Wolfgang Gruener
TrendwatchSun, 13 Jan 2008 04:34 UTC
The Internet continued its rapid growth rate in the final month of last year, adding more than five million websites for a bottom line of more than 150 million.
According to Netcraft's web server survey, web hosters saw an increase of 5.4 million websites during the month of December which resulted in a total of 155,230,051 websites by the end of the month. In 2007, the analysis firm estimates that the Internet has grown by more than 50 million websites, topping the previously recorded absolute growth record of about 30 million sites in 2006.
Explorers just returning from the Sahara desert have claimed they found a remarkable relic from Pharaonic times.
Mark Borda and Mahmoud Marai, from Malta and Egypt respectively, were surveying a field of boulders on the flanks of a hill deep in the Libyan desert some 700 kilometres west of the Nile Valley when engravings on a large rock consisting of hieroglyphic writing, Pharaonic cartouche, an image of the king and other Pharaonic iconography came into view.
Mr Borda would not reveal the precise location in order to protect the site.
An international research team has discovered that a magnetic field can interact with the electrons in a superconductor in ways never before observed. Andrea D. Bianchi, the lead researcher from the Université de Montréal, explains in the January 11 edition of Science magazine what he discovered in an exceptional compound of metals - a combination of cobalt, indium and a rare earth - that loses its resistance when cooled to just a couple of degrees above absolute zero.
"This discovery sharpens our understanding of what, literally, holds the world together and brings physicists one step closer to getting a grip on superconductivity at high temperatures. Until now, physicists were going around in circles, so this discovery will help to drive new understanding," said Prof. Bianchi, who was recruited to UdeM as a Canada Research Chair in Novel Materials for Spintronics last fall and performed his experiments at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, in collaboration with scientists from ETH Zurich, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Birmingham, U.K., the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Researchers implant electrodes in the brain, and use the soundtrack from 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'
The human ear is exquisitely tuned to discern different sound frequencies, whether such tones are high or low, near or far. But the ability of our ears pales in comparison to the remarkable knack of single neurons in the brain to distinguish between the very subtlest of sound frequencies.
Reporting in the January 10 issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery and director of the epilepsy surgery program, and colleagues at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science, show that in humans, a single auditory neuron in the brain exhibits an amazing selectivity to a very narrow sound frequency range, roughly down to a tenth of an octave. In fact, the ability of these neurons to detect the slightest of differences in sound frequencies far exceeds that of the auditory nerve that carries information from the hair cells of the inner ear to the cortex as much as 30 times more sensitivity. Indeed, such frequency tuning in the human auditory cortex is substantially superior to that typically found in the auditory cortex of non-human mammals, with the exception of bats.
It is quite a paradox, the researchers note, in that even musically untrained people can detect very small sound frequency differences, much better than the resolution of the peripheral auditory nerves. This is very different from other peripheral nerves, such as those in the skin, where the human ability to detect differences between two points (say from the prick of a needle) is limited by the receptors in the skin. Not so in hearing.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the bending of light from two distant galaxies that both lie behind a foreground massive galaxy.
A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.
A new theory on "First Passage Time" may have profound implications for life sciences, ecology and moreWhy does it take so long for soul mates to find each other? How does disease spread through a person's body? When will the next computer virus attack your hard-drive?
A new theory published last month in
Nature on the statistical concept of "First Passage Time," or FPT, may provide the key to answering at least a few of these questions, says theory co-author Prof. Joseph Klafter from The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences's
School of Chemistry. And the answers may lead to breakthroughs in medicine, mathematics, the environment, and elsewhere.
XinhuaFri, 11 Jan 2008 14:34 UTC
Challenging the long-held notion that it was the Europeans who were the first non-native visitors to the Americas, a Mongolian professor of history has claimed that the Mongols reached the American continent first.
"About 8,000 to 25,000 years ago, Mongols with stone tools crossed the Aleutian Islands and arrived in America first," Sumiya Jambaldorj, a history professor from Chingis Khaan University, said Thursday.
Jambaldorj's claim is based on his study of place names in America and their similarity to names in the Mongolian language.
Sharon Weinberger
WiredTue, 08 Jan 2008 11:03 UTC
Just when you think you've heard all the possible far-out theories behind the
High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska, leave it to the Russians to come up with one better. Forget mind control, the Russians think HAARP is a "geophysical weapon" that's gonna capsize the planet. HAARP, just by way of a reminder for those who don't obssessively follow its progress, is a military project that's supposed to study the ionosphere and "use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes." In more recent years, the Pentagon has also expressed interest in using HAARP to
mitigate the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions. However, HAARP's use of an antenna array operating in the High Frequency (HF) range has also prompted tons and tons of other theories about its uses, ranging from weather control to altering human behavior.
Comment: More on HAARP and mind control
here.
Call it the rule of unintended consequences - drop your guard because one threat goes away and an unexpected menace jumps up and smacks you. And new research shows it even applies to African acacia trees.
For thousands of years these thorny shrubs have provided food and shelter to aggressive biting ants, which protect the trees by attacking animals that try and eat the acacia leaves.
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| ©(AP Photo/Todd Palmer, Science)
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| This undated handout photo provided by the journal Science shows scale-tending by an ant species. One of the ways in which the mutualism breaks down is that ants become more antagonistic towards plants by increasing their tending of these parasitic scale insects.
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Comment: More on HAARP and mind control here.