Science & TechnologyS


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Australia: High-Tech Bid to Save Ancient Top End Language

Jano Gibson
ABC, Australia,
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:43 UTC
Language App
© ABC NewsThe application will be launched in May.
Researchers are developing a mobile phone application in an effort to help save an ancient Aboriginal language that is close to being lost forever.

The language of Iwaidja is thousands of years old but on Croker Island in the Top End only about 150 people still speak it.

Iwaidja is one of about 50 known Aboriginal languages of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.

Bruce Birch from the Minjilang Endangered Languages Project has been working with locals to try to save it.

"It is one of Australia's hundred or so highly endangered languages," he said.

Using $100,000 of federal funding, a mobile phone application is being developed.
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Saturn's Moon Titan May be More Earth-Like Than Thought

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:20 UTC
Titan
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteThis view shows a close up of toward the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and show a depression within the moon's orange and blue haze layers near the south pole. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the image on Sept. 11, 2011 and it was released on Dec. 22.

Saturn's moon Titan may be more similar to an Earth-like world than previously thought, possessing a layered atmosphere just like our planet, researchers said.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere. A better understanding of how its hazy, soupy atmosphere works could shed light on similar ones scientists might find on alien planets and moons. However, conflicting details about how Titan's atmosphere is structured have emerged over the years.

The lowest layer of any atmosphere, known as its boundary layer, is most influenced by a planet or moon's surface. It in turn most influences the surface with clouds and winds, as well as by sculpting dunes.

"This layer is very important for the climate and weather - we live in the terrestrial boundary layer," said study lead author Benjamin Charnay, a planetary scientist at France's National Center of Scientific Research.

Earth's boundary layer, which is between 1,650 feet and 1.8 miles (500 meters and 3 kilometers) thick, is controlled largely by solar heat warming the planet's surface. Since Titan is much further away from the sun, its boundary layer might behave quite differently, but much remains uncertain about it - Titan's atmosphere is thick and opaque, confusing what we know about its lower layers.
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New Animal Virus Takes Northern Europe by Surprise

Kai Kupferschmidt
Sciencenow.org
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:08 UTC
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© FotosearchHost of questions. A new virus that causes stillbirths in sheep and other livestock is puzzling scientists.
Scientists in northern Europe are scrambling to learn more about a new virus that causes fetal malformations and stillbirths in cattle, sheep, and goats. For now, they don't have a clue about the virus's origins or why it's suddenly causing an outbreak; in order to speed up the process, they want to share the virus and protocols for detecting it with anyone interested in studying the disease or developing diagnostic tools and vaccines.

The virus, provisionally named "Schmallenberg virus" after the German town from which the first positive samples came, was detected in November in dairy cows that had shown signs of infection with fever and a drastic reduction in milk production. Now it has also been detected in sheep and goats, and it has shown up at dozens of farms in neighboring Netherlands and in Belgium as well. According to the European Commission's Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health, cases have been detected on 20 farms in Germany, 52 in the Netherlands, and 14 in Belgium. Many more suspected cases are being investigated. "A lot of lambs are stillborn or have serious malformations," Wim van der Poel of the Dutch Central Veterinary Institute in Lelystad says. "This is a serious threat to animal health in Europe."
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Frog

World's Tiniest Frogs Found in Papua New Guinea


Breitbart
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:15 UTC
Image
© Agence France-Presse/Christopher Austin/Louisiana State University World's smallest vertebrate
With voices hardly louder than an insect's buzz, the tiniest frogs ever discovered are smaller than a coin and hop about the rainforest of the tropical island of Papua New Guinea, US scientists said Wednesday.

Not only are these little peepers with the big names -- Paedophryne amauensis and Paedophryne swiftorum -- the smallest frogs known to man, they are also believed to be the smallest vertebrates on Earth, said the report in the science journal PLoS ONE.

Until now the smallest vertebrate was believed to be a transparent Indonesian fish known as Paedocypris progenetica that averaged about eight millimeters (one-third inch).

The largest vertebrate is the blue whale, measuring about 25.8 meters (yards).

The little land frog Paedophryne amauensis comes in at a whopping 7.7 millimeters, or less than one-third of an inch. The other newly discovered kind, Paedophryne swiftorum, measures a bit over eight millimeters.
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Laptop

Addicted! Scientists Show How Internet Dependency Alters the Human Brain (They really mean "games")

Jeremy Laurance
The Independent, UK
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
Internet addiction has for the first time been linked with changes in the brain similar to those seen in people addicted to alcohol, cocaine and cannabis. In a groundbreaking study, researchers used MRI scanners to reveal abnormalities in the brains of adolescents who spent many hours on the internet, to the detriment of their social and personal lives. The finding could throw light on other behavioural problems and lead to the development of new approaches to treatment, researchers said.

An estimated 5 to 10 per cent of internet users are thought to be addicted - meaning they are unable to control their use. The majority are games players who become so absorbed in the activity they go without food or drink for long periods and their education, work and relationships suffer.

Henrietta Bowden Jones, consultant psychiatrist at Imperial College, London, who runs Britain's only NHS clinic for internet addicts and problem gamblers, said: "The majority of people we see with serious internet addiction are gamers - people who spend long hours in roles in various games that cause them to disregard their obligations. I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down because they were unable to emotionally connect with anything outside the game."


Comment: Notice how the headline says "Internet Dependency" when the actual problem is dependency on games which can also be played without being on the internet.

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Can A Scientist Define "Life"?

Carl Zimmer
Txchnologist
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:39 UTC
A strand of RNA.
© Universitat Pompeu FabraA strand of RNA.
In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a "sky crane," the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any previous Martian rover, will perform an unprecedented battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to "assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life."

For all the spectacular engineering that's gone into Curiosity, however, its goal is actually quite modest. When NASA says it wants to find out if Mars was ever suitable for life, they use a very circumscribed version of the word. They are looking for signs of liquid water, which all living things on Earth need. They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive. In other words, they're looking on Mars for the sorts of conditions that support life on Earth.

But there's no good reason to assume that all life has to be like the life we're familiar with. In 2007, a board of scientists appointed by the National Academies of Science decided they couldn't rule out the possibility that life might be able to exist without water or carbon. If such weird life on Mars exists, Curiosity will probably miss it.
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Saturn

Milky Way Crammed With 100 Billion Alien Worlds?

Ian O'Neill
Discovery News
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:28 UTC
exoplanet graphic
© David A. Aguilar (CfA)
Last year, using the exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope as a guide, astronomers took a statistical stab at estimating the number of exoplanets that exist in our galaxy. They came up with at least 50 billion alien worlds.

Today, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., and the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration have taken their own stab at the "galactic exoplanetary estimate" and think there are at least 100 billion worlds knocking around the Milky Way.

Why has the estimate doubled? The key difference here are the methods used to detect alien worlds orbiting distant stars.

The Kepler space telescope watches the same patch of sky -- containing around 100,000 stars -- and waits for slight "dips" in starlight brightness. This dip occurs when an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, thereby blocking a tiny fraction of light from view.
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Nuke

India, China and Israel Ranked Among the World's Worst for Nuclear Security

Julian Borger
The Guardian
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:10 UTC
Containers holding used nuclear fuel
© Don McPheeContainers holding used nuclear fuel being stored under water for up to five years before the uranium and plutonium is reprocessed.
A new index assessing the vulnerability of the world's stocks of weapons-grade nuclear material produces some surprising results.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a respected non-proliferation think tank, and the Economic Intelligence Unit have produced a new ranking system to assess the security of the world's scattered stocks of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.

The NTI Nuclear Materials Security Index is meant to be a measure of how vulnerable those stocks are to theft by terrorists or criminal groups. It is also intended to provide a baseline for assessing progress in locking those stockpiles up, ahead of the next Nuclear Security Summit, due in Seoul at the end of March.

The authors insist this is about establishing an objective view of the work still to be done to meet Barack Obama's ambitious goal to secure the global stockpiles by 2014. This is not about "naming and shaming" they insist. But if you publish a list comparisons are going to be made.
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Bulb

New Bio-Bulbs Could Help You Sleep

Eric Niiler and TS Wiley
The Wiley Protocol
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
New "Eco-Bulbs" originally scheduled to become mandatory January 1, 2012 have been pushed back to October. On the horizon however are "Bio-Bulbs"

As late-night workers and long-distance travelers already know, shifting time zones or work periods throws the body's natural clock out of whack.

Even regular folks often find it nearly impossible to get a restful sleep for several hours after sitting under bright lights after the sun has gone down (some call it the Fenway Park phenomena).

Now a Florida inventor is testing a new LED bio-bulb that could regulate the body's circadian rhythm by helping control the production of melatonin, the body's sleep hormone that tells us when it's nighttime.

Comment: For more information on the importance of getting adequate sleep and ways to help see:

Dying to Sleep

The Link Between Sleep and Memory

Lack of Sleep Linked to Childhood Obesity

Meditation Helps Treat Insomnia

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Info

Lemur-Like Toes Complicate Human Lineage

Jennifer Welsh
Live Science
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:37 UTC
Stone Block
© Maiolino S, et. al. Jan. 2012 PLoS ONE 7(1)Original block containing new partial, semi-articulated foot of Notharctus tenebrosus. The two views are rotated 90 degrees around a vertical axis with respect to one another. Inset on left labels some of the bones visible on the surface, indicating potential for more below.

A 47-million-year-old primate may have been a fashionista of sorts, as new analysis of the fossil suggests it sported grooming claws.

Besides helping the primate rake through its fur, particularly in hard-to-reach spots, the grooming claw presents a puzzle of sorts for scientists studying the relationship between a group that includes humans, apes and monkeys, and the family that includes lemurs.

That's because the primate is the first extinct North American primate with a toe bone showing features associated with the presence of both nails and a grooming claw.

Traditionally, it's thought that primates with a toe attachment called a grooming claw were more closely related to lemurs, which are primates like us but are considered more primitive and part of a different family than great apes (including humans) and monkeys. In lemurs, the claw is located on the second toe.

So where does this newly examined specimen fit in? It was "either in the process of evolving a nail and becoming more like humans, apes and monkeys, or in the process of evolving a more lemurlike claw," study researcher Doug Boyer, of Brooklyn College of New York, said in a statement.
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