Science & Technology

US: Website Can Find Your Exact Location Using Your Phone Number

John Brandon
FoxNews / SciTech
Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:11 UTC

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.

'Lost World' Reached: 20 million Year Old Antarctic Lake 'Drilled'

RT.com
Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:23 UTC

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.

Scientists Use Brain Waves to Eavesdrop on the Mind

Health Day News
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC

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."

The Great Escape: Gene-altered Crops Grow Wild

Lindsey Konkel
Environmental Health News
Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:29 UTC

© Environmental Health News
Feral flowers: Escaped gene-altered canola has some experts concerned that herbicide-resistant “super weeds” could result.

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.

Missing Scientists Mystery Deepens in Frozen Antarctica

Jeremy A. Kaplan
Fox News
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC

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.

Two New Moons Found Orbiting Jupiter

Jason Major
National Geographic News
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC

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.

NASA probe sends back its first video of the moon's 'dark side'

Rob Waugh
Dailymail.co.uk
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:36 UTC

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.

Window Installed Into a Live Brain

Alyssa Danigelis
Discovery News
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00 UTC

© Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen
An illustration of a "window" built into a mouse's brain. The mouse survived the procedure.

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.

Northern forests may be losing their ability to trap carbon

Joel N. Shurkin
Physorg
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:30 UTC

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.

San Andreas Fault May Look Like a Propeller, Scientists Find

Crystal Gammon
OurAmazingPlanet
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:32 UTC

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."

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Science & Technology

US: Website Can Find Your Exact Location Using Your Phone Number

'Lost World' Reached: 20 million Year Old Antarctic Lake 'Drilled'

Scientists Use Brain Waves to Eavesdrop on the Mind

The Great Escape: Gene-altered Crops Grow Wild

Missing Scientists Mystery Deepens in Frozen Antarctica

Two New Moons Found Orbiting Jupiter

NASA probe sends back its first video of the moon's 'dark side'

Window Installed Into a Live Brain

Northern forests may be losing their ability to trap carbon

San Andreas Fault May Look Like a Propeller, Scientists Find

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