Science & TechnologyS


Question

Germany preparing for moon mission


AFP
Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:13 UTC
The German space agency is reportedly preparing for a mission to the moon.

The head of the German Space Programme (DLR), Walter Doellinger, told the Financial Times Deutschland that it would be ready by 2013 to send an unmanned space shuttle to orbit the earth's only natural satellite.

"We want to show that Germany has the know-how," he said, after the DLR presented its plans for the mission to the German parliament.
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Key

Link Found Between Genetics And IQ


UPI
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:46 UTC
U.S. psychiatric geneticists say they have confirmed an association between genetics and intelligence.

Washington University School of Medicine researchers in St. Louis gathered the most extensive evidence to date showing a gene that activates signaling pathways in the brain influences one kind of intelligence.
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Display

French researcher says Vista's user interface suffers from more 'friction' than Microsoft XP

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:29 UTC
Vista's user interface suffers from more "friction" than its predecessor XP, a French analyst said Monday, and is actually a step back for Microsoft Corp. in its pursuit of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X.

In a reprise of research published last year, French analyst Andreas Pfeiffer oversaw testing of what he calls "User Interface Friction," the fluidity and/or reactivity of an operating system to commands. He likens UIF to the reaction -- fast or not -- when stepping on a car's accelerator.
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Display

Windows Vista: I'm Breaking up with You

Chris Pirillo
pirillo.com
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 11:19 UTC
No, seriously. When I have the time, I'm "upgrading" from Windows Vista to Windows XP. My keyboard is completely ambiguous.
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Telescope

Physics legends II

Robert P Crease
PhysicsWeb
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:59 UTC
In my column in November 2006 (see Physics Legends), I discussed stories from the history of science that we repeat even when we suspect that they are wrong. I then asked for your favourites and for ideas why such legends persist. Dozens of readers replied, mentioning legends involving oversimplifications or falsifications of science, of history or of the world. Some of you even protested that stories that I had claimed were true are in fact false, and vice versa.

The apple, the sink and the pendulum

Robert Matthews - a science writer and visiting reader in science at Aston University in the UK - found me too credulous regarding Newton's apple. Yes, he granted, historians have traced the tale back to Newton himself, but that does not make it true. Why, he asked sensibly, was Newton - a notoriously secretive and paranoid person - suddenly so chatty about how he got an idea, unless to cement priority over his rival Hooke?
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Telescope

Flashback Physics Legends

Robert P Crease
PhysicsWeb
Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:57 UTC
Richard Feynman starts his book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter with a remarkable confession. He tells a brief story about the origins of his subject - quantum electrodynamics - and then says that the "physicist's history of physics" that he has just related is probably wrong. "What I am telling you", Feynman says, "is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development, which I do not really know!"

Like Feynman, many teachers and textbooks are unashamed to retell "damn good stories": colourful versions of people and events that are oversimplified and often inaccurate. All of the scholarly fields are afflicted. Ivan Morris, a British-born scholar who taught Japanese studies at Harvard University, once expressed an intention to write a book about myths embraced by his academic colleagues, tentatively entitled The Bull Must Die. Unfortunately, Morris died before he could finish the work and the bull continues to flow unchecked.
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Rocket

Budget crunch delays NASA's moon ship

Kasie Hunt
Associated Press
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:26 UTC
NASA will delay the first manned flight of the new spacecraft designed to take humans back to the moon because of budget constraints, the agency's boss said Wednesday.

The craft, called the Orion, won't fly until early 2015, four to six months later than planned, NASA administrator Michael Griffin told lawmakers.

"We simply do not have the money available" to fly in 2014 as originally planned, he said.

The delay is the result of a $545 million difference between President Bush's request for the agency this year and the money Congress included in a spending bill Bush signed this month. Lawmakers gave the space agency the same amount of money it received in 2006.
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Stop

Misleader: Early sex correlates with delinquency

Matt Ford
arstechnica.com
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:13 UTC
New research suggests that when teenagers and younger children engage in their first sexual intercourse far earlier than their peers that they will exhibit higher levels of delinquency in the subsequent years. Conversely, the same work found that those who first engage in sex much later than their peers have a significantly lower delinquency rate. However, Stacy Armour, the co-author of the study, is careful to point out the fact that they are "not finding that sex itself leads to delinquency, but instead, that beginning sexual relationships long before your friends is cause for concern."

Comment: It's obvious that early sex is more likely the effect rather than a cause of delinquency. Those who anti-social regarding theft, vandalism and drugs are not likely to be restrained by social or familial values in any respect.

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Star

Astronomical odds

Mike Lafferty
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:39 UTC
SAN FRANCISCO - About twice a year, an asteroid smashes into Earth's atmosphere with the force of a Hiroshima-size atomic blast. And those are small ones, scientists say; the space rocks vaporize before they can do any harm.

When the big one hits, we won't be as fortunate.

Comment: If you are interested in the consequences of a meteor impact, have a read of The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith. The book, part detective story, part horror novel, presents, as the editorial review on amazon says, "new scientific evidence about a series of prehistoric cosmic events that explains why the last Ice Age ended so abruptly. Their findings validate the ubiquitous legends and myths of floods, fires, and weather extremes passed down by our ancestors and show how these legendary events relate to each other. Their findings also support the idea that we are entering a thousand-year cycle of increasing danger and possibly a new cycle of extinctions."

Believe it.

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Bulb

Bacteria to protect against quakes


University of California-Davis news release
Wed, 28 Feb 2007 06:27 UTC
If you live near the sea, chances are high that your home is built over sandy soil. And if an earthquake strikes, deep and sandy soils can turn to liquid, with some disastrous consequences for the buildings sitting on them. But now, U.S. researchers have found a way to use bacteria to steady buildings against earthquakes by turning these sandy soils into rocks. Today, it is possible to inject chemicals in the ground to reinforce it, but this can have toxic effects on soil and water. On the contrary, this use of common bacteria to 'cement' sands has no harmful effects on the environment. But so far, this method is limited to labs and the researchers are working on scaling their technique.

This process has been partially developed at by Jason DeJong, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. DeJong worked with Michael Fritzges, a senior engineer at Langan Engineering, Philadelphia, Klaus Nüsslein, associate professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the members of his lab.
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