Results tagged “scienceinthenews” from 60 Second Science

Giant Meteor Fireball Explodes Over Northwest U.S.

from National Geographic News: A meteor zipped across the U.S. Pacific Northwest sky early Tuesday morning before exploding, possibly littering eastern Oregon with marble- to basketball-size space rocks, an expert says. Impact sites are yet to be found, according to Richard Pugh, a scientist with the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University in Oregon. Pugh is coordinating a search for potential meteorites. He said 40 to 50 eyewitnesses have contacted his lab to report the fireball. ... The meteor was first spotted over Washington State moving in an east-southeast direction. "The light was bright enough to wake up people even though the shades were pulled, and then the sonic boom hit, rattling windows and making the dust fly, and the dogs crawled under the bed," Pugh said.

Continue reading 'Giant meteor fireball explodes over northwest U.S., wolves delisted as endangered, and researchers sneak up on sleeping whales' >

Long Nights, 90 Below. What More Could Astronomers Want?

from the New York Times (Registration Required): It's been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy. And so 17 Chinese astronomers, engineers and technicians boarded an old icebreaker last November, crunched into a harbor in East Antarctica and then set off on a 20-day, 1,000-mile trip across the snows to establish a new observatory at the bottom of the world. The observatory is called Plato, for the Plateau Observatory. For now it consists of a collection of boxes and towers holding seven small telescopes and cameras on a bump known as Dome Argus, which is 13,000 feet high and about 700 miles east of the South Pole. For the next year they will hold vigil alone, reporting by satellite radio through the long Antarctic night, but these instruments are the vanguard of great hopes.

Continue reading 'An Antarctic observatory, self-healing rubber, and a mysterious Peruvian pyramid complex' >

Mysterious Creatures Found in Antarctica

from the San Francisco Examiner: SYDNEY, Australia (Associated Press) - Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths. Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before. Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists still do not fully understand.

Continue reading 'Mysterious Antarctic creatures found, sharks travel superhighways and visit 'cafes,' and spy satellite could be shot down tonight' >

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.

The Most Intense Laser in the Universe

from Nature News: Is this really the most intense laser in the Universe? Yes, that's what scientists working on the HERCULES laser at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor claim. ... This record-breaking beam actually has very low energy - at just 20 joules, it is less than the 8,000 joules stored in a tic tac - but the energy is squeezed into a tiny spot (1.3 micrometres in diameter, about a hundred times thinner than a human hair) for a very short time, just 30 femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). So the beam has an intensity of 2 x 10^22 watts per square centimetre: two orders of magnitude more intense than achieved before.

Continue reading 'The most intense laser in the universe, a giant 'frog from hell' fossil found in Madagascar, and scientists could turn greenhouse gas into gasoline' >

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Five-Seat Concept Car Runs on Air

from BBC News Online: An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town. The OneCAT will be a five-seater with a glass fibre body, weighing just 350 kg and could cost just over 2,500 [pounds]. It will be driven by compressed air stored in carbon-fibre tanks built into the chassis. The tanks can be filled with air from a compressor in just three minutes - much quicker than a battery car. Alternatively, it can be plugged into the mains for four hours and an on-board compressor will do the job. For long journeys the compressed air driving the pistons can be boosted by a fuel burner which heats the air so it expands and increases the pressure on the pistons. The burner will use all kinds of liquid fuel. The designers say on long journeys the car will do the equivalent of 120 mpg In town, running on air, it will be cheaper than that.

Continue reading 'A car that runs on air, FEMA trailers toxic, and remembering our digital past' >

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MS Therapy Shows Promise in Test

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): An experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis that targets a portion of the immune system not previously subjected to therapy reduced damaging lesions of the nervous system by 91 percent and relapses of the disease by 58 percent, researchers report today. A single course of the drug, called rituximab, helped patients for the full 48 weeks of the trial and suggests a new way to treat relapsing-remitting MS, the most common form of the disabling disease. Researchers said they were still concerned about potential long-term side effects of the drug, which is used under the brand name Rituxan to treat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis, like MS an autoimmune disease.

Continue reading 'MS therapy shows promise, nationwide flu epidemic underway, and fabric may allow for first 'power suit'' >

Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to.

Trash-Based Biofuels: From Landfill to Full Tank of Gas

from Scientific American: The remains of plants processed for human purposes molder in landfills across the world. Whether waste paper or raked leaves, the plant remnants still contain cellulose, a sugar in greenery that bonds with the chemical compound lignin to furnish a plant's structure. Microbes living in the landfills break down this cellulose into methane, which slowly seeps to the surface and into the atmosphere, where it is a potent greenhouse gas. BlueFire Ethanol, Inc., in Irvine, Calif., would rather harvest that energy for use as cellulosic ethanol fuel. "We produce 70 gallons of ethanol per ton of waste," says engineer Arnold Klann, BlueFire's president and CEO. "The trick is unlocking the sugar molecule from the lignin, which is the glue that holds it together."

Continue reading 'Trash-based biofuels, grizzlies ruining moose quality-of-life, and a prehistoric insect rampage could foreshadow a new one' >

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin

from the Guardian (UK): To mark Darwin's birthday, and 150 years since he unveiled his theory of natural selection, [The Guardian] brings you the definitive guide to On the Origin of Species. "Big enough to undermine creation but simple enough to be stated in a sentence, the theory of natural selection is a masterpiece," writes Richard Dawkins. "Sequence any gene and you will see that our version is more similar to that of other apes than to that of the rat, fish or fly. It's what Darwin would have predicted," says Laurence D Hurst.

Continue reading 'Happy birthday to Darwin, centenarians less exclusive, and a miniature pterodactyl' >

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Robot Glider Harvests Ocean Heat

from BBC News Online: A sea-going robotic glider that harvests heat energy from the ocean has been tested by US scientists. The yellow, torpedo-shaped machine has been combing the depths of seas around the Caribbean since December 2007. The team which developed the autonomous vehicle say it has covered "thousands of kilometres" during the tests. The team believe the glider - which needs no batteries - could undertake oceanographic surveys for up to six months at a time. "We are tapping a virtually unlimited energy source for propulsion," said Dave Fratantoni of the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOi). But Steve McPhail, an expert in autonomous underwater vehicles at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton, said the machine would not totally do away with batteries.

Continue reading 'Robot glider harvests ocean heat, court rejects emission trades, and peeking inside voters' minds' >

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Experts Challenge Ice Shelf Claim

from BBC News Online: Two scientists have claimed that climate change was not the only cause of the collapse of a 500bn tonne ice shelf in Antarctica six years ago. The 656 ft thick, 1,255 sq mile Larsen B shelf broke apart in March 2002. But Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Ted Scambos of Colorado University claim in a new study that it had been on the brink for decades. They argue that glaciological and atmospheric factors were also invoved. In a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology, the pair say that when Larsen B collapsed it appeared to be the latest in a long line of victims of Antarctic summer heatwaves linked to global warming. ... But Prof Glasser said the dramatic event was "not as simple as we first thought."

Continue reading 'Experts challenge ice shelf claim, scientists hail spinal injury breakthrough and biofuel emissions coud be worse than oil' >

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Rewritable Holograms Promise 3D Displays

from New Scientist: A material that can create rewritable holograms could bring 3D displays to the home, or provide dramatically high-capacity computer memory, US researchers say. A layer of the material can record a holographic image, erase it, and replace it with another in a few minutes. While technological challenges remain, the researchers are confident they can advance the technology to refresh pictures at video frame rates of around 30 times a second. The same material could store "pages" of rewritable data in layers through the depth of a hologram, they say. Today's emerging holographic disks are read-only.

Continue reading 'Rewritable 3D hologram displays, DNA 'barcode' revealed in plants and a window opens on Alzheimer's conundrum' >

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Three-Parent Embryo Formed in Lab

from BBC News Online: Scientists believe they have made a potential breakthrough in the treatment of serious disease by creating a human embryo with three separate parents. The Newcastle University team believe 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 organelles that are found within individual cells.

Continue reading 'Three-parent embryos, building blocks of life detected in distant galaxy, and smoking disrupts sleep' >

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U.S. Close to Decision on Polar Bears

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): The Bush administration is nearing a decision that would officially acknowledge the environmental damage of global warming, and name its first potential victim: the polar bear. The Interior Department may act as soon as this week on its year-old proposal to make the polar bear the first species to be listed as threatened with extinction because of melting ice due to a warming planet. Both sides agree that conservationists finally have the poster species they have sought to use the Endangered Species Act as a lever to force federal limits on the greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and possibly to battle smokestack industry projects far from the Arctic.

Continue reading 'U.S. close to deciding about polar bear's endangered status, physicists hope U.S. budget means an end to research cuts and building at World Trade Center shows off terror-proof tech' >

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Study Finds Happiness Lowest at Midlife

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): The road to happiness is U-shaped. New research this week has found that happiness over the course of a lifetime follows a universal curve in which the greatest bliss occurs at the beginning and end of life, while misery dominates middle age. The pattern was consistent around the globe, according to the report, which examined social survey data on 2 million people in 80 countries, including the United States. The study, conducted by economists Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, set out to look at the relationship between age and happiness.

Continue reading 'Happiness is lowest at midlife, a crocodile missing link and no lack of earthlike planets in space' >

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German Study Links Heart Trouble, Game-Day Stress

from Newsday: The excitement of spectator sports puts so many pressures on the hearts of some people that an ancient biological response results in a heart attack, say doctors who are cautioning stress-prone Super Bowl fans to chill. The latest reasoning for that advice comes from a lengthy study of German soccer fans who, like many soccer devotees throughout Europe, can get so worked up they pay a devastating cardiac price. Whether you're rooting for the Giants or the New England Patriots, a biochemical cocktail of stress-induced compounds can likewise damage the heart. Reporting in yesterday's New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich found that during seven days when the German team played in the 2006 World Cup, cardiac emergencies more than doubled overall, and tripled for men.

Continue reading 'The link between heart trouble and Superbowl Sunday, a bizarre mammal discovery and soldeier suicides at record levels' >

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Dead Spy Satellite Could Crash Into U.S.

from National Geographic News: (Associated Press) - A large spy satellite expected to fall to Earth in late February or early March could hit North America, an official said Tuesday. The U.S. military is developing contingency plans to deal with that possibility, Air Force Gen. Victor "Gene" Renuart, Jr., who heads U.S. Northern Command, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The size of the satellite suggests that some number of pieces will not burn up as the orbiting vehicle re-enters the Earth's atmosphere - and will hit the ground. "We're aware that this satellite is out there," Renuart said. "We're aware it is a fairly substantial size. And we know there is at least some percentage [of it] that it could land on ground as opposed to in the water."

Continue reading 'Spy satellite could hit U.S., Mercury's volcanic past and Benjamin Franklin played Sudoku' >

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Researchers Find Exercise Buffs Have "Younger" Cells

from the Philadelphia Inquirer: As if gray hair, brittle bones and wrinkles weren't bad enough, scientists say that as you age, the very DNA in your trillions of cells starts to fray, unravel and disintegrate. Now there may be something you can do to slow the inevitable - exercise. A study published [Monday] hints that fitness buffs appear to have "younger" DNA than the chronically sedentary. The finding could help scientists understand the effects of exercise and aging at a molecular level. In theory, it might also motivate people to get off the couch. "This is a provocative paper and an interesting piece of research," said Jack Guralnik, an epidemiologist at the National Institute on Aging who wrote an editorial that accompanied the research report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Continue reading 'Exercise buffs have younger cells, behavioral therapy for autism-risk babies, and an ancient mass sacrifice and treasures found in China' >

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Life Cycle of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): Doctors and parents have long been left to guess at which children with a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, will go on to become adults with significant attention problems, how well they will navigate the challenges of adulthood and whether early recognition of -- and medication for -- their condition will make any difference in the trajectory of their lives. Now a series of studies following 457 Finnish children from birth to ages 16 to 18 offers a glimpse of how the primary symptoms of ADHD typically evolve. At the same time, the studies raise provocative questions about the long-term effect of treating those symptoms with medication.

Continue reading 'The life cycle of ADD, a mushroom cloud in space and coffee may make diabetes worse' >

Canada, oh, Canada: Our do-gooder big brother just can't seem to get it right. Usually he's busy trying to impress Mom, but lately he's decided to rebel in a bold effort to challenge us as the cool bad boy.

But they may have gone too far this time: Canadia (the 'i' is silent) is closing the position of national science adviser after current adviser Arthur Carty retires on March 1st. Several of the country's scientists are understandably concerned, including Queen's University ecology professor John Smol:

"Having someone in a position to advise the prime minister or a cabinet minister gave me more confidence in the process," Smol said. "There's so little of this contact between the scientific community and politicians. If you remove one of those major contacts, I don't see it as a positive thing."

Continue reading 'Canada ends national science advisor position; nation's scientists let out collective 'eh?'' >

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Why Water Is So Utterly Weird

from Science News: You wouldn't expect to learn much about the properties of water by watching a square dance. But think again. Following the caller's lead, the dancers meet, separate, weave, and swing in a perfectly fluid manner. It turns out that similar coordinated maneuvers - with water molecules taking the places of the dancers - may be responsible for some of water's most puzzling features, an array of recent research findings suggest. As liquids go, water is a radical nonconformist - differing from other liquids in dozens of ways. Most famous among water's peculiarities is its density at low temperatures. While other liquids contract and get denser as they cool toward their freezing points, water stops contracting and starts to expand. That's why ice floats and frozen pipes burst.

Continue reading 'The weirdness of water, business smarts in fighting disease, and a falling U.S. spy satellite' >

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Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life

from the New York Times (Registration Required): Taking a significant step toward the creation of man-made forms of life, researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components. While scientists had previously synthesized the complete DNA of viruses, this is the first time it has been done for bacteria, which are much more complex. The genome is more than 10 times as long as the longest piece of DNA ever previously synthesized. The feat is a watershed for the emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves the design of organisms to perform particular tasks, such as making biofuels. Synthetic biologists envision being able one day to design an organism on a computer, press the "print" button to have the necessary DNA made, and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.

Continue reading 'Scientists take step toward man-made life, UN calls water a top priority, and Brazil vows to crack down on Amazon deforestation' >

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Jupiter's Raging Thunderstorms a Sign of 'Global Upheaval'

from New Scientist: Towering storms more than 100 kilometres tall have been caught punching up through Jupiter's cloud deck for the first time, thanks to a series of Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observations. The rare storms - a sign of recent turmoil on the planet - are helping scientists deduce what lies hidden beneath the clouds that shroud the solar system's largest planet. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the first of the two clouds by chance just as it was forming on 25 March 2007. A second, very similar cloud appeared just 9 hours later in an image taken by a team of amateur astronomers from the ground.

Continue reading 'Jupiter's raging storms, relief for troubled orcas, and high mercury in sushi tuna' >

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NASA Moon Rocket Could Shake Apart, Experts Say

from National Geographic News: (Associated Press) - NASA is wrestling with a potentially dangerous problem in a spacecraft, this time in a moon rocket that hasn't even been built yet. Engineers are concerned that the new rocket - meant to replace the space shuttle and send astronauts on their way to the moon - could shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly destroying the entire vehicle. "They know it's a real problem," said Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Paul Fischbeck, who has consulted on risk issues with NASA in the past. "This thing is going to shake apart the whole structure, and they've got to solve it."

Continue reading 'NASA moon rocket could shake apart, a lingering bird flu threat, and web-based worlds teach us about the real one' >

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Volcano Found Under Antarctic Ice

from Nature News: Scientists have found an active volcano beneath Antarctic ice that last erupted just 2,000 years ago. The hotspot lies beneath the Pine Island region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where glaciers are retreating more quickly than elsewhere on the continent. The dramatic find might help to explain this particularly rapid loss of ice. Although the Antarctic is often thought of as a huge, sedate expanse of snow, the continent is known to host several active volcanoes, some of which poke out of the ice. Mount Erebus, on Ross Island in the Ross Sea, is the area's most famous active volcano and its continuous activity has been observed since the 1970s. This volcanic activity has led some geologists to suspect that volcanoes lurking beneath the ice might affect how glaciers melt and flow on the continent. But no such hot-spots have been confirmed until now.

Continue reading 'Volcano found under Antarctic ice, a possible drop in emissions with today's technology, and caffeine linked to miscarriage rates' >

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After Linking Staph to Gay Men, University Scrambles to Clarify

from the New York Times (Registration Required): SAN FRANCISCO - In a matter of days, it jumped from a routine press release to a medical controversy. On Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were "many times more likely than others" to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potential lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300. And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters round the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid which dubbed the disease "the new H.I.V." But for gay men in the Castro neighborhood here ... the report also seemed to cast an unfair, and all too familiar, stigma on their sexuality.

Continue reading 'Clarifying the link between staph infections and gay men, diversity training is ineffective, and a rare middle-class Egyptian tomb' >

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Mercury Amazes Scientists

from the Baltimore Sun: Scientists poring over their first close-up data from Mercury in almost 33 years say they're delighted by some new discoveries and astonished by the remarkably sharp view of the planet captured by the Maryland-built Messenger spacecraft during its flyby Monday. "We're just jumping up and down as each new image gets examined and new data comes down," said Messenger's principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. "One experimenter after another has been coming into the bullpen and showing us brand-new stuff," he said. "Even on the side of Mercury Mariner 10 was able to view 30 years ago, we're seeing things for the first time."

Continue reading 'Mercury amazes scientists, China launches human genome sequence initiative, and U.S. births at a 45-year high' >

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Scientists Unveil 'Supercarrot'

from BBC News Online: Scientists in the US say they have created a genetically-engineered carrot that provides extra calcium. They hope that adding the vegetable to a normal diet could help ward off conditions such as brittle bone disease and osteoporosis. Someone eating the new carrot absorbs 41% more calcium than if they ate the old, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study suggests. The calcium-charged vegetable still needs to go through many safety trials. "These carrots were grown in carefully monitored and controlled environments," said Professor Kendal Hirschi, part of the team at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. "Much more research needs to be conducted before this would be available to consumers."

Continue reading 'Scientists create 'supercarrot,' giant fossil rodents and USDA disses FDA ruling on cloned food' >

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FDA Says Clones Are Safe For Food

from the Washington Post (Registration Required): A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats. The 968-page "final risk assessment," not yet released but obtained by The Washington Post, finds no evidence to support opponents' concerns that food from clones may harbor hidden risks. But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones -- and that cloning could undermine the wholesome image of American milk and meat -- the agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions.

Continue reading 'FDA says clones are safe for food, brain scans fail to support ESP, and cosmology's Big Brain theory' >

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Scientists Create Beating Heart

from the Times (London): Scientists have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch. The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein "skeleton" that created its shape was left. Then the skeleton was seeded with live "progenitor" cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart. The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.

Continue reading 'Scientists create beating heart, moral instincts and infinity is big...but maybe countable' >

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Accelerator Plans Stalled After US and UK Cuts

from Nature News: The machine on which the world's particle physicists have staked the future of their discipline hangs in the balance owing to budget cuts. On 18 December, the US Congress passed a spending bill slashing funding for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a 31-kilometre machine to collide electrons with positrons, by three-quarters to just $15 million in 2008, money that has already been spent. The United States pays for around a third of the collider's roughly $100-million to $120-million annual global research and development effort. And a week earlier, the United Kingdom announced that it was withdrawing from the project, describing plans for it as "not credible." The decision will help make up an $160-million shortfall at the funding body responsible for UK high-energy physics.

Continue reading 'Accelerator stalled, blind cavefish produce sighted offspring, and South Pole ice grows as Arctic ice melts' >

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Fix Will Give Hubble Major Boost

from BBC News Online: Nasa has announced details of a challenging mission to "rescue" the Hubble Space Telescope. Without the mission, the multi-billion dollar orbiting observatory is likely to fail in 2010 or 2011. The upgrade will provide a massive boost to Hubble's capabilities, giving it greater sensitivity and a larger field of view. The mission, by space shuttle Atlantis, will make Hubble 90 times more powerful than its original version. It could also extend the telescope's lifetime by more than a decade. The mission was outlined at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

Continue reading 'Repair will boost Hubble, terrorism causing U.S. heart disease, and carbon nanosheets promise super-fast chips' >

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Get Sharp - Older Really Is Wiser

from the Times (London): New findings seem to contradict one of the most widely accepted assumptions about ageing: that the human brain is at its most powerful between the ages of 18 and 26. Scientists have discovered that intelligence, instead of peaking in our youth, remains stable and, in some respects, gets sharper as we grow older. The researchers found that verbal skills continued to increase for at least two decades beyond the age of 20, while arithmetic ability remained constant. Their work suggests that many of the assumptions made by employers, policymakers and educational institutions about ageing need to be rethought. "Verbal ability appears to keep increasing over time," said Lars Larsen, a psychologist at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who led the research.

Continue reading 'Older is wiser, men and women give different directions and polar bears could be first animals listed as endangered because of climate change' >

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Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing

from the New York Times (Registration Required): NEW ORLEANS - Are movies like "Hannibal" and the remake of "Halloween," which serve up murder and mutilation as routine fare, actually making the nation safer? A paper presented by two researchers over the weekend to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association here challenges the conventional wisdom, concluding that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs. Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

Continue reading 'Movie violence might curb real violence, Bill Gates hails digital senses and searching for glaciers in the farthest places' >

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The Battle of the Butterflies and the Ants

from Nature News: Butterflies that trick ants into helping to raise their young are driving an evolutionary arms race between the two species, researchers have found. The discovery is important to the conservation of rare Alcon blue butterfies, they say. Maculinea alcon butterflies infect the nests of Myrmica ants by hatching caterpillars nearby, hoping that the caterpillars will be 'adopted' and cared for by ants that mistake them for their own young. The caterpillars achieve this by mimicking the surface chemistry of the ants. Getting this chemistry right is important: if an ant doesn't recognize a caterpillar as one of its own it will eat it, says David Nash, a zoologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Continue reading 'Butterfly vs. ant battles, six tech trends for 2008 and how to live forever' >

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.

Top 25 Science Stories of 2007

from Scientific American: The past year has been both tempestuous and exciting - from pet food, E. coli and toy poisoning scares to political fireworks over embryonic stem cell research to forest fires ravaging California. A controversial Nobel scientist (James Watson) went down in a blaze of infamy, tumbling from grace after putting his foot in his mouth one time too many, whereas a former vice president and defeated presidential candidate (Al Gore) rose from the ashes to become a Nobel Peace prize (and Oscar) winner for raising awareness on the urgency of global warming. The honor came on the heels of official worldwide recognition that climate change is not only a pressing problem, but one that was almost completely caused by humans - and one, too, that humans must fix. On a related note, we discovered that the North Pole is melting, beloved freshwater dolphins are practically extinct and nuclear power ... has become the clean-energy alternative du jour that even has the backing of some enviros.

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