Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

Virginia Tech Engineer Identifies New Concerns For Antibiotic Resistance, Pollution


Terra Daily
Sat, 11 Dec 2010 14:47 UTC
Image
© Virginia Tech PhotoVirginia Tech associate professor of civil and environmental engineering Amy Pruden explained that reducing the spread of antibiotic resistance is a critical measure needed to prolong the effectiveness of currently available antibiotics.
Blacksburg Virginia--When an antibiotic is consumed, researchers have learned that up to 90 percent passes through a body without metabolizing. This means the drugs can leave the body almost intact through normal bodily functions.

In the case of agricultural areas, excreted antibiotics
can then enter stream and river environments through a variety of ways, including discharges from animal feeding operations, fish hatcheries, and nonpoint sources such as the flow from fields where manure or biosolids have been applied. Water filtered through wastewater treatment plants may also contain used antibiotics.

Consequently, these discharges become "potential sources of antibiotic resistance genes," says Amy Pruden, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient, and an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech.
Read More...
2 + 2 = 4

Redrawing The Map Of Great Britain Based On Human Interaction


Space Daily
Sat, 11 Dec 2010 14:31 UTC
Image
© unkFile image.
A group of researchers at MIT, Cornell University and University College London have used one of the world's largest databases of telecommunications records to redraw the map of Great Britain. The research, which will be published in the journal PLoS ONE, is based on the analysis of 12 billion anonymized records representing more than 95% of Great Britain's residential and business landlines.

"Since the pioneering work of Christaller and Losch in the early 20th century, a long-standing question in economic geography has been how to define regions in space," explains Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab and one of the paper's authors.

"Our paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions."
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

US: Phallic-Shaped Rock Discovered in Maryland

Clara Moskowitz
Live Science
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:41 UTC
phallic rock
© Martin D. KennyMartin Kenny discovered this phallic-shaped stone where workers were excavating to build a new barn in Maryland
When Martin Kenny came across what looked like a phallic carving at a site where workers had been excavating to build a new barn, he didn't know what to make of the thing.

"I was standing there and just happened to look down and said, 'Holy crap, what's that?' Kenny told LiveScience. "I put it in my trunk and said, 'What am I going to do about this?'"

Kenny, who works as a horse farrier (a specialist in hoof care), said he's contacted several academic institutions to see if they were interested in analyzing the object, but hasn't received a response. [Photos of the phallic carving]
Read More...
Info

Lego Replica of Ancient Astronomy Calculator is Mind-Blowing

Jeremy Hsu
Live Science
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:56 UTC
An astronomy calculator created by the ancient Greeks has been rebuilt as a Lego replica. The fully-functional replica can still perform original functions such as predicting eclipses, as seen in a Nature Video movie that has gone viral.

The Antikythera Mechanism originated more than 2,100 years ago as a complex gearwheel system that can display the date, positions of the sun and moon, lunar phases, a 19-year calendar, and a 223-month eclipse prediction dial. Divers retrieved the device in 1901 from the shipwreck of a 1st-century B.C. Roman merchant ship.

In 2008, researchers also found inscriptions on the device that represent names linked to the first Olympic Games celebrated by the ancient Greek city-states.

Read More...
Info

Manuscripts Reveal Legend of Jesus' Great-Grandmother

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:39 UTC
A pious, and ultimately, saintly woman named Ismeria was grandmother to the Virgin Mary, and great-grandmother to Jesus, according to a medieval legend.

Now, an examination of two manuscripts from 14th- and 15th-century Florence, Italy, reveals who exactly the legendary great-grandmother was, telling the story of the woman who gave birth to St. Anne, who became Mary's mother. The story of her life reflects expectations among Florentines living at that time, according to Catherine Lawless of the University of Limerick in Ireland. [Who Was Jesus the Man?]

"This article tells us a lot about fourteenth-century Florentine religious beliefs and practices, and nothing about the 'historical family' of Christ," Lawless wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience.

The story of St. Ismeria's life, rather, is rich in information on how a pious woman could be expected to live a married and widowed life, Lawless wrote in the Journal of Medieval History in an article posted online on Oct. 6.

According to the legend that unfolds in the manuscripts, Ismeria was a beautiful and devout woman who married "Santo Liseo," a patriarch. On their wedding day, the two made a deal that reconciled marriage with the demands of a pious life.
Read More...
Info

Ancient Tiger-Sized Predator Unearthed in Texas

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Sat, 11 Dec 2010 08:53 UTC
Dimetrodon
© Houston Museum of Natural ScienceAn illustration of a dimetrodon skeleton. The bones already exposed on "Wet Willi" are shaded red.
Paleontologists in Texas have unearthed a nearly complete fossil of a dimetrodon, a reptile-like predator that roamed the Permian landscape 287 million years ago.

This weekend, the team is working to transport the 400-pound animal's torso from its resting place in north Texas to Houston, where the fossil will be prepped for display in the newly renovated Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) paleontology hall in 2012.

Famous for the enormous fin on its back, dimetrodon is often mistaken for a dinosaur, although dimetrodons pre-dated dinos by millions of years. The creature could easily pass as a reptile, but dimetrodon wasn't precisely reptilian, either: It was a synapsid, a category that includes modern mammals. Think of dimetrodon as a very distant, very toothy cousin.

The first dimetrodon fossils were discovered in the late 1800s, but the new find is the most complete skeleton of the species found in 100 years, said Robert Bakker, HMNS curator of paleontology and the director of the dig that uncovered the fossil.

"It's stunning," Bakker told LiveScience. "Everyone who visits it, and there's been a steady stream of ranchers and amateur paleontologists, they just sit at the edge of the quarry and stare in reverence."
Read More...
Control Panel

Morality is modified in the lab


Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sat, 11 Dec 2010 06:26 UTC
Image
© Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Spectroscopy LaboratoryHow complex is our sense of morality?
Scientists have shown they can change people's moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses.

They identified a region of the brain just above and behind the right ear which appears to control morality.

And by using magnetic pulses to block cell activity they impaired volunteers' notion of right and wrong.

The small Massachusetts Institute of Technology study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read More...
Info

No Evidence of Time Before Big Bang

Edwin Cartlidge
Nature
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:34 UTC
Big Bang
© NASACircular ripples in the cosmic microwave background have been making waves with theoreticians.

Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles - and even triangles - but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background - the radiation left over from the Big Bang - might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

The provocative idea was posited by Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and celebrated theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK. In a recent paper1, posted on the arXiv preprint server, Gurzadyan and Penrose argue that collisions between supermassive black holes from before the Big Bang would generate spherically propagating gravitational waves that would, in turn, leave characteristic circles within the cosmic microwave background.

To verify this claim, Gurzadyan examined seven years' worth of data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, calculating the change in temperature variance within progressively larger rings around more than 10,000 points in the microwave sky. And indeed, he identified a number of rings within the WMAP data that had a temperature variance that was markedly lower than that of the surrounding sky.
Read More...
Attention

U.S. Military in Talks to Share Fireball Data from Secret Satellites

Leonard David
Space.com
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:50 UTC
Fireball
© Space.com

For decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has operated classified spacecraft loaded with high-tech gear to carry out a range of reconnaissance duties. But the satellites have also spotted the high-altitude explosions of natural fireballs that routinely dive into the Earth's atmosphere, and talks are under way to offer scientists access to that data.

In the past, the data on the fireballs, caused by small asteroids called bolides, was shared with the near-Earth object (NEO) science community, information deemed ideal for understanding the size of small NEOs and the hazard they pose.

From space scientists, they stress that such data sharing is also important for validating airburst simulations, characterizing the physical properties of small NEOs - such as their strength - and assisting in the recovery of meteorites.

On the other hand, the message from U.S. military and intelligence officials is that they worry about release of sensitive data gleaned by secret satellites.
Read More...
Sun

Prepare for nature's 2012 spectacular! NASA predicts brightest northern lights display for 50 years... but solar activity could play havoc with technology


Daily Mail
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:52 UTC
Image
2007: This shot of the lights above a building in Iceland shows an impressive but quite dim display.

Peak in activity could see problems for mobiles, GPS and National Grid

It is nature's most mesmerising lights show and it's about to get a whole lot better. Experts predict the northern lights will shine at the brightest levels seen for 50 years in 2012. Since 2007 the aurora borealis has been growing in intensity and will peak during the year after next, according to NASA scientists.

However, if the 2012 aurora are as big as expected, it could cause disruption to mobile phones, GPS and even the national grid. The event will be caused by the Solar Maximum - a period when the sun's magnetic field on the solar equator rotates at a slightly faster pace than at the solar poles. The solar cycle takes an average of around 11 years to go from one solar maximum to the next - varying between 9 to 14 years for any given solar cycle.

The last Solar Maximum was in 2000 and NASA scientists have predicted that the next one in 2012 will be the greatest since 1958, where the aurora stunned the people of Mexico by making an appearance on three occasions. In 2012 scientists have stated that the 'Northern' lights should at least be visible as far south as Rome. Icelandic photographer Orvar Thorgiersson, from Reyjavik, is in the middle of a project to document the growing intensity of the phenomena.
Read More...