http://www.sott.net/signs/list_by_category/14-Science-Technology Signs of the Times: The World for People who Think. Featuring news and commentary on world events. en-us Original content Copyright 2012 by Signs of the Times/Sott.net. For other content, see our Fair Use Policy at www.sott.net. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:07:24 -0600 http://www.sott.net/images/sottlogo_rss.jpg SOTT.net http://www.sott.net http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241443-Rupert-Sheldrake-the-heretic-at-odds-with-scientific-dogma Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College. All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake's untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a "book for burning" and that Sheldrake was to be "condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy". For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. "It was," he says, "exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists." That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that "conventional, materialist science" cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241443-Rupert-Sheldrake-the-heretic-at-odds-with-scientific-dogma Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:06:26 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241428-Is-Venus-Rotation-Slowing-Down- New measurements from ESA's Venus Express spacecraft shows that Venus' rotation rate is about 6.5 minutes slower than previous measurements taken 16 years ago by the Magellan spacecraft. Using infrared instruments to peer through the planet's dense atmosphere, Venus Express found surface features weren't where the scientists expected them to be. "When the two maps did not align, I first thought there was a mistake in my calculations as Magellan measured the value very accurately, but we have checked every possible error we could think of," said Nils Müller, a planetary scientist at the DLR German Aerospace Centre, lead author of a research paper investigating the rotation. Using the VIRTIS infrared instrument, scientists discovered that some surface features were displaced by up to 20 km from where they should be given the accepted rotation rate as measured by the Magellan orbiter in the early 1990s. Over its four-year mission, Magellan determined the length of the day on Venus as being equal to 243.0185 Earth days. But the data from Venus Express indicate the length of the Venus day is on average 6.5 minutes longer. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241428-Is-Venus-Rotation-Slowing-Down- Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:41:22 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241427-E-Cat-Cold-Fusion-Machine-Claims-of-Fraud-Heating-Up If Italian inventor Andrea Rossi's cold fusion machine, called the E-Cat, really works, then the world's energy problems are all but solved. Rossi claims that a small amount of input energy drives a fusion reaction between hydrogen and nickel atoms inside his machine, producing an outpouring of surplus heat that can be used to generate electricity. And instead of the nasty radioactive byproducts given off by nuclear fission reactors - think Fukushima or Chernobyl - the E-Cat spits out just a teaspoon of copper. In the past year, at least 15 reputable scientists have watched live demonstrations of Rossi's E-Cat (short for Energy Catalyzer) and have declared it to be a success. Government documents reveal that NASA scientists have discussed the E-Cat extensively in meetings, and in December, Rossi even visited a senator in Massachusetts to explore the possibility of opening an energy plant in the state. The E-Cat is fast becoming an international star. But most scientists couldn't raise their eyebrows any higher, and now, an Australian engineer has provided an alternative explanation for where all the E-Cat's excess heat is coming from, and how Rossi is possibly scamming the world. Cold fusion - the term for stable atoms fusing together at room temperature - is ruled out by the laws of physics. Those laws say it takes a huge amount of energy to push atoms close enough together for them to fuse, and so nuclear fusion can happen only in scorching hot places like the sun. But two decades ago, a pair of scientists, puzzled by the results of an experiment, thought they were observing nuclear fusion at room temperature. Ever since, fringe scientists have been trying to harness the physics-defying effect they called cold fusion. They've kept at it despite the fact that the original experiment turned out to be flawed. The E-Cat has gone further into mainstream acceptance than any attempted cold fusion machine before it. Though Rossi doesn't let anyone look under the E-Cat's hood, claiming the technology isn't patent-protected, he invites scientists and investors to staged demonstrations. After a demo last April, for example, a pair of Swedish physicists vouched for Rossi's work, reporting that the E-Cat produced too much excess heat to have been originating from a chemical process, and that "the only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production." According to their report, 400 watts was put into the machine, and this appeared to catalyze a mysterious reaction, and in the process, generate 12,400 watts of energy that slowly poured out of the machine over the next two hours. And therein lies the alleged scam. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241427-E-Cat-Cold-Fusion-Machine-Claims-of-Fraud-Heating-Up Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:31:39 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241363-Breaking-the-Code-Why-Yuor-Barin-Can-Raed-Tihs You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine. For emaxlpe, it deson't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm. S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17. Passages like these have been bouncing around the Internet for years. But how do we read them? And what do our incredibly low standards for what's legible say about the way our brains work? According to Marta Kutas, a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego, the short answer is that no one knows why we're so good at reading garbled nonsense. But they've got strong suspicions. "My guess is that context is very, very, very important," Kutas told Life's Little Mysteries. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241363-Breaking-the-Code-Why-Yuor-Barin-Can-Raed-Tihs Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:41:51 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241354-What-are-superbugs-doing-in-Antarctica- A multidrug-resistant strain of E. coli, potentially even more dangerous than the superbug MRSA, has been discovered living in Antarctic seawater. Escherichia coli bacteria, better-known as E. coli, are common in the lower intestines of humans. That means they go everywhere people go - even Antarctica. Many strains of E. coli are harmless when ingested, but some are deadly - as seen during last year's major outbreak of foodborne E. coli in Europe, as well as smaller U.S. outbreaks in Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Virginia. And while antibiotics are rarely used to treat food poisoning, it's nonetheless troubling that many E. coli strains can now withstand such medicine when it is needed - a phenomenon known as antibiotic resistance. Drug-busting microbes are mainly a problem in hospitals, whether it's MRSA, C. difficile or NDM-1 superbugs. But they're increasingly common in the broader environment, too, as illustrated by a recent study in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241354-What-are-superbugs-doing-in-Antarctica- Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:59:08 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241326-Is-It-Possible-to-Reanimate-the-Dead- In 1999, a Swedish medical student named Anna Bagenholm lost control while skiing and landed head first on a thin patch of ice covering a mountain stream. The surface gave way and she was pulled into the freezing current below; when her friends caught up with her minutes later, only her skis and ankles were visible above an 8-inch layer of ice. Bagenholm found an air pocket and struggled beneath the ice for 40 minutes as her friends tried to dislodge her. Then her heart stopped beating and she was still. Forty minutes after that, a rescue team arrived, cut her out of the ice and administered CPR as they helicoptered her to a hospital. At 10:15 p.m., three hours and 55 minutes after her fall, her first heartbeat was recorded. Since then, she has made a nearly full recovery. Bagenholm was the very definition of clinically dead: Her circulatory and respiratory systems had gone quiet for just over three hours before she was brought back to life. But what was happening in her body on a cellular level during the hours she went without a heartbeat? Were her tissues dying along with her consciousness? And how much longer could she have gone with no blood circulation? Can scientists learn anything from cases like this that could help them revive people who have been "dead" for an even longer period? http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241326-Is-It-Possible-to-Reanimate-the-Dead- Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:04:16 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241322-Study-Schizophrenia-s-Hallucinated-Voices-Drown-Out-Real-Ones A new finding in brain science reveals that the voices in a schizophrenia patient's head can drown out voices in the real world - and provides hope that people with the disorder can learn to ignore hallucinatory talk. The new research pulls together two threads in earlier schizophrenia studies. Many scientists have noticed that when patients hallucinate voices, neurons in brain regions associated with processing sounds spontaneously fire despite there being no sound waves to trigger this activity. That's an indication of brain overload. But when presented with real-world voices, other studies showed, hallucinating patients' brains often failed to respond at all, in contrast with healthy brains. These studies pointed to a stifling of brain signals. By analyzing all of these studies together, biological psychologist Kenneth Hugdahl of the University of Bergen in Norway found the simultaneous over-stimulation and dampening of brain signals to be two sides of the same coin. The findings help explain why schizophrenia patients retreat into a hallucinatory world. Now, Hugdahl wants to use this knowledge to help patients reverse that tendency. "What if one could train the patient to shift attention away from the inside voices to voices coming from outside?" Hugdahl said. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241322-Study-Schizophrenia-s-Hallucinated-Voices-Drown-Out-Real-Ones Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:47:44 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241320-Russian-Scientists-Reach-Huge-Lake-Buried-Under-Miles-of-Antarctic-Ice After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have reached a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years - a pristine body of water that may hold life from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets. Finally touching the surface of Lake Vostok, the largest of nearly 400 subglacial lakes in Antarctica, is a major discovery avidly anticipated by scientists around the world. Valery Lukin, the head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) who oversaw the mission and announced its success, likened the endeavour to the epic race to the moon won by American scientists over the Soviets in 1969. "I think it's fair to compare this project to flying to the moon," he said Wednesday. The Russian team hit the lake Sunday at the depth of 12,366 feet (3,769 metres) about 800 miles (1,300 kilometres) southeast of the South Pole in the central part of the continent. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241320-Russian-Scientists-Reach-Huge-Lake-Buried-Under-Miles-of-Antarctic-Ice Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:23:53 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241314-Android-s-Siri-Rival-Full-of-Racist-Rape-Condoning-Madness Upon Apple's introduction of the iPhone 4S, arguably the standout feature of the device was Siri -- the virtual assistant prompted by voice commands. Intended as an answer, as well as an improvement, to Android's Voice Commands, Siri was given a high-profile marketing push to showcase its nifty features and "fuzzy language" prompts. It wasn't too long, however, before Apple faced some controversy in regards to Siri's assistance. Due to a series of very unfortunate bugs and unpolished information, Siri appeared to snub the pro-choice movement by seemingly denying access to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood locations. Prompts like "Where can I go for birth control?" and "Where can I go get an abortion?" were met with confusion, despite many local clinics and Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Apple responded to the mess by asserting that these were not "intentional omissions meant to offend anyone" and were, in fact, simple glitches of a beta product. But if you thought the fallout from Siri's bugs was serious, wait until you see the insane and wildly inappropriate responses given by Iris -- Android's answer to Siri. Iris was released as an Android app following Siri's debut, intended to provide most of the functionality to Apple's voice service to Android. Developed by a company named Dexetra and powered by the Q&A engine ChaCha, Iris was a massive success, earning heaps of four-star ratings, and is now installed on roughly 5 million devices. It's also a wealth of racist, rape-condoning madness. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241314-Android-s-Siri-Rival-Full-of-Racist-Rape-Condoning-Madness Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:13:55 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241313-Hubble-s-1923-Nova-in-Andromeda-Erupts-Again- On December 11, 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered a nova in the Andromeda galaxy. Novae occurring in our Milky Way's sister galaxy have proven to be not that uncommon, as there have been over 800 novae detected in M31 in the last 100 years. Hubble's 1923 discovery became known as M31N 1923-12c, the third nova discovered in December of 1923. Fast forward to January 21, 2012, and another nova has been discovered in M31, already the second novae seen in January 2012. K. Nishiyama and F. Kabashima reported the discovery and it has been given the designation, PNV J00423804+4108417. A day later, a spectrum was taken with the 9.2m Hobby-Eberly Telescope using the Marcario Low-Resolution Spectrograph, confirming the new nova in M31, and that it is a member of the He/N spectroscopic class. What's even more interesting, however, is that the new nova likely comes from the same progenitor as Hubble's 1923 nova! Classical novae are a subclass of cataclysmic variable stars. They are semi-detached binary systems where an evolved, late-type star fills its Roche lobe and transfers mass to its white dwarf companion. If the mass accretion rate onto the white dwarf is sufficiently low, it allows this gas to pile up and become degenerate. Eventually, after thousands to tens of thousands of years, a thermonuclear runaway ensues in this highly pressurized layer of gas, leading to a nova eruption. These eruptions can reach an absolute magnitude as bright as about MV -10, making them among the most luminous explosions in the Universe. Their high luminosities and rates, about 50 per year in a galaxy like M31, make novae very useful to astronomers exploring the properties of close binaries in extragalactic stellar populations. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241313-Hubble-s-1923-Nova-in-Andromeda-Erupts-Again- Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:37:50 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241308-Eco-Marine-Unveils-Massive-Solar-Oil-Tanker-Concept Japan-based Eco Marine Power believes that any ship could be powered by wind and solar energy in the future. The company unveiled a concept design that applies to virtually any type of ship, including monstrous ferries, survey boats, cruise ships, and oil tankers that could be equipped with gigantic sails of solar panels to reduce fuel consumption and even integrate an electric propulsion system in the future. Called the "Aquarius Eco Ship", a full-scale model would also feature an "optimized hull design and waste heat recovery technologies," Eco Marine Power said. The company believes that the concept ship is capable of carrying at least a 1MWp solar system and enough energy storage modules "so that the ship would not need to use auxiliary diesel generators whilst in port." The entire concept would enable a ship to reduce its fuel consumption by up to 40 percent. The company said that it is looking for a shipbuilder to develop the concept in to an actually functional ship. Tests of the technology are expected to occur later this year. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241308-Eco-Marine-Unveils-Massive-Solar-Oil-Tanker-Concept Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:57:57 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241301-Genetic-Mixing-Not-Extinction-Led-To-Neanderthals-Demise Rather than being physically wiped out, a new study suggests that Neanderthals were likely integrated into the gene pool of early humans after the two groups crossed paths and began interbreeding. The new study, published in the journal Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), was written by C. Michael Barton of Arizona State University (ASU) and Julien Riel-Salvatore of the University of Colorado Denver, and "builds on work published last year in the journal Human Ecology and on recent genetic studies that show a Neanderthal contribution to the modern human genome," according to a February 6 ASU press release. Barton and Riel-Salvatore used archaeological data in order to track behavioral, cultural, and social-ecological changes throughout Western Eurasia over a span of 120,000 years. Their computer models showed both Neanderthals and early humans began to interact and mate more as a result of shifting land-use patterns during the Upper Pleistocene era, resulting in a hybridization of the two species rather than the out-and-out extinction of either. While Neanderthals were limited to the western part of the supercontinent, and as the smaller population were the ones to effectively die-out, the researchers found that "succeeding hybrid populations still carry genes from the regional group that disappeared," according to the press release. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241301-Genetic-Mixing-Not-Extinction-Led-To-Neanderthals-Demise Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:43:15 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241300-Neuroscience-Could-Mean-Soldiers-Controlling-Weapons-with-Minds Soldiers could have their minds plugged directly into weapons systems, undergo brain scans during recruitment and take courses of neural stimulation to boost their learning, if the armed forces embrace the latest developments in neuroscience to hone the performance of their troops. These scenarios are described in a report into the military and law enforcement uses of neuroscience, published on Tuesday, which also highlights a raft of legal and ethical concerns that innovations in the field may bring. The report by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, says that while the rapid advance of neuroscience is expected to benefit society and improve treatments for brain disease and mental illness, it also has substantial security applications that should be carefully analysed. The report's authors also anticipate new designer drugs that boost performance, make captives more talkative and make enemy troops fall asleep. "Neuroscience will have more of an impact in the future," said Rod Flower, chair of the report's working group. "People can see a lot of possibilities, but so far very few have made their way through to actual use. "All leaps forward start out this way. You have a groundswell of ideas and suddenly you get a step change." The authors argue that while hostile uses of neuroscience and related technologies are ever more likely, scientists remain almost oblivious to the dual uses of their research. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241300-Neuroscience-Could-Mean-Soldiers-Controlling-Weapons-with-Minds Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:32:00 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241263-Shhh-Ocean-Noises-Stress-Out-Whales Scientists have long wondered whether propeller and engine noises from big ships stress whales out. Now, thanks to a poop-sniffing dog and an accidental experiment born of a national tragedy, they may finally have their answer. Baleen whales use low-frequency sounds to communicate in the ocean. "They're in an environment where there's not a lot of light; they're underwater. They can't rely on eyesight like we do," says veterinarian Roz Rolland of the New England Aquarium in Boston. Some studies have found that whales alter their behavior and vocalizations when noise increases, and it stands to reason, she says, that noise pollution would hinder their ability to communicate and cause them stress. But because scientists can't control the amount of noise in the sea, that's been very hard to prove. Researchers couldn't stop traffic, but the September 2001 terrorist attacks did. At the time, Rolland was collecting feces of right whales in the Bay of Fundy in Canada so she could try to develop pregnancy tests and other ways to study the animals' reproduction. Animals break up their hormones and get rid of the leftovers in their poop, so feces can show whether an animal is pregnant and reveal its levels of stress. Blood samples would do the same, but feces are much easier to collect. In the first few days after the terrorist attacks, ship traffic in the region decreased dramatically. "There was nobody else there. It was like being on the primal ocean," Rolland says. The whales seem to have noticed the difference, too. The levels of stress hormones in their feces went down, suggesting that ship noise places whales chronically under strain. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241263-Shhh-Ocean-Noises-Stress-Out-Whales Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:34:59 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241258-MIT-Crowdsources-and-Gamifies-Brain-Analysis There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. At the moment we know that neurons trigger an electrical signal, and that hormones affect the speed at which signals cross between synapses, and that somehow this results in a mental image of a naked Kristen Bell from her Veronica Mars period, but that's about it. MIT wants to change all that by tasking thousands of people with analyzing a 0.3-millimeter slice of mouse retinal tissue. Using a new site called Eyewire, MIT will ask users to track a neuron's path by coloring in each axon (tendril). In the future, MIT will roll out another "game" which challenges users to find the synapses. The end result will be the connectome (a tome of connections) of the mouse's retina. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241258-MIT-Crowdsources-and-Gamifies-Brain-Analysis Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:43:19 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241255-Has-Facebook-Alerted-You-to-WW3-Breaking-Out-You-May-Now-Have-a-Computer-Virus A fake news page saying, 'U.S. attacks Iran and Saudi Arabia, the begin (sic) of World War 3,' is the latest virus scam to circulate on Facebook. The story uses CNN's logos, and appears to offer video footage of a breaking news story, but says users need to upgrade their Flash video software to watch. When they 'upgrade', they in fact infect their PC with a trojan. Security experts Sophos reported at least 60,000 people have already fallen victim. Cyber criminals have begun using fake news headlines to lure in victims on social networks such as Facebook. Videos are often used as 'bait', because computer users are used to upgrading video software such as Flash, so installing software does not set off alarm bells. 'Naked Security has seen a worrying number of Facebook users posting the same status messages today, claiming that the United States has attacked Iran and Saudi Arabia in a move heralding the beginning of World War 3,' said Graham Cluley of Sophos's Naked Security blog. 'Within the first three hours of this malware campaign, some 60,000 Facebook users had been duped into visiting the malicious link.' 'What isn't entirely clear at this point is how the message is being shared by so many Facebook profiles.' 'It's possible that malicious code on users' computers is sending the message to Facebook without users knowing. To be on the safe side, you should scan your computer with up-to-date anti-virus software and ensure you have the latest security patches in place.' http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241255-Has-Facebook-Alerted-You-to-WW3-Breaking-Out-You-May-Now-Have-a-Computer-Virus Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:15:30 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241253-Oldest-living-thing-on-earth-discovered Ancient patches of a giant seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea are now considered the oldest living organism on Earth after scientists dated them as up to 200,000 years old. Scientists say a patch of ancient seagrass in the Mediterranean is up to 200,000 years and could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Australian researchers, who genetically sampled the seagrass covering 40 sites from Spain to Cyprus, say it is one of the world's most resilient organisms - but it has now begun to decline due to global warming. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241253-Oldest-living-thing-on-earth-discovered Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:49:01 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241244-British-Scientists-Show-Vegetables-Can-Talk- A research team at the University of Exeter visualized on television the ability of plants to communicate, the university reported on its website. Injured plants are capable of releasing a gas that triggers responses in plants around them. But the team at Exeter, led by Professor Nick Smirnov, was the first to catch the process on film by infusing a plant with a firefly gene and using a special camera. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241244-British-Scientists-Show-Vegetables-Can-Talk- Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:57:17 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241223-Signs-of-Ancient-Ocean-on-Mars-Spotted-by-European-Spacecraft A European spacecraft orbiting Mars has found more revealing evidence that an ocean may have covered parts of the Red Planet billions of years ago. The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft detected sediments on Mars' northern plains that are reminiscent of an ocean floor, in a region that has also previously been identified as the site of ancient Martian shorelines, the researchers said. "We interpret these as sedimentary deposits, maybe ice-rich," study leader Jérémie Mouginot, of the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) in France and the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. "It is a strong new indication that there was once an ocean here." As part of its mission, Mars Express uses a radar instrument, called MARSIS, to probe beneath the Martian surface and search for liquid and solid water in the upper portions of the planet's crust. The researchers analyzed more than two years of MARSIS data and found that the northern plains of Mars are covered in low-density material that suggests the region may have been an ancient Martian ocean. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241223-Signs-of-Ancient-Ocean-on-Mars-Spotted-by-European-Spacecraft Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:48:56 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241216-Belgian-Battery-Can-Power-1-400-Homes Chemicals giant Solvay hailed Monday the successful entry into service in Flanders of what it said was the largest fuel cell of its type in the world. A super-battery that produces enough electricity to power nearly 1,400 homes, the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell has been producing clean electricity at a "steady rate" for weeks at a SolVin plant part-owned by Germany's BASF in Antwerp, northern Dutch-speaking Belgium. SolVin is a market leader in vinyl, or PVC production. The fuel cell converts the chemical energy from hydrogen into clean electricity through an electrochemical reaction with oxygen, and "has generated over 500 MWh in about 800 hours of operation," Solvay said in a news release. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241216-Belgian-Battery-Can-Power-1-400-Homes Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:04:00 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241207-Newfound-Alien-Planet-is-Best-Candidate-Yet-to-Support-Life-Scientists-Say A potentially habitable alien planet - one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface - has been found around a nearby star. The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface. "It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. "It's right smack in the habitable zone - there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241207-Newfound-Alien-Planet-is-Best-Candidate-Yet-to-Support-Life-Scientists-Say Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:01:14 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241201-US-Website-Can-Find-Your-Exact-Location-Using-Your-Phone-Number Is it possible to pinpoint your location with nothing more than a cellphone number? Absolutely. Your smartphone always knows where you are. And thanks to the Life360.com service, powered by technology from a company called Loc-Aid, a parent can locate a child by her phone number or even an elderly parent who has wandered away from home. Indeed, network location services can save lives, protect children, and enable business services -- and they're available to anyone. Thanks to a free online demo at Loc-Aid.com, you can type in the cellphone number of anyone in the U.S. and find their precise location in just a few seconds. Agreements with wireless carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint let Loc-Aid triangulate position using cellular towers and the GPS signal on your phone. In urban areas, the results are more precise than rural areas where there are fewer cell towers. Locaid adds security measures to keep the site safe: You have to type in your own birthday (to prevent minors from using the service) and the person you are trying to locate must agree to the location search by replying to a text message. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241201-US-Website-Can-Find-Your-Exact-Location-Using-Your-Phone-Number Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:19:07 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241193-Lost-World-Reached-20-million-Year-Old-Antarctic-Lake-Drilled- After 30 years spent drilling through a four-kilometer-thick ice crust, researchers have finally broken through to a unique subglacial lake. Scientists are set to reveal its 20-million-year-old secrets, and imitate a quest to discover ET life. The Vostok project breathes an air of mystery and operates at the frontiers of human knowledge. The lake is one of the major discoveries in modern geography; drilling operations at such depths are unprecedented; never before has a geological project required such subtle technologies. The main inspiration for the project - the Russian scientist who posited the lake's existence - died just six months before the moment of contact with the lake's surface. Now, the whole world is looking to Lake Vostok for crucial data which might help to predict climate change. "Yesterday [on Sunday] our scientists at the Vostok polar station in the Antarctic completed drilling at depths of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the subglacial lake," RIA Novosti reported, quoting an unnamed Russian scientist. Meanwhile, Itar-Tass news agency says the scientists still have a few meters to go. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241193-Lost-World-Reached-20-million-Year-Old-Antarctic-Lake-Drilled- Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:32:46 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241185-Study-Child-Abuse-Affects-More-U-S-Kids-Than-SIDS Parents are usually the perpetrators of abuse, largely because they are unprepared to deal with kids' crying. How a little education could help reverse the trend. When it comes to child abuse, the first year of life is the most dangerous for children. Although SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome, attracts far more attention, the rate of hospital admissions related to SIDS is actually lower than the rate of child abuse - 50 per 100,000 children under age 1 for SIDS, compared with 58.2 per 100,000 births, according to research published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. "These kids are physically vulnerable because they're small," says Dr. John M. Leventhal, lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School. "They are challenging for some parents to take care of because they cry, it's hard to understand what they want and parents can get frustrated, exhausted and angry." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241185-Study-Child-Abuse-Affects-More-U-S-Kids-Than-SIDS Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:26:39 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241155-Scientists-Use-Brain-Waves-to-Eavesdrop-on-the-Mind Scientists may one day be able to read the minds of people who have lost the ability to speak, new research suggests. In their report, published in the Jan. 31 online edition of the journal PLoS Biology, University of California, Berkeley researchers describe how they have found a way to analyze a person's brain waves in order to reconstruct words the person hears in normal conversation. This ability to decode electrical activity in an area of the auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus may one day enable neuroscientists to hear the imagined speech of stroke or other patients who can't speak, or to eavesdrop on the constant, internal monologues that run through people's minds, the researchers explained in a journal news release. "This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] and can't speak," Robert Knight, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, said in the news release. "If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241155-Scientists-Use-Brain-Waves-to-Eavesdrop-on-the-Mind Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:49:35 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241104-The-Great-Escape-Gene-altered-Crops-Grow-Wild Throughout North Dakota, little yellow flowers dot thousands of miles of roadsides. These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy: They prove that large numbers of genetically modified plants have escaped from farm fields and are now growing wild. About 80 percent of canola growing along roadsides in North Dakota contains genes that have been modified to make the plants resistant to common weed-killers, according to a team of University of Arkansas researchers. The discovery of escaped gene-altered canola has some experts concerned that it could lead to herbicide-resistant "super weeds" that farmers would have difficulty controlling. Also, the plants could be moving onto the fields of organic farmers. In Australia, one farmer who lost his organic certification has sued his neighbor, saying genetically modified canola contaminated his organic crops. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241104-The-Great-Escape-Gene-altered-Crops-Grow-Wild Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:53:56 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241100-Missing-Scientists-Mystery-Deepens-in-Frozen-Antarctica The world holds its breath, hoping for the best after six days of radio silence from Antarctica -- where a team of Russian scientists is racing the clock and the oncoming winter to dig to an alien lake far beneath the ice. The team from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) have been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 13,000 ft. below the surface of the icy continent. Lake Vostok hasn't been exposed to air in more than 20 million years. The team's last contact with colleagues in the unfrozen world was six long days ago, and scientists from around the globe are unsure of the fate of the mission -- and the scientists themselves -- as Antarctica's killing winter draws near. "When you're outside, it's extremely cold -- minus 30, minus 40," microbiologist Dr. David A. Pearce told FoxNews.com. "If you left your eyes open the fluid in them would start to freeze. Your nostrils would start to freeze. The moisture in your mouth would start to freeze," he said. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241100-Missing-Scientists-Mystery-Deepens-in-Frozen-Antarctica Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:30:11 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241090-Two-New-Moons-Found-Orbiting-Jupiter Tiny satellites add to planet's "backward" swarm, astronomers say. Two new moons have been found orbiting Jupiter, bringing the Jovian family count up to 66 natural satellites, astronomers revealed this week. Currently known as S/2011 J1 and S/2011 J2, the new moons were first identified in images acquired with the Magellan-Baade Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile on September 27, 2011. The objects are among the smallest moons yet discovered in the solar system, each measuring only about a kilometer (0.62 mile) wide. Unlike Jupiter's four large Galilean moons, which are visible from Earth with even small backyard telescopes, both new moons are dim and very distant from the planet, taking about 580 and 726 days to complete their orbits. Scientists had previously discovered new Jovian satellites in 2010, and astronomers think there may be more - lots more. "The satellites are part of the outer retrograde swarm of objects around Jupiter," said Scott Sheppard, of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, D.C., who reported the discovery. Retrograde satellites are moons that orbit "backward" - in the opposite direction of a planet's axial rotation. Including the two new moons, the Jupiter swarm features 52 known retrograde satellites, which are all relatively tiny. "It is likely there are about a hundred satellites of this size" in the swarm, Sheppard said. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241090-Two-New-Moons-Found-Orbiting-Jupiter Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:00:52 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241058-NASA-probe-sends-back-its-first-video-of-the-moon-s-dark-side- Nasa's twin Grail probes arrived at the moon in early January - and one has just sent back its first video from the 'dark' side of the moon, the one we don't see from Earth. The video shows a flight from the north pole to the south pole of the moon. 'It's very rugged and covered with impact craters from asteroids that hit the moon's surface,' says Maria Zuber, Nasa's principal investigator on Grail. In the video, the north pole of the Moon is visible at the top of the screen as the spacecraft flies toward the lunar south pole. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241058-NASA-probe-sends-back-its-first-video-of-the-moon-s-dark-side- Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:40:13 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241030-Window-Installed-Into-a-Live-Brain What if we had a glass window into the brain that lets us look inside? For the first time ever, a team of physicists, chemists and biologists has done just that. Led by a microscopy pioneer, they peered into a living mouse's brain using powerful technology. "You can look into the brain and see a true neuron in action," said physicist Stefan Hell, who leads the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry's Department of NanoBiophotonics. His team's achievement is described in the latest issue of the journal Science. Hell is well-known in the field for inventing a super-resolution "stimulated emission depletion" or STED microscope in the 1990s that can distinguish among features in living samples on a scale so small that general wisdom said it would be impossible. With that microscope, Hell and his colleagues at Max Planck can discern features down to 70 nanometers in the living brain -- four times beyond what had been the physical limit. An electron microscope can show powerful levels of detail, but only on dead cells mounted and prepared just so. Recently Hell's team took a live mouse that had been genetically modified so its neurons produce a fluorescent agent. They placed the mouse under anesthesia, opened its skull, and replaced part of the bone with a glass window. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241030-Window-Installed-Into-a-Live-Brain Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:13:07 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241022-Northern-forests-may-be-losing-their-ability-to-trap-carbon The northern forests of western Canada are likely absorbing less carbon dioxide because of climate change, and the decline may be making a bad situation worse, researchers from Quebec and China have concluded. If the situation remains as it is, the forests may actually put more carbon dioxide back into the air than they absorb, the researchers said. While researchers have seen this happen in tropical rainforests, the new result suggests that this problem could be much more widespread. The scientists at the University of Quebec's Montreal campus and from several Chinese institutions, reporting in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have been able to put numbers to the fears that the ability of northern forests to absorb carbon -- to act as carbon sinks -- was decreasing. The researchers studied 96 permanent old-growth forests out of 20,000 candidates, concentrating on aspens, which are more sensitive to changes in precipitation. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241022-Northern-forests-may-be-losing-their-ability-to-trap-carbon Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:28:39 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241016-San-Andreas-Fault-May-Look-Like-a-Propeller-Scientists-Find Last October more than 8.6 million Californians practiced the "Drop, Cover and Hold On" drill in the Great California ShakeOut. The exercise was designed to help residents prepare for the next "big one," a potential magnitude-7.8 earthquake along the southern San Andreas Fault. All of the Great ShakeOut scenarios are based on everything scientists think they know about the San Andreas Fault - a so-called strike-slip boundary between the North American and Pacific plates that, geologists assumed, is very near vertical. But what if it's not vertical? A team recently took a new look at the San Andreas Fault and found that its geometry isn't that simple. "It looks like the San Andreas continues down into the mantle with a propeller shape," said Gary Fuis, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. "If it's not vertical, it makes a big difference in who feels the shaking." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241016-San-Andreas-Fault-May-Look-Like-a-Propeller-Scientists-Find Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:04:04 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241001-Engineers-Invent-Bullet-That-Guides-Itself-to-Target Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have invented a bullet that guides itself to the target. Sandia has wide expertise at miniature technology, and the bullet works like a tiny guided missile. The patented design doesn't shoot straight. Instead of a spiral rotation, the bullet twists and turns to guide itself towards a laser directed point. It can make up to thirty corrections per second while in the air. Jim Jones, distinguished member of technical staff, and his team of engineers at Sandia Labs think the .50-caliber bullets would work well with military machine guns so soldiers could hit their mark faster and with precision. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/241001-Engineers-Invent-Bullet-That-Guides-Itself-to-Target Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:35:35 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240994-Book-Review-The-Science-Delusion-by-Rupert-Sheldrake The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn't often mentioned today. It's a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can't go on pretending to believe that our own experience - the source of all our thought - is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality. We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings - and indeed other animals - as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals. Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don't suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing "Questions for Materialists", questions such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do you explain the placebo response?" and so on. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240994-Book-Review-The-Science-Delusion-by-Rupert-Sheldrake Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:52:53 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240992-It-s-Time-For-Science-to-Move-On-from-Materialism The rigid 19th-century orthodoxy should be challenged to allow broader interpretations, as Rupert Sheldrake argues Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, once observed that history could be divided into periods according to what people of the time made of matter. In his book Physics and Philosophy, published in the early 60s, he argued that at the beginning of the 20th century we entered a new period. It was then that quantum physics threw off the materialism that dominated the natural sciences of the 19th century. Of materialism, he wrote: "[This] frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concept of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world." Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: "The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240992-It-s-Time-For-Science-to-Move-On-from-Materialism Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:41:15 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240982-Ancient-Islamic-Architects-Created-Perfect-Quasicrystals A researcher in the US reports to have found the first examples of perfect quasicrystal patterns in Islamic architecture. Her upcoming paper also describes how the designers were creating these geometric patterns from as early as the 12th century CE using nothing but rudimentary tools. It was not until the 1970s that academics began to develop mathematics that could explain these striking patterns seen in nature. Quasicrystals are patterns that fill all of a space but do not have the translational symmetry that is characteristic of true crystals. In two dimensions this means that sliding an exact copy of the pattern over itself will never produce an exact match, though rotating the copy will often produce a match. They were first described mathematically by the British academic Roger Penrose in the guise of the famous Penrose tiles. About 10 years later Danny Schechtman of Israel's Technion University showed that the positions of atoms in a metallic alloy had a quasicrystalline structure. Since then, hundreds of different quasicrystals have been discovered in nature. Mesmerizing patterns Various people from both scientific and design fields have noted the similarity between quasicrystal structures and certain forms of Islamic decorative art. These mesmerizing geometric patterns, often located in places of worship, comprise repetitive patterns that reveal different features depending on whether you look at small sections or larger regions of the design. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240982-Ancient-Islamic-Architects-Created-Perfect-Quasicrystals Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:29:52 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240971-Alien-Particles-Found-Invading-Our-Solar-System NASA probe detects matter from interstellar space. For the first time, a NASA spacecraft has directly observed "alien" particles that came from beyond our solar system, astronomers announced today. The discovery not only gives us a glimpse of what exists in the so-called interstellar medium - the matter between stars - but also offers clues to the anatomy of our local galactic neighborhood. Orbiting Earth some 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) away, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft was able to snag samples of hydrogen, oxygen, and neon that came from interstellar space. "It's exciting to be able to have these first observations of alien matter - stuff that didn't come from our sun or the planets, but came from the outside of our solar system, from other parts of the galaxy," David McComas, team leader for the IBEX program, said during a NASA news conference Tuesday. "We think these are really important measurements, because these elements are the fundamental building blocks of stars, planets, and people." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240971-Alien-Particles-Found-Invading-Our-Solar-System Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:23:48 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240949-Magma-May-Give-Signs-of-Super-Volcano-Eruptions Crystals from a giant eruption linked to the legend of Atlantis may reveal ways to predict future super-volcano eruption, researchers say. Each of the world's roughly one dozen super-volcanoes is capable of spewing out thousands of times more magma and ash than any eruption ever recorded in human history. For instance, when Mount Toba on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted some 74,000 years ago, a staggering 700 cubic miles (2,800 cubic kilometers) of magma and a thick layer of ash were released over South Asia. In comparison, the explosion of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883, one of the largest eruptions in recorded history, released about 3 cubic miles (12 cubic km) of material. "These are catastrophic eruptions," said researcher Tim Druitt, a volcanologist at the University of Blaise Pascal in France, who with his colleagues examined crystals from the Greek island of Santorini to try to learn about the behavior of the magma reservoir beneath a powerful volcano. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240949-Magma-May-Give-Signs-of-Super-Volcano-Eruptions Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:36:30 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240941-Inside-Your-Mind-Scientist-Can-Eavesdrop-on-What-You-Hear By analyzing the brain, scientists can tell what words a person has just heard, research now reveals. Such work could one day allow scientists to eavesdrop on the internal monologues that run through our minds, or hear the imagined speech of those unable to speak. "This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease and can't speak," said researcher Robert Knight at the University of California at Berkeley. "If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit." Recent studies have shown that scientists could tell what number a person has just seen by carefully analyzing brain activity. They similarly could figure out how many dots a person was presented with. To see if they could do the same for sound, researchers focused on decoding electrical activity in a region of the human auditory system called the superior temporal gyrus, or STG. The 15 volunteers in the study were patients undergoing neurosurgery for epilepsy or brain tumor - as such, researchers could directly access the STG with electrodes and see how it responded to words in normal conversation that volunteers listened to. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240941-Inside-Your-Mind-Scientist-Can-Eavesdrop-on-What-You-Hear Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:37:31 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240937-Surveillance-Video-Becomes-a-Tool-for-Studying-Customers The huge success of online shopping and advertising - led by giants like Amazon and Google - is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent - counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with video from security cameras. "There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available," says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information." Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices - valuable data to them and to the device makers. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240937-Surveillance-Video-Becomes-a-Tool-for-Studying-Customers Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:57:16 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240932-Facebook-s-Oregon-Data-Center-Uses-As-Much-Power-As-Entire-County Facebook has invested $210 million to build the first phase of its new data center in Prineville, Oregon, which has a capacity of 28 megawatts of power, the company and local economic development officials revealed this week. The disclosures, released in an economic impact study and a community economic forum, were the first public confirmations of the cost and power usage of the Facebook project. The new data, which shed light on the cost of operating Facebook's massive server infrastructure, emerges as the company is said to be prepping papers for an initial public offering, which would include additional details about the company's operations. The Oregon disclosures are part of Facebook's effort to reinforce the benefits of its data center to the local economy, amid a dispute over property taxes and questions from some Prineville residents about the impact of data centers on the small community in central Oregon. For Prineville, Facebook is a big business operation - a fact reflected in the power required to operate the first phase of the data center. The 28 megawatts of utility power for the 300,000 square foot first phase isn't extraordinary for a data center of that size. But it stands out in Crook County, where all the homes and business other than Facebook use 30 megawatts of power. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240932-Facebook-s-Oregon-Data-Center-Uses-As-Much-Power-As-Entire-County Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:39:50 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240928-First-Chimeric-Monkeys-Born By inserting genes from six different monkey embryos, US researchers have created the first chimera primates. Three chimera monkeys were born in a lab at the Oregon National Primate Research Center recently. To create these chimera primates, scientists inserted a combination of genes from several monkey embryos into a new embryo, accomplishing a feat that had been previously only demonstrated in less complex species. Previously, knockout mice have become powerful tools for scientists studying genetic diseases including Parkinson's and obesity, but the techniques were not applicable to primates. Knockout mice are created by fusing together mouse embryonic stem cells in a lab dish and then culturing those cells into a mouse embryo. But with the more complicated primate embryo, the cultured stem cells do not integrate so easily. "So far, scientists studied human and monkey embryonic stem cells in vitro, in a Petri dish, and thought that since they came initially from embryos, they retain the ability to develop into mature and functional tissues and organs, just like normal stem cells in developing embryos," said study author Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Centre at Oregon Health and Science University. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240928-First-Chimeric-Monkeys-Born Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:26:54 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240907-NASA-Probe-Discovers-Alien-Matter-From-Beyond-Our-Solar-System For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system - material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy, researchers announced today (Jan. 31). This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) above Earth. "This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people are made of - it's really important to be measuring it," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a news briefing today from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. An international team of scientists presented new findings from IBEX, which included the first detection of alien particles of hydrogen, oxygen and neon, in addition to the confirmation of previously detected helium. These atoms are remnants of older stars that have ended their lives in violent explosions, called supernovas, which dispersed the elements throughout the galaxy. As interstellar wind blows these charged and neutral particles through the Milky Way, the IBEX probe is able to create a census of the elements that are present. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240907-NASA-Probe-Discovers-Alien-Matter-From-Beyond-Our-Solar-System Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:32:22 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240894-US-Nuclear-reactor-loses-power-venting-steam Chicago - A nuclear reactor at a northern Illinois plant shut down Monday after losing power, and steam was being vented to reduce pressure, according to officials from Exelon Nuclear and federal regulators. Unit 2 at Byron Generating Station, about 95 miles northwest of Chicago, shut down at 10:18 a.m., after losing power, Exelon officials said. Diesel generators began supplying power to the plant, and operators began releasing steam to cool the reactor from the part of the plant where turbines are producing electricity, not from within the nuclear reactor itself, officials said. The steam contains low levels of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, but federal and plant officials insisted the levels were safe for workers and the public. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared the incident an "unusual event," the lowest of four levels of emergency. Commission officials also said the release of tritium was expected. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240894-US-Nuclear-reactor-loses-power-venting-steam Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:01:37 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240885-Patent-For-A-Pig-The-Big-Business-of-Genetics Patent For A Pig: The Big Business of Genetics: The American biotechnology firm, Monsanto, has applied for a patent for pig breeding in 160 countries. The patent is for specific parts of the genetic material of pigs which Monsantos genetic researchers have decoded. If this patent is granted, pig breeding would be possible with the approval of the company. Farmers and breeders are naturally alarmed because these genes have long existed in the great majority of their pigs. Using DNA tests they can prove that there is no new invention in the patent applications but that, instead, granting this patent would be to allow a part of nature to fall into the hands of a single company. Monsantos influence on the patent offices is huge. If the patent is approved, money will have to be paid to Monsanto for e very pig in the world carrying this genetic marker. This has long been the case for certain feedstuffs, such as genetically modified maize. Many farmers in the US have already become dependent on the company. It is not merely a question of money, however, but also a question of the risk posed to consumers. In America, as in Europe, cases of infertility in animals fed with genetically modified maize are becoming increasingly common. No-one yet knows what effects such products are having on humans. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240885-Patent-For-A-Pig-The-Big-Business-of-Genetics Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:18:04 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240868-Students-Discover-Millisecond-Pulsar-Help-in-the-Search-for-Gravitational-Waves A special project to search for pulsars has bagged the first student discovery of a millisecond pulsar - a super-fast spinning star, and this one rotates about 324 times per second. The Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) has students analyzing real data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's (NRAO) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to find pulsars. Astronomers involved with the project said the discovery could help detect elusive ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves. "Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity," said Dr. Maura McLaughlin, from Western Virginia University. "We have very good proof for their existence but, despite Einstein's prediction back in the early 1900s, they have never been detected." Four other pulsars have been discovered by high school students participating in this project. "When you discover a pulsar, you feel like you're walking on air! It is the best experience you can ever have," said student co-discoverer Jessica Pal of Rowan County High School in Kentucky. "You get to meet astronomers and talk to them about your experience. I still can't believe I found a pulsar. It is wonderful to know that there is something out there in space that you discovered." http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240868-Students-Discover-Millisecond-Pulsar-Help-in-the-Search-for-Gravitational-Waves Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:22:57 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240864-Unusual-Volcanic-Episode-Rapidly-Triggered-Little-Ice-Age-Researchers-Find Washington, DC - New evidence from northern ice sheets suggests that volcanic eruptions triggered the multiple-century cool spell known as the Little Ice Age, and pinpoints the start of the climate shift to the final decades of the 13th century. Researchers have long known that the Little Ice Age began sometime after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century. But, estimates of its onset have ranged from the 13th to the 16th century. According to the new study, the Little Ice Age began abruptly between 1275 and 1300 A.D., triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self- perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to Gifford Miller, a geological sciences professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU-Boulder), who led the study. The primary evidence comes from radiocarbon dates from dead vegetation emerging from rapidly melting icecaps on Baffin Island, combined with ice and sediment core data from the poles and Iceland, and from sea-ice climate model simulations, said Miller. He and his colleagues will publish their findings on 31 January in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). During the cool spell, advancing glaciers in mountain valleys in northern Europe destroyed towns. Famous paintings from the period depict people ice-skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, places that were ice-free before and after the Little Ice Age. There is evidence also that the Little Ice Age affected places far from Europe, including South America and China. While scientific estimates regarding the onset of the Little Ice Age extend from the 13th century to the 16th century, there has been little consensus, said Miller. "The dominant way scientists have defined the little Ice Age is by the expansion of big valley glaciers in the Alps and in Norway," said Miller. "But the time in which European glaciers advanced far enough to demolish villages would have been long after the onset of the cold period," said Miller, a Fellow at his university's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240864-Unusual-Volcanic-Episode-Rapidly-Triggered-Little-Ice-Age-Researchers-Find Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:55:48 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240854-Our-Planet-s-Killer-Electrons-Shoot-Toward-Space-Not-Earth As the sun heads toward its 2013 maximum, the corresponding increase in space weather may temporarily strip the radiation belts around Earth of their charged electrons. But a new study of data recorded by 11 independent spacecraft reveals that the deadly particles are blown into space rather than cast into our planet's atmosphere, as some scientists have suggested. Streams of highly charged electrons zip through the Van Allen radiation belts circling Earth. When particles from the sun collide with the planet's magnetic field, which shields Earth from the worst effects, the resulting geomagnetic storms can decrease the number of dangerous electrons. Where those particles go is something physicists have long puzzled over - and since they could wreak havoc on sensitive telecommunication satellites and pose a risk to astronauts in space, it's an important question, researchers say. At the heart of the geomagnetic storm mystery are strange dips, known as dropouts, in the number of charged particles in the radiation belts. These lapses can happen multiple times per year, but when the sun is going through an active period - as it is now - the number can increase to several times per month, scientists involved in the new study explained. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240854-Our-Planet-s-Killer-Electrons-Shoot-Toward-Space-Not-Earth Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:17:23 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240822-New-Theory-of-Life-Claims-to-Unite-Fields-of-Science The Earth is alive, asserts a new scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects - for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA - are animate, that is, alive. Erik Andrulis, PhD, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, advanced his controversial framework in his manuscript "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life," published in the peer-reviewed journal, Life. His theory explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on Earth and in the Universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres. In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Andrulis' theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable. The basic idea of Andrulis' framework is that all physical reality can be modeled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre. The so-called "gyromodel" depicts objects - particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells - as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel's center. A singularity is itself modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of life. An example of this nested, self-similar organization is the Russian Matryoshka doll. http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240822-New-Theory-of-Life-Claims-to-Unite-Fields-of-Science Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:05:23 -0600 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240804-Documentary-The-Aquatic-Ape-Hypothesis A BBC documentary based on the book The Aquatic Ape by author Elaine Morgan. This hypothesis was first proposed by biologist Alister Hardy and is an alternative human origin theory. Part 1 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/240804-Documentary-The-Aquatic-Ape-Hypothesis Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:17:16 -0600