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Good Behavior, Religiousness May Be Partly Genetic


ScienceDaily
Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:05 UTC
A new study in Journal of Personality shows that selfless and social behavior is not purely a product of environment, specifically religious environment. After studying the behavior of adult twins, researchers found that, while altruistic behavior and religiousness tended to appear together, the correlation was due to both environmental and genetic factors.

According to study author Laura Koenig, the popular idea that religious individuals are more social and giving because of the behavioral mandates set for them is incorrect. "This study shows that religiousness occurs with these behaviors also because there are genes that predispose them to it."

"There is, of course, no specific gene for religiousness, but individuals do have biological predispositions to behave in certain ways," says Koenig. "The use of twins in the current study allowed for an investigation of the genetic and environmental influences on this type of behavior."
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Cut

Boldly going nowhere: Nasa ends plan to put man back on Moon

Jacqui Goddard
The Times
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:49 UTC
Nasa has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon - effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight programme despite a congressional ban on its doing so.

Legislators have accused President Obama's Administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill.

Constellation aimed to build upon what was arguably America's greatest technological achievement, the first lunar landing of 1969, by launching new expeditions to the Moon and to Mars and worlds beyond. Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was "over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation", but he has met opposition in Congress, which has yet to approve his plan.The head of Nasa, Major-General Charlie Bolden - an Obama appointee - has now written to aerospace contractors telling them to cut back immediately on Constellation-related projects costing almost $1 billion (£690 million), to comply with regulations requiring them to budget for possible contract termination costs.
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Info

Biophotonics Lights Medicine's Path

Kathlyn Stone
Flesh and Stone
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:22 UTC
Biophotonics_1
© ICFOLasers are one of the light sources used by biophotonics researchers.
Have you heard of biophotonics or photomedicine? If not, you're not alone, since the discipline has a rather low profile despite its wide use in oncology, dermatology, ophthalmology, surgery and cardiology.

Light is at the heart of biophotonics. Biophotonics is the convergence of biology and photonics - science and technology focused on generating, manipulating and detecting photons, which are the quantum units of light. Biophotonics employs applying a light source, such as a microscope light, a laser or radiation, to a tissue or cell.

One simple application of biophotonics you've probably seen is a light-emitting device, called a pulse oximeter, which is placed on a finger to ascertain a person's arterial oxygen saturation and cardiac rhythm.
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Info

River Deltas Hint at Ancient Martian Ocean

Jon Cartwright
Nature News
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:32 UTC
Mars Ocean
© B.Hynek/University of ColoradoA huge ocean may have covered almost one-third of the Martian surface.
Planetary geologists in the United States have analysed data that suggest Mars was once home to a huge ocean of water, covering nearly one-third of its surface. Their evidence, a ring of dry river deltas and valleys all at a similar elevation, adds weight to the idea that the red planet once supported an Earth-like water cycle.

Hints that an ocean once occupied the northern lowlands of ancient Mars first arose in the late 1980s. Scientists examining pictures of the surface claimed to recognize extensive shorelines and vast networks of river valleys and outflow channels feeding in the same direction. Other researchers used thermal physics to imply that such networks could only have been carved by a complete water cycle, fuelled by one or more huge bodies of water.

Not all evidence has supported the idea of a Martian ocean, however. In the late 1990s, researchers studying high-resolution images of the proposed shoreline regions could not find any of the erosion and sediment normally associated with an ocean's edge. Nor have they since found the telltale coastal landforms seen on Earth, such as spits and wave-deposited ridges.
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Sun

Sunspot 1081's M1-Class Solar Flare


Space Weather
Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:10 UTC
Today, June 12th at 0055 UT, new sunspot 1081 unleashed an impulsive M1-class solar flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the blast in high-resolution:
Image
© NASA

The explosion hurled a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) off the sun's western limb; the cloud will probably not hit Earth. The explosion also produced a Type II radio burst. "Although the Sun was setting here in New Mexico, I was able to record the burst at 28 MHz and 24 MHz," says amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft. "Here is an audio file. The slow swoosh is radio noise from the sun!"
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Meteor

Comet McNaught C/2009 R1


Space Weather
Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:19 UTC
One wonders... Did the inhabitants of galaxy NGC 891 duck when Comet McNaught flew past the edge-on spiral on the morning of June 8th? Mike O'Connor and Tristan Dilapo took this picture of the cosmic close encounter from Colden, New York:

Image
© Mike O'Connor and Tristan Dilapo
"The comet was only 10 degrees above the horizon," says O'Connor. "Nevertheless, we got a good picture using a 12-inch telescope and an SBIG ST9-E camera."

And, no, the denizens of that distant galaxy did not flinch, flee, duck or take notice in any way. NGC 891 is 30 million light years away, far removed from the willowy tail of Comet McNaught.

We Earthlings are having the true close encounter. Comet McNaught (C/2009 R1) is gliding through the inner solar system, due to approach our planet only 100 million miles away on June 15th and 16th. The approaching comet looks great in small telescopes, and may yet become a naked-eye object before the end of the month. Because this is Comet McNaught's first visit, predictions of future brightness are necessarily uncertain; amateur astronomers should be alert for the unexpected.
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Chalkboard

Radiation-soaking metamaterial puts black in the shade

Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:30 UTC
Image
© U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Andy DunawaySoon even harder to spot
Fashionistas take note: this material really does deserve to be labelled the new black - it absorbs virtually all the light that hits it.

This "blacker than black" stuff is an example of a class of substances known as metamaterials, which exhibit optical properties not normally found in nature.

Metamaterials consist of a regular array of two or more tiny components, each smaller than the wavelengths of the light they interact with. It is this array-like internal structure that gives them their unusual properties.

Evgenii Narimanov of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, realised that it should be possible to design a metamaterial with the right internal structure to absorb virtually all the electromagnetic radiation in a particular range. An object made of such a material would effectively be perfectly black. By contrast, ordinary black objects always reflect a little light.

In collaboration with Narimanov, Mikhail Noginov and colleagues at Norfolk State University in Virginia have now created such a perfectly black material. It consists of silver wires 35 nanometres in diameter, embedded in 1-centimetre squares of aluminium oxide, 51 micrometres thick.
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Blackbox

Did a 'sleeper' field awake to expand the universe?

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist
Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:26 UTC
Image
© NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/Calar Alto O. Krause et alSupernovae point to expansion
It's the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent "dark energy" of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.

To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.
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Question

Jupiter Impact: Mystery of the Missing Debris

Matt
Space Fellowship
Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:44 UTC
On June 3rd, 2010, something hit Jupiter. A comet or asteroid descended from the black of space, struck the planet's cloudtops, and disintegrated, producing a flash of light so bright it was visible in backyard telescopes on Earth. Soon, observers around the world were training their optics on the impact site, waiting to monitor the cindery cloud of debris which always seems to accompany a strike of this kind.

Jupiter_impact_1
© Anthony Wesley of Broken Hill, Australia.A color composite image of the June 3rd Jupiter impact flash.
They're still waiting.

"It's as if Jupiter just swallowed the thing whole," says Anthony Wesley of Australia, one of two amateur astronomers who recorded the initial flash. The other, Christopher Go of the Philippines, says "it was thrilling to see the impact, but the absence of any visible debris has got us scratching our heads."
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Network

Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed

Ryan Tate
Gawker
Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:35 UTC
iPad iLeaks
© gawker.com
Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They - and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet - could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was compromised.
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