Every weekday, Sigma Xi,
the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the
mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from the Seattle Times: WASHINGTON - While U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan engage the enemy with guns, tanks, airplanes and missiles, the Pentagon is quietly fighting a much different kind of war on a new front - cyberspace. Military officials say that a cyber-attack by foreign enemies or terrorist groups could result in "an electronic Pearl Harbor" that would shut down electricity, banking systems, cellphones and other tools of day-to-day life. A report issued Thursday by security-software firm McAfee said government-affiliated hackers in China are at the forefront of a brewing "cyber Cold War" still in its infancy. Within two decades, according to McAfee, the scuffle could erupt into a worldwide conflict involving hundreds of countries attacking one another's online networks with sophisticated software.
The Discovery Channel has teamed with video-game maker Activision to start making animal-themed games based on its many cable properties. This is all a plan by Discovery to break away from the label of lowly "cable channel" and become a multimedia content provider. In the immortal words of Kent Brockman, "This, I don't need."
Possible titles include video-game adaptations of popular shows like "Meerkat Manor" and "Orangutan Island," and could bow as early as late 2008. Activision has had recent success with "Guitar Hero," but they also turn out tons of dreck based on Hollywood properties like SPider-Man and Transformers. I'm praying to the video game gods in hopes that they flop, because if we have to endure "American Chopper: The Show: The Game," I think it might be the surest sign of an impending apocalypse.
Footprints of both creatures have recently been discovered. But apparently the two didn't cross paths.
Reuters reports that a U.S. film crew's unveiling of fresh prints around Mt Everest has sparked a new fury of Yeti believers. Meanwhile, hunters spotted thousands of dino tracks in an ATV park in Utah, just north of the Arizona border.
26 years in the making, worldwide mobile subscriptions have reached 3.3 billion according to research firm Informa Telecoms and Media. As of, oh, right now, the US Census Bureau puts the global population at 6,634,545,153. This doesn't mean that half the world has a cell phone, since 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent, meaning at least some people have more than one subscription. I--gadget yuppie that I am--have 17.
Everyone digs retro stuff. I haven't changed my pants for decades — yeah, they smell, but you just can't find acid-washed bellbottoms like these anymore. NASA is basically doing the same thing with their new Orion rocket missions, which will see the return of Apollo-style rockets and space capsules used to complete missions to the International Space Station and eventually the moon.
Rockets came back into fashion at NASA because they are safer and better-designed than the aging, disaster-prone shuttle fleet, and they have better long-range capability than shuttles. Still, it's more than just a matter of pulling the old Gemini out of the closet and Febrezing away that musty Gus Grissom smell:
"We could have already built up an early lunar outpost, or smaller ones at different places of interest," says NASA's administrator Michael Griffin. "Most of the next 15 years will be spent recreating capabilities we once had, and discarded."
I'll openly acknowledge that most groundbreaking inventions should be revealed only in the province of the super-privileged; I've never been beaten as badly and as frequently as when I rode my Segway around my ghetto-ass nabe, shouting things like, 'gaze upon your Golden God, filthy rubes!"
Still, the announcement that "a new science, a Super Material" that "will contribute in a major way to reducing climate change" will debut at a £1,000-a-head dinner in London has me both curious and wary. The super-luxe dinner (which, for that price, better have glazed baby on the menu) happens later today in London, and Al Gore is in attendance, so maybe it will be a BFD after all. Then again, that guy will fall for anything as long as there's glazed baby involved.
Ya gotta hand it to jellyfish: For basically being a gelatinous conglomeration of nematocysts and ganglia, they sure know how to f*** s*** up. After getting all wicked on an Irish salmon farm earlier this month, wrecking their shizz to the tune of $2 million, they've decided to let Japan know who's ocean it really is. Giant jellyfish, some as large as 450 lbs and six feet in diameter, have invaded the coasts of Japan, clogging fishing nets, stinging fools, and generally treating the land of the rising sun like its bitch. Blame for the jellies rise could include global warming, overfishing, dropping oxygen levels in the ocean or, like everything, the Chinese. The Wall Street Journal's got video of the nastiest east-side gang since the Crips in action. Look out for the Japanese researcher who has to be "very careful" to not get jellyfish goo in his eye. These guys don't stand a chance — jellies on the east siiiiyeeeeed!
The Republican showdown on YouTube wasn’t the only debate raging on Wednesday. In New York, scientists and scholars gathered at the National Academy of Design to weigh in on the art/science question that won’t go away: can you use fractal analysis to authenticate art?
The US reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 percent in 2006 as compared to 2005, according to the government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA). It’s only the third time since 1990 that our emissions have declined between years rather than risen. On average our GHG output increases by .9 percent annually.
The majority of the decline is thanks to reduced energy consumption and therefore a lowering of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
This sounds like marginally good news, and it is, but let's unpack why our energy use dropped by .5 percent as compared to 2005.
Ah, infidelity: Some Americans call it 'sinful,' the Spanish call it an 'adventure,' and Mormon fundamentalists call it Thursday. A new study shows evidence that 20 percent of all long-term relationships start when one party is already involved with someone else.
Psychologists who polled 16,000 individuals in 53 countries as part of the International Sexuality Description Project found the figure holds up across age groups and with couples who are married, living together or dating.
In North America, 62 percent of men and 40 percent of women say they've attempted to entice another's mate for a short-term fling. Some 47 percent of men and 32 percent of women say they've succumbed to such attempts. The more sexual equality in a culture, the closer women come to matching men in the number of poaching attempts.
I always knew feces was the key to complex life -- why do you think the best jokes involve poop? Scientists have long sought to explain the evolutionary explosion of life that occurred 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period; this population boom eventually gave rise to the ancestors of complex life. Biogeochemist Graham Logan argues that feces-producing creatures, which actually arrived about 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian, were the key that enabled single-celled organisms to expand.
Before pooping creatures, bacteria consumed most of the available oxygen. Plankton produced oxygen slowly, but bacteria would consume most of it in order to digest dead plankton. The dearth of oxygen didn't allow for much multicellular development.
As a kid, I was always terrible with the whole "Magic Eye" drawing thing. I used to sit at the little kiosk in the mall, guessing wrong answers until I drew a crowd. Once I couldn't hear my guesses over the laughter, I ran away to cry under the dress rack in Dillard's.
Maybe that's why I'm so pleased this Motion-Induced Blindness optical illusion works on me. While staring at the center dot, the three other points will simply disappear at different intervals before your eyes.
When most people think of aliens, they think of little green men with almond eyes.
But when physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist Paul Davies sat down to imagine what they might actually look like, he turned to the world of the very small.
Artist and illustrator Jean-Francois Podevin took Davies' ideas about improbably tiny alien bacteria, silicon based life-forms, and the potential that life arose more than once, and turned them into some of the most stunning illustrations ever seen in Scientific American.
"At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors... quantitative body-counts... suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own."
(Incredibly, he's even including all the wars and genocides of the 21st century in that body count)
The country may be neutral, but it's not safe from warming temperatures and the bugs that come with melting glaciers.
An Asian tiger mosquito, known for carrying deadly diseases, was discovered for the first time in northern Switzerland. Authorities have yet to determine whether the mosquito brought friends or whether it arrived solo.
CERN, which stands for "place where war-losing Frogs and neutral, chocolate-loving Swiss accelerate particles" is currently the largest particle accelerating physics lab. They should revel in their grandiosity while they can, because the title will soon go to the Large Hadron Collider in May 2008, just up the street in Geneva.
But before everyone ditches the tired-ass CERN for the hotter, younger Large Hadron Collider, we should all remember why we fell in love with CERN in the first place. She gave us W and Z bosons, the determination of the number of neutrino families and the creation of antihydrogen atoms. The World Wide Web (now called Innernets) was also created in her superfine computer center in 1990, by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (sit down, Al).
But times have changed, baby, and we gots to move on. LHC is tighter, younger and may give us a Higgs boson — It's just the way the world works, right? Try to remember the good times, baby.
"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well-known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer," said L. Rowell Huesmann, author of a new study in a special edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health looking at over 50 years of research.
While smokers can remain excited that they're still living on the edge as by far the most badass people in the world, people have been ragging on violent media for, obviously, over 50 years (actual date closer to 2000 years.) But it looks like this study was promoted by the government. At the very bottom of the press release is this tidbit: "The supplement was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
Every weekday, Sigma Xi,
the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the
mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's edition of Science in the News is piping hot.
from the Daily Telegraph (UK): Today it is our idea of hell but scientists now think that Venus was once much more Earth-like and awash with water until an eco-disaster struck. They have been able to work out details of an ancient global warming catastrophe that turned a world similar to Earth in mass and size into the noxious and inhospitable planet it is today thanks to Venus Express - a spacecraft built by European scientists and engineers which has been studying our fiery sister for two years. Astronomers gathered at the European Space Agency headquarters in Paris [yesterday] to reveal what the orbiting probe has told them about this hothouse world, where temperatures soar to 400 degrees Celsius. Intriguingly, they cannot exclude the possibility that primitive organisms could lurk there - that is, if the planet had ever harboured life.
New data further supports that humans in the Americas arrived in a single wave from Siberia via the Bering Straight land bridge 12,000 years ago, fanning down the coast to today's South America.
Led by the University of Michigan, the study addresses a long debated topic among archaeologists and anthropologists: From where and when did people arrive in the New World. The land bridge's competing hypothesis strongly argues that people came by land and sea in successional waves over the past 30,000 years from various parts of Asia and/or Polynesia.
Just under 5 feet tall, weighing 245 pounds, and speaking with a feminine coo, Twendy-One the human symbiotic robot can manipulate chop sticks, bring you ketchup from the 'fridge and use her gorilla arms to support the weight a person. In the world of robot technology, she's an accomplishment in balancing dexterity with strength that has been seven years in the making with a several million dollar budget.
Are degrees of latitude as valid a metric for discussing climate policy alternatives as those of temperature , whether Fahrenheit, Kelvin, or Celsius? One degree of warming may shift your environment roughly a Degree or two away from the North or South Pole, but any re-examination of the issue in terms of biogeography and shifting biotremes and human
ecology needs an uncontroversial point of statistical departure.
It may not be easy to come by, because just
as the concept of "average " global temperature is
scientifically , statistically and semantically ambiguous, it's hard to get a
firm handle on the "average" temperature the whole of humanity experiences.
Because demography is changing faster than climate .
This Pentagon report says that climate change is as big a threat to humanity as terrorism. And this health secretary has warned that obesity is as big a threat as climate change.
In 2005-2006, the same number of adults were obese as in 2003-2004, says the CDC. That's still 1 in 3, or twice the rate of obesity the U.S. could lay claim to in 1980.
Whether this is a temporary lull or a heartening new trend, at least, for the first time in decades, we did not become any more massive than we already are.
In 1978 a NASA probe saw evidence of electrical activity in Venus' atmosphere, but there was no proof that it was lightning, which would affect scientists' interpretations of Venus' atmosphere. Now, however, a magnetic antenna on the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe has proven it. In light of that fact, the ESA has given us this artist's rendition of what the world probably looks like, which we all could have just as easily imagined yesterday.
For more than 20 years the poor piping plover's been on the endangered species list. The bird has bugged people who love their beach free of restrictions and "Protect Our Plover" signage.
But now, all of that hassle may be paying off.
According to the New York Times, biologists tracked 1,743 pairs of mating plovers on the Atlantic Coast in 2006.
Every weekday, Sigma Xi,
the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the
mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Science in the News is piping hot.
from the Times (London): A bionic hand that restores the sense of touch to amputees could soon be developed thanks to US research that has enabled two patients to feel sensations. The man and the woman can sense pressure, temperature and pain as if their missing hands were still present, after surgery rerouted the nerves from their injured arms to the skin on the chest. Claudia Mitchell, 27, who lost her left arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident three years ago, was fitted with the world's most advanced prosthetic arm after the operation pioneered by Todd Kuiken, of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
You may have heard of parasites that influence the behavior of their hosts, but seeing it happen is another brand of madness entirely. The juvenile nematomorph hairworm is a parasite in insects. They grow from a tiny cyst to a gigantic worm that inhabits most of the animal's cavity. They then induce their host to jump into the water, effectively committing suicide. Geesh.
Thanks to global warming, our future prospects for shreddin' sweet powder in the mountains don't look so good. But that ain't about to deter the scrappy Texans behind Bearfire Resort, a horribly-named artificial ski mountain set to open in the near future in the blizzard-challenged Ft. Worth, TX.
"But how will one ski year round in a locale not known for snow?" you might ask. Are you kidding? "Snow?" Hell you talkin' 'bout, grandpa? That's for has-beens and chee
The Discovery Channel has teamed with video-game maker Activision to start making animal-themed games based on its many cable properties. This is all a plan by Discovery to break away from the label of lowly "cable channel" and become a multimedia content provider. In the immortal words of
Everyone digs retro stuff. I haven't changed my pants for decades — yeah, they smell, but you just can't find acid-washed bellbottoms like these anymore. NASA is basically doing the same thing with their new 
I'll openly acknowledge that most groundbreaking inventions should be revealed only in the province of the super-privileged; I've never been beaten as badly and as frequently as when I rode my Segway around my ghetto-ass nabe, shouting things like, 'gaze upon your Golden God, filthy rubes!"
Ah, infidelity: Some Americans call it 'sinful,' the Spanish call it an 'adventure,' and Mormon fundamentalists call it Thursday. A new study shows evidence that 20 percent of all long-term relationships start when one party is already involved with someone else. 
I always knew feces was the key to complex life -- why do you think the best jokes involve poop? Scientists have long sought to explain the evolutionary explosion of life that occurred 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period; this population boom eventually gave rise to the ancestors of complex life. Biogeochemist Graham Logan argues that feces-producing creatures, which actually arrived about 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian, were the key that enabled single-celled organisms to expand. 
As a kid, I was always terrible with the whole "Magic Eye" drawing thing. I used to sit at the little kiosk in the mall, guessing wrong answers until I drew a crowd. Once I couldn't hear my guesses over the laughter, I ran away to cry under the dress rack in Dillard's. 
In 1978 a NASA probe saw evidence of electrical activity in Venus' atmosphere, but there was no proof that it was lightning, which would affect scientists' interpretations of Venus' atmosphere. Now, however, a magnetic antenna on the 
Thanks to global warming, our future prospects for shreddin' sweet powder 