Science & TechnologyS


Bug

Carbon trading registry suspends ops following hack attack

John Leyden
The Register
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:26 UTC
Smokey and the bandits

A carbon emissions trading registry in Austria has suspended operations until at least 21 January following a hacking attack earlier this month.

The registry has been disconnected from the EU and UN carbon trading registries in response to the 10 January attack, details on which are unclear. A statement on the trading registry website (extract below) explains that the disconnection from other registries and suspension of operations is a security precaution taken to safeguard the operation of wider EU systems while problems on the Austrian site are identified and resolved.
Umweltbundesamt GmbH as registry and ECRA GmbH as registry service provider inform that for security reasons all access to the Austrian emissions trading registry has been locked because of a hacker attack on 10 January 2011. The Austrian registry can therefore not be reached until further notice.

Since the registry also had to be disconnected from the CITL and the ITL to ensure security, it is currently not foreseeable when trading in the Austrian emissions trading registry may continue.
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Magnify

$1b effort yields no bioterror defenses

Bryan Bender
Boston
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 03:21 UTC
Mass. labs in line to join scaled-back Pentagon program

The Pentagon is scaling back one of its largest efforts to develop treatments for troops and civilians infected in a germ warfare attack after a $1 billion, five-year program fell short of its primary goal.

Even the heavy infusion of research cash and a unified effort by university labs and biotech companies from Boston to California were insufficient to break through limitations of genetic science, according to government officials and specialists in biological terrorism.

Instead, the Pentagon's next $1 billion for the Transformational Medical Technologies program will focus on better ways to identify mutant versions of Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly viruses. Those are among the genetically modified agents that officials fear could be used by terrorists or rogue states against urban or military targets.
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Sun

Plasma Rain on The Sun


SpaceWeather
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:24 UTC
A sheet of plasma more than 350,000 km wide is rising and falling along the sun's southwestern limb today. It's so big, it makes an easy target for backyard observatories. Amateur astronomer Michael Buxton sends this time lapse movie from Ocean Beach, California:


"I made the movie at 1 minute intervals from 1753-1934 UT on Jan. 18th," he explains. "It was a real jaw dropper. Even in my small telescope (a 4-inch Takahashi refractor with a H-alpha solar filter) you could clearly see blobs of plasma falling to the stellar surface."
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Bug

Dutch Scientist Has Solution To Global Food Crisis - Bugs


BBC News
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
Dutch scientist Arnold van Huis has advocated bugs as a healthy, green, alternative food, saying it is time to break old eating habits.

Insect dishes could be the answer to the global food crisis, shrinking land and water resources, he argued.

"Children don't have a problem with eating insects," he told Reuters.

Prof van Huis gives lectures, tastings and cookery classes with a master chef who prepares Dutch-farmed bugs.

The problem for adults is psychological, he said, and "only tasting and experience can make them change their minds".

Insects are a long-established food in some parts of the world such as Mexico and Thailand.
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Beaker

The genetic basis of brain diseases

Don Powell
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:06 UTC
A set of brain proteins is found to play a role in over 100 brain diseases and provides a new insight into evolution of behavior

In recent research scientists studied human brain samples to isolate a set of proteins that accounts for over 130 brain diseases. The paper also shows an intriguing link between diseases and the evolution of the human brain.
protiens brain diseases
© UnknownBrain tissue samples were removed from patients undergoing brain surgery (left image). As shown in the middle image, two nerve cells are shown with their long branches which contact one another at synapses and one of them is boxed (for illustration purposes). From the synapses, the proteins were identified and as shown in the right image, each protein can be represented as a point, and the lines show the connections between proteins. This shows how the many proteins in the PSD are connected in a network or roadmap. Many of these proteins are involved in human diseases and these are shown as 'stars' in the protein network map.

Brain diseases are the leading cause of medical disability in the developed world according to the World Health Organisation and the economic costs in the USA exceeds $300 billion.

The brain is the most complex organ in the body with millions of nerve cells connected by billions of synapses. Within each synapse is a set of proteins, which, like the components of an engine, bind together to build a molecular machine called the postsynaptic density - also known as the PSD. Although studies of animal synapses have indicated that the PSD could be important in human diseases and behaviour, surprisingly little was known about it in humans.
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Info

Astronomers Have Discovered a Previously Unknown Mechanism for The Formation of Galaxies

Nata09
Scienceray
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:29 UTC
Scientists have found evidence of the birth of new stars and galaxy formation in an unusual gas cloud in the constellation Leo. In their view, these processes are due to a previously unknown mechanism that occurred only in the earliest stages of evolution of the Universe.

"If these gas clouds were prevalent in the young universe, they could lead to a large number of faint, and therefore has not yet been discovered dwarf galaxies do not contain dark matter and heavy elements," - wrote the authors of the study. Described in the article, the gas cloud, is a ring of Leo, has approximately 650,000 light years in diameter and revolves around the two galaxies in the constellation Leo. It consists mostly of hydrogen and helium, and was first discovered in 1983, radio astronomy, as in the visible spectrum is practically invisible. Attempts to locate any star in the Ring of Leo since its discovery so far been unsuccessful.
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Sun

Is the Sun Emitting a Mystery Particle?

Ian O'Neill
Discovery News
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:21 UTC
Sunset
© Discovery NewsISS-sunset.

When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.

But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?

This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.

This is the conclusion that researchers from Stanford and Purdue University have arrived at, but the only explanation they have is even weirder than the phenomenon itself: The sun might be emitting a previously unknown particle that is meddling with the decay rates of matter. Or, at the very least, we are seeing some new physics.

Many fields of science depend on measuring constant decay rates. For example, to accurately date ancient artifacts, archaeologists measure the quantity of carbon-14 found inside organic samples at dig sites. This is a technique known as carbon dating.
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Syringe

Bill Gates: Cell Phones Can Track Newborns For Shots

Bob Unruh
World Net Daily
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:52 UTC
Bill Gates
© UnknownBill Gates

Microsoft mogul Bill Gates says cell-phone technology could be used to register every birth around the globe and track children to make sure they have been vaccinated as government advisers urge.

The massive effort was discussed by Gates at a recent mHealth Summit, which delved into the issues of technology and health.

According to a report today from Natural News, Gates told a conference late last year that the goal is a lower population, and using vaccines to improve early childhood health is a step in that direction.

"That sounds paradoxical," he said. "The fact is that within a decade of improving health outcomes, parents decide to have [fewer] children."
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Wine

Turns Out That Music Really is Intoxicating After All

Matthew Lasar
ars technica
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:48 UTC
music graphic
© ars technica
An "outburst of the soul," the composer Frederick Delius called music. The sounds associated with the form produce "a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without," observed Confucius. It is the art "which is most nigh to tears and memory," noted the writer Oscar Wilde.

It turns out that these guys were more on target than we thought. Our experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains "at peak emotional arousal during music listening."

Not only that, but the scientists noticed that various parts of the striatum responded to the dopamine rush differently. The caudate was more involved during the expectation of some really nice musical excerpt, and the nucleus accumbens took the lead during "the experience of peak emotional responses to music."
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Evil Rays

SOTT Focus: Feeling the Future: Premonitions and Precognition - Elements of Practice and of a Theory

Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Sott.net
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00 UTC
The subject of this article is precognition and premonitions, psychology, parapsychology and quantum physics. It's a relatively long article. Glancing through it for sixteen seconds - the average time that the average reader spends on a web posting - is not enough to get a grasp of its content. Therefore, for those in a hurry, here's the comic-book version:

Image

Dr. Daryl J. Bem - a not-so-serious-looking professor of psychology at Cornell University

Image

Recently wrote a serious-looking paper

Image

on the subject of parapsychology.

Image

He argues that we can see our future, including the erotic one.

Image

Others are attacking him

Image

But I have found a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon. The phenomenon is possible given an appropriate antenna and a kaironic mirror retransmitter.


Here is the essence of my invention:
Knight went on again. 'I'm a great hand at inventing things. Now, I daresay you noticed, that last time you picked me up, that I was looking rather thoughtful?'
'You were a little grave,' said Alice.
'Well, just then I was inventing a new way of getting over a gate - would you like to hear it?'
'Very much indeed,' Alice said politely.
'I'll tell you how I came to think of it,' said the Knight.
'You see, I said to myself, "The only difficulty is with the feet: the head is high enough already." Now, first I put my head on the top of the gate - then I stand on my head - then the feet are high enough, you see - then I'm over, you see.'
'Yes, I suppose you'd be over when that was done,'
Alice said thoughtfully: 'but don't you think it would be rather hard?'
'I haven't tried it yet,' the Knight said, gravely: 'so I can't tell for certain - but I'm afraid it would be a little hard.' [LC]
End of the comic part.
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