Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

2,000-Year-Old Temple Dedicated to Cat God Discovered in Egypt


The London News
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 2,000-year-old temple in Alexandria dedicated to a cat goddess.

According to a report by BBC News, the temple is the first trace of the royal quarters of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be revealed in Alexandria.

The temple, discovered in the Kom el-Dekkah neighbourhood of the city, is believed to belong to Queen Berenike II, wife of Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the third century BC, according to Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The temple is the first part of the royal palace to be unearthed, and it is 60m (200ft) high and 15m (50ft) wide.

Archaeologists found statues of Bastet, worshipped by the Greek-speaking Egyptians as the moon goddess.
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Pharoah

Did Ancient Egyptian Makeup Have Protective Powers?


HealthDay News
Sat, 23 Jan 2010 10:41 UTC
The stunning eye makeup worn thousands of years ago by Queen Nefertiti and other Egyptian royals may not have been used to enhance beauty alone: New research suggests that the ancient cosmetics may have helped prevent or treat eye disease.

Some ancient Egyptians thought their lead-based black eye makeup could protect against illness. Until now, scientists haven't believed this because lead-based substances -- such as paint -- can make people sick.

In the study, published in the current issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers analyzed substances from ancient Egyptian makeup containers that are preserved at the Louvre museum in Paris. They found that the substances raise the production of nitric oxide in skin cells, which can help boost the immune system and prevent or treat eye infections.
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Magnify

Scientists say scanner can detect PTSD in veterans

Katie Drummond
CNN
Sat, 23 Jan 2010 10:04 UTC
Post-traumatic stress is estimated to afflict more than 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, but until now, it's been labeled a "soft disorder" -- one without an objective biological path to diagnosis.

That may have changed this week, after researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis VA Medical Center announced they'd found a distinct pattern of brain activity among PTSD sufferers.

The team used magnetoencephalography (MEG), a brain imaging method that measures how the brain processes information.
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Magnify

Mind Reading, Brain Fingerprinting and the Law


ScienceDaily
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
What if a jury could decide a man's guilt through mind reading? What if reading a defendant's memory could betray their guilt? And what constitutes 'intent' to commit murder? These are just some of the issues debated and reviewed in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, the latest interdisciplinary project from Wiley-Blackwell, which for registered institutions will be free for the first two years.

In the article "Neurolaw," in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, co-authors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Annabelle Belcher assess the potential for the latest cognitive science research to revolutionize the legal system.

Neurolaw, also known as legal neuroscience, builds upon the research of cognitive, psychological, and social neuroscience by considering the implications for these disciplines within a legal framework. Each of these disciplinary collaborations has been ground-breaking in increasing our knowledge of the way the human brain operates, and now neurolaw continues this trend.
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Magnify

Neurons Developed from Stem Cells Successfully Wired With Other Brain Regions in Animals


ScienceDaily
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Weimann et al./The Journal of Neuroscience 2010This is a single stem cell-derived neuron that has migrated away from the transplantation site in the cortex and grown into a mature neuron. The blue stain shows the nuclei of the endogenous neural cells in this part of the brain.
Transplanted neurons grown from embryonic stem cells can fully integrate into the brains of young animals, according to new research in the Jan. 20 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Healthy brains have stable and precise connections between cells that are necessary for normal behavior. This new finding is the first to show that stem cells can be directed not only to become specific brain cells, but to link correctly.

In this study, a team of neuroscientists led by James Weimann, PhD, of Stanford Medical School focused on cells that transmit information from the brain's cortex, some of which are responsible for muscle control. It is these neurons that are lost or damaged in spinal cord injuries and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). "These stem cell-derived neurons can grow nerve fibers between the brain's cerebral cortex and the spinal cord, so this study confirms the use of stem cells for therapeutic goals," Weimann said.
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Bulb

Inflammation 'on switch' also serves as 'off switch': Study reveals unexpected function for seemingly redundant protein


North Carolina State University
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:40 UTC
In a surprising finding, researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered the critical importance of a protein previously believed to be a redundant "on switch" for certain immune-system responses.

Scientists previously understood that the protein called TAB2 activates inflammation, an important biological process that stimulates wound-healing and prevents invasion of harmful organisms. But scientists considered TAB2 nonessential to the process due to the redundant function of a cousin protein, called TAB3, which has no trouble serving as an "on switch" to activate the inflammation process in TAB2's absence.
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Laptop

The Less-Connected Kids Are Alright - Says Study

Ed Oswald
PC World
Sat, 23 Jan 2010 21:23 UTC
A Kaiser Family Foundation study indicates that kids are spending more time than ever using some form of technology - and those who spend less time using technology get better grades.

Parents these days seem to complain more and more about their kids being online too much, and a recent study by by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicates that they may spend nearly a third of their day - which in many cases is probably half their waking hours - using some form of technology. Among those between the ages of 8 to 18, 7.5 hours is spend feeding their electronic habits.
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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Climategate Junk Scientist Michael Mann Awarded Half a Million in Stimulus Cash


National Center for Public Policy Research
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:11 UTC
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© Unknown
Funds Should be Returned to U.S. Treasury, Says National Center for Public Policy Research

Washington, DC - In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

"It's outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he's under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury," said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project.

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind's activities are causing global warming.
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Arrow Up

Opera and Firefox downloads soar after IE alerts

Cade Metz
The Register
Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:08 UTC
After Microsoft confirmed that a hole in its Internet Explorer browser was used in the December cyber attacks on Google and at least 33 other outfits, a trio of security-conscious nations - Germany, France, and Australia - went so far as to warn their citizens against the use of IE. And that led to a very good week for the likes of Opera and Mozilla.

Following an IE warning from the German government, Opera saw German downloads of its desktop browser more than double. And in Australia, where a similar warning was issued, its downloads leaped 37 per cent.

Meanwhile, Mozilla saw a "statistically significant rise" in the number of downloads originating from both Germany and France, the third nation to warn against the use of IE. In the chart below - supplied by Mozilla - the orange area shows an estimated 300,000 extra downloads in Germany over the past four days:
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Control Panel

The Internet: New shot in the arm for US hegemony


China Daily
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:20 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The Internet originated on American soil. In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department established the world's first testing packet-switched network (PSN) to connect four universities on US soil. The world saw a remarkable expansion of the scale and number of Internet users from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. In September 1989, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was founded with a grant from the US Department of Commence to administer the Internet terminal server. Over the past 40 years, the US has been dominating the world Internet as the core technique holder with an inherent advantage of being the cradle of the Internet.

There are 13 terminal servers in the world to keep the Internet running, with a master server and nine of the 12 secondary servers stationed in the US. In terms of technique, the network of a country will disappear from the world Internet if its domain name registry is blocked or deleted from the terminal server. This kind of conduct is not legally binding with the law of any country except ICANN. In April 2004, Libya was unseen on the Internet for three days after the collapse of the domain name registry of the country "LY" caused by a domain administration dispute.
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