Science News

"This area near the core of the Pinwheel Galaxy turns out to be bursting with newborn stars, some only a few million years old. And there are about 60 supernova remnants, showing the full stellar life-cycle." - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

So how much energy does it take to get THAT pinwheel spinning!? - Aaron Kendrick

"Helpful acts, such as grooming or foster parenting, are common throughout the animal kingdom, but accounts of animals rescuing one another from danger are exceedingly rare, having been reported in the scientific literature only for dolphins, capuchin monkeys, and ants. New research shows that in the ant Cataglyphis cursor, the behavior is surprisingly sophisticated. " - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"A Chinese scholar persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for smuggling a rare collection of mushrooms out of China before World War II was honored Saturday when the collection was returned more than 70 years later." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"A laser-powered robotic climber has won $900,000 in a competition designed to spur technology for a future elevator to space. Building a space elevator would require anchoring a cable on the ground near Earth's equator and deploying the other end thousands of kilometres into space. The centrifugal force due to Earth's spin would keep the cable taut so that a robot could climb it and release payloads into orbit. Though building a space elevator might require an initial investment of billions of dollars, proponents say once constructed, it would make for cheaper trips into space than is possible using rockets. But huge technological hurdles must first be overcome, including how to supply power to the robotic climber. To that end, NASA offered $2 million in prize money in a competition called the Power Beaming Challenge, in which robotic climbers, powered wirelessly from the ground, attempt to ascend a cable as fast as possible. Now, a robotic climber has made a prize-winning ascent... more... - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

"On Wednesday, LaserMotive fired up its laser, powering the climber to ascend 900 metres up a cable suspended from a helicopter at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave, California. The climber reached the top in just over 4 minutes, for an average speed of 3.7 metres per second. The team's climber repeated the feat at a slightly higher speed of 3.9 metres per second on Thursday. On Friday,... more... - RAPatton

Wow, I didn't realize they had advanced this far with the idea. - Jason Huebel from Android

"The decline was rapid. I got my first pair of glasses aged 9, and by my mid-teens could no longer read the title on the cover of New Scientist at arm's length. With my mum's eyes just as bad, I always assumed that I'd inherited my short-sightedness from her and that I could do little to stop my vision from becoming a little blurrier each year. Around the same time, however, rates of short-sightedness, or myopia, were rising to epidemic proportions around the world. Today, in some of the worst-affected countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, around 80 per cent of young adults are myopic, compared to only 25 per cent a few decades back. Rates are lower in western countries - between 30 and 50 per cent - but myopia seems to be rising steadily here too. What could be causing this mysterious epidemic? It is clear that genetics alone can't explain the condition, and the long-standing theory that reading was to blame has failed to play out in subsequent studies. Large-scale... more... - RAPatton

Nice article and insightful. - ashish

I wouldn't call this "privileged" like the author, as the memories and associations were no stronger than the auditory associations... - Noah Gray from Bookmarklet

Talk about pie-in-the-sky! This has been evaluated, discussed, and rejected as impractical, expensive, and having little return on investment. Let's come up with a new idea. - Aaron Kendrick

"From the sudden whiff of school cabbage to the pungent smell of hospital disinfectant,  nothing transports people back to their childhood more than an unexpected smell. Now scientists think they have discovered how scents from the past make such a lasting impression. Using brain scans, they have shown that new 'odour memories' - such as the association of a perfume with a person - really do get 'etched' onto the brain. The 'signature' of the memory is different from other types of memories, they found. Dr Yaara Yeshurun, who led the study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel said early smells had a 'privileged' status in our memories. Scientists have long known that smells are one of the best ways to evoke the past.  Past studies have shown that memories triggered by smells are more vivid and more emotional than those triggered by sounds, pictures or words. The new study, reported in the journal Current Biology,  tried to mimic the creation of childhood memories of smells in 16 adult volunteers." - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

"'We found that the first pairing or association between an object and a small had a distinct signature in the brain,' said Dr Yaara. 'This "etching" of initial odour memories in the brain was equal for good and bad smells, yet was unique to odour.' The researchers also found that they could predict what a person what remember later based on the activity in their brains on the first... more... - RAPatton

"Scientists have developed an atlas of the bacteria that live in different regions of the human body. Some of the microbes help keep us healthy by playing a key role in physiological functions" - chaz2b from Bookmarklet

...and some of them make you smell like rotting pizza.... - Aaron Kendrick

"U.S. health officials said on Friday they are making progress in improving the supply of H1N1 vaccine to state health departments and urged people frustrated by long lines and scarce supply not to give up. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Dr. Anne Schuchat said there are now twice as many doses of vaccine available as there were two weeks ago, with 38 million doses ordered or available for ordering by states." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

I love looking at stuff like this and seeing patterns on a whole new scale - Jay

"Among the tiny insects known as water striders, males who aggressively attempt to mate with females don't wind up with as many offspring as their more gentlemanly counterparts. How can aggressive mating ever be a losing strategy? A group of researchers in the United States decided to do an experiment with water striders, in which they observed the mating success of prudent, "nice" males versus aggressive, "psychopathic" males. The latter group tried often to mate with the females very aggressively, and in previous experiments they had the most reproductive success. But these scientists discovered that the success of the psychopaths depended on very specific laboratory conditions It turned out that other studies of sex among water striders had kept the population contained in a limited area, where females had access to very few males. When the researchers opened up the insects' habitat, allowing the females to roam freely, they discovered that the less aggressive males attracted the highest number of mates" - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

""The presence of psychopaths dramatically reduced the productivity of the population," [biologist David Sloan] Wilson said. "When all the males were gentlemen, the females laid about three times more eggs than they did when all the males were psychopaths. And yet within each group the psychopaths were doing better than the gentlemen. How do the gentlemen persist if they're... more... - RAPatton

"While your local hardware store may be urging you to convert incandescent lights in your home to compact fluorescent lighting, researchers are hard at work developing the next bright thing in lighting -- LEDs. Earlier this fall, the first entry to the Department of Energy's L Prize competition was submitted by Philips Electronics. The competition offers a ten million dollar cash prize for the development of a LED lightbulb that would replace the common 60-watt 'Edison' style incandescent light bulb and the PAR-38 halogen reflector-lamp bulb. The winning entry must meet certain requirements for durability, energy efficiency, and quality. We'll talk with the manager of the DOE's LED lighting program about the competition and the drive towards more efficient LED-based bulbs. Teachers, find more information about using Science Friday as a classroom resource in the Kids' Connection. Guests Jim Brodrick Lighting Program Manager Building Technologies Program U.S. Department of Energy Washington, DC - Bluesun 2600 from Bookmarklet

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is working with the chemist to turn the technology into a portable biocontamination detection instrument. Hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and even electronics manufacturers -- anywhere unwanted germs congregate -- may one day benefit from the breakthrough." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

If I had this, I wouldn't want to leave my house! - Shevonne

"New research sheds light on the possible link between the genes you inherit and the size of your belly. Participants in a French study doubled their risk of having fat around the abdomen if they had a certain genetic trait, and the more of these traits one had, the greater the risk for a pot belly." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

"French scientists mixed gene therapy and bone marrow transplants in two boys to seemingly halt a brain disease that can kill by adolescence. The surprise ingredient: They disabled the HIV virus so it couldn't cause AIDS, and then used it to carry in the healthy new gene." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet

I am not sure how to react ot that. It's very disturbing on many, many levels. - Aaron Kendrick

"If human teenagers seem terrible at times, be thankful we don't have young tyrannosaurs to deal with. Scientists now find these adolescent predators got into serious battles with their peers, with bites at times puncturing through bone — the kinds of fights we see today in distant relatives of the dinosaurs. Researchers investigating Jane, the prized juvenile T. rex at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, discovered she received a serious bite that punctured her left upper jaw and snout in four places. As severe as it was, the injury wasn't life threatening and eventually healed over, although it left its mark. "Jane has what we call a boxer's nose," said researcher Joe Peterson, a paleontologist at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, who helped unearth Jane in Montana in 2001. "Her snout bends slightly to the left. It was probably broken and healed back crooked." Peterson and his colleagues determined another juvenile tyrannosaur probably caused the damage.... more... - RAPatton

oww - Will Higgins™

"The new addition to T. rex's clan is known from a 30cm-long skull uncovered during excavations in Gloucestershire in the 1900s. The well-preserved fossil is held in London's Natural History Museum. A British-German team has now uncovered evidence linking it to what may be the most famous dinosaur family of all. The dinosaur, named Proceratosaurus, lived about 165m years ago, during the middle Jurassic Period. The two-legged meat-eater would have measured about 3m long and weighed up to 60kg. The palaeontologists used computed tomography (CT) techniques to generate a 3D image of the delicate skull to investigate its internal structure in meticulous detail. Dr Angela Milner, associate keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, told BBC News: "This is a unique specimen. It is the only one of its kind known in the world." She added: "It was quite a surprise when our analysis showed we had the oldest known relative of T. rex." - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

""Inside the skull, which we were able to look at using CT scanning, there are lots of internal air spaces. Tyrannosaurus had those as well." Although the skull has attracted much interest because of its exquisite preservation, it has not been closely studied until now, thus, its link to the tyrannosaurs remained undiscovered. "This is still one of the best-preserved dinosaur skulls... more... - RAPatton

"The 12.4 mile-wide object has been cloaked in mystery since it was identified as a powerful X-ray source in 1999. Astronomers now know the source is a neutron star 11,000 light years from Earth at the centre of the supernova Cassiopeia A. It is the youngest object of its kind ever discovered, having appeared just 330 years ago. Neutron stars are the super-dense compact cores of massive stars whose outer shells have been blasted away in violent explosions at the end of their lives. Compressed tightly by gravity, they are composed almost entirely of neutrons, sub-atomic particles with no electric charge that form part of atoms. One teaspoonful of material from a neutron star would weigh a billion tonnes. The newly identified neutron star has a unique atmosphere of carbon just centimetres thick. Britain's first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, is believed to have observed the supernova that spawned it in 1680. Astronomers studied the supernova using the Chandra X-ray space telescope launched by the American space agency Nasa in 1999. Every other neutron star identified by scientists has been much older." - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

Further evidence that Cassiopeia rocks *sagenod* - Michael W. May

cool - echostreamer

"Space explorers have yet to get their hands on the replicator of "Star Trek" to create anything they might require. But NASA has developed a technology that could enable lunar colonists to carry out on-site manufacturing on the moon, or allow future astronauts to create critical spare parts during the long trip to Mars. The method, called electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3), uses an electron beam to melt metals and build objects layer by layer. Such an approach already promises to cut manufacturing costs for the aerospace industry, and could pioneer development of new materials. It has also thrilled astronauts on the International Space Station by dangling the possibility of designing new tools or objects, researchers said." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"The mystery of the origins of the Falklands Wolf described by Charles Darwin may finally have been solved. Darwin's observations of the wolf - the only mammal native to the Falklands - helped to formulate the theory of evolution, but scientists have always been baffled by how they managed to get to the remote islands. The Falkland Wolf or 'Warrah' was hunted to extinction in the late 19th century because they were viewed as a threat to sheep as well as prized by fur trappers. Early biologists believed their ancestors were brought by early native south Americans settlers but escaped back to the wild. But modern day scientists believe their origin may be far older. They compared the DNA from four of the world's Falklands wolf museum specimens with living wolfs from around the world. The tissue samples revealed they last shared a common ancestor 70,000 years ago. The finding suggests the wolf must have crossed to the Falklands on an ice bridge during an ice age before it was cut off." - RAPatton from Bookmarklet

"University of California's Graham Slater said: 'It's really strange that the only native mammal on an island would be a large canid (wolf). 'There are no other native terrestrial mammals - not even a mouse. 'It's even stranger when you consider that the Falklands are some 480 kilometres from the South American mainland. The question is, how did they get there?' The diet of the wolf is... more... - RAPatton