Science & TechnologyS


Butterfly

Why Butterflies Have 'Eye Spots'

Stéphan Reebs
Live Science/Natural History Magazine
Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:13 UTC


owl butterfly
©Iowa State University Extension
Owl butterflies in the genus Caligo are so named because of the large eyespots, or ocelli, on the undersides of the hind wings. When the butterfly lands and folds its wings over its back these eyespots are prominent and threaten would-be predators.

Some moths and butterflies bear circular, high-contrast marks on their wings that have long been thought to scare off predators by mimicking the eyes of the predators' own enemies.

Not so, say Martin Stevens and two colleagues at the University of Cambridge in England, who argue the marks work simply because they are conspicuous. (Predators are wary of prey with striking patterns, as those patterns often warn of toxic substances.)
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Network

Internet traffic begins to bypass the U.S.

John Markoff
The New York Times
Sun, 31 Aug 2008 02:59 UTC
The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.
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People

Human genes can map persons' ancestry to home countries

Mohit Joshi
TopNews Health
Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:42 UTC
London - Human genomes can actually provide a geographical map through which one can map a person's ancestry down to his/her home country, according to new research.
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Key

In Our Genes, Old Fossils Take On New Roles

David Brown
Washington Post
Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:37 UTC
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

-- William Faulkner

Over the past 15 years, scientists have been comparing the inherited genetic material -- the genomes -- of dozens of organisms, acquiring a life history of life itself. What they're finding would impress even novelist William Faulkner, the great chronicler of how the past never really goes away.
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Better Earth

Flashback The Genetic Map of Europe

Nicholas Wade
The New York Times
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:13 UTC


Genetic map of Europe
©Unknown
Click for larger image.

Biologists have constructed a genetic map of Europe showing the degree of relatedness between its various populations.

All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
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Network

Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise

Hakon Lie
The Register
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:47 UTC
In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default."

Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise.

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
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Telescope

New comet discovered by Swiss amateur astronomer


Agence France-Presse
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:17 UTC
Geneva - A Swiss amateur astronomer has discovered a new comet from an observatory in the western Jura district, the ATS news agency said Saturday.

Only five similar comets -- fragile clusters of dust, ice and carbon-based molecules believed to be primitive material left over from the building of our star system -- have been been documented from Switzerland since the 17th century.

The latest one to be discovered has a diameter of 20,000 kilometres (12,400 miles) and has been named Ory after Michel Ory who made the discovery, the report said.

Discovered from the Vicques Observatory in Jura, Ory spotted the comet overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday and again from Wednesday to Thursday.

The best sightings are expected in October and November, the report added.
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Network

Carnegie Mellon system thwarts Internet eavesdropping


Carnegie Mellon University
Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:50 UTC
The growth of shared Wi-Fi and other wireless computer networks has increased the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and College of Engineering have devised a low-cost system that can thwart these "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attacks.

The system, called Perspectives, also can protect against attacks related to a recently disclosed software flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet phone book used to route messages between computers.

The researchers - David Andersen, assistant professor of computer science, Adrian Perrig, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and public policy, and Dan Wendlandt, a Ph.D. student in computer science - have incorporated Perspectives into an extension for the popular Mozilla Firefox v3 browser than can be downloaded free of charge here.
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Nuke

Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun?


The physics arXiv blog
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:37 UTC
Here's an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates.

We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields).

So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s.
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Bulb

Scientists unmask brain's hidden potential


Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:50 UTC
New findings explain how the brain compensates for vision loss; suggests much more versatility than previously recognized.

Previous research has found that when vision is lost, a person's senses of touch and hearing become enhanced. But exactly how this happens has been unclear.

Now a long-term study from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) demonstrates that sudden and complete loss of vision leads to profound - but rapidly reversible -- changes in the visual cortex. These findings, reported in the August 27 issue of the journal PLOS One, not only provide new insights into how the brain compensates for the loss of sight, but also suggest that the brain is more adaptable than originally thought.

"The brain's ability to reorganize itself is much greater than previously believed," explains senior author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "In our studies [in which a group of sighted study subjects were blindfolded for five days], we have shown that even in an adult, the normally developed visual system quickly becomes engaged to process touch in response to complete loss of sight. The speed and dynamic nature of the changes we observed suggest that rather than establishing new nerve connections - which would take a long time - the visual cortex is unveiling abilities that are normally concealed when sight is intact."
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