorounga Impact Crater, southeast of of Emi Koussi volcano in Chad.

A major meteorite impact on Earth could spell doomsday - or not. To better predict what could be in store if a giant space rock slammed into our planet, scientists have built a new model to simulate the seismic fallout from such an event.

The model predicts how seismic waves would spread through Earth after a meteorite collision. It's the first to take into account the planet's elliptical shape, surface features and ocean depths. In contrast, previous models have assumed Earth is perfectly spherical and featureless, with nothing to disrupt a meteorite's impact.

"After a meteorite impact, seismic waves travel outward across the Earth's surface like after a stone is thrown in water," research leader Matthias Meschede of the University of Munich said in a statement. "For the Earth, these calculations are usually made using a smooth, perfect sphere model, but we found that the surface features of a planet or a moon have a huge effect on the aftershock a large meteorite will have, so it's extremely important to take those into account."
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Cell Phone

Wristband lets iPhone track activity, movement and sleep

Sean Ludwig
Moblie Beat
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© unknown
Bluetooth headset maker Jawbone will soon release its new Up life monitoring wristband that's designed to help you live a move healthy life by tracking every move you make, what you're eating, how long you're sleeping and how many calories you burn.

The Jawbone Up, in many ways, is a cool use of technology to tackle the problem of not being active enough. Using the wristband and an iOS app, you can get prompts to move when you sit at your desk too long, be told exactly how long you've slept, be prompted to wake up in accordance with your natural sleep cycle and track how many calories you eat by snapping photos of your food.

To get the most out of the product, you are expected to wear the wristband 24 hours a day. To make that possible, the Jawbone team has made the Up band water resistant and durable and it lasts 10 days on a single charge.

While all of those aspects are handy, some potential users may shy away because they don't want a piece of technology tracking every single thing they do or eat 24 hours a day. While the data isn't neccesarily being shared with anyone else, there is something a little creepy about a machine that knows every little thing you do in your life. Additionally, if someone else gets their hands on your iPhone, he or she may be able to see all of those things.
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Arrow Down

Netherlands: Tilburg Professor Faked Data in at Least 30 Academic Publications


DutchNews.nl
Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
Tilburg and Groningen universities are to take legal action against one of their professors after an investigation showed he had faked research data in at least 30 scientific papers.

The fraud is 'considerable and shocking', the committee set up to look into Diederik Stapel's academic publications said in an initial report into the scandal on Monday.

Stapel, who was a professor of social and behavioural sciences at Tilburg, was suspended last month after doubts emerged about research that concluded eating meat makes people anti-social and selfish.
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Wolf

Dutch Psychologist Admits to Faking Dozens of Scientific Studies

Robert T. Gonzalez
i09
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:10 UTC
Image
Every branch of science has its share of "sexy" studies - so called for their supposed tendency to provoke media attention, even in the absence of strong or conclusive findings - but investigations in the field of social psychology are often especially popular targets of the "sexy" label.

Now, prominent social psychologist Diederik Stapel (who earlier this year reported that something as trivial as litter can promote discriminatory behavior) has been outed as one of the biggest frauds in scientific history. Will social psychology be able to recover?

A preliminary investigative report issued on Monday by Tilburg University has concluded that dozens of research papers authored and co-authored by Stapel contain fabricated data.

Comment: Corruption in science appears to be widespread - see : The Corruption of Science in America

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Info

Our Skin Cells Can 'See' UV Rays

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:01 UTC
Melanocyte
© The Oancea Lab/Brown UniversityHuman melanocyte skin cells send out signals, using calcium, when exposed to ultraviolet light, a key step in producing the protective pigment melanin. Researchers have found that melanocytes use a light-sensitive receptor, called rhodopsin, also found in the retinas of our eyes, to detect certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light.

How the skin knows to start tanning after the sun's rays hit is somewhat of a mystery. Now researchers have found our skin may be able to "see" the sun's ultraviolet rays using a light-sensing pigment also found in our eyes.

"As soon as you step out into the sun, your skin knows that it is exposed to ultraviolet radiation," said senior researcher Elena Oancea, assistant professor of biology at Brown University. "This is a very fast process, faster than anything that was known before."

Tanning, or the darkening of skin when exposed to sun, is a protective response. Melanin, the dark pigment responsible for darkening skin, is believed to protect skin cells from damage caused by ultraviolet radiation in sunlight by absorbing the radiation.

Ultraviolet radiation at the Earth's surface comes in two flavors: UVA and UVB. UVB rays have shorter wavelengths, and make up only a small portion of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Such rays lead to darkening of the skin days after exposure. UVB rays are typically linked with DNA damage that can cause skin cancer, although research has also linked UVA to cancer. UVA rays, by contrast, have longer wavelengths and are less intense, but account for the majority of ultraviolet radiation and lead to skin darkening much more quickly.
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Info

As Social Network Grows, so Does the Brain

Jennifer Welsh
Live Science
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:49 UTC
Monkeys
© Live Science

Monkey brains grow bigger with every cagemate they acquire, according to a new study showing that certain parts of the brain associated with processing social information expand in response to more complex social information.

"Interestingly, there are a couple of studies in humans by different research groups that show some correlation between brain size and the size of the social network, and we found some similarities in our studies," study researcher Jerome Sallet, of Oxford University in the U.K., told LiveScience.

"[Our study] reinforces the idea that the human social network was built on something that was already there in the rhesus macaques."

Monkey studies

The researchers studied 23 rhesus macaques living in different size groups in a research facility; they had been in these groups for at least two months (the average length of time spent in their present group was more than one year).

These different groups each had a dominance-based hierarchy (except the one monkey that was caged alone). One's rank among male cagemates is dependent upon social interactions, including the ability to make friends and form coalitions, which grants the monkey access to valued resources.

The researchers scanned the brains of the monkeys using magnetic resonance imaging to gauge the sizes of different brain regions. They saw enlargements in gray matter in several areas of the brain associated with social interactions. On average, they saw more than a 5 percent increase in gray matter mass per extra cagemate.
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Bad Guys

Climate Clues Found In Ancient Underwater Caves

Brett Israel
OurAmazingPlanet
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:35 UTC
Underwater Caves
© NASA Earth ObservatoryDown inside the Great Blue Hole lies clues to the climate's past.
Ice cores drilled from polar glaciers aren't the only place where scientists find clues about the Earth's past climate and by extension its potential future climate. Deep divers in the Bahamas are retrieving stalagmites from underwater caves to learn about the impact that ancient dust storms had on the planet's climate.

Scientists at the University of Miami collected samples of stalagmites that formed in underwater caves tens of thousands of years ago to study their chemical composition, an important indicator of the Earth's past climate.

Stalagmites are a type of cave formation created as water drips down from a cave's ceiling and onto its floor where it deposits minerals, particularly calcium carbonate, in cone-shaped spikes. Stalagmites are the formations that point up, while stalactites are the formations that hang from a cave's ceiling.
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Nuke

Aussie scientists develop radioactivity-trapping nanofibers

Iain Thomson
The Register
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:11 UTC
One gram of fiber cleans a ton of water

Scientists from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have developed a new material for cleaning up contaminated water from radioactive leaks and medical processes.

The team mixed titanate nanofiber and nanotubes into a powder that, it says, will clean the radioactive particles in a ton of water with a single gram, provided it's properly distributed or filtered. The outsides of the nanotubes are coated with silver oxide nanocrystals to hold and fix radioactive iodine ions, even if the material becomes wet again.

"One gram of the nanofibers can effectively purify at least one ton of polluted water," Professor Zhu said in a statement. "This saves large amounts of dangerous water needing to be stored somewhere and also prevents the risk of contaminated products leaking into the soil."

japscientist
© The RegisterProfessor Zhu makes exceedingly good nuke cleaners
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Nuke

India uncloaks new thorium nuke plants

Andrew Orlowski
The Register
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:14 UTC
Won't have to look far for fuel, either

The Advanced Heavy Water design differs from China's molten salt or liquid fluoride designs. But Indian scientists expect the AHW reactor to be operational before China's, certainly by 2020, and are confident enough to seek buyers for their existing PHWRs, or pressurised heavy water reactors, the Guardian reports.

It's not so surprising, given India's long history of nuclear boffinry. The country's research programme was started by Homi Bhabha in 1944, with the nation's first reactor sparking into life in 1960. India also sits on the world's most abundant deposits of thorium.
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Robot

One Step Closer to the Borg

Trace Dominguez
Discovery News
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:15 UTC
Cyborg
© Discovery News
This week, a research breakthrough at the University of Washington brings us one step closer to living as cyborgs. Chao Zhong and his colleagues have built a biocompatible solid state device made from the shells of crustaceans that's able to monitor and control the flow of protons. Unlike electronic machines that transfer information via electrons, our bodies and brains do it via ions and protons. And that difference between machines and bodies -- we're incompatible technology -- has been one challenge to advancing cybernetics.

That's not the only challenge. Several technologies allow people to control machines with their minds. Take the video embedded in this blog, where a man is controlling his prosthetic hand with his mind. But it involves extensive electrode implants to monitor electrical activity in the brain. Other methods may use brain caps studded with electrodes that analyze brainwaves and convert them into some kind of action controlled by a computer.

Instead of complex electrode array or brainwave monitoring rigs, Zhong and his team's solution involves a very small transistor roughly one twentieth the width of a human hair. The decrease in size will allow for direct implantation, as well as the construction of more complex pieces of equipment as the technology continues to advance.
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