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Half of World's Languages May Become Extinct By Year 2100

Andrew Moran
Digital Journal
Sat, 15 May 2010 12:00 UTC
A new report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states that half of all modern languages may vanish by the year 2100. UNESCO says many languages are already considered to be endangered.

Here are some interesting facts about languages: There are 6,912 languages in the world. There are thirteen languages that are spoken by more than 100 million people. Approximately 2,000 languages are spoken by less than 1,000 people. The English language has about 800,000 words. Language has existed since 100,000 BC and the first language ever written was either Sumerian or Egyptian in 3,200 BC. Italian movies have won the most Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film.

All of that history of language could become extinct by the year 2100, according to UNESCO. A new report shows that half of all modern languages will "probably vanish" by the end of the century, reports Press TV.

Professor K. David Harrison, the director of the Living Tongues Institute of Swarthmore College, explained that there is a large rate of "language extinction or language death" and that half of the world's languages are already endangered. Harrison further added that the world is losing one language every two weeks.
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Info

LDS Church's Granite Mountain Vault Opened For Virtual Tour

Scott Taylor
Mormon Times
Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:03 UTC
Gene Vault
© Mormon Times
Salt Lake City -- The LDS Church is opening its storied vault -- albeit in a virtual kind of way.

Kicking off the national Family History Conference at the Salt Palace Convention Center was Wednesday morning's virtual video tour of the Granite Mountain Records Vault, the seldom-seen site of records preservation and storage for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Granite Mountain is home to some 35 billion images of genealogical information, contained mostly on 2.4 million rolls of microfilm, said Jay L. Verkler, managing director of the church's Family History Department and presenter of Wednesday's "tour."

Some 50-plus employees work at the secluded vault site, where records are stored, copied and digitized.

Granite Mountain doubles as a deep-storage facility protecting materials key to church operations, leadership and history.

If the casual observer sees LDS temples as being semi-secret, then the average Mormon may have similar leanings about the facility located not far up Little Cottonwood Canyon.
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Health

Found: Genes That Let You Live To 100

Jonathan Leake
Times Online
Sat, 15 May 2010 20:28 UTC
Scientist have discovered the "Methuselah" genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle.

The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.

No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right "suite" of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare - only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

The genes found so far each appear to give a little extra protection against the diseases of old age. Centenarians appear to have a high chance of having several such genes embedded in their DNA.

"Long-lived people do not have fewer disease genes or ageing genes," said Eline Slagboom of Leiden University, who is leading a study into 3,500 Dutch nonagenarians. "Instead they have other genes that stop those disease genes from being switched on. Longevity is strongly genetic and inherited."
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Rocket

Russia Develops Fundamentally New Space Weapons


International Business Times
Sat, 15 May 2010 15:44 UTC
Russia's air and space forces are preparing for future threats from space with a "fundamentally new weapon," a senior officer said Saturday on Ekho Moskvy radio.

"We are developing a fundamentally new weapon that can destroy potential targets in space," Col. Eduard Sigalov of Russia's air and space defense forces said.

The brigade commander said the 5th Brigade of the air and space defense forces, which is deployed in the Moscow Region, is ready to protect the capital against potential threats from outer space.

"In the near future we will have to perform the task of protecting Moscow from space-based threats," Sigalov said, adding that he hoped the potential protection would be enough and it would not actually have to be used.

He said the brigade currently had S-300 (SA-10 Grumble, SA-12 Giant/Gladiator) and S-400 (SA-21 Growler) missile systems and was capable of destroying any airborne threat.

The colonel added that improvements in recent years meant that units could now be ready to fire within 10 minutes.
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Info

Linking The Brain: Crucial Insights On Anvil

Suraj Saraf
Central Chronicle - Madhya Pradesh
Sat, 15 May 2010 00:12 UTC
Can people's moral judgement be altered by disrupting a part of the brain? Possible, says a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

"During the transmission two people are hooked up to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. After the first person's computer recognizes the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to other person's PC." "It is not telepathy", Dr. James said. "There is no conscious thought forming in one person's head and another conscious thought appearing in other person's mind".

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists were able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have major implications for judges and juries.

Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology disrupted activity in the right temporietal junction or TPJ, which is usually highly active when we think about what we believe the outcome of a particular act will be. The researchers disrupted the TJP by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp and got study participants to read a series of scenarios posing moral conundrums.
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Bad Guys

Police Loading Up on Military Technology

William Maclean
The Vancouver Sun
Fri, 14 May 2010 23:55 UTC
Undercover police spot a suspected suicide bomber apparently about to attack a crowd: They alert a commander, explaining the evidence is inconclusive.

Does the commander neutralize the threat by shooting dead a possibly innocent man, or go for an arrest, thereby alerting the man, who then explodes a device? The clock ticks unforgivingly.

From New York and London to the mountains of Afghanistan, the gizmos used by special forces and police to try to solve terrifying dilemmas such as these are increasingly similar, a trend driven in part by security companies seeking new markets.

While the crossover of gadgetry between military and civilian authorities is not new, its greatly expanded scale and variety is.
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Info

Planets in Nearby System are Off-Kilter, Measurements Show

Ron Cowen
Science News
Fri, 14 May 2010 14:56 UTC
Like bugs glued to a phonograph record, the solar system's planets all orbit the sun in nearly the same plane. A new finding shatters the notion that planetary systems around other stars all have a similarly flattened arrangement. Newly reported measurements reveal that the two outermost planets known to circle a nearby sunlike star called Upsilon Andromedae are wildly misaligned, orbiting the star in different planes separated by 30 degrees.

The observations include ground-based measurements of the back-and-forth motion, or wobble, of Upsilon Andromedae due to the tug of its orbiting planets. But most critical were Hubble Space Telescope observations that tracked the two-dimensional motion of the star as it pirouetted across the sky, orbiting the center of mass of its planetary system.

The new measurements are the first to accurately determine the angle between the orbits of two extrasolar planets circling a sunlike star, says Barbara McArthur of the University of Texas at Austin. She and her colleagues describe the findings in the June 1 Astrophysical Journal. The researchers are also scheduled to describe their study May 24 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Miami.
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Chalkboard

Mechanism Found That Prepares the a Newborn's Brain for Information Processing


Science Daily
Fri, 14 May 2010 15:44 UTC
Image
© Unknown
With their French colleagues, researchers at the University of Helsinki have found a mechanism in the memory center of newborn that adjusts the maturation of the brain for the information processing required later in life.

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain cells in the brain of a newborn are still quite loosely interconnected. In the middle of chaos, they are looking for contact with each other and are only later able to operate as interactive neural networks.

Many cognitive operations, such as attention, memory, learning and certain states of sleep are based on rhythmic interactions of neural networks. For a long time the researchers have been interested in finding the stage in the development of the brain in which the functional characteristics and interconnections are sufficiently developed for these subtle brain functions.
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Satellite

Space Station Rainbow


Space Weather
Fri, 14 May 2010 11:37 UTC
On May 12th, the International Space Station passed high over Queensbury, New York, where John E Cordiale was waiting ... with a prism. When the bright light of the streaking spacecraft passed through the glass, it spread into all the colors of a rainbow:

Image
© John E Cordiale
"This is an 18 sec exposure on my Nikon D200," says Cordiale. "For the objective prism, I used a Takahashi Meteor Spectrograph."

The ISS shines by reflected sunlight--just like the raindrops that reflect sunlight in the aftermath of a terrestrial thunderstorm. That's why the "space station rainbow" looks so familar. Same sun, same colors.
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Satellite

Incredible 3D Space Station - No Glasses Required!


Space Weather
Fri, 14 May 2010 11:28 UTC
Image
© Theirry Legault
Imagine a giant spaceship, a 750,000-lb behemoth as wide as a football field with solar wings that dwarf a modern airliner. Robotic arms are busy working around its exterior, careful to avoid a number of smaller spacecraft attached to docking ports. This amazing ship glides across the night sky--and suddenly jumps toward you in startling 3D!

Brace yourself, it's about to happen. First, look at the image below and cross your eyes; merge the two space stations into a single 3D object. Click HERE to watch to set the scene in motion (DivX required).

"I made the movie on April 24th when the International Space Station passed over my home in France," says Theirry Legault. Setting adjacent video frames side by side provided the 3D effect. "All you have to do is squint."

Legault, who is legendary among astrophotographers for his extraordinary shots of spacecraft and other things, recorded the flyby through a 10" Meade ACF telescope on a modified Takahashi EM-400 mount. The trick, he says, was using a green laser to pinpoint the ISS and a custom-made double joystick to track the spacecraft as it glided across the sky.
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