Science & TechnologyS

Bulb

Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility

CLAUDIA DREIFUS
The New York Times
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:29 UTC
Two years ago, when Malcolm Gladwell published his best-selling "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," readers throughout the world were introduced to the ideas of Gerd Gigerenzer, a German social psychologist.

Dr. Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, is known in social science circles for his breakthrough studies on the nature of intuitive thinking. Before his research, this was a topic often dismissed as crazed superstition. Dr. Gigerenzer, 59, was able to show how aspects of intuition work and how ordinary people successfully use it in modern life.
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Display

Google's New Foe: Hulu

Nat Worden
TheStreet
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:29 UTC
News Corp. and General Electric planted a flag in cyberspace Wednesday in their bid to steal YouTube's thunder with a rival video site, now called Hulu.

Having announced the partnership in March, the media giants have finally put a homepage up on the Web, though no videos are available yet.
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Star

Up Up And Away To Venus


Space Daily
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 07:06 UTC
Scientists hope to learn more about climate changes here on Earth by studying Venus. A prototype balloon could eventually study the planet's surface and examine its atmosphere and the bizarre winds and chemistry within it. A team of JPL, ILC Dover and NASA Wallops Flight Facility engineers designed, fabricated and tested the balloon.

©ESA
Scientists believe the Venus balloons could also help us learn more about climate changes here on Earth. "Venus is a place where global warming has gone amuck," Hall said. "It's about the same size as our planet, but the surface is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, and we want to find out why."

Slightly smaller than Earth, Venus is often regarded as Earth's sister planet. Both have similar densities, chemical compositions and gravities. However, its atmosphere is nearly 100 times thicker than Earth's, which causes blazing temperatures at the surface. By flying in the cool skies above Venus, the balloons would avoid that environment.
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Snowman

Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia

Mason Inman
National Geographic
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 06:57 UTC
Bacteria can survive in deep freeze for hundreds of thousands of years by staying just alive enough to keep their DNA in good repair, a new study says.

In earlier work, researchers had found ancient bacteria in permafrost and in deep ice cores from Antarctica.
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Life Preserver

Hit the Beach: Why Humans Love Water

Meredith F. Small
Live Science
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 06:41 UTC
I am lying on hot slab of rock on the coast of Maine. Fifty feet down to my right, the Atlantic Ocean crashes against a cliff face. I watch as the water spews upward and across a pile of boulders, leaving tide pools in its wake.

I am completely mesmerized. The waves come and they go and I stare and stare, my mind totally blank.

But then I realize it's not so much blank as content, mentally at rest, and that it's been a while since I've felt this good. The water has apparently washed away any thoughts of stuff I need to do for work, or personal troubles that days before were weighing me down.

I'm on vacation, I say to myself, and that's why happiness has taken over my brain.
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Magnify

'No surprise' Report: Average SAT scores dip again

Justin Pope
AP Education Writer
Tue, 28 Aug 2007 21:13 UTC
Combined math and reading SAT scores for the high school class of 2007 were the lowest in eight years - a trend the College Board attributed largely to the good news that a more diverse pool of students is taking the exam.
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Info

Second longest 'Great Wall' in Asia discovered in Iran


ANI
Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:03 UTC
British and Iranian archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a 200 kilometre long wall, the second longest wall in Asia after the Great Wall of China, in northern Iran.

Experts believe the Gorgan Great Wall in northern Iran's Golestan Province was built at about the same time as the 'Great Wall' and was used as a defence system against the invasions of the Ephthalites, a nomadic people who once lived in Central Asia.

©Unknown
A view of Gorgan's Defensive Wall.
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Telescope

Asteroids Found by Bulgarian Astronomers Acknowledged


international.news.bg
Tue, 28 Aug 2007 18:37 UTC
The Center for small objects in the Solar system in Harvard, USA, acknowledged the three new asteroids found last week by Bulgarian astronomers in the Capricorn constellation.

This announced the University center on space research and technologies at the Physics faculty of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", cited by Darik radio.

The objects are temporarily labeled as 2007 PN28, 2007 PQ2 ะธ 2007 QD2 and are situated in the main asteroid zone. They circle between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter with periods respectively 4.7, 3.6 and 5.4 years.
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Star

Shrinking giants, exploding dwarves


Weizmann Institute of Science
Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:03 UTC
When white dwarf stars explode, they leave behind a rapidly expanding cloud of 'stardust' known as a Type Ia supernova. These exploding events, which shine billions of times brighter than our sun, are all presumed to be extremely similar, and thus have been used extensively as cosmological reference beacons to trace distance and the evolution of the Universe.

Astronomers have now - for the first time ever - provided a unique set of observations obtained with the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile and the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii, enabling them to find traces of the material that had surrounded a white dwarf star before it exploded. Their data set is unique in that no Type Ia supernova event has ever been observed at this level of detail over a several-month period following the explosion.
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Clock

A computer simulation shows how evolution may have speeded up


Weizmann Institute of Science
Tue, 28 Aug 2007 07:57 UTC
Is heading straight for a goal the quickest way there" If the name of the game is evolution, suggests new research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the pace might speed up if the goals themselves change continuously.

Nadav Kashtan, Elad Noor and Prof. Uri Alon of the Institute's Molecular Cell Biology and Physics of Complex Systems Departments create computer simulations that mimic natural evolution, allowing them to investigate processes that, in nature, take place over millions of years. In these simulations, a population of digital genomes evolves over time towards a given goal: to maximize fitness under certain conditions. Like living organisms, genomes that are better adapted to their environment may survive to the next generation or reproduce more prolifically. But such computer simulations, though sophisticated, don't yet have all the answers. Achieving even simple goals may take thousands of generations, raising the question of whether the three-or-so billion years since life first appeared on the planet is long enough to evolve the diversity and complexity that exist today.
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