Headlines of the day
Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert
(AFP)
Study Shows Bacteria Are Common in Snow (AP)
Report: 1 in every 100 adults behind bars (CNN)
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/27/08
Headlines of the day
Snake eats family dog as kids watch (CNN)
Eskimo village sues over global warming (CNN)
William F. Buckley, Crypto-Fascist, Is Correcting Usage In Heaven (Gawker)
It’s right next to the porch light region and just above the “wait ‘till your father gets home” lobe.
Why Do We Love Babies? Parental Instinct Region Found In The Brain
ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2008) — Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive? Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them which allows our species to survive. Nobel-Prize-winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face, including a relatively large head and forehead, large and low lying eyes and bulging cheek region, that serves to elicit these parental responses. But the biological basis for this has remained elusive.
Now, a possible brain basis for this parental instinct has been reported. This research was led by Morten Kringelbach and Alan Stein from the University of Oxford and was funded by the Wellcome Trust and TrygFonden Charitable Foundation. The authors showed that a region of the human brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex is highly specifically active within a seventh of a second in response to (unfamiliar) infant faces but not to adult faces.
This finding has potentially important clinical application in relation to postnatal depression, which is common, occurring in approximately 13% of mothers after birth and often within six weeks. The present findings could eventually provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.
The research team used a neuroimaging method called magnetoencephalography (MEG) at Aston University, UK. This is an advanced neuroscientific tool which offers both excellent temporal (in milliseconds) and spatial (in millimetres) resolution of whole brain activity. Because the researchers were primarily interested in the highly automatized processing of faces, they used an implicit task that required participants to monitor the colour of a small red cross and to press a button as soon as the colour changed. This was interspersed by adult and infant faces that were shown for 300 ms, but which were not important to solve the task.
The authors found a key difference in the early brain activity of normal adults when they viewed infant faces compared to adult faces. In addition to the well documented brain activity in the visual areas of the brain in response to faces, early activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex to infant faces but not adult faces. This wave of activity starts around a seventh of a second after presentation of an infant face. These responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive.
The medial orbitofrontal cortex is located in the front of the brain, just over the eyeballs. It is a key region of the emotional brain and appears to be related to the ongoing monitoring of salient reward-related stimuli in the environment. In the context of the experiment, the medial orbitofrontal cortex may provide the necessary emotional tagging of infant faces that predisposes us to treat infant faces as special and plays a key role in establishing a parental bond.
Snake eats family dog as kids watch (CNN)
Eskimo village sues over global warming (CNN)
William F. Buckley, Crypto-Fascist, Is Correcting Usage In Heaven (Gawker)
It’s right next to the porch light region and just above the “wait ‘till your father gets home” lobe.
Why Do We Love Babies? Parental Instinct Region Found In The Brain
ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2008) — Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive? Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them which allows our species to survive. Nobel-Prize-winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face, including a relatively large head and forehead, large and low lying eyes and bulging cheek region, that serves to elicit these parental responses. But the biological basis for this has remained elusive.
Now, a possible brain basis for this parental instinct has been reported. This research was led by Morten Kringelbach and Alan Stein from the University of Oxford and was funded by the Wellcome Trust and TrygFonden Charitable Foundation. The authors showed that a region of the human brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex is highly specifically active within a seventh of a second in response to (unfamiliar) infant faces but not to adult faces.
This finding has potentially important clinical application in relation to postnatal depression, which is common, occurring in approximately 13% of mothers after birth and often within six weeks. The present findings could eventually provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.
The research team used a neuroimaging method called magnetoencephalography (MEG) at Aston University, UK. This is an advanced neuroscientific tool which offers both excellent temporal (in milliseconds) and spatial (in millimetres) resolution of whole brain activity. Because the researchers were primarily interested in the highly automatized processing of faces, they used an implicit task that required participants to monitor the colour of a small red cross and to press a button as soon as the colour changed. This was interspersed by adult and infant faces that were shown for 300 ms, but which were not important to solve the task.
The authors found a key difference in the early brain activity of normal adults when they viewed infant faces compared to adult faces. In addition to the well documented brain activity in the visual areas of the brain in response to faces, early activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex to infant faces but not adult faces. This wave of activity starts around a seventh of a second after presentation of an infant face. These responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive.
The medial orbitofrontal cortex is located in the front of the brain, just over the eyeballs. It is a key region of the emotional brain and appears to be related to the ongoing monitoring of salient reward-related stimuli in the environment. In the context of the experiment, the medial orbitofrontal cortex may provide the necessary emotional tagging of infant faces that predisposes us to treat infant faces as special and plays a key role in establishing a parental bond.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/26/08
Headline of the day
Falling icicles kill six in Russia...(Drudge)
Hard water…
Once again, British researchers demonstrate they have a tough time distinguishing between fact and opinion
Materialistic society is 'damaging' children: poll
(Breitbart) Children feel under pressure to own the latest designer clothes and computer games and most adults believe the "commercialisation of childhood" is damaging young people's well-being, a poll said Tuesday.
A survey by GfK NOP for the Children's Society showed that out of the 1,225 adults questioned, 89 percent felt that children are more materialistic now than in previous generations.
Evidence submitted to the inquiry from children themselves suggests that they do feel under pressure to keep up with the latest trends, the society added.
The poll is part of a larger inquiry into childhood and includes evidence by professionals and members of the public on issues such as lifestyle, learning, friends and family.
Professor of child psychology Philip Graham -- who is leading the inquirys lifestyle theme -- believes that commercial pressures may have "worrying psychological effects" on children.
"One factor that may be leading to rising mental health problems is the increasing degree to which children and young people are preoccupied with possessions; the latest in fashionable clothes and electronic equipment.
"Evidence both from the United States and from the UK suggests that those most influenced by commercial pressures also show higher rates of mental health problems," he said.
Commenting on the results of the poll, chief executive of the Childrens Society Bob Reitemeier said: "As adults we have to take responsibility for the current level of marketing to children. To accuse children of being materialistic in such a culture is a cop out.
"Unless we question our own behaviour as a society we risk creating a generation who are left unfulfilled through chasing unattainable lifestyles."
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and patron of the inquiry, added: "Children should be encouraged to value themselves for who they are as people rather than what they own.
"The selling of lifestyles to children creates a culture of material competitiveness and promotes acquisitive individualism at the expense of the principles of community and cooperation."
Other results in the poll showed that just over 60 percent wants the government to ban junk food adverts and nearly 7 in ten agreed that violent video games make children more aggressive.
The final report and recommendations of the Good Childhood Inquiry will be published in early 2009
Breaking news: Cool kids often ridicule those who are less attractive. Years later, geeks use this to justify their trip to the bell tower with an AK. Film at 11.
Acne May Prevent People From Participating In Sport And Exercise, Says Research
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2008) — Acne patients who are highly anxious about their skin condition say they are less likely to participate in sport or exercise, according to new research at the
The study, published in the Journal of Health Psychology, involved 50 young to middle-aged adults recruited from a national acne support group.
As well as saying that they were less likely to participate in sport or exercise, acne sufferers who perceived their skin to be negatively evaluated by others also experienced lower self-esteem and a poorer quality of life. This pattern was similar in both men and women.
The researchers say that ‘dermatological social anxiety’ is often overlooked in studies on motivation for sport and exercise in favour of physical inhibitions.
“The skin is the most visible organ in the human body and, as such, is an important part of personal image,” said Dr Martyn Standage, a lecturer in the School for Health at the University of Bath.
“Fear of having one’s skin evaluated by others has implications for physical and social wellbeing.
“Sport and exercise activities provide many opportunities for the skin to be exposed to evaluation. Due to this, acne sufferers may become so anxious about their appearance that it prevents them from participating in physical activity.”
Want cookie, must have cookie, will have cookie, give cookie
Children Show Goal-oriented Behavior By Age Three
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2008) — Hang on, parents. After the terrible twos come the goal-oriented threes. Kids seem to grow into the ability to act in pursuit of goals outside of what they can immediately sense sometime around that age, according to a new study. Researchers found that by around age 3, children appear to shape their behavior in response to the outcomes they've come to expect. Anticipated outcomes that they value move them to act more than do outcomes that they don't -- a hallmark of emerging autonomy.
At the University of Cambridge, a trio of psychologists trained 72 children between 18 months and 4 years old, divided into three 10-month age bands (averaging 1.3 to 2.2 years, 2.3 to 3.075 years, and 3.08 to 4 years) to touch a red or green butterfly icon on a touch-screen display to see different cartoon video clips. The children came to associate one butterfly with one cartoon sequence and the other butterfly with another.
After that, the experimenters devalued one of the outcomes by showing that sequence repeatedly, until the children became bored with it. Thus, the less-viewed cartoon clips became, by contrast, more interesting and valuable. The researchers then re-tested the children, who should now have associated one butterfly with a valued cartoon and the other butterfly with a less-valued cartoon.
Relative to the younger children, those who were 32 months (nearly 3 years) and older touched the butterfly for the less-valued cartoon significantly less often than they touched the butterfly for the more novel cartoon. During that test, the cartoons were not actually presented; the children had to rely on their memories of which butterfly icon produced which cartoon. This test thus showed that the actions of the older children behavior depended on the current values of the
Falling icicles kill six in Russia...(Drudge)
Hard water…
Once again, British researchers demonstrate they have a tough time distinguishing between fact and opinion
Materialistic society is 'damaging' children: poll
(Breitbart) Children feel under pressure to own the latest designer clothes and computer games and most adults believe the "commercialisation of childhood" is damaging young people's well-being, a poll said Tuesday.
A survey by GfK NOP for the Children's Society showed that out of the 1,225 adults questioned, 89 percent felt that children are more materialistic now than in previous generations.
Evidence submitted to the inquiry from children themselves suggests that they do feel under pressure to keep up with the latest trends, the society added.
The poll is part of a larger inquiry into childhood and includes evidence by professionals and members of the public on issues such as lifestyle, learning, friends and family.
Professor of child psychology Philip Graham -- who is leading the inquirys lifestyle theme -- believes that commercial pressures may have "worrying psychological effects" on children.
"One factor that may be leading to rising mental health problems is the increasing degree to which children and young people are preoccupied with possessions; the latest in fashionable clothes and electronic equipment.
"Evidence both from the United States and from the UK suggests that those most influenced by commercial pressures also show higher rates of mental health problems," he said.
Commenting on the results of the poll, chief executive of the Childrens Society Bob Reitemeier said: "As adults we have to take responsibility for the current level of marketing to children. To accuse children of being materialistic in such a culture is a cop out.
"Unless we question our own behaviour as a society we risk creating a generation who are left unfulfilled through chasing unattainable lifestyles."
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and patron of the inquiry, added: "Children should be encouraged to value themselves for who they are as people rather than what they own.
"The selling of lifestyles to children creates a culture of material competitiveness and promotes acquisitive individualism at the expense of the principles of community and cooperation."
Other results in the poll showed that just over 60 percent wants the government to ban junk food adverts and nearly 7 in ten agreed that violent video games make children more aggressive.
The final report and recommendations of the Good Childhood Inquiry will be published in early 2009
Breaking news: Cool kids often ridicule those who are less attractive. Years later, geeks use this to justify their trip to the bell tower with an AK. Film at 11.
Acne May Prevent People From Participating In Sport And Exercise, Says Research
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2008) — Acne patients who are highly anxious about their skin condition say they are less likely to participate in sport or exercise, according to new research at the
The study, published in the Journal of Health Psychology, involved 50 young to middle-aged adults recruited from a national acne support group.
As well as saying that they were less likely to participate in sport or exercise, acne sufferers who perceived their skin to be negatively evaluated by others also experienced lower self-esteem and a poorer quality of life. This pattern was similar in both men and women.
The researchers say that ‘dermatological social anxiety’ is often overlooked in studies on motivation for sport and exercise in favour of physical inhibitions.
“The skin is the most visible organ in the human body and, as such, is an important part of personal image,” said Dr Martyn Standage, a lecturer in the School for Health at the University of Bath.
“Fear of having one’s skin evaluated by others has implications for physical and social wellbeing.
“Sport and exercise activities provide many opportunities for the skin to be exposed to evaluation. Due to this, acne sufferers may become so anxious about their appearance that it prevents them from participating in physical activity.”
Want cookie, must have cookie, will have cookie, give cookie
Children Show Goal-oriented Behavior By Age Three
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2008) — Hang on, parents. After the terrible twos come the goal-oriented threes. Kids seem to grow into the ability to act in pursuit of goals outside of what they can immediately sense sometime around that age, according to a new study. Researchers found that by around age 3, children appear to shape their behavior in response to the outcomes they've come to expect. Anticipated outcomes that they value move them to act more than do outcomes that they don't -- a hallmark of emerging autonomy.
At the University of Cambridge, a trio of psychologists trained 72 children between 18 months and 4 years old, divided into three 10-month age bands (averaging 1.3 to 2.2 years, 2.3 to 3.075 years, and 3.08 to 4 years) to touch a red or green butterfly icon on a touch-screen display to see different cartoon video clips. The children came to associate one butterfly with one cartoon sequence and the other butterfly with another.
After that, the experimenters devalued one of the outcomes by showing that sequence repeatedly, until the children became bored with it. Thus, the less-viewed cartoon clips became, by contrast, more interesting and valuable. The researchers then re-tested the children, who should now have associated one butterfly with a valued cartoon and the other butterfly with a less-valued cartoon.
Relative to the younger children, those who were 32 months (nearly 3 years) and older touched the butterfly for the less-valued cartoon significantly less often than they touched the butterfly for the more novel cartoon. During that test, the cartoons were not actually presented; the children had to rely on their memories of which butterfly icon produced which cartoon. This test thus showed that the actions of the older children behavior depended on the current values of the
Monday, February 25, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/25/08
Headlines of the day
Cannibalistic iguana chokes on toy lizard (CNN)
Suicidal pets get anti-depressants (News.com.au)
So how come there are no notes?
40-year-old son accused of Tasering mom at late night party (Sun-Sentinal.com)
Lawyers gird for inevitable conflict
Python Snakes, An Invasive Species In Florida, Could Spread To One Third Of US
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2008) — Burmese pythons—an invasive species in south Florida—could find comfortable climatic conditions in roughly a third of the United States according to new "climate maps" developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Although other factors such as type of food available and suitable shelter also play a role, Burmese pythons and other giant constrictor snakes have shown themselves to be highly adaptable to new environments.
The just-released USGS maps can help natural resource agencies manage and possibly control the spread of non-native giant constrictor snakes, such as the Burmese python, now spreading from Everglades National Park in Florida. These "climate match" maps show where climate in the U.S. is similar to places in which Burmese pythons live naturally (from Pakistan to Indonesia).
A look at the map shows why biologists are concerned.
The maps show where climate alone would not limit these snakes. One map shows areas in the U.S. with current climatic conditions similar to those of the snakes' native ranges. A second map projects these "climate matches" at the end of this century based on global warming models, which significantly expands the potential habitat for these snakes.
Biologists with Everglades National Park confirmed a breeding population of Burmese python in the Florida Everglades in 2003, presumably the result of released pets. Python populations have since been discovered in Big Cypress National Preserve to the north, Miami's water management areas to the northeast, Key Largo to the southeast, and many state parks, municipalities, and public and private lands in the region.
Hopefully, someone is developing the "tissues of death"
Bacteria Use 'Invisibility Cloak' To Hide From Human Immune System
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2008) — Scientists at the University of York have characterised an important new step in the mechanism used by bacteria to evade our immune system.
It is an ‘invisibility cloak’ which means that bacteria like Haemophilus influenzae, a common cause of ear infections in children, can move about the body without the risk of being attacked by the immune system.
A multidisciplinary research team from the Departments of Biology and Chemistry at York have been studying how bacteria capture the molecule used to make the ‘cloak’, called sialic acid.
The researchers have now discovered an enzymatic activity that helps in the more efficient capture of sialic acids released from our cell surfaces. As well as using the sialic acid to make the ‘invisibility cloak’ other bacteria use similar methods to capture sialic acid as a simple food source, so are literally eating us from the inside!
Ok, so what aren’t they telling us—and do they have brussels sprouts?
Doomsday' seed vault to open in Norway
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (CNN) -- A vast underground vault storing millions of seeds from around the world is scheduled to open this week in a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean.
art.seeds.norway.ap.jpg
The inside of one of the vaults at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which will hold 4.5m different seed types.
Dubbed the "Doomsday Vault," the seed bank is considered the ultimate safety net for the world's seed collections, protecting them from a wide range of threats including war, natural disasters, lack of funding or simply poor agricultural management.
The Norwegian government paid to build the vault in a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the remote Svalbard islands between Norway and the North Pole. Building began last year, and the vault is scheduled to open officially Tuesday.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it is officially known, can hold as many as 4.5 million seed samples and will eventually house almost every variety of most important food crops in the world, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is paying to collect and maintain the seeds.
The United Nations founded the trust in 2004 to support the long-term conservation of crop diversity, and countries and foundations provide the funding.
"The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the trust. "At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years."
The vault's location deep inside a mountain in the frozen north ensures the seeds can be stored safely no matter what happens outside.
"We believe the design of the facility will ensure that the seeds will stay well-preserved even if such forces as global warming raise temperatures outside the facility," said Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager for the Norwegian government.
Don't Miss
The vault sits at the end of a 120-meter (131-yard) tunnel blasted inside the mountain. Workers used a refrigeration system to bring the vault to -18 degrees Celsius (just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit), and a smaller refrigeration system plus the area's natural permafrost and the mountain's thick rock will keep the vault at least -4 C (25 F).
The vault at Svalbard is similar to an existing seed bank in Sussex, England, about an hour outside London. The British vault, called the Millennium Seed Bank, is part of an scientific project that works with wild plants, as opposed to the seeds of crops.
Paul Smith, the leader of the Millennium Seed Bank project, said preserving the seeds of wild plants is just as important as preserving the seeds of vital crops.
"We must give ourselves every option in the future to use the whole array of plant diversity that is available to us," Smith told CNN.
The idea for the Arctic seed bank dates to the 1980s but only became a possibility after the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources came into force in 2004, the Norwegian government said. The treaty provided an international framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity.
advertisement
Svalbard is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the world.
The Norwegian government says it has paid 50 million Norwegian Kroner ($9.4 million) to build the seed vault.
Cannibalistic iguana chokes on toy lizard (CNN)
Suicidal pets get anti-depressants (News.com.au)
So how come there are no notes?
40-year-old son accused of Tasering mom at late night party (Sun-Sentinal.com)
Lawyers gird for inevitable conflict
Python Snakes, An Invasive Species In Florida, Could Spread To One Third Of US
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2008) — Burmese pythons—an invasive species in south Florida—could find comfortable climatic conditions in roughly a third of the United States according to new "climate maps" developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Although other factors such as type of food available and suitable shelter also play a role, Burmese pythons and other giant constrictor snakes have shown themselves to be highly adaptable to new environments.
The just-released USGS maps can help natural resource agencies manage and possibly control the spread of non-native giant constrictor snakes, such as the Burmese python, now spreading from Everglades National Park in Florida. These "climate match" maps show where climate in the U.S. is similar to places in which Burmese pythons live naturally (from Pakistan to Indonesia).
A look at the map shows why biologists are concerned.
The maps show where climate alone would not limit these snakes. One map shows areas in the U.S. with current climatic conditions similar to those of the snakes' native ranges. A second map projects these "climate matches" at the end of this century based on global warming models, which significantly expands the potential habitat for these snakes.
Biologists with Everglades National Park confirmed a breeding population of Burmese python in the Florida Everglades in 2003, presumably the result of released pets. Python populations have since been discovered in Big Cypress National Preserve to the north, Miami's water management areas to the northeast, Key Largo to the southeast, and many state parks, municipalities, and public and private lands in the region.
Hopefully, someone is developing the "tissues of death"
Bacteria Use 'Invisibility Cloak' To Hide From Human Immune System
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2008) — Scientists at the University of York have characterised an important new step in the mechanism used by bacteria to evade our immune system.
It is an ‘invisibility cloak’ which means that bacteria like Haemophilus influenzae, a common cause of ear infections in children, can move about the body without the risk of being attacked by the immune system.
A multidisciplinary research team from the Departments of Biology and Chemistry at York have been studying how bacteria capture the molecule used to make the ‘cloak’, called sialic acid.
The researchers have now discovered an enzymatic activity that helps in the more efficient capture of sialic acids released from our cell surfaces. As well as using the sialic acid to make the ‘invisibility cloak’ other bacteria use similar methods to capture sialic acid as a simple food source, so are literally eating us from the inside!
Ok, so what aren’t they telling us—and do they have brussels sprouts?
Doomsday' seed vault to open in Norway
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (CNN) -- A vast underground vault storing millions of seeds from around the world is scheduled to open this week in a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean.
art.seeds.norway.ap.jpg
The inside of one of the vaults at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which will hold 4.5m different seed types.
Dubbed the "Doomsday Vault," the seed bank is considered the ultimate safety net for the world's seed collections, protecting them from a wide range of threats including war, natural disasters, lack of funding or simply poor agricultural management.
The Norwegian government paid to build the vault in a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the remote Svalbard islands between Norway and the North Pole. Building began last year, and the vault is scheduled to open officially Tuesday.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it is officially known, can hold as many as 4.5 million seed samples and will eventually house almost every variety of most important food crops in the world, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is paying to collect and maintain the seeds.
The United Nations founded the trust in 2004 to support the long-term conservation of crop diversity, and countries and foundations provide the funding.
"The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the trust. "At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years."
The vault's location deep inside a mountain in the frozen north ensures the seeds can be stored safely no matter what happens outside.
"We believe the design of the facility will ensure that the seeds will stay well-preserved even if such forces as global warming raise temperatures outside the facility," said Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager for the Norwegian government.
Don't Miss
The vault sits at the end of a 120-meter (131-yard) tunnel blasted inside the mountain. Workers used a refrigeration system to bring the vault to -18 degrees Celsius (just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit), and a smaller refrigeration system plus the area's natural permafrost and the mountain's thick rock will keep the vault at least -4 C (25 F).
The vault at Svalbard is similar to an existing seed bank in Sussex, England, about an hour outside London. The British vault, called the Millennium Seed Bank, is part of an scientific project that works with wild plants, as opposed to the seeds of crops.
Paul Smith, the leader of the Millennium Seed Bank project, said preserving the seeds of wild plants is just as important as preserving the seeds of vital crops.
"We must give ourselves every option in the future to use the whole array of plant diversity that is available to us," Smith told CNN.
The idea for the Arctic seed bank dates to the 1980s but only became a possibility after the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources came into force in 2004, the Norwegian government said. The treaty provided an international framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity.
advertisement
Svalbard is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the world.
The Norwegian government says it has paid 50 million Norwegian Kroner ($9.4 million) to build the seed vault.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/15/08
Headline of the day
Police: Man calls 911 27,000 times (CNN)
Well, it seemed like an emergency to him.
Police: Man calls 911 27,000 times (CNN)
Well, it seemed like an emergency to him.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/14/08
Headlines of the day
DUI hearing postponed; defendant was drunk (Seattle Times)
Finding love getting easier in rural areas (CNN)
Don’t feel sheepish.
DUI hearing postponed; defendant was drunk (Seattle Times)
Finding love getting easier in rural areas (CNN)
Don’t feel sheepish.
What gave it away? Was it the golden arches? Astronomers See Signs of Other Solar Systems Like Ours (KYW Newsradio) |
| Scientists have discovered smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn in a distant solar system. This suggests that there may be a lot of solar systems out there similar to ours. And this brings us one step closer to answering the question, "Is there another planet like Earth in our galaxy?" A team of astronomers has discovered two planets about 80 percent of the size of our Jupiter and Saturn in a solar system 5,000 light years away. Astronomer Scott Gaudi at Ohio State University, using a new technique called gravitational microlensing, says the fact that two planets were discovered right off the bat indicates that our galaxy may host many planetary systems like ours: "It was still this completely open question: how common are solar systems like our own? Our results show that indeed there are other solar systems out there like our own -- and they might well be common."
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/13/08
Headlines of the day
Woman, 89, uses ax to smash door glass after being locked out (The Obscure Store)
"Marketers salivate over lickable ads" (WSJ)
We have a great deal of respect for all the great metaphysical traditions, economics in particular. The Nobel people think these guys are doing dynamite work.
Why Youth Hostel Showers Are Like The Stock Market: Variety Provides Stabililty
ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — Diversity keeps you warm. At least that is true while you're having a shower in youth hostels. If you like, this sums up the research project just published by scientists from the Universities of Fribourg and Bonn. Their result is not as trivial as it sounds. Ultimately it shows that heterogeneity provides stability, whether this is in a shower, in power grids or even on the stock market.
Having a shower in a youth hostel can be risky when there is not enough hot water for everybody. If only one visitor turns up the hot tap during the early morning shower, everyone else is threatened by an icy gush of water. This unwanted form of hydrotherapy is particularly likely to happen when all the shower taps have the same possible settings, in other words if cold and hot water can be adjusted to exactly the same amount in all showers. But if the water taps in each shower have their individual quirks, the risk of extreme fluctuations is less.
At least that is what the Bonn economist Christina Matzke and her colleague Damien Challet, a physicist at the University of Fribourg, say. They modelled the temperature profile of showers in a youth hostel on the computer. 'All in all, heterogeneous taps offer advantages -- they prevent the average shower temperature of all guests from suddenly dropping or rising,' Christina Matzke explains. 'From the perspective of the individual they also have disadvantages, as it's more difficult for each person to set the right temperature.'
The problem sounds comical, but in principle it can be applied to all situations where people compete for a scarce resource, whether this is hot water, electricity or equities. One thing is always true, the more individualistic the behaviour of those involved in the market is, the more stable the whole system becomes. Put simply, the only reason why our electricity grid does not break down is that not all the inhabitants of Germany switch on the tumble drier at the same time. And if all shareholders made strictly rational decisions on their investments, there would probably be a lot more turbulence on the stock market.
The result is also significant from a theoretical point of view. 'We show what different results economic models can produce, depending on whether they are based on homogeneous or heterogeneous behaviour,' Christina Matzke emphasises. Accordingly, it is important to account for differences in individual behaviour when making forecasts. Although it sounds obvious, economists long ignored this insight. For decades their models were dominated by 'homo economicus', an imaginary standardised market investor who always made rational decisions rather than deciding according to individual criteria.
From this thing that look like a rummage sale ashtray we can deduce that this creature was 25 feet long. At least it was in the afternoon.
A Baby Dinosaur, 72 Million Years Old
By NED POTTER/ABC News
The Mexican state of Coahuila, due west of the southern tip of Texas, is arid country today. But 72 million years ago it was a tropical paradise, warm and moist, close to a vast sea that divided what eventually became North America.
Now, scientists report they have found a new dinosaur species there -- one of the very few ever discovered in Mexico.
It was apparently a duck-billed plant eater, probably about 25 feet long. Scientists hesitate to guess too much about it, but they say they can tell from its bone structure that it was probably not fully grown. An adult of the species could have been 10 feet longer.
"Close your eyes," said Terry Gates, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah. "I want you to imagine yourself on a beach in Puerto Vallarta. Nice day, with the sun and the ocean -- and then, when you open your eyes, you're suddenly looking at this thing."
Gates was on the team, from Mexico, Canada and the United States, that dug up the fossil and reconstructed it. The work took more than 10 years, partly because the skull was shattered -- and buried under 12 feet of rock and dirt. They called the new species Velafrons coahuilensis.
It is different from almost any other duck-billed dinosaur ever found. The reassembled skull has a large hollow bulge on top, through which it probably breathed.
"The really cool thing about these duck-billed dinosaurs is that their nasal passages probably allowed them to make some kind of music," said Gates. "We don't know exactly what kinds of sounds they would make, but it is likely to be somewhat like what trumpeters make."
Gates said it is likely that such an ornate crest on top of the head might have been useful in attracting a mate. Beauty, even in the late cretaceous period, was in the eye of the beholder.
The desert terrain of northern Mexico has made dinosaur hunting difficult there. For lack of rain, there is little erosion, so buried fossils are rarely exposed over time.
Velafrons coahuilensis was found, like many fossils, by accident. Parts of it protruded from the earth on the outskirts of the small Mexican town of Rincon, Colo.
Volunteers from the area tried for a decade to dig it up. Not until 2002 did scientists from Utah mount an expedition. They saw how difficult the dig would be, and came back with a jackhammer.
It took two years, back at the lab, for the skull to be reconstructed. They also found fossils of turtles, fish and lizards buried in the area around the dinosaur skeleton.
What killed the great animal? That question is as mysterious as the many about how it lived.
Scientists wonder about the geography of the area. Central America would not have formed yet 72 million years ago, so Mexico would have been the southern end of the continent. It is quite possible, say the researchers, that the young dinosaur was caught in a prehistoric hurricane.
"This discovery is part of a new window that's being opened up," said paleontologist Scott Sampson of the Utah Museum. "It won't be the only Mexican dinosaur for long."
"The really cool thing about these duck-billed dinosaurs is that their nasal passages probably allowed them to make some kind of music," said Gates. "We don't know exactly what kinds of sounds they would make, but it is likely to be somewhat like what trumpeters make." Were they more like Miles or Dizzy?”
Woman, 89, uses ax to smash door glass after being locked out (The Obscure Store)
"Marketers salivate over lickable ads" (WSJ)
We have a great deal of respect for all the great metaphysical traditions, economics in particular. The Nobel people think these guys are doing dynamite work.
Why Youth Hostel Showers Are Like The Stock Market: Variety Provides Stabililty
ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — Diversity keeps you warm. At least that is true while you're having a shower in youth hostels. If you like, this sums up the research project just published by scientists from the Universities of Fribourg and Bonn. Their result is not as trivial as it sounds. Ultimately it shows that heterogeneity provides stability, whether this is in a shower, in power grids or even on the stock market.
Having a shower in a youth hostel can be risky when there is not enough hot water for everybody. If only one visitor turns up the hot tap during the early morning shower, everyone else is threatened by an icy gush of water. This unwanted form of hydrotherapy is particularly likely to happen when all the shower taps have the same possible settings, in other words if cold and hot water can be adjusted to exactly the same amount in all showers. But if the water taps in each shower have their individual quirks, the risk of extreme fluctuations is less.
At least that is what the Bonn economist Christina Matzke and her colleague Damien Challet, a physicist at the University of Fribourg, say. They modelled the temperature profile of showers in a youth hostel on the computer. 'All in all, heterogeneous taps offer advantages -- they prevent the average shower temperature of all guests from suddenly dropping or rising,' Christina Matzke explains. 'From the perspective of the individual they also have disadvantages, as it's more difficult for each person to set the right temperature.'
The problem sounds comical, but in principle it can be applied to all situations where people compete for a scarce resource, whether this is hot water, electricity or equities. One thing is always true, the more individualistic the behaviour of those involved in the market is, the more stable the whole system becomes. Put simply, the only reason why our electricity grid does not break down is that not all the inhabitants of Germany switch on the tumble drier at the same time. And if all shareholders made strictly rational decisions on their investments, there would probably be a lot more turbulence on the stock market.
The result is also significant from a theoretical point of view. 'We show what different results economic models can produce, depending on whether they are based on homogeneous or heterogeneous behaviour,' Christina Matzke emphasises. Accordingly, it is important to account for differences in individual behaviour when making forecasts. Although it sounds obvious, economists long ignored this insight. For decades their models were dominated by 'homo economicus', an imaginary standardised market investor who always made rational decisions rather than deciding according to individual criteria.
From this thing that look like a rummage sale ashtray we can deduce that this creature was 25 feet long. At least it was in the afternoon.
A Baby Dinosaur, 72 Million Years Old
By NED POTTER/ABC News
The Mexican state of Coahuila, due west of the southern tip of Texas, is arid country today. But 72 million years ago it was a tropical paradise, warm and moist, close to a vast sea that divided what eventually became North America.
Now, scientists report they have found a new dinosaur species there -- one of the very few ever discovered in Mexico.
It was apparently a duck-billed plant eater, probably about 25 feet long. Scientists hesitate to guess too much about it, but they say they can tell from its bone structure that it was probably not fully grown. An adult of the species could have been 10 feet longer.
"Close your eyes," said Terry Gates, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah. "I want you to imagine yourself on a beach in Puerto Vallarta. Nice day, with the sun and the ocean -- and then, when you open your eyes, you're suddenly looking at this thing."
Gates was on the team, from Mexico, Canada and the United States, that dug up the fossil and reconstructed it. The work took more than 10 years, partly because the skull was shattered -- and buried under 12 feet of rock and dirt. They called the new species Velafrons coahuilensis.
It is different from almost any other duck-billed dinosaur ever found. The reassembled skull has a large hollow bulge on top, through which it probably breathed.
"The really cool thing about these duck-billed dinosaurs is that their nasal passages probably allowed them to make some kind of music," said Gates. "We don't know exactly what kinds of sounds they would make, but it is likely to be somewhat like what trumpeters make."
Gates said it is likely that such an ornate crest on top of the head might have been useful in attracting a mate. Beauty, even in the late cretaceous period, was in the eye of the beholder.
The desert terrain of northern Mexico has made dinosaur hunting difficult there. For lack of rain, there is little erosion, so buried fossils are rarely exposed over time.
Velafrons coahuilensis was found, like many fossils, by accident. Parts of it protruded from the earth on the outskirts of the small Mexican town of Rincon, Colo.
Volunteers from the area tried for a decade to dig it up. Not until 2002 did scientists from Utah mount an expedition. They saw how difficult the dig would be, and came back with a jackhammer.
It took two years, back at the lab, for the skull to be reconstructed. They also found fossils of turtles, fish and lizards buried in the area around the dinosaur skeleton.
What killed the great animal? That question is as mysterious as the many about how it lived.
Scientists wonder about the geography of the area. Central America would not have formed yet 72 million years ago, so Mexico would have been the southern end of the continent. It is quite possible, say the researchers, that the young dinosaur was caught in a prehistoric hurricane.
"This discovery is part of a new window that's being opened up," said paleontologist Scott Sampson of the Utah Museum. "It won't be the only Mexican dinosaur for long."
"The really cool thing about these duck-billed dinosaurs is that their nasal passages probably allowed them to make some kind of music," said Gates. "We don't know exactly what kinds of sounds they would make, but it is likely to be somewhat like what trumpeters make." Were they more like Miles or Dizzy?”
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/12/08
Headlines of the day
Ex-Florida prison boss: Drunken orgies tainted system (CNN)
What gave it away?
Falling moose nearly takes out trooper ( Anchorage Daily News)
And where is squirrel?
UPDATE: Hardwired for love: Are robots the sex partners of the future? (Drudge)
A future where even the lawyers get some.
Meth Deposited in ATM, Woman Jailed...(AP)
Talk about a speedy transaction...
Mummified Corpse Found in Bathtub of Arizona Renter (Breitbart.com)
“Oh yeah? Check the lease.
Newsweek: We may still be (unconscious) racists
Really?
Today’s episode of Gil Scott-Heron’s “And Whitey’s on the Moon.”
Scientists prove Napoleon not poisoned
Researchers measured arsenic levels using nuclear reactor to irradiate hair
ROME - Italian scientists say they have proved Napoleon was not poisoned, scotching the legend the French emperor was murdered by his British jailors.
Napoleon's post-mortem said he died of stomach cancer aged 51, but the theory he was assassinated to prevent any return to power has gained credence in recent decades as some studies indicated his body contained a high level of the poison arsenic.
"It was not arsenic poisoning that killed Napoleon at Saint Helena," said researchers at the University of Pavia who tested the theory the British killed him while he was in exile on the South Atlantic island in 1821.
The Italian research — which studied hair samples from various moments in his life which are kept in museums in Italy and France — showed Napoleon's body did have a high level of arsenic, but that he was already heavily contaminated as a boy.
The scientists used a nuclear reactor to irradiate the hairs to get an accurate measure of the levels of arsenic.
Looking at hairs from several of Napoleon's contemporaries, including his wife and son, they found arsenic levels were generally much higher than is common today.
"The result? There was no poisoning in our opinion because Napoleon's hairs contain the same amount of arsenic as his contemporaries," the researchers said in a statement published on the university's website.
The study found the samples taken from people living in the early 1800s contained 100 times as much arsenic than the current average. Glues and dyes commonly used at the time are blamed for high environmental levels of the toxic element.
"The environment in which people lived in the early 1800s evidently caused the intake of quantities of arsenic that today we would consider dangerous," the scientists said.
One theory was that Napoleon was poisoned accidentally by arsenic vapor from dyes in his wallpaper at Saint Helena, but the study showed there was no massive increase in arsenic levels in his latter years.
"It is clear that one cannot talk about a case of poisoning, but of a constant absorption of arsenic," the researchers said.
Napoleon had been exiled once before — on the Italian island of Elba after his failed invasion of Russia. But he returned to France and was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815 after which he was sent to the much more remote Saint Helena.
Golly, we’re glad they cleared that up.
Lord Vader Has No Comment
New Cosmic Theory Unites Dark Forces
Michael Schirber
Special to SPACE.com
SPACE.com Mon Feb 11, 6:46 AM ET
The two biggest mysteries in cosmology may be one. A new theory says that dark matter and dark energy could arise from a single dark fluid that permeates the whole universe. And this could mean Earth-based dark matter searches will come up empty.
Dark matter, as originally hypothesized, is extra hidden mass that astrophysicists calculate is necessary for holding together fast-turning galaxies. The most popular notion is that this matter is made of some yet-to-be-identified particle that has almost no interactions with light or ordinary matter. Yet it seems to be everywhere, acting as a scaffolding for galaxy clusters and the whole structure of the universe.
On the other hand, dark energy is needed to explain the more recently-discovered acceleration of the universe's expansion. It supposedly exists all throughout space, delivering a pressure that counteracts gravity.
It's counterintuitive that one substance could be both a gravitational anchor for galaxies and anti-gravity force for the universe. However, HongSheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews in Scotland claims that a fluid-like dark energy can act like dark matter when its density becomes high enough.
"Dark energy is a property of the vacuum — of fields that we do not easily see," Zhao told Space.com. "From it, we can derive the dark matter effect."
Zhao compares this dark fluid to Earth's atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure causes air to expand, but part of the air can collapse to form clouds. In the same way, the dark fluid might generally expand, but it also could collect around galaxies to help hold them together.
Unification
Zhao is not the first theorist to try to bring dark energy and dark matter under the same framework.
The type of dark fluid that Zhao is looking at is similar to one that Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford and his colleagues devised a few years ago.
"[Our theory] involves positing a preferred time direction, in some sense a special time frame," Ferreira said. "It has the interesting effect of modifying Einstein's theory of general relativity."
The idea is similar to the "ether," an invisible medium that physicists once thought light waves travelled through. Einstein's relativity did away with the need for such a medium, but cosmologists have recently found that an ether-like substance can mimic dark matter.
The presence of such a substance changes the way gravity works. This is most noticeable in the distant outskirts of a galaxy, where the galaxy's gravitational pull would be expected to be small, but the ether makes it much stronger.
The ether "effectively softens space-time in regions of low [gravitational] acceleration making it more sensitive to the presence of mass than usual," Ferreira explained.
Zhao has refined this approach and found that it can match a lot of astronomical data, as reported in a recent article in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"I like [Zhao's model] because it shows that these theories are predictive and, if worked out in detail, can be tested properly against experiment," Ferreira said.
For one, Zhao's fluid divides itself into a dark energy part and a dark matter part with the same ratio that is seen from observations (dark energy is about 75 percent of the universe's mass-energy content, while dark matter is about 21 percent and normal matter makes up the last 4 percent).
Although the fluid is all around us, Zhao found that it does not affect the motion of Earth or the other planets, which is "reassuring," he said, because data shows that our solar system obeys traditional gravity to very high accuracy.
But the fluid does affect the speed at which galaxies can rotate. Some 75 years ago, astronomers noticed that galaxies were turning faster than would be expected from the amount of normal light-emitting matter they contained. The answer seemed to require some form of unseen dark matter.
However, Zhao has shown that his fluid can keep galaxies from flying apart just as well as dark matter can.
Zhao has also tested his model against the bullet cluster of galaxies, where a massive collision appears to have stripped hot gas from its dark matter envelope. This "naked" dark matter was seen as iron-clad proof for traditional dark matter theories, but Zhao claims that his fluid can reproduce the same effect.
Christian Boehmer from University College London thinks it "compelling" that Zhao's model can reproduce so much galaxy data.
If the dark fluid is mimicking dark matter, then scientists are searching in vain for the elusive dark matter particle, often called a WIMP (for weakly interacting massive particle).
Currently, several experiments are trying to detect a rare collision of a WIMP on Earth or observe gamma rays from distant WIMP self-annihilations.
"Direct detections will be more difficult," Zhao said. WIMPs may still exist, but there won't be as many of them as predicted.
Without WIMPs to worry about, the dark fluid could make scientists' jobs easier.
But not many cosmologists are ready to abandon dark matter just yet. The dark fluid idea is still fairly new, so some issues have yet to be worked out, whereas dark matter is a fairly mature theory.
"The current [dark matter] model provides the best fit to the data and is therefore the best model at hand," Boehmer said.
However, Boehmer agrees that having two unknowns — dark matter and dark energy — make up 95 percent of the universe is a bit embarrassing for cosmology.
"Frankly speaking, these are just fancy words we use to name something we do not understand," he said.
If a simpler model (with a single word) can explain all the data, then cosmologists will gladly accept it, Boehmer said.
"The type of dark fluid that Zhao is looking at is similar to one that Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford and his colleagues devised a few years ago". Let’s see, that called for shoe polish and eye of newt, if we remember correctly.
Is this a pitch for a prehistoric yogurt ad?
How Did Huge Dinosaurs Find Enough Food? Did Bacteria Aid Their Digestion?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago. They want to find out how the dinosaurs were able to become as large as they did. In fact such gigantic animals should not have existed according to general rules of ecology.
Dinosaur digestion
Take 200 milligrammes of dried and ground equisetum, ten millilitres of digestive juice from sheep's rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly. In this way you obtain the artificial 'dinosaur rumen'. With this apparatus (also used as a 'Menke gas production technique' in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces which are still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these 'sauropod dinosaurs' with their 70 to 100 tonnes had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average people.
Larger than permitted
How the dinosaurs could ever attain this size is something which scientists from Germany and Switzerland are investigating. The Bonn palaeontologist, Professor Martin Sander, the coordinator of the research group 'Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: The Evolution of Gigantism', says, 'There is a law to which most animals living today conform. The larger an animal, the smaller the density of the population, i.e. the fewer animals of the same species there are per square kilometre.' The larger an animal is, the larger the amount of food it has to have in order to survive. Therefore a specific area can only feed a certain maximum number of animals.
At the same time there is a lower limit to the density of population. If this is undercut, the species dies out: 'In this case diseases can rapidly wipe out the whole stock. Moreover, finding a mate becomes difficult,' Martin Sander explains. An animal like the 100-tonne argentinosaurus should have normally not had this 'minimum population density', actually it should not have been able to exist. But there are hypotheses for this apparent paradox: for example the giant dinosaurs presumably had a metabolism that was lower than that of mammals. In this context it is unclear how nutritious the plants were that formed their diet.
This question is being investigated by Dr. Jürgen Hummel in conjunction with Dr. Marcus Clauss from the University of Zurich. 'We assume that the herbivorous dinosaurs must have had a kind of fermenter, similar to the rumen in cows today.' Almost all existing herbivores digest their food by using bacteria in this way. The panda is the exception. Because the panda is not like this its digestion is inefficient. It stuffs bamboo leaves into its mouth all day long, in order to meet its energy needs, despite the fact that it does not move about much, thereby saving energy.
Jürgen Hummel transforms glass syringes into simple fermenters, which he fills with bacteria from the sheep's rumen. 'These micro-organisms are very old from an evolutionary point of view; we can therefore assume that they also existed in the past,' he explains. To the mix of bacteria he adds dried and ground food plants: grass, foliage or herbs which still form part of animals' diet, and for comparison equisetum, Norfolk Island pine or ginkgo leaves, i.e. parts of plants which have been growing for more than 200 million years on earth. The gas formed during the fermentation process presses the plunger out of the syringes. Jürgen Hummel can therefore read the success of the fermentation process directly off their scales. This is measured according to a simple rule: the more gas is produced, the 'higher the quality' of the food.
Equisetum is bad for the teeth
These 'old' plants stand their ground surprisingly well compared to today's flora. 'The difference is not as great as might be expected,' Jürgen Hummel emphasises. The bacteria digest ginkgo even better than foliage, but they seem to prefer equisetum most. With it gas production is even higher than with some grasses. Nevertheless, equisetum figures in the diet of comparatively few animals. The reason is that in addition to the toxins present in many modern species it wears down animals' teeth too much. 'Equisetum contains a lot of silicates,' Jürgen Hummel says. 'It acts like sand paper.'
However, many dinosaurs did not have any molars at all. They just pulled up their food and gulped it down. The mechanical break-up may have been carried out by a 'gastric mill'. Similar to today's birds, dinosaurs may have swallowed stones with which they ground the food to a paste with their muscular stomach. However, there are no clear indications of this. Only recently the Bonn palaeontologist Dr. Oliver Wings doubted that dinosaurs had bezoar stones, at least this assumption could not be verified from fossil findings.
The results of the research have now been published in the journal 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B'.
Ex-Florida prison boss: Drunken orgies tainted system (CNN)
What gave it away?
Falling moose nearly takes out trooper ( Anchorage Daily News)
And where is squirrel?
UPDATE: Hardwired for love: Are robots the sex partners of the future? (Drudge)
A future where even the lawyers get some.
Meth Deposited in ATM, Woman Jailed...(AP)
Talk about a speedy transaction...
Mummified Corpse Found in Bathtub of Arizona Renter (Breitbart.com)
“Oh yeah? Check the lease.
Newsweek: We may still be (unconscious) racists
Really?
Today’s episode of Gil Scott-Heron’s “And Whitey’s on the Moon.”
Scientists prove Napoleon not poisoned
Researchers measured arsenic levels using nuclear reactor to irradiate hair
ROME - Italian scientists say they have proved Napoleon was not poisoned, scotching the legend the French emperor was murdered by his British jailors.
Napoleon's post-mortem said he died of stomach cancer aged 51, but the theory he was assassinated to prevent any return to power has gained credence in recent decades as some studies indicated his body contained a high level of the poison arsenic.
"It was not arsenic poisoning that killed Napoleon at Saint Helena," said researchers at the University of Pavia who tested the theory the British killed him while he was in exile on the South Atlantic island in 1821.
The Italian research — which studied hair samples from various moments in his life which are kept in museums in Italy and France — showed Napoleon's body did have a high level of arsenic, but that he was already heavily contaminated as a boy.
The scientists used a nuclear reactor to irradiate the hairs to get an accurate measure of the levels of arsenic.
Looking at hairs from several of Napoleon's contemporaries, including his wife and son, they found arsenic levels were generally much higher than is common today.
"The result? There was no poisoning in our opinion because Napoleon's hairs contain the same amount of arsenic as his contemporaries," the researchers said in a statement published on the university's website.
The study found the samples taken from people living in the early 1800s contained 100 times as much arsenic than the current average. Glues and dyes commonly used at the time are blamed for high environmental levels of the toxic element.
"The environment in which people lived in the early 1800s evidently caused the intake of quantities of arsenic that today we would consider dangerous," the scientists said.
One theory was that Napoleon was poisoned accidentally by arsenic vapor from dyes in his wallpaper at Saint Helena, but the study showed there was no massive increase in arsenic levels in his latter years.
"It is clear that one cannot talk about a case of poisoning, but of a constant absorption of arsenic," the researchers said.
Napoleon had been exiled once before — on the Italian island of Elba after his failed invasion of Russia. But he returned to France and was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815 after which he was sent to the much more remote Saint Helena.
Golly, we’re glad they cleared that up.
Lord Vader Has No Comment
New Cosmic Theory Unites Dark Forces
Michael Schirber
Special to SPACE.com
SPACE.com Mon Feb 11, 6:46 AM ET
The two biggest mysteries in cosmology may be one. A new theory says that dark matter and dark energy could arise from a single dark fluid that permeates the whole universe. And this could mean Earth-based dark matter searches will come up empty.
Dark matter, as originally hypothesized, is extra hidden mass that astrophysicists calculate is necessary for holding together fast-turning galaxies. The most popular notion is that this matter is made of some yet-to-be-identified particle that has almost no interactions with light or ordinary matter. Yet it seems to be everywhere, acting as a scaffolding for galaxy clusters and the whole structure of the universe.
On the other hand, dark energy is needed to explain the more recently-discovered acceleration of the universe's expansion. It supposedly exists all throughout space, delivering a pressure that counteracts gravity.
It's counterintuitive that one substance could be both a gravitational anchor for galaxies and anti-gravity force for the universe. However, HongSheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews in Scotland claims that a fluid-like dark energy can act like dark matter when its density becomes high enough.
"Dark energy is a property of the vacuum — of fields that we do not easily see," Zhao told Space.com. "From it, we can derive the dark matter effect."
Zhao compares this dark fluid to Earth's atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure causes air to expand, but part of the air can collapse to form clouds. In the same way, the dark fluid might generally expand, but it also could collect around galaxies to help hold them together.
Unification
Zhao is not the first theorist to try to bring dark energy and dark matter under the same framework.
The type of dark fluid that Zhao is looking at is similar to one that Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford and his colleagues devised a few years ago.
"[Our theory] involves positing a preferred time direction, in some sense a special time frame," Ferreira said. "It has the interesting effect of modifying Einstein's theory of general relativity."
The idea is similar to the "ether," an invisible medium that physicists once thought light waves travelled through. Einstein's relativity did away with the need for such a medium, but cosmologists have recently found that an ether-like substance can mimic dark matter.
The presence of such a substance changes the way gravity works. This is most noticeable in the distant outskirts of a galaxy, where the galaxy's gravitational pull would be expected to be small, but the ether makes it much stronger.
The ether "effectively softens space-time in regions of low [gravitational] acceleration making it more sensitive to the presence of mass than usual," Ferreira explained.
Zhao has refined this approach and found that it can match a lot of astronomical data, as reported in a recent article in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"I like [Zhao's model] because it shows that these theories are predictive and, if worked out in detail, can be tested properly against experiment," Ferreira said.
For one, Zhao's fluid divides itself into a dark energy part and a dark matter part with the same ratio that is seen from observations (dark energy is about 75 percent of the universe's mass-energy content, while dark matter is about 21 percent and normal matter makes up the last 4 percent).
Although the fluid is all around us, Zhao found that it does not affect the motion of Earth or the other planets, which is "reassuring," he said, because data shows that our solar system obeys traditional gravity to very high accuracy.
But the fluid does affect the speed at which galaxies can rotate. Some 75 years ago, astronomers noticed that galaxies were turning faster than would be expected from the amount of normal light-emitting matter they contained. The answer seemed to require some form of unseen dark matter.
However, Zhao has shown that his fluid can keep galaxies from flying apart just as well as dark matter can.
Zhao has also tested his model against the bullet cluster of galaxies, where a massive collision appears to have stripped hot gas from its dark matter envelope. This "naked" dark matter was seen as iron-clad proof for traditional dark matter theories, but Zhao claims that his fluid can reproduce the same effect.
Christian Boehmer from University College London thinks it "compelling" that Zhao's model can reproduce so much galaxy data.
If the dark fluid is mimicking dark matter, then scientists are searching in vain for the elusive dark matter particle, often called a WIMP (for weakly interacting massive particle).
Currently, several experiments are trying to detect a rare collision of a WIMP on Earth or observe gamma rays from distant WIMP self-annihilations.
"Direct detections will be more difficult," Zhao said. WIMPs may still exist, but there won't be as many of them as predicted.
Without WIMPs to worry about, the dark fluid could make scientists' jobs easier.
But not many cosmologists are ready to abandon dark matter just yet. The dark fluid idea is still fairly new, so some issues have yet to be worked out, whereas dark matter is a fairly mature theory.
"The current [dark matter] model provides the best fit to the data and is therefore the best model at hand," Boehmer said.
However, Boehmer agrees that having two unknowns — dark matter and dark energy — make up 95 percent of the universe is a bit embarrassing for cosmology.
"Frankly speaking, these are just fancy words we use to name something we do not understand," he said.
If a simpler model (with a single word) can explain all the data, then cosmologists will gladly accept it, Boehmer said.
"The type of dark fluid that Zhao is looking at is similar to one that Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford and his colleagues devised a few years ago". Let’s see, that called for shoe polish and eye of newt, if we remember correctly.
Is this a pitch for a prehistoric yogurt ad?
How Did Huge Dinosaurs Find Enough Food? Did Bacteria Aid Their Digestion?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago. They want to find out how the dinosaurs were able to become as large as they did. In fact such gigantic animals should not have existed according to general rules of ecology.
Dinosaur digestion
Take 200 milligrammes of dried and ground equisetum, ten millilitres of digestive juice from sheep's rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly. In this way you obtain the artificial 'dinosaur rumen'. With this apparatus (also used as a 'Menke gas production technique' in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces which are still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these 'sauropod dinosaurs' with their 70 to 100 tonnes had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average people.
Larger than permitted
How the dinosaurs could ever attain this size is something which scientists from Germany and Switzerland are investigating. The Bonn palaeontologist, Professor Martin Sander, the coordinator of the research group 'Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: The Evolution of Gigantism', says, 'There is a law to which most animals living today conform. The larger an animal, the smaller the density of the population, i.e. the fewer animals of the same species there are per square kilometre.' The larger an animal is, the larger the amount of food it has to have in order to survive. Therefore a specific area can only feed a certain maximum number of animals.
At the same time there is a lower limit to the density of population. If this is undercut, the species dies out: 'In this case diseases can rapidly wipe out the whole stock. Moreover, finding a mate becomes difficult,' Martin Sander explains. An animal like the 100-tonne argentinosaurus should have normally not had this 'minimum population density', actually it should not have been able to exist. But there are hypotheses for this apparent paradox: for example the giant dinosaurs presumably had a metabolism that was lower than that of mammals. In this context it is unclear how nutritious the plants were that formed their diet.
This question is being investigated by Dr. Jürgen Hummel in conjunction with Dr. Marcus Clauss from the University of Zurich. 'We assume that the herbivorous dinosaurs must have had a kind of fermenter, similar to the rumen in cows today.' Almost all existing herbivores digest their food by using bacteria in this way. The panda is the exception. Because the panda is not like this its digestion is inefficient. It stuffs bamboo leaves into its mouth all day long, in order to meet its energy needs, despite the fact that it does not move about much, thereby saving energy.
Jürgen Hummel transforms glass syringes into simple fermenters, which he fills with bacteria from the sheep's rumen. 'These micro-organisms are very old from an evolutionary point of view; we can therefore assume that they also existed in the past,' he explains. To the mix of bacteria he adds dried and ground food plants: grass, foliage or herbs which still form part of animals' diet, and for comparison equisetum, Norfolk Island pine or ginkgo leaves, i.e. parts of plants which have been growing for more than 200 million years on earth. The gas formed during the fermentation process presses the plunger out of the syringes. Jürgen Hummel can therefore read the success of the fermentation process directly off their scales. This is measured according to a simple rule: the more gas is produced, the 'higher the quality' of the food.
Equisetum is bad for the teeth
These 'old' plants stand their ground surprisingly well compared to today's flora. 'The difference is not as great as might be expected,' Jürgen Hummel emphasises. The bacteria digest ginkgo even better than foliage, but they seem to prefer equisetum most. With it gas production is even higher than with some grasses. Nevertheless, equisetum figures in the diet of comparatively few animals. The reason is that in addition to the toxins present in many modern species it wears down animals' teeth too much. 'Equisetum contains a lot of silicates,' Jürgen Hummel says. 'It acts like sand paper.'
However, many dinosaurs did not have any molars at all. They just pulled up their food and gulped it down. The mechanical break-up may have been carried out by a 'gastric mill'. Similar to today's birds, dinosaurs may have swallowed stones with which they ground the food to a paste with their muscular stomach. However, there are no clear indications of this. Only recently the Bonn palaeontologist Dr. Oliver Wings doubted that dinosaurs had bezoar stones, at least this assumption could not be verified from fossil findings.
The results of the research have now been published in the journal 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B'.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/11/08
Headlines of the day
Wienermobile wipes out (Starr-Gazette.com)
No bun intended.
Pa. Lawmaker Eager to Push Beer Sales 'Into 21st Century' (KYW Newsradio.com)
Does Jules Verne know about this? How about Admiral Richard Byrd?
Rubik's Cube In Center Of Earth? Computer Simulations Support New Model Of Earth's Core
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2008) — Swedish researchers have presented evidence to support their new theory about the structure of the earth's core. The findings may be of significance for our understanding of the cooling down of the earth, and of the stability of the earth’s magnetic field.
It has long been known that the inner core of the earth, a sphere consisting of a solid mass with a radius of about 1,200 km, is mainly made up of iron. However, seismic observations have shown that elastic waves pass more rapidly through this core in directions that are parallel to the earth’s axis of rotation than in directions parallel to the equator–-a phenomenon that has not been previously explained. At the high temperatures that prevail in the core of the earth, these waves should pass at the same speed regardless of their direction.
In the present study, scientists from Uppsala University and KTH present an explanation for this puzzling characteristic. The new publication in Science is part of a series of articles published by the same research team in Nature and Science.
Initially, in 2003, they published strong theoretical proof that the earth’s core assumes the so-called body-centered cubic crystal structure at high temperatures–-a structure that despite its high degree of symmetry evinces a surprisingly high level of elastic anisotropy, that is, its elastic properties are contingent on direction. This theory about the crystal structure directly contradicted the then prevailing view, but since then the theory has found both experimental and theoretical support.
In this new study the researchers present simulations of how seismic waves are reproduced in iron under the conditions that prevail in the core of the earth, showing a difference of about 12 percent depending on their direction-–which suffices as an explanation for the puzzling observations. First the trajectories of movement were calculated for several million atoms in strong interaction with each other. On this basis, the scientists were then able to determine that the progress of the sound waves was actually accurately described in the computer-generated model for iron under the conditions prevailing in the core of the earth.
“We found that the body-centered cubic structure of iron is the only structure that could correspond to the experimental observations,” says Börje Johansson, professor of condensed-matter theory at Uppsala University.
The earth’s heat balance, like its magnetic field, is dependent on the amount of heat that is stored in the inner core of the earth. These conditions, in turn, are dependent on the crystal structure of the iron in the inner core. Previously these estimates were based on models deriving from the hexagonal structure of iron in the inner core. The Swedish scientists’ discovery will now entail a critical revaluation of the cooling off of the earth and of the stability of its magnetic field.
“This study opens new perspectives for our understanding of the earth’s past, present, and future,” says Natalia Skorodumova, a researcher at the Department of Physics and Materials Science.
In their studies these researchers have used models based on the so-called density-functional theory for which Walter Kohn was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize. The calculations were carried out using the most powerful parallel supercomputers in existence, in Stockholm and Linköping.
The body-centered cubic crystal structure forms a cube with atoms in each corner and a further atom in the middle of this cube. It is oriented in such a way that its great diagonal is directed along the earth’s axis of rotation, which makes it possible for the iron to evince sound propagations with the velocities observed.
Social scientists get a grant to point out the obvious. Film at 11.
Spouses more irritating as time goes on
ANN ARBOR, Mich., Feb. 11 (UPI) -- A University of Michigan study of 800 adults found as people age, they are more likely to see their spouses as irritating and demanding.
Study leader Kira Birditt, a research fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and colleagues Lisa Jackey and Toni Antonucci interviewed people at different stages in life -- young, middle-aged and older adults -- first in 1992 and again in 2005.
The study participants in their 20s and 30s had the most negative relationships overall.
The study also found that for all age groups, including adults in their 40s and 50s, the spousal relationship was seen as the most negative -- and it tended to increase in negativity over time. However, Birditt said that viewing a spouse more negatively over time may not be all bad.
"As we age, and become closer and more comfortable with one another, it could be that we're more able to express ourselves to each other," Birditt said in a statement. "In other words, it's possible that negativity is a normal aspect of close relationships that include a great deal of daily contact."
The findings were presented at the Gerontological Society of America.
When galaxies fail to move their feet
A Cosmic Fossil? Brilliant But Fuzzy Galaxy May Be Aftermath Of Multi-Galaxy Collision
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) — The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of the galaxy NGC 1132 which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil – the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant but fuzzy giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies.
The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132, seen in this latest image from Hubble, belongs to a category of galaxies called giant ellipticals. NGC 1132, together with the small dwarf galaxies surrounding it, are dubbed a “fossil group” as they are most likely the remains of a group of galaxies that merged together in the recent past.
In visible light NGC 1132 appears as a single, isolated, giant elliptical galaxy, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Scientists have found that NGC 1132 resides in an enormous halo of dark matter, comparable to the amount of dark matter usually found in an entire group of tens or hundreds of galaxies. It also has a strong X-ray glow from an abundant amount of hot gas – an amount normally only found in galaxy groups. Its X-ray glow extends over a region of space ten times larger than the 120,000 light-year radius it has in visible light. An X-ray glow that is equal in size to that of an entire group of galaxies.
The origin of fossil group systems remains a puzzle. The most likely explanation is that they are the end-products of a cosmic feeding frenzy in which a large cannibal galaxy devours all of its neighbours. A less likely explanation is that they may be very rare objects that formed in a region or period of time where the growth of moderate-sized galaxies was somehow suppressed, and only one large galaxy formed.
Many galaxies reside in groups that are gravitationally bound together, including our own Milky Way, which is part of the Local Group. Sometimes gravity makes galaxies collide and eventually merge into one single galaxy. There is strong evidence that the Milky Way is one such cannibal that has snacked on numerous smaller galaxies during its lifetime, inheriting their stars in the process. Scientists are keenly studying the environment surrounding galaxies such as NGC 1132 using space telescopes like Hubble, and they try to trace the history of the formation these galaxies by analysing their properties.
In this Hubble image, NGC 1132 is seen surrounded by thousands of ancient globular clusters, swarming around the galaxy like bees around a hive. These globular clusters are likely to be the survivors of the disruption of their cannibalised parent galaxies that have been eaten by NGC 1132 and may reveal its merger history. In the background, there is a stunning tapestry of numerous galaxies that are much further away.
Elliptical galaxies are smooth and featureless. They contain hundreds of millions to trillions of stars, and their shapes range from nearly spherical to very elongated in shape. Their overall yellowish colour is a telltale sign of their great age. Because elliptical galaxies do not contain much cool gas they can no longer make new stars.
NGC 1132 is located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. This image of NGC 1132 was taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Data obtained in 2005 and 2006 through green and near-infrared filters were used to produce a colour composite.
.
Wienermobile wipes out (Starr-Gazette.com)
No bun intended.
Pa. Lawmaker Eager to Push Beer Sales 'Into 21st Century' (KYW Newsradio.com)
Does Jules Verne know about this? How about Admiral Richard Byrd?
Rubik's Cube In Center Of Earth? Computer Simulations Support New Model Of Earth's Core
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2008) — Swedish researchers have presented evidence to support their new theory about the structure of the earth's core. The findings may be of significance for our understanding of the cooling down of the earth, and of the stability of the earth’s magnetic field.
It has long been known that the inner core of the earth, a sphere consisting of a solid mass with a radius of about 1,200 km, is mainly made up of iron. However, seismic observations have shown that elastic waves pass more rapidly through this core in directions that are parallel to the earth’s axis of rotation than in directions parallel to the equator–-a phenomenon that has not been previously explained. At the high temperatures that prevail in the core of the earth, these waves should pass at the same speed regardless of their direction.
In the present study, scientists from Uppsala University and KTH present an explanation for this puzzling characteristic. The new publication in Science is part of a series of articles published by the same research team in Nature and Science.
Initially, in 2003, they published strong theoretical proof that the earth’s core assumes the so-called body-centered cubic crystal structure at high temperatures–-a structure that despite its high degree of symmetry evinces a surprisingly high level of elastic anisotropy, that is, its elastic properties are contingent on direction. This theory about the crystal structure directly contradicted the then prevailing view, but since then the theory has found both experimental and theoretical support.
In this new study the researchers present simulations of how seismic waves are reproduced in iron under the conditions that prevail in the core of the earth, showing a difference of about 12 percent depending on their direction-–which suffices as an explanation for the puzzling observations. First the trajectories of movement were calculated for several million atoms in strong interaction with each other. On this basis, the scientists were then able to determine that the progress of the sound waves was actually accurately described in the computer-generated model for iron under the conditions prevailing in the core of the earth.
“We found that the body-centered cubic structure of iron is the only structure that could correspond to the experimental observations,” says Börje Johansson, professor of condensed-matter theory at Uppsala University.
The earth’s heat balance, like its magnetic field, is dependent on the amount of heat that is stored in the inner core of the earth. These conditions, in turn, are dependent on the crystal structure of the iron in the inner core. Previously these estimates were based on models deriving from the hexagonal structure of iron in the inner core. The Swedish scientists’ discovery will now entail a critical revaluation of the cooling off of the earth and of the stability of its magnetic field.
“This study opens new perspectives for our understanding of the earth’s past, present, and future,” says Natalia Skorodumova, a researcher at the Department of Physics and Materials Science.
In their studies these researchers have used models based on the so-called density-functional theory for which Walter Kohn was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize. The calculations were carried out using the most powerful parallel supercomputers in existence, in Stockholm and Linköping.
The body-centered cubic crystal structure forms a cube with atoms in each corner and a further atom in the middle of this cube. It is oriented in such a way that its great diagonal is directed along the earth’s axis of rotation, which makes it possible for the iron to evince sound propagations with the velocities observed.
Social scientists get a grant to point out the obvious. Film at 11.
Spouses more irritating as time goes on
ANN ARBOR, Mich., Feb. 11 (UPI) -- A University of Michigan study of 800 adults found as people age, they are more likely to see their spouses as irritating and demanding.
Study leader Kira Birditt, a research fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and colleagues Lisa Jackey and Toni Antonucci interviewed people at different stages in life -- young, middle-aged and older adults -- first in 1992 and again in 2005.
The study participants in their 20s and 30s had the most negative relationships overall.
The study also found that for all age groups, including adults in their 40s and 50s, the spousal relationship was seen as the most negative -- and it tended to increase in negativity over time. However, Birditt said that viewing a spouse more negatively over time may not be all bad.
"As we age, and become closer and more comfortable with one another, it could be that we're more able to express ourselves to each other," Birditt said in a statement. "In other words, it's possible that negativity is a normal aspect of close relationships that include a great deal of daily contact."
The findings were presented at the Gerontological Society of America.
When galaxies fail to move their feet
A Cosmic Fossil? Brilliant But Fuzzy Galaxy May Be Aftermath Of Multi-Galaxy Collision
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) — The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of the galaxy NGC 1132 which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil – the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant but fuzzy giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies.
The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132, seen in this latest image from Hubble, belongs to a category of galaxies called giant ellipticals. NGC 1132, together with the small dwarf galaxies surrounding it, are dubbed a “fossil group” as they are most likely the remains of a group of galaxies that merged together in the recent past.
In visible light NGC 1132 appears as a single, isolated, giant elliptical galaxy, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Scientists have found that NGC 1132 resides in an enormous halo of dark matter, comparable to the amount of dark matter usually found in an entire group of tens or hundreds of galaxies. It also has a strong X-ray glow from an abundant amount of hot gas – an amount normally only found in galaxy groups. Its X-ray glow extends over a region of space ten times larger than the 120,000 light-year radius it has in visible light. An X-ray glow that is equal in size to that of an entire group of galaxies.
The origin of fossil group systems remains a puzzle. The most likely explanation is that they are the end-products of a cosmic feeding frenzy in which a large cannibal galaxy devours all of its neighbours. A less likely explanation is that they may be very rare objects that formed in a region or period of time where the growth of moderate-sized galaxies was somehow suppressed, and only one large galaxy formed.
Many galaxies reside in groups that are gravitationally bound together, including our own Milky Way, which is part of the Local Group. Sometimes gravity makes galaxies collide and eventually merge into one single galaxy. There is strong evidence that the Milky Way is one such cannibal that has snacked on numerous smaller galaxies during its lifetime, inheriting their stars in the process. Scientists are keenly studying the environment surrounding galaxies such as NGC 1132 using space telescopes like Hubble, and they try to trace the history of the formation these galaxies by analysing their properties.
In this Hubble image, NGC 1132 is seen surrounded by thousands of ancient globular clusters, swarming around the galaxy like bees around a hive. These globular clusters are likely to be the survivors of the disruption of their cannibalised parent galaxies that have been eaten by NGC 1132 and may reveal its merger history. In the background, there is a stunning tapestry of numerous galaxies that are much further away.
Elliptical galaxies are smooth and featureless. They contain hundreds of millions to trillions of stars, and their shapes range from nearly spherical to very elongated in shape. Their overall yellowish colour is a telltale sign of their great age. Because elliptical galaxies do not contain much cool gas they can no longer make new stars.
NGC 1132 is located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. This image of NGC 1132 was taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Data obtained in 2005 and 2006 through green and near-infrared filters were used to produce a colour composite.
.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/08/08
Headlines of the day
Principal denies report that farting is banned in school (The Obscure Store)
Man stabs wife with fork, returns utensil to drawer, police say (The IslandPacket.com)
Music cannot change the world, says Neil Young (Breitbart)
He should know.
This just in. Humans Buy Things So They Won’t Feel Bad. Film at 11:00
Sadness May Encourage More Extravagance
By Mark Jewell, AP Business Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- If you're sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people's spending judgment goes out the window when they're down, especially if they're a bit self-absorbed.
Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip.
The so-called "misery is not miserly" phenomenon is well-known to psychologists, advertisers and personal shoppers alike, and has been documented in a similar study in 2004.
The new study released Friday by researchers from four universities goes further, trying to answer whether temporary sadness alone can trigger spendthrift tendencies.
The study found a willingness to spend freely by sad people occurs mainly when their sadness triggers greater "self-focus." That response was measured by counting how frequently study participants used references to "I," "me," "my" and "myself" in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally.
The brief video was about the death of a boy's mentor. Another group watched an emotionally neutral clip about the Great Barrier Reef, the vast coral reef system off Australia's coast.
On average, the group watching the sad video offered to pay nearly four times as much for a sporty-looking, insulated water bottle than the group watching the nature video, according to the study by researchers from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Pittsburgh universities.
Thirty-three study subjects -- young adults who responded to an advertisement offering $10 for participation -- were offered the chance to trade some of the $10 to buy the bottle. The sad group offered to trade an average of $2.11, compared with 56 cents for the neutral group.
Despite the big difference, participants in the sad group typically insisted that the video's emotional content didn't affect their willingness to spend more -- an incorrect assumption, said one of the study's co-authors.
"This is a phenomenon that occurs without awareness," Jennifer Lerner, a Harvard professor who studies emotion and decision making, said in a phone interview. "This is really different from the idea of retail therapy, where people are feeling negative and want to cheer themselves up by shopping. People have no idea this is going on."
The researchers concluded sadness can trigger a chain of emotions leading to extravagant tendencies. Sadness leads people to become more focused on themselves, causing the person to feel that they and their possessions are worth little. That feeling increases willingness to pay more -- presumably to feel better about themselves.
"Because the study used real commodities and real money, results hold implications for everyday decisions," according to the authors of the study, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, and presented Saturday at a meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology.
Edward Charlesworth, a Houston-based clinical psychologist who was not involved in the study, suggested the misery-is-not-miserly phenomenon is rooted in a culture that encourages people to buy to feel better.
"Certainly, the advertising industry knows that," Charlesworth, citing as an example a 1970s McDonald's fast-food jingle, "You deserve a break today."
Charlesworth frequently sees clients in his clinical practice who overspend to deal with difficulties.
"It's not necessarily that you go to the mall and go on a shopping spree," said Charlesworth, author of a book on stress management. "It's often more subtle -- you spend a bit more on something than you normally would. But if you magnify that over the course of a year, or a lifetime, those little things add up."
Personal shoppers, who make a business of prowling the aisles for others, say they frequently see clients stray from their budgets when they're feeling blue.
"At that point, cost isn't usually a factor," said Kalyn Johnson, of New York City-based Style by Kalyn Johnson. "They say, 'If I can have these wonderful shoes, I'll look better, and feel better.'
"But on the back end, I've seen buyer's remorse. This kicks in after they realize that new pair of shoes, or iPod, or whatever, didn't make them feel better, and then there's that sense of, 'Oh my God, why did I spend money on this?'"
The study released Friday was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health. Besides Lerner, the other study authors were Carnegie Mellon's Cynthia Cryder, Stanford's James Gross, and the University of Pittsburgh's Ronald Dahl.
So Modigliani turns to the model and says, “Why the long face?”
Pygmy dinosaur? It’s right next to the jumbo shrimp.
Pygmy Dinosaur Inhabited Tropical Islands In Britain's Prehistoric Past
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2008) — The celebrated Bristol Dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, has now been shown to live on subtropical islands around Bristol, instead of in a desert on the mainland as previously thought.
See also:
This new research could explain the dinosaur's small size (2 m) in relation to its giant (10 m) mainland equivalent, Plateosaurus. Like many species trapped on small islands, such as the 'hobbit' Homo floresiensis of Flores and pygmy elephants on Malta, the Bristol Dinosaur may have been subjected to island dwarfing.
Geological mapping indicates that the islands were quite small in size and, judging by abundant remains of fossil charcoal, were often swept by fires. Thus the pygmy Bristol Dinosaur may have met its death in a wildfire.
Thecodontosaurus is one of the earliest named dinosaurs. Its bones were originally found near what is now Bristol Zoo in 1834 - some time before dinosaurs were recognised as a group. In 1975, the remains of at least 11 other individual dinosaurs were uncovered in a quarry at Tytherington, north of Bristol.
Now, a collaboration between two palaeontologists, Professor John Marshall, a University of Southampton expert on fossil pollen, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and Bristol University's Dr David Whiteside, an authority on extinct reptiles, has revealed that Thecodontosaurus lived more recently than was previously thought.
Dr Whiteside emphasises that this is 'a unique equal collaboration between a palaeontologist specialising in pollen which are microfossils and a vertebrate palaeontologist working on Triassic reptiles.' He says: 'I can't think of any other scientific paper where the two specialisms were combined to produce a complete paleoenvironmental model which includes the whole community of land animals showing the time and habitat they lived in and how they died.'
Microscopic study of marine algae and fossil pollen shows that, rather than inhabiting the arid uplands of the late Triassic Period, the dinosaurs lived just before the Jurassic Period in a series of lushly vegetated islands around Bristol, the outlines of which can still be seen today in the shape of the land.
Professor John Marshall comments: 'The cave deposits with dinosaurs have been known for over 150 years and are world famous. You would think there would be nothing new to find. But by looking at new deposits with a fresh mind we have been able to radically change the environmental interpretation. The big surprise was discovering that these reptiles did not live on arid uplands but rather on small well-vegetated tropical islands around Bristol around 200 million years ago. It is only the microfossil pollen and algae that can tell us this. The outlines of the islands can still be seen today in the shape of the land.'
Professor Marshall and Dr Whiteside add that the deposits that contain the dinosaurs and other reptiles are very unusual. The bones are found in fossil caves, formed by Triassic rain and seawater dissolving the 350 million-year-old Carboniferous Limestone. The caves then filled with sediments including the dinosaur bones as sea levels rose at the very end of the Triassic Period.
Thecodontosaurus bones have been discovered on both Cromhall Island, north of Bristol and Failand Island, part of which is in the city of Bristol and a short distance inland from the present coast. Geological mapping indicates that the islands the dinosaurs lived on were quite small in size.
The discovery that the Bristol dinosaur lived on very small islands is very important as most researchers have believed that it was a primitive member of the prosauropods, which included some very large animals and existed before the huge sauropods such as Diplodocus of the Jurassic.
'This changes the context which we should view Thecodontosaurus,' says Dr Whiteside. 'It has many similarities to the giant Plateosaurus that lived at the same time and other researchers have not taken into account the rapid changes that take place when large animals are isolated on islands of decreasing size. We believe that the Bristol dinosaur is probably a dwarfed species that derived from the giant Plateosaurus or a very similar animal.'
The study The age, fauna and palaeoenvironment of the Late Triassic fissure deposits of Tytherington, South Gloucestershire, UK is published in Geologi
How you doin’? Want to come over and see my rock?
Barnacles Go To Great Lengths To Mate
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) — Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size - up to 8 times their body length - so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours.
Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions.
When wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of higher wave action, a shorter (stouter) penis is more manoeuvrable in flow and therefore can reach more mates.
The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that sexual selection - competition with other males, female choice, sexual conflict between males and females - is not required to explain variation in genital form.
In barnacles, this variation appears to be driven largely by the hydrodynamic conditions experienced under breaking waves.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Alberta.
Principal denies report that farting is banned in school (The Obscure Store)
Man stabs wife with fork, returns utensil to drawer, police say (The IslandPacket.com)
Music cannot change the world, says Neil Young (Breitbart)
He should know.
This just in. Humans Buy Things So They Won’t Feel Bad. Film at 11:00
Sadness May Encourage More Extravagance
By Mark Jewell, AP Business Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- If you're sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people's spending judgment goes out the window when they're down, especially if they're a bit self-absorbed.
Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip.
The so-called "misery is not miserly" phenomenon is well-known to psychologists, advertisers and personal shoppers alike, and has been documented in a similar study in 2004.
The new study released Friday by researchers from four universities goes further, trying to answer whether temporary sadness alone can trigger spendthrift tendencies.
The study found a willingness to spend freely by sad people occurs mainly when their sadness triggers greater "self-focus." That response was measured by counting how frequently study participants used references to "I," "me," "my" and "myself" in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally.
The brief video was about the death of a boy's mentor. Another group watched an emotionally neutral clip about the Great Barrier Reef, the vast coral reef system off Australia's coast.
On average, the group watching the sad video offered to pay nearly four times as much for a sporty-looking, insulated water bottle than the group watching the nature video, according to the study by researchers from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Pittsburgh universities.
Thirty-three study subjects -- young adults who responded to an advertisement offering $10 for participation -- were offered the chance to trade some of the $10 to buy the bottle. The sad group offered to trade an average of $2.11, compared with 56 cents for the neutral group.
Despite the big difference, participants in the sad group typically insisted that the video's emotional content didn't affect their willingness to spend more -- an incorrect assumption, said one of the study's co-authors.
"This is a phenomenon that occurs without awareness," Jennifer Lerner, a Harvard professor who studies emotion and decision making, said in a phone interview. "This is really different from the idea of retail therapy, where people are feeling negative and want to cheer themselves up by shopping. People have no idea this is going on."
The researchers concluded sadness can trigger a chain of emotions leading to extravagant tendencies. Sadness leads people to become more focused on themselves, causing the person to feel that they and their possessions are worth little. That feeling increases willingness to pay more -- presumably to feel better about themselves.
"Because the study used real commodities and real money, results hold implications for everyday decisions," according to the authors of the study, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, and presented Saturday at a meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology.
Edward Charlesworth, a Houston-based clinical psychologist who was not involved in the study, suggested the misery-is-not-miserly phenomenon is rooted in a culture that encourages people to buy to feel better.
"Certainly, the advertising industry knows that," Charlesworth, citing as an example a 1970s McDonald's fast-food jingle, "You deserve a break today."
Charlesworth frequently sees clients in his clinical practice who overspend to deal with difficulties.
"It's not necessarily that you go to the mall and go on a shopping spree," said Charlesworth, author of a book on stress management. "It's often more subtle -- you spend a bit more on something than you normally would. But if you magnify that over the course of a year, or a lifetime, those little things add up."
Personal shoppers, who make a business of prowling the aisles for others, say they frequently see clients stray from their budgets when they're feeling blue.
"At that point, cost isn't usually a factor," said Kalyn Johnson, of New York City-based Style by Kalyn Johnson. "They say, 'If I can have these wonderful shoes, I'll look better, and feel better.'
"But on the back end, I've seen buyer's remorse. This kicks in after they realize that new pair of shoes, or iPod, or whatever, didn't make them feel better, and then there's that sense of, 'Oh my God, why did I spend money on this?'"
The study released Friday was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health. Besides Lerner, the other study authors were Carnegie Mellon's Cynthia Cryder, Stanford's James Gross, and the University of Pittsburgh's Ronald Dahl.
So Modigliani turns to the model and says, “Why the long face?”
Pygmy dinosaur? It’s right next to the jumbo shrimp.
Pygmy Dinosaur Inhabited Tropical Islands In Britain's Prehistoric Past
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2008) — The celebrated Bristol Dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, has now been shown to live on subtropical islands around Bristol, instead of in a desert on the mainland as previously thought.
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This new research could explain the dinosaur's small size (2 m) in relation to its giant (10 m) mainland equivalent, Plateosaurus. Like many species trapped on small islands, such as the 'hobbit' Homo floresiensis of Flores and pygmy elephants on Malta, the Bristol Dinosaur may have been subjected to island dwarfing.
Geological mapping indicates that the islands were quite small in size and, judging by abundant remains of fossil charcoal, were often swept by fires. Thus the pygmy Bristol Dinosaur may have met its death in a wildfire.
Thecodontosaurus is one of the earliest named dinosaurs. Its bones were originally found near what is now Bristol Zoo in 1834 - some time before dinosaurs were recognised as a group. In 1975, the remains of at least 11 other individual dinosaurs were uncovered in a quarry at Tytherington, north of Bristol.
Now, a collaboration between two palaeontologists, Professor John Marshall, a University of Southampton expert on fossil pollen, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and Bristol University's Dr David Whiteside, an authority on extinct reptiles, has revealed that Thecodontosaurus lived more recently than was previously thought.
Dr Whiteside emphasises that this is 'a unique equal collaboration between a palaeontologist specialising in pollen which are microfossils and a vertebrate palaeontologist working on Triassic reptiles.' He says: 'I can't think of any other scientific paper where the two specialisms were combined to produce a complete paleoenvironmental model which includes the whole community of land animals showing the time and habitat they lived in and how they died.'
Microscopic study of marine algae and fossil pollen shows that, rather than inhabiting the arid uplands of the late Triassic Period, the dinosaurs lived just before the Jurassic Period in a series of lushly vegetated islands around Bristol, the outlines of which can still be seen today in the shape of the land.
Professor John Marshall comments: 'The cave deposits with dinosaurs have been known for over 150 years and are world famous. You would think there would be nothing new to find. But by looking at new deposits with a fresh mind we have been able to radically change the environmental interpretation. The big surprise was discovering that these reptiles did not live on arid uplands but rather on small well-vegetated tropical islands around Bristol around 200 million years ago. It is only the microfossil pollen and algae that can tell us this. The outlines of the islands can still be seen today in the shape of the land.'
Professor Marshall and Dr Whiteside add that the deposits that contain the dinosaurs and other reptiles are very unusual. The bones are found in fossil caves, formed by Triassic rain and seawater dissolving the 350 million-year-old Carboniferous Limestone. The caves then filled with sediments including the dinosaur bones as sea levels rose at the very end of the Triassic Period.
Thecodontosaurus bones have been discovered on both Cromhall Island, north of Bristol and Failand Island, part of which is in the city of Bristol and a short distance inland from the present coast. Geological mapping indicates that the islands the dinosaurs lived on were quite small in size.
The discovery that the Bristol dinosaur lived on very small islands is very important as most researchers have believed that it was a primitive member of the prosauropods, which included some very large animals and existed before the huge sauropods such as Diplodocus of the Jurassic.
'This changes the context which we should view Thecodontosaurus,' says Dr Whiteside. 'It has many similarities to the giant Plateosaurus that lived at the same time and other researchers have not taken into account the rapid changes that take place when large animals are isolated on islands of decreasing size. We believe that the Bristol dinosaur is probably a dwarfed species that derived from the giant Plateosaurus or a very similar animal.'
The study The age, fauna and palaeoenvironment of the Late Triassic fissure deposits of Tytherington, South Gloucestershire, UK is published in Geologi
How you doin’? Want to come over and see my rock?
Barnacles Go To Great Lengths To Mate
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) — Compelled to mate, yet firmly attached to the rock, barnacles have evolved the longest penis of any animal for their size - up to 8 times their body length - so they can find and fertilize distant neighbours.
Graduate student Christopher Neufeld and Dr. Richard Palmer from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta have shown that barnacles appear to have acquired the capacity to change the size and shape of their penises to closely match local wave conditions.
When wave action is light, a longer (thinner) penis can reach more mates, but at times of higher wave action, a shorter (stouter) penis is more manoeuvrable in flow and therefore can reach more mates.
The research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that sexual selection - competition with other males, female choice, sexual conflict between males and females - is not required to explain variation in genital form.
In barnacles, this variation appears to be driven largely by the hydrodynamic conditions experienced under breaking waves.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Alberta.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/07/08
Headlines of the day
Gangs Turn To Social Networking Sites To Recruit...(Drudge)
Gangs, clubs, what's the difference?
5-legged cat gets 2 useless legs cut off (CNN)
If you let the word get around, pretty soon everybody is going to want one.
Kissing cousins have more kids (MSNBC)
Well, yeah.
And you thought “power to the people” was just a slogan
Knee dynamo taps 'people power'
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A stroll around the park may soon be enough to charge the raft of batteries needed in today's power-hungry gadgets.
US and Canadian scientists have built a novel device that effortlessly harvests energy from human movements.
The adapted knee brace, outlined in the journal Science, can generate enough energy to power a mobile phone for 30 minutes from one minute of walking.
The first people to benefit could be amputees who are being fitted with increasingly sophisticated prosthetics.
"All of the new developments in prosthetics require large power budgets," Dr Douglas Weber of the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the authors of the paper, told BBC News.
"You need power to run your neural interface; you need it to run your powered joint, and so on.
Biomechanical energy harvester
"Getting that power is going to be really important."
Walk and talk
The new device generates power by a process known as "generative braking", analogous to the braking systems found in hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius.
"Walking is a lot like stop-and-go driving," explained Dr Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, lead author of the paper.
"Within each stride muscles are continuously accelerating and decelerating the body.
Hybrid electric cars take advantage of stop-and-go driving using so-called "regenerative braking" where the energy normally dissipated as heat is used to drive a generator.
"We have essentially applied the same principle to walking."
Using a series of gears, the knee brace assists the hamstring in slowing the body just before the foot hits the ground, whilst simultaneously generating electricity.
Sensors on the device switch the generator off for the remainder of each step.
In this way, the device puts less strain on the wearer than if it was constantly producing energy.
Tests of the 1.6kg device produced an average of 5 watts of electricity from a slow walk.
"We also explored ways of generating more electricity and found that we can get as much as 13 watts from walking," said Dr Donelan.
"13 watts is enough to power about 30 minutes of talk time on a typical mobile phone from just one minute of walking."
Enlarge Image
However, to generate this amount of power the generator had to be constantly switched on, which required more effort from the wearer.
Battery pack
The knee brace is the latest development in a field known as "energy harvesting".
The field seeks to develop devices and mechanisms to recover otherwise-wasted energy and convert it into useful electrical energy.
"We're pretty effective batteries," Dr Donelan told BBC News. "In our fat we store the equivalent of about a 1,000kg battery."
Tapping this power source is not a new idea and has been exploited in everyday devices such as wind-up radios and self-winding watches.
The US defence research agency Darpa has a long-standing project to tap energy from "heel-strike" generators implanted in soldier's boots and powered through the pumping motion of a footstep.
And in 2005, US scientists showed off an energy-harvesting backpack which used a suspended load to convert movement into electrical energy.
However, heel-strike devices generate relatively little energy whilst people using the backpack have to bear the burden of carrying the bag.
"It requires a relatively heavy load - around 38kg - to get a substantial amount of power," said Dr Donelan.
Simulations showed that a soldier carrying the pack and walking at a relatively brisk pace could generate around 7.4 watts of power. "It's about the same amount of power as [the knee braces] produce," said Dr Donelan.
South African amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius
The technology could be used to make "smart prosthetics"
Kit list
The team believes the new device could have many uses.
"I think the early adopters will be people whose lives depend on portable power," he told BBC News.
"On the medical front, portable power is used by those who have amputated limbs to charge their powered prosthetic limbs," he said.
However, Dr Art Kuo at the University of Michigan does not believe it will be simply a case of strapping the device on to an existing prosthetic.
"It would probably involve building a new [prosthetic] knee that uses some existing ideas and then also tries to harvest energy using these principles," he said.
The team also hope the device could be useful for people who have suffered a stroke or spinal chord injury who wear an "exoskeleton" to help them move.
"The current and future emphasis is on powered exoskeletons," said Dr Donelan.
Soldiers may also benefit from wearing the knee brace to power the multitude of devices they now carry ,such as night vision goggles and GPS.
"They treat batteries like they treat food and water - they are so essential to what they do," he said.
Dr Donelan has now set up a spin-out company to exploit the technology and believes it will eventually be possible to develop a small device that can be fitted internally across different joints.
However, in the short term he has his sights set on a light weight, slim-line version of the knee brace.
"That's about 18 months away, so it's not science fiction far in the future stuff," he said.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until somebody gets a hand chopped off.
Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is "unavoidable" says Archbishop of Canterbury
Gangs Turn To Social Networking Sites To Recruit...(Drudge)
Gangs, clubs, what's the difference?
5-legged cat gets 2 useless legs cut off (CNN)
If you let the word get around, pretty soon everybody is going to want one.
Kissing cousins have more kids (MSNBC)
Well, yeah.
And you thought “power to the people” was just a slogan
Knee dynamo taps 'people power'
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A stroll around the park may soon be enough to charge the raft of batteries needed in today's power-hungry gadgets.
US and Canadian scientists have built a novel device that effortlessly harvests energy from human movements.
The adapted knee brace, outlined in the journal Science, can generate enough energy to power a mobile phone for 30 minutes from one minute of walking.
The first people to benefit could be amputees who are being fitted with increasingly sophisticated prosthetics.
"All of the new developments in prosthetics require large power budgets," Dr Douglas Weber of the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the authors of the paper, told BBC News.
"You need power to run your neural interface; you need it to run your powered joint, and so on.
Biomechanical energy harvester
"Getting that power is going to be really important."
Walk and talk
The new device generates power by a process known as "generative braking", analogous to the braking systems found in hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius.
"Walking is a lot like stop-and-go driving," explained Dr Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, lead author of the paper.
"Within each stride muscles are continuously accelerating and decelerating the body.
Hybrid electric cars take advantage of stop-and-go driving using so-called "regenerative braking" where the energy normally dissipated as heat is used to drive a generator.
"We have essentially applied the same principle to walking."
Using a series of gears, the knee brace assists the hamstring in slowing the body just before the foot hits the ground, whilst simultaneously generating electricity.
Sensors on the device switch the generator off for the remainder of each step.
In this way, the device puts less strain on the wearer than if it was constantly producing energy.
Tests of the 1.6kg device produced an average of 5 watts of electricity from a slow walk.
"We also explored ways of generating more electricity and found that we can get as much as 13 watts from walking," said Dr Donelan.
"13 watts is enough to power about 30 minutes of talk time on a typical mobile phone from just one minute of walking."
Enlarge Image
However, to generate this amount of power the generator had to be constantly switched on, which required more effort from the wearer.
Battery pack
The knee brace is the latest development in a field known as "energy harvesting".
The field seeks to develop devices and mechanisms to recover otherwise-wasted energy and convert it into useful electrical energy.
"We're pretty effective batteries," Dr Donelan told BBC News. "In our fat we store the equivalent of about a 1,000kg battery."
Tapping this power source is not a new idea and has been exploited in everyday devices such as wind-up radios and self-winding watches.
The US defence research agency Darpa has a long-standing project to tap energy from "heel-strike" generators implanted in soldier's boots and powered through the pumping motion of a footstep.
And in 2005, US scientists showed off an energy-harvesting backpack which used a suspended load to convert movement into electrical energy.
However, heel-strike devices generate relatively little energy whilst people using the backpack have to bear the burden of carrying the bag.
"It requires a relatively heavy load - around 38kg - to get a substantial amount of power," said Dr Donelan.
Simulations showed that a soldier carrying the pack and walking at a relatively brisk pace could generate around 7.4 watts of power. "It's about the same amount of power as [the knee braces] produce," said Dr Donelan.
South African amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius
The technology could be used to make "smart prosthetics"
Kit list
The team believes the new device could have many uses.
"I think the early adopters will be people whose lives depend on portable power," he told BBC News.
"On the medical front, portable power is used by those who have amputated limbs to charge their powered prosthetic limbs," he said.
However, Dr Art Kuo at the University of Michigan does not believe it will be simply a case of strapping the device on to an existing prosthetic.
"It would probably involve building a new [prosthetic] knee that uses some existing ideas and then also tries to harvest energy using these principles," he said.
The team also hope the device could be useful for people who have suffered a stroke or spinal chord injury who wear an "exoskeleton" to help them move.
"The current and future emphasis is on powered exoskeletons," said Dr Donelan.
Soldiers may also benefit from wearing the knee brace to power the multitude of devices they now carry ,such as night vision goggles and GPS.
"They treat batteries like they treat food and water - they are so essential to what they do," he said.
Dr Donelan has now set up a spin-out company to exploit the technology and believes it will eventually be possible to develop a small device that can be fitted internally across different joints.
However, in the short term he has his sights set on a light weight, slim-line version of the knee brace.
"That's about 18 months away, so it's not science fiction far in the future stuff," he said.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until somebody gets a hand chopped off.
Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is "unavoidable" says Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury has today said that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is "unavoidable" and that it would help maintain social cohesion.
Rowan Williams told BBC Radio 4's World At One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
He says that Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He added Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".
Dr Williams said there was a place for finding a "constructive accommodation" in areas such as marriage - allowing Muslim women to avoid Western divorce proceedings.
Other religions enjoyed such tolerance of their own laws, he pointed out, but stressed that it could never be allowed to take precedence over an individual's rights as a citizen.
He said it would also require a change in perception of what Sharia involved beyond the "inhumanity" of extreme punishments and attitudes to women seen in some Islamic states.
Dr Williams said: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system.
"We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances."
He added: "There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.
"It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general.
Scroll down for more...
Sharia law in Britain would provide Muslims with an alternative to our divorce courts
"But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them.
"In some cultural and religious settings, they would seem more appropriate."
But his views were condemned today by senior Tory MP Peter Luff, who said: "This is a very dangerous route which we should not go down. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You can't have a little bit of sharia law.
"We should not start introducing new different legal systems alongside ours."
But the Archbishop defended his position saying people people needed to look at Islamic law "with a clear eye."
"They should not imagine, either, that we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and just associate it with ... Saudi Arabia, or whatever," he continued.
"Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states: the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women."
There were questions about how it interacted with human rights, he said.
"But I do not think we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights just because it doesn't immediately fit with how we understand it."
Dr Williams said Orthodox Jewish courts already operated in the UK, and anti-abortion views of Catholics and other Christians were "accommodated within the law".
"The whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways the law of the land pays respect to custom and community, that's already there."
He said the issue of whether Catholic adoption agencies would be forced under equality laws to accept gay parents showed there was confusion on the matter.
"That principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy.
"But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that."
He said he accepted people might be surprised by his call but urged them to consider the wider question.
"What we don't want is a stand-off where the law squares up to people's religious consciences, on something like abortion or indeed by forcing a vote on some aspects of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in the Commons ... we don't either want a situation where, because there's no legal way of monitoring what communities do, making them part of the public process, people do what they like in private in such a way that that becomes another way of intensifying oppression within a community."
Sharia law was originally more enlightened in its attitude to women than other legal systems, he pointed out, but did now have to be brought up to date.
"But you have to translate that into a setting where that whole area of the rights and liberties of women has moved on.
"The principle and the vision which animates the whole Islamic legal provision needs broadening because of that."
Responding to comments by one of his senior bishops that Islamic extremism was creating communities with "no-go areas" for non-Muslims, he said it was "not at all the case that we have absolute social exclusion.
"But we do have a lot of social suspicion, a lot of distance and we just have to go on working at how that shared citizenship comes through."
The Bishop of Rochester, The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, said last month that non-Muslims faced a hostile reception in places dominated by the ideology of Islamic radicals.
Dr Williams said the use of the phrase "no-go areas" had sparked controversy because it reminded people of Northern Ireland.
"I don't think that was at all what was intended; I think it was meant to point to the silo problem, the sense of communities not communicating with each other.
"Many Muslims would say that they feel bits of British society are no-go areas for them."
Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, welcomed the comments.
"These comments further underline the attempts by both our great faiths to build respect and tolerance.
"Sharia law for civil matters is something which has been introduced in some Western countries with much success; I believe that Muslims would take huge comfort from the Government allowing civil matters being resolved according to their faith.
"We are however disappointed that the Archbishop of Canterbury was silent when Mr Nazir-Ali was promoting intolerance and lying about no-go areas for Christians in the UK by Muslim extremists.
"Unless he speaks out against this intolerance, Muslims will take his silence as authorisation and support for such comments.
"The Ramadhan Foundation will continue to work with the Church of England to build understanding and respect for our two communities."
Dr Williams's comments are likely to fuel the debate over multiculturalism in the UK.
But he insists that Sharia law needs to be better understood.
At the moment, he says "sensational reporting of opinion polls" clouds the issue.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 06/25/08
Headlines of the day
Dover firefighters use 'jaws of life' to free boy from washing machine (WKYC.com)
Trailer burns when woman uses gas to clean up (SunSentinel.com)
Scientists to launch paper planes from space (MSNBC)
Oh, so that’s what she meant when she called me a “fat head”
Obesity May Be Wired In The Brain, Rat Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2008) — A predisposition for obesity might be wired into the brain from the start, suggests a new study of rats.
Rats selectively bred to be prone to obesity show abnormalities in a part of the brain critical for appetite control, the researchers found. Specifically, the researchers show that the obese rats harbor defects in neurons of the arcuate nucleus (ARH) of the hypothalamus, which leaves their brains less responsive to the hunger-suppressing hormone leptin.
"The neurodevelopmental differences in these animals can be seen as early as the first week," said Sebastien Bouret of the University of Southern California. "The results show that obesity can be wired into the brain from early life. The three-million-dollar question now is how to get around this problem."
It is increasingly accepted that obesity results from a combination of genetic and environmental factors, the researchers said. Rodent models of obesity can provide valuable insights into the biological processes underlying the development of obesity in humans. The "diet-induced obese" (DIO) rats used in the current study are particularly suited to the task, according to Bouret, because their tendency to become overweight shares several features with human obesity, including the contribution of many genes.
Previous studies had suggested that the brains of DIO rats are insensitive to leptin, the researchers added. Circulating leptin, produced by fat tissue, acts as a signal to the brain about the body's energy status. Leptin is also critical for the initial development of ARH neurons.
In the new study, the researchers examined the obesity-prone rats for signs of abnormal brain development. They found that the animals' brains had fewer neural projections from the ARH, a deficiency that persisted into adulthood. Those projections are needed to relay the leptin signal received by the ARH to other parts of the hypothalamus, Bouret said.
The researchers found further evidence that those changes in brain wiring stem from a reduced responsiveness of the brain to leptin's action during development.
"It seems [in the case of these rats] that appetite and obesity are built into the brain," Bouret said. While their condition might be ameliorated by exercising and eating right, he added, the findings suggest that the propensity to gain weight can't be reversed.
But there is hope yet. It's possible that treatments delivered during a critical early period of development might be capable of rewiring the brain, Bouret said.
This research was published in the February issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press.
The sign said 10 minutes for a quarter
Why Do Earthquakes Stop?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2008) — Why do some earthquakes terminate along a fault, while others jump or step-over a gap to another fault? The underlying structure of a fault determines whether an earthquake rupture will jump from one fault to another, magnifying its size and potential devastation.
Understanding why some earthquakes terminate along a fault, while others jump or step-over a gap to another fault, is essential to forecasting the seismic hazard of complex fault systems, such as the San Andreas Fault.
In a paper published in the February issue of BSSA, author David Oglesby of University of California at Riverside suggests that the pattern of stress at the end of the primary fault can strongly affect an earthquake's ability to jump to a secondary fault.
He suggests that a smooth, gradual decrease in stress along a rupture results in slower rupture deceleration, less strain, less generation of seismic waves, and lowers the likelihood that the earthquake will jump to another fault.
In contrast, a stress pattern that terminates suddenly leads to abrupt rupture termination, higher strain, more seismic radiation, and a higher likelihood of the rupture jumping to a secondary fault. The results of this numerical study illustrate the importance of the slip gradient and the acceleration of the rupture front in determining the probability of a rupture jumping from one fault segment to another.
Dover firefighters use 'jaws of life' to free boy from washing machine (WKYC.com)
Trailer burns when woman uses gas to clean up (SunSentinel.com)
Scientists to launch paper planes from space (MSNBC)
Oh, so that’s what she meant when she called me a “fat head”
Obesity May Be Wired In The Brain, Rat Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2008) — A predisposition for obesity might be wired into the brain from the start, suggests a new study of rats.
Rats selectively bred to be prone to obesity show abnormalities in a part of the brain critical for appetite control, the researchers found. Specifically, the researchers show that the obese rats harbor defects in neurons of the arcuate nucleus (ARH) of the hypothalamus, which leaves their brains less responsive to the hunger-suppressing hormone leptin.
"The neurodevelopmental differences in these animals can be seen as early as the first week," said Sebastien Bouret of the University of Southern California. "The results show that obesity can be wired into the brain from early life. The three-million-dollar question now is how to get around this problem."
It is increasingly accepted that obesity results from a combination of genetic and environmental factors, the researchers said. Rodent models of obesity can provide valuable insights into the biological processes underlying the development of obesity in humans. The "diet-induced obese" (DIO) rats used in the current study are particularly suited to the task, according to Bouret, because their tendency to become overweight shares several features with human obesity, including the contribution of many genes.
Previous studies had suggested that the brains of DIO rats are insensitive to leptin, the researchers added. Circulating leptin, produced by fat tissue, acts as a signal to the brain about the body's energy status. Leptin is also critical for the initial development of ARH neurons.
In the new study, the researchers examined the obesity-prone rats for signs of abnormal brain development. They found that the animals' brains had fewer neural projections from the ARH, a deficiency that persisted into adulthood. Those projections are needed to relay the leptin signal received by the ARH to other parts of the hypothalamus, Bouret said.
The researchers found further evidence that those changes in brain wiring stem from a reduced responsiveness of the brain to leptin's action during development.
"It seems [in the case of these rats] that appetite and obesity are built into the brain," Bouret said. While their condition might be ameliorated by exercising and eating right, he added, the findings suggest that the propensity to gain weight can't be reversed.
But there is hope yet. It's possible that treatments delivered during a critical early period of development might be capable of rewiring the brain, Bouret said.
This research was published in the February issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press.
The sign said 10 minutes for a quarter
Why Do Earthquakes Stop?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2008) — Why do some earthquakes terminate along a fault, while others jump or step-over a gap to another fault? The underlying structure of a fault determines whether an earthquake rupture will jump from one fault to another, magnifying its size and potential devastation.
Understanding why some earthquakes terminate along a fault, while others jump or step-over a gap to another fault, is essential to forecasting the seismic hazard of complex fault systems, such as the San Andreas Fault.
In a paper published in the February issue of BSSA, author David Oglesby of University of California at Riverside suggests that the pattern of stress at the end of the primary fault can strongly affect an earthquake's ability to jump to a secondary fault.
He suggests that a smooth, gradual decrease in stress along a rupture results in slower rupture deceleration, less strain, less generation of seismic waves, and lowers the likelihood that the earthquake will jump to another fault.
In contrast, a stress pattern that terminates suddenly leads to abrupt rupture termination, higher strain, more seismic radiation, and a higher likelihood of the rupture jumping to a secondary fault. The results of this numerical study illustrate the importance of the slip gradient and the acceleration of the rupture front in determining the probability of a rupture jumping from one fault segment to another.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/05/08
Headlines of the day
Being daddy's girl is a good thing for baboons (MSNBC)
Oh yeah, we’re different.
A work wife: Good for business? (CNN)
The vice squad has another name for that kind of relationship.
I so love nature, without the icky bits.
Communing without nature
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.
Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts," wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic. "We think it probable that any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation."
"The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children," Pergams said in a statement. "Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance."
By studying visits to national and state parks and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.
The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.
For example, fishing peaked in 1981 and had declined 25 percent by 2005, the researchers found. Visits to national parks peaked in 1987 and dropped 23 percent by 2006, while hiking on the Appalachian Trial peaked in 2000 and was down 18 percent by 2005.
Japan suffered similar declines, the researchers found, as visits to national parks there dropped by 18 percent between 1991 and 2005.
There was a small growth in backpacking, but that may reflect day trips by some people who previously were campers, wrote Pergams and Zaradic. Pergams is a visiting research assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while Zaradic is a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Delaware Valley, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market, they found.
"This may be related to various overfishing and pollution issues decreasing access to fish populations, contrasted with exploding deer populations," they said.
The research was funded by The Nature Conservancy. E-mail to a friend E-mail to a friend
“God, I feel so alive, sitting here, warmed by the glow of the screen.”
This sounds like a psychotherapist’s wet dream
Three-parent embryo formed in lab
Scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in IVF treatment by creating a human embryo with three separate parents.
The Newcastle University team believes the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy.
The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests.
It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children.
The technique is intended to help women with diseases of the mitochondria - mini-organs that are found within individual cells.
They are sometimes described as "cellular power plants" because they generate most of the cell's energy.
Faults in the mitochondrial DNA can cause around 50 known diseases some which lead to disability and death.
About one in every 6,500 people is affected by such conditions, which include fatal liver failure, stroke-like episodes, blindness, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and deafness.
At present, no treatment for mitochondrial diseases exists.
The Newcastle team have effectively given the embryos a mitochondria transplant.
They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.
Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.
The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria - around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed with six days.
Appearance
Experiments using mice have shown that the offspring with the new mitochondria carry no information that defines any human attributes.
So while any baby born through this method would have genetic elements from three people, the nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg.
However, the team only have permission to carry out the lab experiments and as yet this would not be allowed to be offered as a treatment.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team, said: "We believe that from this work, and work we have done on other animals that in principle we could develop this technique and offer treatment in the forseeable future that will give families some hope of avoiding passing these diseases to their children."
Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, which has funded the Newcastle research, was confident it would lead to a badly needed breakthrough in treatment.
"Mitochondrial myopathies are a group of complex and severe diseases," she said.
"This can make it very difficult for clinicians to provide genetic counselling and give patients an accurate prognosis."
However, but the Newcastle work has attracted opposition.
Josephine Quintavalle, of the pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said it was "risky, dangerous" and a step towards "designer babies"
"It is human beings they are experimenting with," she said.
"We should not be messing around with the building blocks of life."
Mrs Quintavalle said embryo research in the US using DNA from one man and two women was discontinued because of the "huge abnormalities" in some cases.
Fortunately, finding an obese person in Mississippi is a bit like unicorn hunting
Miss. Law Would Ban Serving Obese Diners
By Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A state lawmaker wants to ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers — but please, don't be offended. He says he never even expected his plan to become law.
"I was trying to shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi,'' said Republican Rep. John Read of Gautier, who acknowledges that at 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, he'd probably have a tough time under his own bill.
More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi are considered it obese, according to a 2007 study by the Trust for America's Health, a research group that focuses on disease prevention.
The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland of Plantersville, said he is going to "shred'' the bill.
"It is too oppressive for government to require a restaurant owner to police another human being from their own indiscretions,'' Holland said Monday.
The bill had no specifics about how obesity would be defined, or how restaurants were supposed to determine if a customer was obese.
Al Stamps, who owns a restaurant in Jackson, said it is "absurd'' for the state to consider telling him which customers he can't serve. He and his wife, Kim, do a bustling lunch business at Cool Al's, which serves big burgers — beef or veggie — and specialty foods like "Sassy Momma Sweet Potato Fries.''
"There is a better way to deal with health issues than to impose those kind of regulations,'' Al Stamps said. "I'm sorry — you can't do it by treating adults like children and telling them what they can and cannot eat.''
The Dutch, they know so much. Welcome to the world of unintended consequences
Actually, it's a long, healthy life that costs more
Treating obesity and smoking is cheaper than keeping folks fit, study says
LONDON - Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn’t save money, researchers reported Monday.
It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.
“It was a small surprise,” said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. “But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more.”
In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.
Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the “healthy-living” group (thin and non-smoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on “cost of illness” data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.
The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.
Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of
Being daddy's girl is a good thing for baboons (MSNBC)
Oh yeah, we’re different.
A work wife: Good for business? (CNN)
The vice squad has another name for that kind of relationship.
I so love nature, without the icky bits.
Communing without nature
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.
Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts," wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic. "We think it probable that any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation."
"The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children," Pergams said in a statement. "Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance."
By studying visits to national and state parks and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.
The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.
For example, fishing peaked in 1981 and had declined 25 percent by 2005, the researchers found. Visits to national parks peaked in 1987 and dropped 23 percent by 2006, while hiking on the Appalachian Trial peaked in 2000 and was down 18 percent by 2005.
Japan suffered similar declines, the researchers found, as visits to national parks there dropped by 18 percent between 1991 and 2005.
There was a small growth in backpacking, but that may reflect day trips by some people who previously were campers, wrote Pergams and Zaradic. Pergams is a visiting research assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while Zaradic is a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Delaware Valley, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market, they found.
"This may be related to various overfishing and pollution issues decreasing access to fish populations, contrasted with exploding deer populations," they said.
The research was funded by The Nature Conservancy. E-mail to a friend E-mail to a friend
“God, I feel so alive, sitting here, warmed by the glow of the screen.”
This sounds like a psychotherapist’s wet dream
Three-parent embryo formed in lab
Scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in IVF treatment by creating a human embryo with three separate parents.
The Newcastle University team believes the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy.
The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests.
It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children.
The technique is intended to help women with diseases of the mitochondria - mini-organs that are found within individual cells.
They are sometimes described as "cellular power plants" because they generate most of the cell's energy.
Faults in the mitochondrial DNA can cause around 50 known diseases some which lead to disability and death.
About one in every 6,500 people is affected by such conditions, which include fatal liver failure, stroke-like episodes, blindness, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and deafness.
At present, no treatment for mitochondrial diseases exists.
The Newcastle team have effectively given the embryos a mitochondria transplant.
They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.
Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.
The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria - around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed with six days.
Appearance
Experiments using mice have shown that the offspring with the new mitochondria carry no information that defines any human attributes.
So while any baby born through this method would have genetic elements from three people, the nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg.
However, the team only have permission to carry out the lab experiments and as yet this would not be allowed to be offered as a treatment.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team, said: "We believe that from this work, and work we have done on other animals that in principle we could develop this technique and offer treatment in the forseeable future that will give families some hope of avoiding passing these diseases to their children."
Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, which has funded the Newcastle research, was confident it would lead to a badly needed breakthrough in treatment.
"Mitochondrial myopathies are a group of complex and severe diseases," she said.
"This can make it very difficult for clinicians to provide genetic counselling and give patients an accurate prognosis."
However, but the Newcastle work has attracted opposition.
Josephine Quintavalle, of the pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said it was "risky, dangerous" and a step towards "designer babies"
"It is human beings they are experimenting with," she said.
"We should not be messing around with the building blocks of life."
Mrs Quintavalle said embryo research in the US using DNA from one man and two women was discontinued because of the "huge abnormalities" in some cases.
Fortunately, finding an obese person in Mississippi is a bit like unicorn hunting
Miss. Law Would Ban Serving Obese Diners
By Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A state lawmaker wants to ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers — but please, don't be offended. He says he never even expected his plan to become law.
"I was trying to shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi,'' said Republican Rep. John Read of Gautier, who acknowledges that at 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, he'd probably have a tough time under his own bill.
More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi are considered it obese, according to a 2007 study by the Trust for America's Health, a research group that focuses on disease prevention.
The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland of Plantersville, said he is going to "shred'' the bill.
"It is too oppressive for government to require a restaurant owner to police another human being from their own indiscretions,'' Holland said Monday.
The bill had no specifics about how obesity would be defined, or how restaurants were supposed to determine if a customer was obese.
Al Stamps, who owns a restaurant in Jackson, said it is "absurd'' for the state to consider telling him which customers he can't serve. He and his wife, Kim, do a bustling lunch business at Cool Al's, which serves big burgers — beef or veggie — and specialty foods like "Sassy Momma Sweet Potato Fries.''
"There is a better way to deal with health issues than to impose those kind of regulations,'' Al Stamps said. "I'm sorry — you can't do it by treating adults like children and telling them what they can and cannot eat.''
The Dutch, they know so much. Welcome to the world of unintended consequences
Actually, it's a long, healthy life that costs more
Treating obesity and smoking is cheaper than keeping folks fit, study says
LONDON - Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn’t save money, researchers reported Monday.
It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.
“It was a small surprise,” said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. “But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more.”
In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.
Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the “healthy-living” group (thin and non-smoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on “cost of illness” data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.
The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.
Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of
Monday, February 4, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 02/04/08
Headlines of the day
Exorcist's calendar full; Vatican seeks help (CNN)
Chimps show reluctance to barter (MSNBC)
Good news for mice everywhere, Humans must wait their turn.
Sniffling mouse could unlock cold cure: British scientists
The first mouse to catch a cold has given British scientists fresh hope that they could finally find a cure for coughs and sneezes, as well as more serious conditions like asthma, they said Monday.
Scientists at Imperial College London created a genetically engineered mouse susceptible to the virus causing most colds, which normally only infects humans and chimpanzees.
The breakthrough means that it should now be easier to test new cold remedies as well as treatments for other respiratory conditions like asthma and bronchitis, potentially speeding up the discovery of cures.
The research, led by Professor Sebastian Johnston, was published in the journal Nature Medicine.
"These mouse models should provide a major boost to research efforts to develop new treatments for the common cold as well as for more potentially fatal illnesses such as acute attacks of asthma and of COPD (constructive obstructive pulmonary disorder, such as chronic bronchitis)," Johnston said.
The discovery was welcomed by Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of Britain's Medical Research Council, which funded the study.
He said the research would "open up new paths to finding treatments which have been delayed for many years and provides us with the opportunities for further breakthroughs in the future".
Rhinoviruses, which cause most colds, were discovered 50 years ago but studying them without being able to experiment on mice has proved difficult.
The Common Cold Unit started work in Britain in 1946 to find a cure for the sniffles through experiments on human volunteers but it was disbanded in 1989 after failing to crack the problem.
Most colds are triggered when rhinoviruses latch on to a receptor molecule found on the surface of cells.
In mice, the receptor is slightly different to the version in humans so the viruses are unable to bind with it.
But in this case, the Imperial College scientists modified the mouse receptor to make it more like the human one, meaning the rodent could catch a cold.
Life is the blue plate special: If your order the roast beef, you get the green beans. Order the bananas and you get…well... you see.
You Are What You Eat: Some Differences Between Humans And Chimpanzees Traced To Diet
ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2008) — Using mice as models, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology traced some of the differences between humans and chimpanzees to differences in our diet.
Humans consume a distinct diet compared to other apes. Not only do we consume much more meat and fat, but we also cook our food. It has been hypothesized that adopting these dietary patterns played a key role during human evolution. However, to date, the influence of diet on the physiological and genetic differences between humans and other apes has not been widely examined.
By feeding laboratory mice different human and chimp diets over a mere two week period, researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, were able to reconstruct some of the physiological and genetic differences observed between humans and chimpanzees.
The researchers fed laboratory mice one of three diets: a raw fruit and vegetable diet fed to chimpanzees in zoos, a human diet consisting of food served at the Institute cafeteria or a pure fast food menu from the local McDonald's™ (the latter caused the mice to significantly gain weight). The chimpanzee diet was clearly distinct from the two human diets in its effect on the liver - thousands of differences were observed in the levels at which genes were expressed in the mouse livers. No such differences were observed in the mouse brains. A significant fraction of the genes that changed in the mouse livers, had previously been observed as different between humans and chimpanzees. This indicates that the differences observed in these particular genes might be caused by the difference in human and chimpanzee diets.
Furthermore, the diet-related genes also appear to have evolved faster than other genes - protein and promoter sequences of these genes changed faster than expected, possibly because of adaptation to new diets.
Homer Simpson vindicated. Glazed donuts all around.
Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance
ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2008) — A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study.
The study, authored by Matthew A. Tucker, PhD, of the Center for Sleep and Cognition and the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, focused on 33 subjects (11 males, 22 females) with an average age of 23.3 years. The participants arrived at the sleep lab at 11:30 a.m., were trained on each of the declarative memory tasks at 12:15 p.m., and at 1 p.m., 16 subjects took a nap while 17 remained awake in the lab. After the nap period, all subjects remained in the lab until the retest at 4 p.m.
It was discovered that, across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for those subjects that strongly acquired the tasks during the training session.
"These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory," said Dr. Tucker. "The importance of this finding is that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well."
It is recommended that adults get between seven and eight hours of nightly sleep.
The article "Enhancement of Declarative Memory Performance Following a Daytime Nap is Contingent on Strength of Initial Task Acquisition" was published in the February 1 issue of the journal Sleep.
Bacon used to be good for you, back when it came from the pig of knowledge ...before the fall.
Bacon, eggs used to be full of omega-3s
KATONAH, N.Y., Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Eating fish isn't the only way to add omega-3 to one's diet -- grass-fed livestock and some oils also give an anti-inflammatory boost , a U.S. author advises.
Susan Allport, author of "The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From Our Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them," explains that livestock used to eat grass, insects and other green foods, but livestock today eats mostly seeds and grains. Omega-3s originate in the green leaves of plants -- not fish, as many believe -- and they accumulate in animals that eat the green foods including fish.
Food today is full of polyunsaturated fats, omega-6s that are much more prevalent in seeds and grains. Polyunsaturated fats produce cell messengers -- prostaglandins -- which are far more inflammatory, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
"It may not be practical for us to eat only grass-fed (livestock) and eggs, but it's also not possible for us to catch, or raise, enough fish to correct this problem," Allport says in a statement. "We can increase our omega-3s by eating small amounts of fish and grass-fed animals and using vegetable oils with a healthier balance of omega-6s to omega-3s."
.
Exorcist's calendar full; Vatican seeks help (CNN)
Chimps show reluctance to barter (MSNBC)
Good news for mice everywhere, Humans must wait their turn.
Sniffling mouse could unlock cold cure: British scientists
The first mouse to catch a cold has given British scientists fresh hope that they could finally find a cure for coughs and sneezes, as well as more serious conditions like asthma, they said Monday.
Scientists at Imperial College London created a genetically engineered mouse susceptible to the virus causing most colds, which normally only infects humans and chimpanzees.
The breakthrough means that it should now be easier to test new cold remedies as well as treatments for other respiratory conditions like asthma and bronchitis, potentially speeding up the discovery of cures.
The research, led by Professor Sebastian Johnston, was published in the journal Nature Medicine.
"These mouse models should provide a major boost to research efforts to develop new treatments for the common cold as well as for more potentially fatal illnesses such as acute attacks of asthma and of COPD (constructive obstructive pulmonary disorder, such as chronic bronchitis)," Johnston said.
The discovery was welcomed by Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of Britain's Medical Research Council, which funded the study.
He said the research would "open up new paths to finding treatments which have been delayed for many years and provides us with the opportunities for further breakthroughs in the future".
Rhinoviruses, which cause most colds, were discovered 50 years ago but studying them without being able to experiment on mice has proved difficult.
The Common Cold Unit started work in Britain in 1946 to find a cure for the sniffles through experiments on human volunteers but it was disbanded in 1989 after failing to crack the problem.
Most colds are triggered when rhinoviruses latch on to a receptor molecule found on the surface of cells.
In mice, the receptor is slightly different to the version in humans so the viruses are unable to bind with it.
But in this case, the Imperial College scientists modified the mouse receptor to make it more like the human one, meaning the rodent could catch a cold.
Life is the blue plate special: If your order the roast beef, you get the green beans. Order the bananas and you get…well... you see.
You Are What You Eat: Some Differences Between Humans And Chimpanzees Traced To Diet
ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2008) — Using mice as models, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology traced some of the differences between humans and chimpanzees to differences in our diet.
Humans consume a distinct diet compared to other apes. Not only do we consume much more meat and fat, but we also cook our food. It has been hypothesized that adopting these dietary patterns played a key role during human evolution. However, to date, the influence of diet on the physiological and genetic differences between humans and other apes has not been widely examined.
By feeding laboratory mice different human and chimp diets over a mere two week period, researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, were able to reconstruct some of the physiological and genetic differences observed between humans and chimpanzees.
The researchers fed laboratory mice one of three diets: a raw fruit and vegetable diet fed to chimpanzees in zoos, a human diet consisting of food served at the Institute cafeteria or a pure fast food menu from the local McDonald's™ (the latter caused the mice to significantly gain weight). The chimpanzee diet was clearly distinct from the two human diets in its effect on the liver - thousands of differences were observed in the levels at which genes were expressed in the mouse livers. No such differences were observed in the mouse brains. A significant fraction of the genes that changed in the mouse livers, had previously been observed as different between humans and chimpanzees. This indicates that the differences observed in these particular genes might be caused by the difference in human and chimpanzee diets.
Furthermore, the diet-related genes also appear to have evolved faster than other genes - protein and promoter sequences of these genes changed faster than expected, possibly because of adaptation to new diets.
Homer Simpson vindicated. Glazed donuts all around.
Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance
ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2008) — A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study.
The study, authored by Matthew A. Tucker, PhD, of the Center for Sleep and Cognition and the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, focused on 33 subjects (11 males, 22 females) with an average age of 23.3 years. The participants arrived at the sleep lab at 11:30 a.m., were trained on each of the declarative memory tasks at 12:15 p.m., and at 1 p.m., 16 subjects took a nap while 17 remained awake in the lab. After the nap period, all subjects remained in the lab until the retest at 4 p.m.
It was discovered that, across three very different declarative memory tasks, a nap benefited performance compared to comparable periods of wakefulness, but only for those subjects that strongly acquired the tasks during the training session.
"These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory," said Dr. Tucker. "The importance of this finding is that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well."
It is recommended that adults get between seven and eight hours of nightly sleep.
The article "Enhancement of Declarative Memory Performance Following a Daytime Nap is Contingent on Strength of Initial Task Acquisition" was published in the February 1 issue of the journal Sleep.
Bacon used to be good for you, back when it came from the pig of knowledge ...before the fall.
Bacon, eggs used to be full of omega-3s
KATONAH, N.Y., Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Eating fish isn't the only way to add omega-3 to one's diet -- grass-fed livestock and some oils also give an anti-inflammatory boost , a U.S. author advises.
Susan Allport, author of "The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From Our Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them," explains that livestock used to eat grass, insects and other green foods, but livestock today eats mostly seeds and grains. Omega-3s originate in the green leaves of plants -- not fish, as many believe -- and they accumulate in animals that eat the green foods including fish.
Food today is full of polyunsaturated fats, omega-6s that are much more prevalent in seeds and grains. Polyunsaturated fats produce cell messengers -- prostaglandins -- which are far more inflammatory, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
"It may not be practical for us to eat only grass-fed (livestock) and eggs, but it's also not possible for us to catch, or raise, enough fish to correct this problem," Allport says in a statement. "We can increase our omega-3s by eating small amounts of fish and grass-fed animals and using vegetable oils with a healthier balance of omega-6s to omega-3s."
.
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