Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Archaeologist find pre-Clovis human DNA


Genetic Archaeology
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:39 UTC
Human DNA from dried excrement recovered from Oregon's Paisley Caves is the oldest found yet in the New World -- dating to 14,300 years ago, some 1,200 years before Clovis culture -- and provides apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia, according to an international team of 13 scientists.

Among the researchers is Dennis L. Jenkins, a senior archaeologist with the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, whose summer field expeditions over two summers uncovered a variety of artifacts in caves that had caught the scientific attention of the UO's Luther Cressman in the 1930s.

Image
©Unknown
Jenkins is shown holding a piece of the human caprolite (dried feces) that dates to 14,300 years ago.
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Magnify

Scientists create material one atom thick

Roger Highfield
Telegraph
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:31 UTC
The foundations of the universe have been glimpsed in Manchester by scientists who have created the thinnest possible material.

Flat, parallel sheets of carbon atoms in the graphite of pencil lead have been peeled apart by the scientists to yield a sheet a single atom thick that has peculiar properties which made the fundamental feat possible.
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Telescope

How to deflect an asteroid

Kunio M. Sayanagi
ars technica
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:12 UTC
By now, we have all heard about a handful of asteroids that are big enough to level a city or two and have a small but non-negligible chance of hitting Earth. Should we find one heading straight at Earth, what can we do about it, if anything at all?
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Fish

Fish 'trained to catch themselves'


GAAP web
Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:34 UTC
Thousands of people across the world spend their leisure time on the banks of rivers and lakes engaging in the epic battle of human against fish, but the contest could soon become embarrassingly one-sided.

Perhaps inspired by spending too many days sitting in the cold and rain without getting a single bite, a team of researchers in the US is attempting to teach fish to catch themselves.

Comment: Replace the word 'fish' for 'human beings' and you would have a pretty good description of how this planet works.

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Bulb

Flashback The offline cost of an online life


BBC News
Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:58 UTC
The technology we use is accounting for more and more of the energy we consume, says Bill Thompson. And we need to know just how much. The next time you want to search for something on the web, try going to www.blackle.com instead of your usual search engine. The page you get looks remarkably like Google, and queries are fed through to Google, but there's one obvious difference.

Instead of the generous amount of white space which has characterised Google's home page since its 1998 launch, the page is mostly black.
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Display

US man gets $2.6m for domain name


BBC News
Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:54 UTC
A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6m (£1.3m) - after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994. Chris Clark, 43, accepted the offer from an anonymous bidder after a week-long online auction.

"It's crazy, it's just crazy," Mr Clark, who lives in North Potomac, Maryland, was quoted as saying by the Baltimore Sun newspaper. "It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure," he added.
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Evil Rays

Cell Phone Boosters Coming for the Home

Peter Svensson
Associated Press
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:04 UTC
Verizon Wireless is joining Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) in jumping on the latest craze in the wireless world: little boxes called femtocells that boost cell-phone coverage in subscribers' homes.
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Info

Fossil From Last Common Ancestor Of Neanderthals And Humans Found In Europe, 1.2 Million Years Old


Science Daily
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:51 UTC
University of Michigan researcher Josep M. Pares is part of a team that has discovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe.

The find shows that members of the genus Homo, to which modern humans belong, colonized the region much earlier than previously believed. Details of the discovery were published in the March 27 issue of the journal Nature.

mandible 1.2 miilion yo
©EIA/Jordi Mestre
Top view of the mandible ATE 9-1.
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Telescope

Black Hole Discovered In Center Of Enigmatic Omega Centauri


Science Daily
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:44 UTC
A new discovery has resolved some of the mystery surrounding Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. Images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile show that Omega Centauri appears to harbour an elusive intermediate-mass black hole in its centre. "This result shows that there is a continuous range of masses for black holes, from supermassive, to intermediate-mass, to small stellar mass types", explained astronomer Eva Noyola of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and leader of the team that made the discovery.

Omega Centauri
©NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowlegement: A. Cool (San Francisco State Univ.) and J. Anderson (STScI)
A new discovery has resolved some of the mystery surrounding Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. Images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile show that Omega Centauri appears to harbor an elusive intermediate-mass black hole in its center.
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Bulb

New research to unlock mysteries of brain cancer, stroke


University of Adelaide
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:21 UTC
New studies at the University of Adelaide will delve into some of the crucial issues surrounding death by brain tumours and stroke.

The research, to be conducted in the joint University of Adelaide/IMVS Centre for Neurological Diseases, will aim to find links between chemical signals in the brain and the reasons why brain tumours or strokes become fatal.

"There are still many mysteries around how the brain works, and this new research will help to unlock key elements we believe are involved in two separate but equally debilitating conditions," says Professor Robert Vink, Head of the University's School of Medical Sciences and NRF Chair of Neurosurgical Research.
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