SCIENCE NEWSCLIPS
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SCIENCE
NEWSCLIPS
from 1-04 thru '05 |
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See 15 Answers to Creationism (in Scientific American).)
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Dec 21, 05: the Cascadia subduction zone is active and that the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding under the North American Plate at an average rate of about 4 meters per century. Based on geologic evidence, scientists think that a massive magnitude-9.0 earthquake rocked the region sometime between 1680 and 1720. The quake must have lasted for several minutes because it caused parts of coastal Washington to plummet by as much as 1.5 meters relative to coastal waters.
. . Japanese written accounts of the orphan tsunami allowed the earthquake to be dated even more precisely. Scientists knew that an earthquake as massive as the one that occurred in Cascadia would have spawned an enormous tsunami—one that could easily travel across the Pacific to affect Japan. The two events had to be related, scientists thought.
. . The Japanese written accounts of the tsunami say that the first waves were felt around midnight on Jan. 27 Japan time. Therefore, scientists estimate that the earthquake that generated the tsunami must have struck sometime between 9 and 10 pm Pacific Standard Time on Jan. 26, 1700.
Dec 15, 05: Now it's official: Mona Lisa was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry. That's the conclusion of a University of Amsterdam computer that applied "emotion-recognition software" to Leonardo da Vinci's work, the British weekly New Scientist reports.
Dec 9, 05: Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said. Despite accelerated movement over the past century, the possibility that Earth's modestly fading magnetic field will collapse is remote.
. . Previous studies have shown that the strength of the Earth's magnetic shield has decreased 10% over the past 150 years. During the same period, the north magnetic pole wandered about 685 miles out into the Arctic, according to a new analysis by Stoner.
. . The rate of the magnetic pole's movement has increased in the last century compared to fairly steady movement in the previous four centuries.
Dec 6, 05: What about those occasionally tottering pachyderms? "Assuming all other model factors are in favor of inebriation, the intoxication would minimally require that the elephant avoids drinking water, consumes a diet of only marula fruit at a rate of at least 400% normal maximum food intake, and with a mean alcohol content of at least 3%."
. . The researchers speculate that they've been poisoned instead. African elephants also eat the bark of the marula tree, the scientists note, and the bark is inhabited by the pupae of a beetle traditionally used to poison the tips of arrows.
Dec 6, 05: Scientists exploring the world's sea floor have discovered new super-hot, mineral-rich geysers belching from the southern Atlantic, Arctic and Indian oceans. The findings are significant because they show that such hydrothermal vents are a global phenomena, which may help shed light on Earth's geological development and the origins of simple life.
. . British oceanographers also witnessed a "megaplume" of dissolved minerals rising more than 1,500 meters above the sea floor from a vent in the Indian Ocean. It's the first such plume to be witnessed outside of the Pacific and scientists are trying to piece together what may have caused this eruptive event.
. . Large deposits of minerals including iron, copper and zinc are believed to exist in the newly discovered vents. But commercial exploitation thus far has been limited by technology and questions of ownership.
. . Marine biologists are interested in the underwater vents because of the unique ecosystems that spring up around them. Vent animals live without sunlight and rely instead on chemicals to produce energy.
. . Scientists have yet to fully examine the creatures in the new ocean hot springs, but they expect to find biodiversity. Previous studies have shown that tubeworms and huge clams reside in the Pacific vent sites, while eyeless shrimp are found only in Atlantic vents.
. . "It really lends to cool questions about how these organisms might move from vent to vent", said Craig Cary, a marine biologist from the University of Delaware.
Dec 5, 05: Undersea explorers said that the discovery of more wreckage from the Titanic suggests that the luxury liner broke into three sections — not two, as commonly thought — and thus sank faster than previously believed.
. . The latest expedition, sponsored by the History Channel, found two hull pieces, each roughly 12 meters by 28 meters and lying about half a kilo from the rest of the wreck. The explorers said the location of the wreckage indicates that the ship's bottom came off the ship intact —-constituting a third major piece-— and later broke in two.
Dec 3, 05: When a large earthquake strikes, it can deform the Earth's mantle, the planet's middle layer between the crust and core, to depths of more than 30 km. Over a time span that can range from weeks to decades, these deformations will eventually smooth out through a process known as "post-seismic relaxation."
. . The new study is the first to detect the process going on so long after the actual quakes. The study finds that a portion of the Earth's crust in central Nevada is still quietly reeling from a series of temblors that struck more than 50 years ago.
Nov 21, 05: A group of engineers and geology experts said today they are considering injecting sea water under Venice to raise the waterlogged Italian city 30 centimeters (12 inches) and rescue it from the tides and floods that bedevil it. That's nearly the same amount of centimeters by which it sank over the last 300 years. The $117-million project entails digging twelve holes with a 30-cm diameter within a 10 km area around the city of Venice, and to pump sea water into the ground at a depth of 700 meters, with a topping of waterproof clay. The complete elevation will be achieved in around 10 years.
Stephen Hawking was asked what he didn't understand about the universe. He replied: "Women."
. . When asked about his thoughts on President Bush's proposal to put a man on Mars within 10 years, Hawking simply replied: "Stupid."
. . Hawking answered one question with more seriousness than others--that concerning his feelings about the U.S. government's policy on stem-cell research. In Britain, he said, stem-cell research is seen as a great opportunity. "America will be left behind if it doesn't change its policy", he said.
Nov 15, 05: A lot of the old food that's gone beyond the manufacturer's expiration date could still be edible for years or decades longer. Such are the findings of food science researchers who recently subjected a panel of human tasters to samples of really old food. They discovered that artifacts like 20-year-old dried milk and 28-year-old rolled oats were still perfectly edible and sometimes even tasted OK.
Food scientists have long maintained that certain foodstuffs, like salt, granulated crystal sugar and wheat kernels, can be stored indefinitely at room temperature or below. But Pike said he was uncertain whether a more processed grain, such as a rolled oat, would also stand the test of time.
. . To find out, researchers prepared oatmeal from 16 samples of regular and quick-cooking rolled oats that had been stored up to 28 years in sealed containers. A panel of tasters rated the oats on aroma, texture, flavor, aftertaste and overall acceptability. Scientists also analyzed the samples' nutritional quality.
. . The conclusion? Tasters rated the quality of the old oats from 4.8 to 6.7 on an ascending scale from 1 to 9. Three-fourths considered them acceptable in an emergency.
. . Seeds can last for thousands of years if they're not damaged. Processing and improper storage practices that expose items to heat or oxygen are what cause deterioration. "I've had canned chicken that was stored in a military case for seven years", Labuza recalled. "It was still very edible."
Nov 9, 05: I, Robot may have a new meaning in the 2020s if programmable dermal displays—implantable nanomedical systems for the human body—become a mainstay for medical monitoring and record-keeping. The displays would switch on by touch and connect the patient with billions of fixed and mobile nanobots monitoring vital signs and physiological parameters throughout the body, says Freitas. "Patients will be able to check their own medical condition any time of day or night, wherever they may be, in great detail, without the need to visit a doctor or a testing lab." When turned off, display nanobots emit no light and the skin has its normal pigment. When turned on, they emit photons, creating a display visible through the uppermost layer of skin.
The displays would draw power from a patient's glucose supplies.
Nov 9, 05: Scientists have found a way to estimate an earthquake's ultimate strength by analyzing the initial seconds of a rupture — a step that could one day provide early earthquake warning. Currently, a quake's magnitude —-or how much energy is released-— is determined after the shaking stops, usually minutes after an event.
. . They say the information could possibly be used in an alert system to give seconds to tens of seconds of advance notice of an impending quake — enough time for schoolchildren to take cover, power generators to trip off and valves to shut on pipelines.
Oct 26, 05: A team of physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, has used ultrafast lasers to look at atoms during collisions lasting just half a picosecond (trillionth of a second). And they were able to confirm the theory that atoms — like tennis balls — "briefly lose form and energy when they hit something." These results will help them to better understand other laws of physics at the atomic level.
. . In the JILA experiments, about 10 quintillion potassium atoms in a dense gas were packed into a titanium container just 1 square centimeter in size and heated to 700 degrees C.
In Leonardo da Vinci's works, approximately 60% to 70% show signs of deterioration. Iron gall inks are typically made of metal, like ferrous or copper sulfate, known as vitriol. Add to that galls, a tumorous growth on trees or plants, Arabic gum and water, and you get indelible ink.
Oct 21, 05: Using the parts inside a single molecule, scientists have constructed the world's smallest car. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. It'd be a real squeeze to take it for a spin, however. The whole car is no more than 4 nanometers across. That's slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick.
. . Other groups have made car-shaped nanoscale objects. But this is the first one that rolls "on four wheels in a direction perpendicular to its axles."
. . The scientists had to use "scanning tunneling microscopy" to *see the thing and prove that it rolls like a car.
Oct 19, 05: A new type of transparent armor made of aluminum could one day replace glass in military vehicles. The product is called aluminum oxynitride. It's a ceramic compound with a high compressive strength and durability. It performs better than the multilayered glass products currently in use, and its about half the weight. It is virtually scratch-resistant.
. . Glass is still used in the new process, being sandwhiched between an outer layer of the polished aluminum oxynitride and a polymer backing. In a test this summer, the product held up to a .50-caliber sniper's rifle with amor-piercing bullets. Traditional glass armor did not survive the test. Officials hope the product will prove even more useful when considering more severe threats, such as explosives.
. . Traditional transparent armor costs less than $4 per square inch. The aluminum oxynitride is now at least $10 per square inch. That price would come down with mass production. And the material's longevity would make it cost less than the initial price tag would indicate. Time, blowing sand and other environmental factors degrade glass surfaces. The aluminum material is expected to retain its clarity for much longer.
Oct 19, 05: Newfound undersea rocks explode when hauled to the surface and could hold a treasure trove of information about Earth's insides. A team of geologists set out earlier this month to search the undersea Popcorn Ridge for the source of the exploding rocks first reported back in 1960. They hauled ten loads of rocks up with no luck. Then sonar revealed a small mound at the base of Popcorn Ridge, and the scientists dredged that spot, about 3,200 meters below the surface.
. . "As soon as we took the rocks out of the water, we could hear them popping, much like a firecracker." The popping is caused by pressurized volcanic gases trapped in bubbles within the lava rocks. When they're no longer confined by the pressure of the deep water, the bubbles pop.
. . The volcanic rock comes from below Earth's crust, in a region called the mantle. So the trapped gases, including carbon dioxide, water vapor, helium and argon, should represent concentrations that exist in the mantle, a part of Earth that scientists are trying to drill into but have yet to reach.
. . Studying the popping rocks could improve understanding of gases inside the Earth as well as the history of Earth's atmosphere, which scientists believe has always been heavily influenced by volcanic events.
Oct 6, 05: Scientists from Brazil and the U.S. have discovered, from a GPS station near the center of the Amazon River basin, that the Earth level is going up and down by almost 7.5 cm every year with the seasonal floods of the big river. In other words, Earth sinks that far under the weight of the flooded Amazon.
Oct 2, 05: Newly released images show a vast region of the Indian Ocean, about the size of Connecticut, glowing three nights in a row. The luminescence was also spotted from a ship in the area. Scientists don't have a good handle what's going on. But satellite sensors have now provided the first pictures.
. . Scientists suspect bioluminescent bacteria are behind the phenomenon. Such creatures produce a continuous glow, in contrast to the brief, bright flashes of light produced by "dinoflagellate" bioluminescent organims that are seen more commonly lighting up ship wakes and breaking waves.
. . "The problem with the bacteria hypothesis is that an extremely high concentration of bacteria must exist before they begin to produce light."
Sept 29, 05: Physicists in the Netherlands built a miniature quicksand pit in their lab, mixing up fine sand, clay and saltwater. They discovered that quicksand becomes more viscous very slowly: it takes days for the substance to become progressively more toffee-like in consistency.
. . On the other hand, it loses this viscosity very quickly in response to stress. A moving object in the sand causes it to liquefy swiftly, as the sand heads towards the bottom and the upper layers become runny. The settling sand then becomes so compact that it is impossible for material with the density of a human body to become completely submerged.
. . On the other hand, he is likely to stay there for a long time, for even the most muscular help won't get him out. The dense sand so clumps around the lower limbs that just to haul out a foot requires a force of 100,000 Newtons --about the same as that needed to lift a medium-sized car.
Sept 27, 05: The distinctive growl of a light plane may soon be accompanied by an eerie hum, thanks to Australian research that shows the effectiveness of aircraft wings is dramatically increased when sound is applied to them.
. . Qantas engineer Ian Salmon tested wing sections covered with a piezoelectric material that vibrates when a current is applied to it. When the tone of the sound was at its most effective pitch, Salmon's wing panel achieved 22% more lift than it would have without the piezoelectric hum.
. . The technique only works well on smaller planes such as light aircraft and military-style unmanned aerial vehicles.
. . It's all about changing the air flow from an unstable laminar flow to a turbulent flow that increases lift.
Sept 26, 05: Japanese scientists have taken the first photographs of one of the most mysterious creatures in the deep ocean --the giant squid.
. . Until now, the only information about the behavior of the creatures which measure up to 18 meters (59 feet) in length has been based on dead or dying squid washed up on shore or captured in commercial fishing nets.
. . Little is known about the creatures because it has been so difficult to locate and study them alive. Large ships and specialist equipment, which is costly, are needed to study deep sea environments.
. . The Japanese scientists found the squid by following sperm whales, the most effective hunters of giant squid, as they gathered to feed between September and December in the deep waters.
. . They added that the giant squid appear to be a much more active predator than researchers had suspected and tangled their prey in their elongated feeding tentacles.
Sept 17, 05: New computer simulations show three modes of locomotion are most efficient for humans: walking, running, and a third one that for some reason we don't employ.
. . Hopping and skipping are no good. And there's a reason why we don't speed-walk or consistently use other odd ways of getting around, the research found. Walking and running at typical paces --the uniquely human gaits you are used to-- use the least amount of energy compared to the performance results.
. . Cornell University engineers Andy Ruina and Manoj Srinivasan compare the mechanics of walking and running with "many other strange and unpracticed gaits." They used a set of computer models that simulated physical measurements such as leg length, force, body velocity and trajectory, forward speed and work.
. . While we can, if we choose, glide along without much bobbing up and down --such as when a waiter must be cautious not to spill coffee filled to the brim-- we don't. Here's why:
. . The computer simulations conclude that normal walking is simply the most energy efficient for travel at low speeds, and running is best at higher speeds. And, they report, a third walk-run gait is optimal for intermediate speeds, even though humans do not appear to take advantage of it.
Saturn's spokes are fairly faint, and are about 100 km wide and 3,500 km long.
Sept 16, 05: Researchers have built an inchworm-like robot so small you need a microscope just to see it. In fact, about 200 hundred of them could line up and do the conga across a plain M&M. The tiny bot measures about 60 micrometers wide (about the width of a human hair) by 250 micrometers long, making it the smallest untethered, controllable microrobot ever.
Forget about *watching, Big Brother may be *listening. It's a form of acoustical spying. Researchers said they were able to feed sound recordings of typing on keyboards into a computer and use an algorithm to recover up to 96% of the keyboard characters entered by typists.
Aug 18, 05: They've managed to encode data on the human fingernail, and they aren't stopping there. Skin, teeth, and more might soon join the fingernail as biological USB drives of a sort.
. . Researchers used a femtosecond laser to encode the data. When parts of a fingernail get zapped, the microscopic sections emit increased fluorescence levels. These levels can then be read by observational technology, such as blue-laser diode illumination, CCD sensors, or imaging lenses. While an average of 5MB of data can be encoded at varying depths, the data will last only about six months, or the amount of time it takes a fingernail to grow out completely.
Aug 18, 05: Researchers at NEC have developed a new type of rechargeable battery based on organic compounds and say it could be useful in a wide range of IT-related applications.
. . The battery is based on a similar cell structure as the common lithium ion battery but with one significant difference: Instead of using poisonous ingredients like lithium and cobalt, the battery uses an organic compound called PTMA. This makes it both environmentally friendly and also makes possible some key performance features, including the capability to deliver a large current over a short time. NEC tested the battery in a PC and found that it can deliver enough power to keep the system running for about 20 seconds. Should the power fail, the battery would let the PC back up data and shut down properly.
. . The batteries are cheap to produce, so they could become common in PCs when they are sold commercially, which could be several years from now.
Aug 11, 05: Whether a storm was over land, ocean or coastal areas, clouds with more ice produced more lightning, researchers studying satellite radar images report in the journal. They're learning new details by studying the National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite images which can look at both the number of lightning strikes and the volume of ice in a cloud at the same time.
. . Crucial is what is called precipitation-sized ice, particles of a millimeter or so which sometimes can be seen falling as small hail. More of that --more lightning. These particles crash into smaller ice particles in the swirling winds inside storm clouds, resulting in a separation of electrical charge. The charge separates between smaller and larger particles, with the smaller carrying a positive charge to the top of the thundercloud and the larger ones with the negative charge sinking to the bottom. It's like making a big battery with the charge building up until it is discharged as lightning.
Aug 8, 05: The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 100 meters away. Officials in the United States say they'll be closely watching the British trial as they contemplate initiating their own tests of the plates, which incorporate radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags to make vehicles electronically trackable.
. . Privacy advocates are less enthusiastic about the technology. "It's too easy for (RFID license plates) to become a back-door surveillance tool."
Aug 6, 05: Italian scientists discovered that nearly 10 pounds of cocaine residues flow into Italy's Po River every day. How is Italy's biggest river getting all that coke? From urine. Turns out that coke users, like beer drinkers, just rent their substance of choice. Although in the case of cocaine, it's transformed by the liver into benzoylecgonine.
. . The level of residues translates into at least 40,000 daily doses of coke snorted by residents of the Po Valley --a great deal more than official estimates of 15,000. Statistics about drug use are notoriously inaccurate, given that drug users don't generally like to fill out surveys.
. . Depending on how far up the sewage system you go, it could also be used to measure drug use in a prison or neighborhood. Depending on how far up the sewage system you go, it could also be used to measure drug use in a prison or neighborhood.
July 29, 05: A new super magnet at The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory weighs more than 13 metric tons and has a magnetic field 420,000 times that of the Earth's. The new magnet, 13 years in development, & costing $16 million, could lead to major advances in medicine, materials research and basic understanding of nature.
. . It operates at a high frequency, making for better images in experiments where the magnet is used to essentially take pictures of cells and molecules. When researchers study the brains of mice they use magnetic resonance imaging. A larger chamber means live mice can be studied —-the whole mouse can fit in there rather than just a small part. And a higher magnetic field means clearer, more detailed pictures of the brain. The magnet also will enable researchers to look at larger molecules — such as proteins —-in more detail.
. . For example, Cross is studying the structure of one particular protein present in the flu virus. By using the new magnet to define the shape and chemical properties of the protein, a drug that specifically targets it can be developed.
. . The magnet will also advance materials research, allowing scientists to better understand the properties of a number of substances used in every day industrial items.
July 27, 05: The heart of our planet is largely a mystery because scientists can't go there or see what's inside. Geologists have just one tool, seismology, with which to probe the inner Earth.
. . The contents of the tool bag just doubled. For the first time, researchers have detected tiny particles called geoneutrinos coming from deep within the Earth. The discovery is expected to shed light, almost literally, on the contents and processes of the planet's insides. "We're doing essentially simple-minded chemical analysis."
. . The outer part of the core is thought to be liquid, while intense pressure forces the inner core of iron to be solid. The exact composition of the core and the lower reaches of the mantle, which surround the core, are not known.
. . Leftover heat from the planet's formation is stored in the core and released gradually. Second, the radioactive decay of rocks releases heat. Scientists do not know how much heat each process contributes. But they know how important the question is. The inner heat drives volcanic activity and the shifting crust, which leads to earthquakes. Heat sculpts the planet.
. . . Here's what turned out to be useful: When rocks decay radioactively, subatomic particles called geoneutrinos are released. Particles representing the decay of uranium and thorium, specifically, were detected in the new experiments by a Japanese apparatus called KamLAND. Over the past two years, the setup spotted about one of the elusive geoneutrinos a month. Each geoneutrino carries a signature of its chemical origin. Larger detectors, which might be built in future decades, could pick up a geoneutrino every day and help scientists pin down the planet's deepest activity.
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. . The Earth’s radius is about 6,400 km. The main layers of its interior are in descending order: crust, mantle and core. The crust thickness averages about 30 km under the continents, but is only about 5 km under the oceans. It is light and brittle and can break. In fact it's fractured into more than a dozen major plates and several minor ones. It is where most earthquakes originate.
. . The mantle is more flexible –-it flows instead of fractures. It extends down to about 2,900 km below the surface. The core consists of a solid inner core and a fluid outer core. The fluid contains iron, which, as it moves, generates the Earth’s magnetic field. The crust and upper mantle form the lithosphere, which is broken up into several plates that float on top of the hot molten mantle below.
July 26, 05: Huge frozen dunes create corduroy-like snow patterns that stretch across the Antarctic landscape. From space, the ripples resemble giant fingerprints. But you'd be excused for missing them if you explored the continent from the surface.
. . Although the snowdrifts, known as megadunes, range up to eight meters high, their crests are up to 6 km apart. The snowy megadunes might bring to mind giant sand dunes found in deserts, but their construction is quite different. Sand dunes are can be hundreds of meters tall, easily dwarfing their cold-climate cousins. "Also, sand dunes migrate down wind, whereas snow dunes actually climb into the wind."
. . The dunes are created by katabatic winds --the term for air moving downhill. The winds, ranging from 90 to 370 kph, are some of the most constant on the planet. The key to megadune building is the steady and continuous nature of the winds. The winds originate near the center of the continent, which is uphill from the megadunes. As air cools at the higher altitudes, it becomes denser. Gravity causes sheets of dense air to slide down the face of the continent. "It's kind of like maple syrup sloughing off a pancake."
. . As the sheet slides down the ice, it picks up speed. Once it hits the plateau, the air begins to ripple. It's this slight wobbling that Scambos and his colleagues believe forms the megadunes.
. . The swirling air whips up snow, and over time, builds dunes. The snow packs on at a rate of less than one inch per year, so it can take a couple of centuries to build just one, and thousands of years for the dune to move from one crest to the next.
. . Sand dunes, in comparison, can be built up in a single sand storm. From 1954 to 1959, group of dunes in China's Ningxia Province moved more than 100 meters per year.
July 26, 05: Scientists have figured out why we rarely notice our own blinking. Researchers found that visual sensitivity starts decreasing just before we blink. But what goes on in the brain remained a mystery.
. . In the new study, scientists put fiber-optic lights in the mouths of people. The lights were powerful enough to penetrate the roofs of their mouths and strike their retinas, where light is recorded. They wore goggles to block outside light. When the test subjects blinked, the amount of light hitting their retinas didn't change. Activity in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. During blinking, brain activity was suppressed in areas that respond to visual input.
July 24, 05: An enormous, hazy cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert is blowing toward the southern United States, but meteorologists do not expect much effect beyond colorful sunsets. The leading edge of the cloud — nearly the size of the continental United States — should move across Florida.
July 20, 05: Heavy rain has caused a series of earth tremors at the foot of the German Alps, Bavarian Environment Minister said. "Scientists had long suspected a connection between heavy rainfall and clusters of small quakes in this part of the Alps", he said in a statement. "The proof is a small sensation among experts." The tremors were probably caused by the rain dissolving salty stone inside the mountain, a ministry official said.
July 19, 05: Residents of the northeastern part of Arkansas along the New Madrid fault should be prepared for a high-magnitude earthquake, the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Information says. The center's information services director, said that there is a "significant probability" that a major trembler could rock the region. "There's always reason to be aware when you're in an area that has the probability to have a a magnitude 6 or greater."
. . There have been six earthquakes measuring 2 or above along the southern part of the New Madrid fault zone since May 1, and four earthquakes near a 4 magnitude since February. There have only been two other times in state history where magnitude 4 earthquakes have happened in such rapid succession.
July 16, 05: New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow. The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked. Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies --16%-- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16%.
. . That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up. Experts say the report is a reminder to doctors and patients that they should not put too much stock in a single study and understand that treatments often become obsolete with medical advances.
. . "The crazy part about science and yet the exciting part about science is you almost never have something that's black and white. A single study is not the final word, and that is an important message."
200 tons of tiny *synthetic diamonds, or grit, are used by industry each year --several times total mined production. (The world has stopped making diamonds.)
July 7, 05: Scientists have proposed two new techniques for growing meat in a lab by a process that could one day make beef cows obsolete. Don't toss out those beef steaks just yet, however. The technology is in its infant stages and it is not clear whether large-scale production will work. It's not known, for example, how to exercise an animal that doesn't exist, in order to give lab meat the full range of cow-like qualities.
. . Currently, small amounts of edible fish can be created in the lab. But University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny says that this process could be adapted on an industrial scale --whole factories producing fish sticks without the fish or chicken nuggets without the real birds. "With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply", Matheny says. "And you could do it in a way that's better for the environment and human health. In the long run, this is a very feasible idea."
. . Lab-grown meats could be designed to be healthier too. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients", Matheny says. "For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat." Cultured meats would reduce the environmental burden that comes from raising livestock. Also, it wouldn't need to be treated with antibiotics and other drugs that are common in the industry.
. . Scientists have already demonstrated that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be turned into thousands in the lab. But so far, these experiments haven't gone large scale. To grow meat on large scale, Matheny suggests two methods. One is to grow muscle cells on long, flat membranes. Once the cells are mature, the tissue would be stretched off the membrane and stacked so the product better resembled the real thing. The other option would be to grow cells on small, three-dimensional beads that stretch with temperature changes. The cells could be scraped off and turned into processed meat like chicken nuggets or ground beef.
. . The trick, however, is to grow something that tastes like real meat. That means growing not just muscle cells, but other types of tissue --like fat-- as well. Once the taste is good, the texture has to be just right for consumers to buy into the idea. "We have to figure out how to 'exercise' the cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch the tissue, like a live animal would."
July 13, 05: The desert in southeastern New Mexico is probably the last place you’d look for a coral reef, but that’s just where a giant one formed millions of years ago. Back during the Permian Era, when all the continents were stuck together in one big landmass that stretched from pole to pole, this region was underwater. Over the years, geologic forces beneath the Earth’s surface pushed some of the reef high into the air. Today, the 400-mile-long, cave riddled, horseshoe-shaped reef is known as the Guadalupe Mountains.
July 13, 05: Last year, in an estimated 232 million visits to U.S. beaches, lifeguards made 48,514 rescues, according to the US Lifesaving Association. Of those frightening situations, 21,123 were related to rip currents. That makes rip currents, also known as rip tides or undertows, a much bigger threat than sharks, which are widely feared but only kill about six people a year worldwide.
. . Every year, more than 100 beachgoers drown in these strong rushes of water that pull swimmers away from the shore. And that's just in the US. A common perception is that rip currents pull you underwater, but in reality they're roughly horizontal currents that gradually suck you further and further from the beach.
. . Here's how they originate: Waves break differently at different parts of a shore -- in some places the waves are strong and in others they are weak. These differing conditions carve out channels in sand bars that lie just off the beach. When water returns to the ocean, it follows the path of least resistance, which is typically through these channels. This creates a strong and often very localized current capable of sweeping unsuspecting swimmers out to sea. The currents usually move at one to two feet per second but stronger ones can pull at up to eight feet per second.
. . Heavy breaking waves can trigger a sudden rip current, but rip currents are most hazardous around low tide, when water is already pulling away from the beach. Most often it happens in waist deep water, experts say. A person will dive under a wave, but when they resurface they find they are much further from the beach and still being pulled away. It does no good to try and swim against it. The US Lifesaving Association (USLA) suggests trying to swim parallel to the shore and out of the current. Once you've gotten out of the current, you can begin swimming back to shore. However, if it is too difficult to swim sideways out of the current, try floating or treading water and let nature do its thing. You'll wash out of the current at some point and can then make your way back to shore.
July 13, 05: Star Trek?! Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems Ltd. makes small blinding lasers used in Iraq. But his real project is a nonlethal energy device called the StunStrike. Basically, it fires a bolt of lightning. It can be tuned to blow up explosives, possibly to stop vehicles and certainly to buzz people. The strike can be made to feel as gentle as "broom bristles" or cranked up to deliver a paralyzing jolt that "takes a few minutes to wear off."
July 13, 05: Scientist Professor Richard Dawkins has opened a global conference of big thinkers warning that our Universe may be just "too queer" to understand. Professor Dawkins, the renowned Selfish Gene author from Oxford University, said we were living in a "middle world" reality that we have created.
. . Professor Dawkins' opening talk, in a session called Meme Power, explored the ways in which humans invent their own realities to make sense of the infinitely complex worlds they are in; worlds made more complex by ideas such as quantum physics, which is beyond most human understanding. "Are there things about the Universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, in principle, ungraspable in any mind, however superior?" he asked. "Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe." Each species, in fact, has a different "reality". They work with different "software" to make them feel comfortable, he suggested.
. . Because different species live in different models of the world, there was a discomfiting variety of real worlds, he suggested. Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins. We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued. This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world --the medium scale environment-- a world in which we cannot see individual atoms. Because we exist in such a limited section of the universe, and given its enormous scale, we cannot expect to be the only organisms within it, Professor Dawkins believes.
. . He concluded with the thought that if he could re-engineer his brain in any way he would make himself a genius mathematician. He would also want to time travel to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
July 13, 05: Mountains appear so ancient and timeless that it can be difficult to comprehend their slow rise from flat obscurity. Geologists have long modeled the process as slow, grinding and hot.
. . A new discovery suggests the buildup can be much quicker and cooler than thought, however. "One way that mountains form is when two parts of the Earth's crust collide and fold over each other under pressure", says Bas Hensen of the University of New South Wales. "This process simultaneously liberates long-buried rocks and consumes others for millions of years."
. . They studied the geology of the Southern Caledonides in western Norway. A continental collision occurred there some 425 million years ago, causing certain rocks to be buried to depths of 60 km (36 miles). These rocks have since returned to the surface, where glaciers have ground and polished them.
. . The researchers found that the time between burial and resurfacing --called the orogenic cycle-- took 13 million years, instead of some 40 million years as previously thought. The implication is that the mountains themselves grow up faster than expected. Besides shorter time scales, the rock recycling process inside mountains may happen at unexpectedly cool temperatures.
Researchers have invented a semiconductor with conductivity similar to silicon. It makes cheap transistors that are as heat-resistant as stoneware, which means they can survive in hostile environments like car engines. They're as flexible and durable as plastic garbage bags, an obvious plus for portable electronics. The best part: They could be used in 3-D displays and windshield computers. Why? Because they're utterly clear.
. . See-through semi-conductors could even make it possible to etch circuitry rapidly in three dimensions, on the inside of clear solid objects. Theoretically, a femtosecond-pulse laser --which can blast electrons away from molecules with a finely focused sunlike flash, altering the composition of materials such as glass and plastic-- could draw a 3-D supercomputer inside a transparent semiconductor.
. . Imagine a video pillar filled top to bottom with radiant 3-D pixels, or a heads-up windshield display that helps you navigate, blocks the sun, flashes warnings to other drivers, and lights up the road ahead. Imagine eyeglasses with the computing power of a high-end laptop and the resolution of HDTV.
The Japanese have discovered an almost friction-free lube. The lubricant is made of an array of fullerene molecules between thin films of graphite.
A Blue Jet is an electrical flash that strikes up into the ionosphere like blue forked fire. This is a high-altitude phenomenon starting 16 km (10 miles) high and reaching another 64 km (40 miles) up, but so tremendous that it's clearly visible from the ground.
. . The ionosphere sits at a 300,000-volt higher potential than the lower atmosphere. Blue jets apparently "ground" the ionosphere by discharging this difference like ordinary lightning does for potentials between clouds and between clouds and the ground. On the other hand, blue jets may help charge the ionosphere. We don't know yet which way the current flows.
. . The field accelerates the electrons and slams them into air molecules. The molecules breakdown into ions and free electrons and emit light. The newly generated electrons also accelerate. It's like an electron avalanche, he says, that can flood up toward the ionosphere or slide earthward, depending on the electric field direction.
July 5, 05: Take Your Time: An extra second will be added to 2005 to make up for the slowing down of the Earth's rotation. The once-common "leap second" is the first in seven years and reflects the unpredictable nature of the planet's behavior. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris keeps track of time by measuring the Earth's rotation, which varies, and by an atomic clock, which is unwavering. When a difference in the two clocks shows up, the IERS adds or subtracts a second to the year.
. . "An atomic clock keeps time by looking at the fundamental vibrations of atoms", O'Brian said. "It's like middle "C" on a tuning fork – a particular kind of atom has a set of frequencies that can be used to keep time." The current standard is a cesium atom, which vibrates 9,192,631,770 times per second. As far as scientists know, this doesn't change over time.
. . At least one was added every year between 1972 and 1983 before a slight drop-off in the mid-eighties and nineties. "And then, in 1999 for reasons still unknown, the rotation of the Earth speeded up a bit, so we haven't had to add a second since then."
. . Part of the secret behind Earth's changing speeds is tidal force exerted by the Moon, which is responsible for the gradual slowing of our planet's rotation over time. But other slight forces are at work, such as changes in the season, movement of rock in the molten core, and other factors that scientists have yet to uncover. "But long term slowing is due to the Moon. It's about 1.5/1000th of a second slower per century. The day is longer today than it was in 1905."
July 1, 05: A breakthrough new study, announced today, supports a leading theory that melting starts when the fundamental structure of matter begins to crack. Melting is considered a basic phenomena in physics. An understanding of how it works is crucial to gaining a firm grasp on the physical world. Yet major details about the mechanisms that drive the melting of an ice cube are missing.
. . A premelting occurs in spots where atoms within solid crystals are not perfectly aligned, and they begin to move. The changes are seen in pictures taken as the material was heated. The imperfections are much like the differences seen in wood grain, the scientists said. "These motions then spread into the more ordered parts of the crystal," Alsayed said. "We could see that the amount of premelting depended on the type of crystal defect and on the distance from the defect."
. . Nature could inspire technology as the process is investigated further. "The existence of premelting inside solid materials implies that liquids exist within crystals before their melting temperature is reached," Yodh said. "Understanding this effect will provide insight for the design of strong materials that are more or less impervious to temperature changes and could also apply to our theories of how natural materials, such as water, evolve in our environment."
July 1, 05: A collection of notes by the 17th century English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, that scientists thought had been lost forever, have been found. The notes on alchemy were originally discovered after Newton's death in 1727 but were lost after they were sold at auction in July 1936 for 15 pounds ($27). They were found while researchers were cataloguing manuscripts at the Royal Society, Britain's academy of leading scientists.
June 21, 05: Neutrinos are tiny particles that can plow through the center of the Earth without even a hint of a whisper. Every second, billions of them rain down --and up-- from outer space. Some of these cosmic ghosts were witnesses to the first seconds of the universe. Now, for the first time, density fluctuations have been observed. The detection provides additional confirmation of the standard cosmological picture, as well as the fundamental theory of particle physics.
. . Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no electric charge and extremely little mass. They are extremely hard to study because they have a very low probability of interacting with the rest of the world.
. . According to the standard theory, neutrinos arose in large numbers out of the fires of the Big Bang. These so-called "background" neutrinos still exist: with 2,500 of them inhabiting every cubic inch of the universe. Detected neutrinos -—coming from the Sun, or from cosmic rays, or occasionally from distant explosions—- have millions of times more energy than the background neutrinos.
. . Having lost much of their energy as the universe expanded and cooled, the background neutrinos are impossible to see in any current—or even proposed—detector, so Trotta and Melchiorri looked at the effect that neutrinos would have on another relic from the early universe—the cosmic microwave background.
. . The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a snapshot of the universe as it looked 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Back then it was a fairly boring place, with no galaxies or stars--just minor fluctuations (one part in 100,000) in the density of matter.
. . This clumpiness left its imprint in temperature variations in the CMB. Light emitted from a dense clump would appear --after traveling billions of light years to reach us-- as a hot spot in the microwave sky. "Neutrinos can't talk to the matter and photons directly, but they can affect the CMB through their gravity." As "neutrino wrinkles are ironed out", said Trotta, they drag on the matter—effectively reducing the number of small-sized clumps.
The Earth is 4,550,000,000 years old, & 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons. ]It didn't specify if that's modern tons or old American tons.]
June 20, 05: For more than a century, some of the biggest minds in science have debated whether brain size has anything to do with intelligence. A new study suggests it does, says its Michael McDaniel, an industrial and organizational psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. "For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume and intelligence are related."
. . Over the past five years or so, various research groups have studied brain size using new imaging techniques that provide a more accurate gauge. Still controversial is whether the standard intelligence tests used to measure smarts in the studies are valid. Do IQ tests really reveal intelligence? And how relevant are they to the real world? "When intelligence is correlated with a biological reality such as brain volume, it becomes harder to argue that human intelligence can't be measured or that the scores do not reflect something meaningful", McDaniel said.
. . Other research discovered that abundant gray matter in certain locations was strongly correlated to IQ. "This may be why one person is quite good at mathematics and not so good at spelling, and another person, with the same IQ, has the opposite pattern of abilities", said that study's leader.
June 17, 05: Quantum behavior is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured those possibilities shrink to one --uncertainty is eliminated. So, if you know the present, you cannot change it. If, for example, you know your father is alive today, the laws of the quantum universe state that there is no possibility of him being killed in the past. See Schrödinger's Cat in our dictionary.
. . It is as if, in some strange way, the present takes account of all the possible routes back into the past and, because your father is certainly alive, none of the routes back can possibly lead to his death. "Quantum mechanics distinguishes between something that might happen and something that did happen. If we don't know your father is alive right now - if there is only a 90% chance that he is alive right now, then there is a chance that you can go back and kill him. But if you know he is alive, there is no chance you can kill him."
. . Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind.
. . The new model, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics, gets rid of the famous paradox surrounding time travel.
June 14, 05: Nanotechnology, an engineering science that holds hope for scores of new products and processes, is not being properly evaluated for human and environmental risks, a study released this week has found.
. . The rapidly evolving science, which involves scores of start-ups, corporations and universities seeking to engineer materials on a molecular level, carries both actual and perceived environmental, health and safety (EHS) risks.
. . But without a full and continuing assessment of those risks, the nascent industry expected to employ thousands of people and generate billions of dollars in revenue may be hobbled by public opposition or corporate mishaps.
. . It could produce $8 trillion in cumulative manufacturing output through 2014, employs sophisticated methods for construction of materials at the atomic level.
June 13, 05: Newly developed processes for wool production promise not only an unshrinkable sweater, but one that is silky smooth and shinier to boot. The new process, called "bio-polishing", was developed by the Agricultural Research Service branch of the USDA. Bio-polishing uses a series of chemical and enzyme treatments to provide smoother and softer wool than by conventional methods.
. . Peroxide whitens the wool and removes a protective layer from the fiber. Once the protective coating has been removed, the wool is treated with an enzyme that snips off the ends of fibers that poke out from yarn. It's these little projections that make wool itchy."The enzyme digests the fiber ends, and that smoothes the fibers."
. . The enzyme treatment also makes the wool worry-free washable. The surface of each wool fiber is covered in scales, much like a fish's skin. When wool gets wet and heated, these scales overlap more and lock in place, which shortens the fibers and thus the length of your sleeves. The enzyme treatment smoothes down the surface of the fibers --preventing them from locking-- without reducing the strength or elastic recovery of the fabric.
. . Bio-polishing will actually produce stronger wool than traditional methods. Current dyeing methods call for high temperatures to get the dye past the protective layer on the fibers.
. . Politics too! Most wool produced in the United States is a byproduct from sheep raised for meat, and in general is not soft or high in quality as wool from countries like Australia, which produces soft, fluffy Merino wool. Softer, unshrinkable wool could give the US wool industry a sales advantage.
June 13, 05: Israeli researchers have germinated a sapling date palm from seeds 2,000 years old, hoping its ancient DNA could reveal medicinal qualities to benefit future generations. They used seeds found in archaeological excavations at Masada, the desert mountain fortress where ancient Jewish rebels chose suicide over capture by Roman legions in A.D. 73. She said they were the oldest seeds ever brought back to life. "A lotus seed was germinated (in China) after 1,200 years." It's now about 12 inches tall. Sallon and her colleagues have sent one of its leaves for DNA analysis.
. . If the plant survives, it will take some 30 years to bear fruit, provided it turns out to be female. Sallon, however, said that even a male will provide food for thought. "The genetics of this plant will be very interesting, whatever sex it is", she said. "It's the females that produce the fruit...but the males are very valuable as well, they're no less valuable than the females."
. . The date palms now grown in Israel were imported from California and are of a strain originating in Iraq, she said. The Judean date prized in antiquity but extinct until Methusaleh's awakening, might have had very different properties to the modern variant. "Dates were highly medicinal. They had an enormous amount of use in ancient times for infections, for tumors", she said.
June 8, 05: Sprites. Lightning-inspired emissions dance high above thunderstorms and produce some of the most spectacular light shows nature has to offer. The sprites rise as high as 80 km into the atmosphere and last only milliseconds, so the are very difficult to study. Pilots who first spotted them were thought crazy by scientists who had never seen them. They were confirmed in 1989 when spotted from a space shuttle.
. . They've found evidence that sprites form during major lightning strikes. They gathered data on thunderstorms from across the United States during the summer of 2000, and showed that high intensity lightning charges are the key ingredient in sprite formation.
. . Sprites have cousins called elves, which are intense flashes of lightning that can light the night sky within a 100 km radius. Both sprites and elves create strong electric fields and electromagnetic pulses that may interact with the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere.
June 7, 05: Scientists at the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico have accelerated a small plate from zero to 34 kilometers a second (76,000 mph) in less than a second. The speed of the thrust was a new record for Sandia's "Z Machine" --not only the fastest gun in the West, but in the world.
. . The Z Machine is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 kilometers per second that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the Sun. That's 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth's gravitational field. The ultra-tiny aluminum plates, just 850 microns thick, are accelerated at 1010 g.
. . Z's hurled plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave --in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure-- that passes through the target material. The waves are so powerful that they turn solids into liquids, liquids into gases, and gases into plasmas.
Many of our valuable metallic resources such as nickel, platinum-group metals, and others are derived from asteroid impacts.
May 31, 05: A new study of Nobel Prize winners and great inventors suggests top innovators are older today than they were a century ago. "I find that the age at which noted innovations are produced has increased by approximately 6 years over the 20th Century", says Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University. "Innovators are much less productive at younger ages."
. . Jones figures that the accumulation of knowledge over time --all that stuff that most of us don't know-- means even great minds need to spend more time educating themselves before they can make a breakthrough. That means the squeeze is on to produce great work. Individual innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle.
June 1, 05: A calcite formation named Snowy River could prove a gold mine for scientists. Snowy River, believed to be the largest continuous calcite formation in the world, was discovered in September 2001. The stark white passage, looking like a river of snow surrounded by walls of brown clay and black manganese dioxide deposits, stretches more than two miles from Fort Stanton Cave in sourthern New Mexico. It's not a Carlsbad Caverns-type cave. Fort Stanton has few secondary formations such as stalactites.
. . Penny Boston, director of the cave and karst studies program at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, has been studying the microbiology of the passage. She has found several types of bacteria that live in a lightless environment and are unknown anywhere else. The chemical byproducts of these bacteria may have pharmaceutical applications.
Keystroke biometrics read a user's typing speed and rhythm, which are ostensibly unique --much like fingerprints. Combined with a password, typing style is an effective identifier. Only 1 in 50 tries yields a false rejection, and just 1 in 1,000 gets wrongly accepted.
May 25, 05: Nanotechnology is broadly defined as working with materials on a sub-100 nanometer scale. eg, Tiny wireless transmitters, cameras and even sensors that can register odors could be strung together and connected to wider networks to allow people conversing virtually to hear, feel and smell all the same things, despite being physically separated. Using the technology this way, he said, would allow new ways of meeting and sharing information for businesses, without incurring huge travel costs.
Bell Labs "cell phone" project, for example, is a transmitter that's small enough to fit inside a single animal cell. Its "electronic cornea", which uses a liquid as a lens to capture images, can be focused and aimed using electricity.
. . Another of the lab's research areas is microfluidics. A structure called "NanoGrass", which looks like a tiny pegboard, can be used to combine or separate materials with electricity. This item has implications for chip cooling and also for batteries, Jaffe said. It could help keep a battery from discharging.
May 25, 05: Cooks know there's a huge difference between raw and cooked garlic. If you've ever gnawed on the raw form, you know it too. What a bite. When cooked, it is mellower. A new study reveals why.
. . Raw garlic is full of sulfurous compounds, including a chemical called alliin. When a clove is bruised, chopped, or crushed, the alliin is quickly converted to a chemical known as allicin. That's the stuff that makes raw garlic stingingly pungent. It actually activates two human proteins, called TRPV1 and TRPA1, that interact with pain-sensing neurons in your mouth. But when the garlic is cooked, the allicin is converted into other sulfur molecules. This change is what results in reduced pungency.
. . The unusual combination of chemicals in garlic may have evolved as a way to protect the bulb, which grows close to the surface in arid climates, researchers say. Ticks, mosquitoes, worms and some birds are indeed repelled by the smell.
. . Garlic originated in Central Asia. The Egyptian and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans all knew of it. Nearly 300,000 metric tons are now produced in the United States each year.
May 23, 05: Hypothetical tunnels called wormholes once looked like the best bet for constructing a real time machine. These cosmic shortcuts, which link one point in the Universe to another, are favored by science fiction writers as a means both of explaining time travel and of circumventing the limitations imposed by the speed of light. But the idea of building these so-called traversable wormholes is looking increasingly shaky, according to two new scientific analyses.
. . Calculations by the Oregon researchers show a wormhole that combines exotic matter with semi-classical space-time would be fundamentally unstable. This result relies in part on a previous paper in which Hsu and Buniy argued that systems which violate a physical principle known as the null energy condition become unstable. "We aren't saying you can't build a wormhole. But the ones you would like to build - the predictable ones where you can say Mr Spock will land in New York at 2pm on this day - those look like they will fall apart", Dr Hsu said.
. . Among other things, their analysis deals with the proposal that wormhole throats could be kept open using arbitrarily small amounts of exotic matter. Fewster and Roman calculated that, even if it were possible to build such a wormhole, its throat would probably be too small for time travel. It might --in theory-- be possible to carefully fine-tune the geometry of the wormhole so that the wormhole throat became big enough for a person to fit through, says Fewster. But building a wormhole with a throat radius big enough to just fit a proton would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 30. A human-sized wormhole would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 60.
. . Cambridge astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is among those researchers who have pondered the question of wormholes. In the 1980s, he argued that something fundamental in the laws of physics would prevent wormholes being used for time travel. This idea forms the basis of Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture.
May 22, 05: Chinese mountaineers and researchers climbed to the top of Mount Everest today to determine whether the world's tallest mountain is still growing. They placed a survey beacon on the summit and set up radar and Global Positioning System instruments to measure its precise height, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
. . In 1975, Chinese scientists measured the height of Everest at 8,848.13 meters, a few centimeters more than an Indian survey had found in the 1950s. But in 1999, a U.S. team measured the mountain at 8,850 meters.
. . Growing or not, Everest is changing in other ways. Its glaciers are shrinking on the Chinese side faster than ever because of global warming.
. . The mountain, known to Chinese as Qomolangma, straddles the border between China and Nepal. The new measurement of its height is due to be released by August.
May 22, 05: Death could become a thing of the past by the mid-21st century, as computer technology becomes sophisticated enough for the contents of a brain to be "downloaded" onto a supercomputer, according to a leading British futurologist. However, this technology might be expensive enough to remain the preserve of the rich for a decade or two past that.
. . Among other eyebrow-raising predictions by Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at British telecommunications giant BT, is the prospect of computer systems being able to feel emotions. This could eventually involve such things as airplanes being programed to be even more terrified of crashing than their passengers, meaning they would do whatever possible to stay airborne.
. . While the predictions might sound outlandish, they were merely the product of extrapolations drawn from the current rate at which computers are evolving, Pearson said. He noted that Sony's new PlayStation 3 computer games console is 35 times as powerful as the model it replaced, and in terms of processing is "one percent as powerful as a human brain".
. . In views which those of a religious persuasion might find hard to handle, Pearson said the next computing goal would be to replicate consciousness. "Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design on a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it's possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020."
May 23, 05: A Japanese geologist says he has discovered another tectonic plate under the Tokyo area, a find that may force Japan to rethink earthquake forecasts and preparations for the capital. Present government estimates say Tokyo has a 90 percent chance of being hit by a major earthquake in the next 50 years. The last massive tremor to hit the city killed 140,000 people in 1923.
. . He deduced the existence of a plate that had previously been thought to be part of what is known as the Philippine Plate. If Toda's findings are confirmed, the geology of the Tokyo region is even more complex than current models indicate, with four tectonic plates layered on top of one another in some areas. Four tectonic plates meet in the Japan area, the Eurasian, North American, Philippine and Pacific plates.
. . Japan is one of the world's most seismically active areas and accounts for 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.
May 20, 05: It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi novel: Powerful X-ray beams are used to illuminate the long-lost theorems of ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, lifting them from faded 10th-century parchments. Though much of its text has been deciphered over the years by visible or ultraviolet light, about a quarter of the 174-page document remains unread.
. . Using state-of-the-art circular particle accelerators called synchrotrons, the scientists shone ultra-fine light beams onto three pages of the aged texts. Tuned to a specific energy, the light caused traces of iron in the ink to fluoresce, revealing for the first time the wispy outlines of Archimedes' 2,000-year-old ideas etched onto a goatskin document known as the "Palimpsest".
. . Bergmann came across a magazine article that mentioned the Palimpsest and other religious texts whose ink contained iron. ``I immediately thought it would be possible to use our X-rays to image the document,'' said Bergmann, whose own research uses synchrotron X-rays to detect extremely small amounts of iron within proteins.
May 20, 05: The earthquake that triggered Asia's deadly tsunami in December was more powerful than scientists originally estimated, according to new studies. The quake generated a tsunami that killed about 300,000 people. Researchers now believe the quake had a magnitude of 9.15
May 19, 05: December's great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake —-the most powerful in more than 40 years and the trigger of a devastating tsunami-— shook the ground everywhere on Earth's surface. Weeks later, the planet was still trembling.
. . The quake resulted from the longest fault rupture ever observed —-720 miles to 780 miles, which spread for 10 minutes, also a record. A typical earthquake's duration would be 30 seconds.
. . The December quake was the first of its size to be measured and studied by the new worldwide array of digital seismic instruments. Those results are starting to come in. They said the higher sea floor displaced so much water from the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea that sea level worldwide was raised 0.004 inch. Ground movement of as much as 0.4 inch occurred everywhere on Earth's surface, though it was too small to be felt in most areas.
. . Among the other findings reported in the various papers:
. . _ In Sri Lanka, more than 1,000 miles from the epicenter, the ground moved nearly 4 inches.
. . _ The rupture spread from south to north, resulting in a Doppler effect in instruments measuring it. Seismometers in Russia recorded the quake at a higher frequency because it was moving toward them, while those in Australia measured a lower frequency as it moved away.
. . _ When the surface waves from the Sumatra quake reached Alaska, they triggered a swarm of 14 local earthquakes in the Mount Wrangell area.
May 19, 05: Cambridge-based CMR Fuel Cells said it had made a breakthrough with a new design of fuel cell which is a tenth of the size of existing models and small enough to replace conventional batteries in laptop computers.
CMR said the new design would run for four times longer than conventional batteries in a laptop or other devices like power tools. "It's also instantly rechargable." Evans said the design, which would run initially on methanol, was based on new type of fuel stack which mixed air and fuel. Up to now fuel stacks have relied on complete separation of the two.
May 19, 05: The continents were moving across the face of the Earth much sooner than had been thought, according to new evidence from China. The new data come from a huge chunk of the rock that lay beneath the sea floor 2.5 billion years ago.
. . Tim Kusky, of St Louis University, US, says it is the first large intact piece of oceanic mantle ever found from our planet's earliest period, the Archean. Located not far from the Great Wall of China, the ancient mantle rocks are preserved in a highly faulted belt 100 kilometers (62 miles) long.
. . The newly found rock was formed tens of kilometers below the ancient sea floor. Scientists say it preserves 2.5-billion-year-old minerals that hold clues to the origin of how continents move across the globe --plate tectonics.
. . The minerals, including an unusual type of chromite (iron chromium oxide) deposit previously only known from deep ocean floor rocks, appear to have been deformed at extremely high temperatures before they were completely crystallized by volcanic heat. This indicates that the rocks were moving away from mid ocean ridges, say scientists. This suggests that the continents were moving more than 500 million years earlier than was previously believed.
. . Hot volcanic vents on the ocean floor may have provided the nutrients and conditions required for life to begin. Because such volcanic vents are associated with tectonic movements Kusky says that it is possible that life developed and diversified around these vents as the plates started spreading.
May 19, 05: Like slow-moving bookends, two earthquake faults are squeezing northern metropolitan Los Angeles nearly a quarter inch a year, scientists said. The big squeeze involves the convergence of the Pacific plate, a vast chunk of Earth's crust, that is sliding under the North American plate. The two converge by 5 mm (0.2 inches) every year. The strain will ultimately be released in earthquakes much like the 1994 Northridge temblor, the scientists believe.
May 19, 05: The smile on the face of the Mona Lisa is so enigmatic that it disappears when it is looked at directly, says a US scientist. Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University said the smile only became apparent when the viewer looked at other parts of the painting.
. . This is because because of the way the human eye processes visual information, said Prof Livingstone. The eye uses two types of vision, foveal and peripheral. Foveal, or direct vision, is excellent at picking up detail but is less suited to picking up shadows. "The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa's smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies, and so is seen best by your peripheral vision."
May 19, 05: The Owl (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) is an awesome project which requires international effort to make it happen. This huge telescope --its main mirror would be more than 100 meters across-- would have a predicted resolution 40 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope and a sensitivity several thousand times greater.
. . It would be sited at an altitude of 5 km and would be operated almost as a space observatory, with a base camp for the human operators nearby at a lower height of no more than 3 km. The preferred site would be in the Atacama Desert, which is said to be the driest in the world, making it a perfect location for astronomy. Already, telescopes are located there from the US, Europe and the Eso's newest member, the UK.
. . Owl is currently in the design phase, with the cost and timescale still to be fixed. But the aim is to take advantage of the latest developments in telescope technology to make the next giant leap forward in observing.
. . "With a telescope that has 10 times the collecting area of every telescope ever built, you would be able to go down several thousand times fainter than the faintest thing you see today with those telescopes. It would open an enormous new window on the Universe, allowing you to detect the presence of oxygen if there is any on Earth-like planets around nearby stars. It would allow you to see exploding stars out to the edge of the Universe. It would really be a 'quantum' jump in our understanding of the Universe."
May 17, 05: Almost half of Africans have never made a phone call and just 1.4% use the Internet.
May 17, 05: Researchers have developed a new technique for making very large diamonds of high quality that could soon boost optics technology and gaudily adorn fingers of the wealthy with sparkling rocks up to an inch wide, or roughly 300 carats. The famed Hope Diamond is 45.52 carats.
. . Using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), several groups have figured out how to make diamonds. But growing them over 3 carats has proved challenging. "Our fabrication of 10-carat, half-inch, CVD diamonds is a major breakthrough", said Russell Hemley of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory. The size is about five times what commercial diamond manufacturers can make using standard processes.
. . Synthetic diamonds are typically yellow or brown, limiting their use in optical technologies. Colorless diamonds --a big goal for optics, scientific research and jewelry-- are expensive to make. The new process developed at Carnegie produces transparent diamonds, as well as some of striking color.
May 17, 05: The U.S. Geological Survey ranks Mount Rainier as the third most dangerous volcano in the nation, after Kilauea on Hawaii's Big Island and Mount St. Helens. Both are currently active. Other studies call Rainier the most dangerous volcano in the world —-not just for its explosive potential, but because of the 3 million people who live in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area. At least 100,000 people live on top of Rainier mudflows that have solidified.
. . Mudflow poses a serious threat for Orting. Two rivers drain off the mountain, hug the town and converge just beyond it, putting Orting squarely in the mountain's strike zone. The town, in fact, was built atop a 500-year-old mudflow that buried the valley 30 feet deep.
. . Construction crews working on new housing developments for Orting's growing population have dug up massive tree stumps —-remnants of a forest buried there the last time Mount Rainier rumbled.
May 11, 05: Scientists have shown in multiple studies that monkeys can manipulate robotic devices with their thoughts. A new study finds a monkey's brain structure adapts to treat a robotic arm as if it was a natural appendage. The finding bolsters the notion that the primate brain is highly adaptable, and it adds more knowledge to the effort to create useful prosthetic devices for humans.
. . While the animals were still able to use their own arms, some brain cells formerly used for that control shifted to control of the robotic arm.
Water freezes at minus 60 degrees Celsius inside nanotubes!
May 4, 05: Australian scientists believe they have developed an unbreakable information code to stop hackers, using a diamond, a kitchen microwave oven and an optical fiber.
Researchers at Melbourne University used the microwave to "fuse" a tiny diamond, just 1/1000th of a millimeter, onto an optical fibre, which could be used to create a single photon beam of light which they say cannot be hacked.
. . Photons are the smallest known particles of light. Until now, scientists could not produce a single-photon beam, thereby narrowing down the stream of light used to transmit information.
. . "When it comes to cryptology, it's not so much of a problem to have a coded message intercepted, the problem is getting the key (to decode it)", said university research fellow James Rabeau, who developed the diamond device. "The single-photon beam makes for an unstealable key."
. . The security of information depends on the properties of light that is used to transmit data. Laser beams which are used at the moment send billions of photons, making it easy for hackers to steal some of them and break the code, said Rabeau. The diamond device sends a stream of single photons, so that if the chain of communication is broken, the information becomes corrupted and a hacker immediately exposed to both the sender and the receiver, he said. Only diamonds are known to create single-photon beams.
May 4, 05: In the past, some scientists wrote off "rogue waves" as rare or even mythology. However, new satellite data collected by the European Space Agency's ERS satellites has confirmed what too many ship captains have come to know. Ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-story apartment buildings are a leading cause of large ship sinkings.
. . The giant waves form when strong winds beat against an opposing ocean current, when waves from different storms join forces, or when swells interact in strange ways with a particular seafloor.
. . Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships more than 200 yards long in the past two decades. But some past statistical work in the past showed that rogue waves could only occur every 10,000 years. So many ships and offshore platforms are built to withstand maximum wave heights of only about 50 feet. "Two large ships sink every week on average [!!], but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash."
. . Now, Vijay Panchang at Texas A&M University at Galveston and his associates say they can accurately predict the daily height of waves anywhere off the coast of the United States for the next 48 hours across spaces as close as 500 meters apart. People who live in coastal Maine already use his forecasts.
. . The Norwegian Dawn, a 300-meter ocean liner , was sailing back to New York from the Bahamas on April 16 when it was struck by a storm that pounded the vessel with heavy seas and the rogue 70-foot wave. The wave smashed windows and sent furniture flying.
. . In a separate event, a buoy off the coast of Alabama recently recorded an average wave height of 16 meters before the gauge broke, Panchang said. Since that figure is just an average of measurement of a sea-state, the biggest wave at that location was probably twice that size -—32 meters.
May 3, 05: Researchers at the University of Southern California and the Doheny Retina Institute have created a prosthetic retina that can allow the blind to detect light/motion and identify objects. We’ve seen a few of these things before using photosensors hooked up to a few distinct nerves which allowed for a very strange form of synesthesia that gives some light sensitivity.
Apr 26, 05: NASA announced a $11 million project with Rice University —-a leader in nanotechnology-— to build lighter, more efficient power cables. Scientists at the Houston university plan to make cables out of carbon nanotubes. The hotdog-shaped cylinder of carbon atoms can conduct electricity up to 10 times more efficiently than copper at about one-sixth the weight. eg, They also contribute a significant fraction of the shuttle's weight.
. . Researchers at Rice and the Johnson Space Center will try to create about 1 yard of the prototype power cable by the end of the four-year grant. If the project is successful, the technology could be used to develop a fishing-line-like version of the cable that could carry power around the globe, Smalley said. "One day we're going to wire the whole world with this stuff."
Tritium is essential to the construction of boosted-fission nuclear weapons. A boosted weapon contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the gases being heated and compressed by the detonation of a plutonium or uranium device. The D-T mixture is heated to a temperature and pressure such that thermonuclear fusion occurs. This process releases a flood of 14 MeV neutrons which cause additional fissions in the device, greatly increasing its efficiency.
. . Nice one - it's good to see science getting the most bangs for the taxpayers' bucks. There is, however, one drawback to the use of tritium in nukes - that 12.3 year half-life. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission explains: Tritium must be replenished in nuclear weapons routinely. The United States has not produced tritium since 1988.
New Scientist: It is the unusual structure that makes metallic glass so promising. In crystalline metal alloys, the atoms are ordered within regions called "grains", and the boundaries between the grains are points of weakness in the material. Metallic glasses, however, have no grain boundaries, so they are much stronger. Hit a crystalline metal with a hammer and it will bend, absorbing some of the energy of the blow by giving way along grain boundaries. But the atoms in an amorphous metal are tightly packed, and easily bounce back to their original shape after a blow. These materials lack bulky crystalline grains, so they can be shaped into features just 10 nanometres across. And their liquid-like structure means they melt at lower temperatures, and can be moulded nearly as easily as plastics.
Apr 25, 05: Scientists say the air around us is heavier than they had thought. Argon is a gas that rarely interacts chemically with anything. The 25-year-old measurement assumed that argon was 0.917% of the air's total composition. The new measurement, reported in a recent issue of the journal Metrologia, puts the value at 0.9332%.
. . The other contents of Earth’s atmosphere are nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), water vapor (typically about one%), and carbon dioxide (0.04%). Stuff coming in at below 0.01% include neon, helium, methane, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, and ozone.
. . Consider a pound of feathers on a scale opposite a pound of lead. In a vacuum, the scale is balanced, but this is not true when air is present. It will push up on the feathers, just as water pushes up on a floating object. Because the feathers are more "buoyant" in air than lead, the scale will tip towards the metal. A measurement of 1,000 tons of steel would have been off by half an ounce.
Apr 25, 05: Diamondoids are now being refined from crude oil by ChevronTexaco in sufficient quantities to allow for formal research and development in nanotechnology. Diamondoids are not for jewelry; each one is only .000000000000000001 carat in size (don't even ask about color or clarity!) They were first isolated from Czechoslovakian petroleum in 1933; the substance was named adamantine (from the Greek word for diamond). An adamantine derivative was found to fight viruses, and also has some efficacy in treating Parkinson's disease.
. . Each diamondoid has just ten carbon atoms; a macromolecular diamond is made up of billions of these units. They are also found in multiples of this basic unit; these higher diamondoids come in many shapes --rods, disks and even screws. This makes them ideal building blocks for nanotechnology research; the production of this nano-material in quantity may be a key enabler for researchers. Previously, synthesizing them has been very difficult and expensive.
Apr 25, 05: A nanofabric just one atom thick has been created at The University of Manchester. The graphene nanofabric belongs to the family of fullerene molecules (buckyballs and nanotubes); this is the first truly two-dimensional fullerene. The nanofabric sheet is described as stable, highly flexible and strong, and remarkably conductive.
. . Researchers have concentrated on the electronic properties of the carbon nanofabric. It appears that electrons can travel without any scattering over submicron distances; this is an important property for making fast-switching transistors. As for other applications, graphene is basically an "unrolled" nanotube; most of the applications considered for nanotubes would also apply to graphene itself.
. . "At present, patches of graphene produced thus far are about ten microns across. However, all the omens are good, as there are no fundamental limitations on the lateral size of carbon nanofabric."
Apr 25, 05: The magnitude 9.3 earthquake has already been said to have shortened the day by fractions of a second, shifted the North Pole by an inch, and made the planet less fat around the middle. It should have left a detectable "scar" on Earth's gravity field, European scientists said. The idea is fairly straightforward. The strength of Earth's gravity varies depending on the depth of a trench or height of a mountain, as well as the density of material. Even changing tides alter the gravity field. The Dec. 26, 2004 quake lifted an 6 meter ledge along a 1,000 km fault.
. . Gravity variations are measured using the geoid, which is similar to sea-level. The geoid is a hypothetical "surface" around the Earth at which the planet's gravitational pull is the same everywhere. Over dense areas, the geoid moves away from the real surface, and where gravity is less, the geoid moves closer to the real surface.
. . After the Sumatran quake, the geoid moved as much as 18 mm, the scientists predict. "Seismology is good for detecting the slip of earthquake faults and the location of the epicenter, geoid monitoring can determine how much mass is actually being moved around."
Osmium is densest of all the elements and twice as heavy as lead. It is as rare as gold and, like gold, can be found as the free metal.
Apr 22, 05: A Ukrainian team has set a new depth record for caving. The nine-strong group travelled 2,080M (6,822ft) underground, passing the elusive 2,000m mark at Krubera, the world's deepest known cave. It built on records set by a previous expedition, which blasted through blocked passages in the cave. "Even now, we don't know whether we've reached the limit - or if it will go on. We're pretty sure we'll eventually go even lower." (gold miners in South Africa regularly go beyond 3,400M).
Apr 23, 05: Elwood "Woody" Norris pointed a metal frequency emitter at one of perhaps 30 people who had come to see his invention. The emitter —-an aluminum square-— was hooked up by a wire to a CD player. Norris switched on the CD player. "There's no speaker, but when I point this pad at you, you will hear the waterfall." And one by one, each person in the audience did, and smiled widely.
. . Norris' HyperSonic Sound system has won him an award coveted by inventors —-the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize. It works by sending a focused beam of sound above the range of human hearing. When it lands on you, it seems like sound is coming from inside your head.
TOP 10 NANOTECH USES
1) Energy storage, production and conversion
2) Agricultural productivity enhancement
3) Water treatment and remediation
4) Disease diagnosis and screening
5) Drug delivery systems
6) Food processing and storage
7) Air pollution and remediation
8) Construction
9) Health monitoring
10) Vector and pest detection and control
Osmium is densest of all the elements and twice as heavy as lead. It is as rare as gold and, like gold, can be found as the free metal. Iridium is so nearly as heavy, it was only in the 90's that osmium was declared heaviest.
Apr 18, 05: Imagine the planet wired for a nearly continuous readout on its vital signs, shared by all. The new "Strategic Plan for the U.S. Integrated Earth Observation System" envisions linking nearly 60 nations within a decade to gather and share information from satellites, ocean buoys, weather stations and other surface and airborne instruments. "Whether it's agriculture, or land use, or water planning, or transportation, or energy, there's a lot of data about the environment that has to be collected."
. . "A surprisingly successful enterprise" at collecting and sharing data already is under way as the result of a United Nations summit on sustainable development in South Africa in 2002. Many of the measurements already are being gathered. The new effort will focus on linking them.
. . Better data could save the United States alone as much as $1 billion in electricity costs each year if winter forecasts prove to be just 1 degree more accurate [& that's the old F-temp!]. As much as $1.7 billion of the annual $4 billion cost of weather-related aviation delays could be saved with better information.
Apr 18, 05: Scientists at Michigan State University have succeeded in recreating an isotope of nickel they say is a "missing link" in the process by which precious metals are formed in supernovae. Teams working at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) fired atoms of a stable isotpe of krypton at a beryllium plate. In the process, they were able to create 11 nickel-78 (Ni-78) atoms --a highly unstable isotope consisting of 28 protons and 50 neutrons-- and determine its life at just 110 milliseconds. "Every gold atom you find in the gold on your ring, every one of those atoms has gone through such a process. We've now seen a link in the chain - one that controlled everything."
Apr 18, 05: Scientists using a giant atom smasher said they have created a new state of matter --a hot, dense liquid made out of basic atomic particles--and said it shows what the early universe looked like for a very, very brief time. All matter was in the form of this liquid, called a quark-gluon plasma, the researchers said. Unexpectedly, the quark gluon plasma behaved like a perfect liquid of quarks, instead of a gas. Normally, quarks are bound together and cannot be measured directly.
. . At temperatures 10,000 times hotter than those found inside the sun and with just a few thousand particles, the nuclear physicists expected the quarks to fly around freely like a gas. Instead, the quarks behaved like a perfect liquid, flowing together like a school of fish, without turbulence or random motion. In contrast, a drop of water containing the same number of particles would not behave like a liquid at all, but just fly apart.
. . The unexpected results have a link to another field of physics, called string theory. String theory attempts to explain properties of the universe using 10 dimensions, instead of the three space and one time dimension that humans commonly perceive. The string theory calculation describing how gravity behaves near a black hole can also explain how quarks move in a quark gluon plasma, experts said.
Apr 14, 05: Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a polymer that will change shape, and return to its original form when hit with a blast of ultraviolet light. Spirals can also be created by exposing one area of a polymer film to UV light while leaving another unexposed.
. . The shape-changing ability is accomplished by attaching photosensitive molecules to a polymer. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the photosensitive particles become active and link to one another, changing the shape of the plastic. Exposing it to light of a slightly different frequency reverses the first reaction, allowing the plastic to return to its original shape.
Apr 13, 05: Earth's core is thought to be a two-part construction. The inner core is solid iron, and that's surrounding by a molten core, theory holds. Around the core is the mantle, and near the planet's surface is a thin crust -- the part that breaks now and then and creates earthquakes.
. . A new study involved complex monitoring of seismic waves passing through the planet. The technique is not new, but this is the first time it's been employed so effectively to probe the heart of our world.
. . "A PKJKP traverses the inner core as a shear wave, so this is the direct evidence that the inner core is solid", Cao told LiveScience, "because only in the solid material the shear wave can exist. In the liquid material, say water, only the compressional wave can travel through." The arrival time and slowness of the waves agree with theoretical predictions of PKJKP waves, which indicates a solid core.
Apr 13, 05: Scientists have derived a new glue from a natural adhesive made by rock-clinging mollusks. It could provide an environmentally friendly alternative to current wood-binding materials.
. . This is not the first time researchers have been attracted to the sticky power of mussels. But Li has made a real and potentially commercial glue from his research. The secret to the mussels' staying power is tiny threads, called byssus. These tentacles, which can reach more than two inches in length, are made of a protein with a high level of stuff called phenolic hydroxyls.
. . Li's research group was able to mimic the mussel's unique protein by adding molecules with phenolic hydroxyl groups to soybean flour --an abundant and inexpensive source of protein. The derivative is renewable and may reduce the need for urea-formaldehyde wood adhesives, which are associated with health concerns and are based on expensive petroleum.
. . Possible applications for the mussel-inspired glue are wood composite products like plywood, oriented strand board, particle board, and laminated veneer lumber products. Li's group has three patents pending.
. . "The plywood we make with this adhesive can be boiled for several hours and the adhesive holds as strong as ever", Li said. "Regular plywood bonded with urea-formaldehyde resins could never do that."
Apr 12, 05: Meat and milk from cloned cattle are virtually identical to the same products from prize animals bred the old-fashioned way, researchers in Japan and the United States reported.
Apr 12, 05: Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence. One day a similar engine might power a tiny mechanical doctor that would travel through your body in the ultimate house call.
. . The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube. The motor is a "surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator", built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.
. . The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. In a nanobot, it could be used as the motor that drives crawling, walking, swimming, jumping, or flying."
. . The new motor could be used within two years in existing Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. MEMS are tiny components made by etching away parts of a silicon wafer or adding tiny layers. As small as a grain of pollen, MEMS are larger than the nanoworld. They are employed in such things as microaccelerometers, the devices that activate automotive airbags. Optical MEMS are used in many home theater systems.
Apr 8, 05: A tiny speck of zircon crystal that is barely visible to the eye is believed to be the oldest known piece of Earth at about 4.4 billion years old. A breakthrough discovery was based on analysis of the crystal: that the early Earth was much cooler than previously believed.
. . With the aid of a microscope, anyone will be able to check out the tiny grain, which measures less than two human hairs in diameter.
. . Valley will display a brand new, $3 million ion microprobe that he and other researchers will use to analyze tiny samples such as the zircon crystal. The hand-built instrument weighs 11 tons and takes up an entire laboratory.
Apr 6, 05: Sony has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain. The U.S. patent, granted to Sony researcher Thomas Dawson, describes a technique for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce "sensory experiences" such as smells, sounds and images. "No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds."
. . It could be an improvement over an existing non-surgical method known as transcranial magnetic stimulation. This activates nerves using rapidly changing magnetic fields, but cannot be focused on small groups of brain cells.
. . A Sony Electronics spokeswoman told the magazine that no experiments had been conducted, and that the patent "was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
Apr 6, 05: A 24-year-old French student claimed a world record after he became the first person to figure out the 13th root of a 200-digit number by mental arithmetic alone. Alexis Lemaire, who is studying for a master's degree in computer studies at the University of Reims, eastern France, took 48 minutes and 51 seconds to arrive at the 16-figure answer. The 13th root is a number that must be multiplied by itself 13 times in order to equal a given value.
. . Use of a computer, calculator and even a pencil and paper were not allowed.
described the 200-digit task as "the most difficult challenge in mental arithmetic in history."
Apr 6, 05: Physicists in Spain are celebrating the 400th anniversary of publication of "Don Quixote" in a very small way: they wrote the first paragraph on a silicon chip in letters so tiny the whole 1,000-page book would fit on the tips of six human hairs. [that's on the cross-section!]
. . It uses a device called an atomic force microscope, which runs a ceramic or semiconductor tip over a silicon surface in much the same way as a phonograph needle scans a record.
Apr 6, 05: A new robotic plane is designed for troops who need a peek at the enemy before going in, or to check out enemy ships when no helicopters are available for the task.
. . The diminutive drone, about the size of a magazine, was tested recently during Navy exercises. Though made with off-the-shelf products, the Wasp is nothing like remote-control planes sold at hobby shops. Its wings, which span 13 inches, carry 4.25 ounces of lithium-ion batteries. The whole rest of the plane --including video cameras front and back-- adds just 1.75 ounces to the total 6-ounce takeoff weight. It is launched by hand.
. . In 2002, a rudimentary Wasp set an endurance record for micro air vehicles (MAVs) of 1 hour and 47 minutes. It has since been outfitted with an autopilot feature that uses the Global Positioning System (GPS). The drone was built by AeroVironment in Simi Valley, Calif. with funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
After bringing in a parade of males and watching for years as nature never took its course, scientists at Mystic Aquarium have performed what is believed to be the first artificial insemination of a beluga whale.
. . After giving the whale hormones to induce the release of an egg into the reproductive tract, workers used a crane to lift Kela out of the water and place her on a mat. Frozen sperm from a Sea World beluga was then inserted. The process took only a few minutes. Scientists plan to use ultrasound and blood tests over the next few days to monitor the 1,156-pound whale with the hope that the procedure worked. Beluga whales have been born in captivity, but never through artificial insemination.
. . Kela would deliver a calf in about 14 months if the procedure was successful, but scientists believe there is only a slim chance of that happening.
Mar 31, 05: A new study suggests a way to take the measure of tough characters. The research, done at the University of Alberta, found a connection between the length of the male index finger relative to the ring finger and the tendency to be aggressive. No such connection was found in women.
. . Scientists found a connection between finger lengths and the amount of testosterone that a fetus was exposed to in the womb: the shorter the index finger relative to the ring finger, the higher the amount of prenatal testosterone. While the study finds a connection, finger ratios only predict behavior a small percentage of the time, the researchers caution. The connection was found only with physically aggressive behavior, not with verbal aggression or other forms of hostility.
Mar 31, 05: US scientists have managed to measure the mass of a cluster of xenon atoms at just a few billionths of a trillionth of a gram --or a few zeptograms. The detection was made using sensitive scales developed at Caltech. The scales use a small blade that vibrates in a magnetic field that generates a voltage in an attached wire. Because the device is cooled, the molecules condense on the bar and add their mass to it, lowering its frequency and changing the voltage of the wire.
. . But to get good measurements of sophisticated biomolecules like proteins, researchers say, the scales will have to become 1,000 times more precise, capable of weighing yoctograms. One yoctogram is about the same as an individual hydrogen atom.
Mar 31, 05: A paralysed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a brain chip that reads his mind. The pioneering surgery last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone. The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher. He can think his TV on and off, change channels and alter the volume.
. . Recently, four people, two of them partly paralyzed wheelchair users, were able to move a computer cursor while wearing a cap with 64 electrodes that pick up brain waves. Mr Nagle's device, called BrainGate, consists of nearly 100 hair-thin electrodes implanted a millimetre deep into part of the motor cortex of his brain that controls movement.
. . The long term aim is to design a package the size of a mobile phone that will run on batteries, and to electrically stimulate the patient's own muscles. This will be difficult.
Mar 30, 05: In a reassessment of the December 26 earthquake that unleashed the Indian Ocean killer tsunami, scientists say the temblor measured 9.3 on the Richter scale --more than twice as powerful as originally estimated, and the second biggest quake ever recorded. The quake split the ocean floor northward from Sumatra along 1,200 km, twice as long as previously thought.
. . The event released so much strain along this particular part of the fault that in theory there should be no quake of similar magnitude, or a similar tsunami, there for another 400 years.
. . As the Richter scale is logarithmic, the difference between 9.3 and 9.0 is 2.5 times. Only one measured quake has been bigger: a 9.5 event that struck Chile in 1960. Their computer model, also published in Nature, suggests that the quake delivered a high-frequency shock that lasted a stunning 500 seconds, compared with 340 seconds for the Chile event in 1960.
Mar 22, 05: A trillion degrees: physicists claim that at this temperature, nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma --thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang. Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded.
. . The main suspect in this detective story is the quark-gluon plasma. But how do you know when you've seen it? The plasma cannot be observed directly --it disappears in less than a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a second. All that researchers can hope to do is detect the particles that fly out when the plasma freezes back into normal matter.
Mar 17, 05: A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said. It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.
. . This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions. Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations. The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as "Hawking" radiation.
. . However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
Gamma-ray flashes shoot into space during a lighting strike. Researchers are interested in determining whether TGFs are related to other upper atmosphere lightning phenomena, like blue jets and sprites. This could tell them what happens to the high-energy electrons that are believed to be the cause of the gamma rays. If TGFs are generated at the top of a cloud, like a blue jet, the electrons will be absorbed in the atmosphere. But if the TGFs originate 30 miles up, like sprites do, then the electrons will feed into the radiation belts.
Japan experiences about 20% of the world's powerful earthquakes.
There are several active Caribbean volcanoes that could set off an inundating wave.
There are also active zones in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and off the coasts of Spain and Portugal that could generate tsunamis.
On Earth, liquid mirrors are limited to roughly 6-meters in size, but subject to atmospheric absorption and distortion, even the wind kicked up by spinning the liquid --usually mercury. Luna, though, provides the required gravity field with no such limitations. "Because of the unique advantages on [Luna] even a 100-meter liquid mirror ain’t that scary."
There are only 6 known quark flavors, & it is said that there can be *no more.
Kepler spent months trying to fit new Mars data to the circular epicycles and deferents that explained planetary orbits in the astronomical tradition of his day. The data just didn’t fit. Unlike his predecessors, Kepler took a leap toward modern science. He elected to trust the data, and abandoned the ancient model of circles upon circles for a new description of planetary motion. His ideas can be condensed into three statements which we call Kepler’s laws. In their simplest form, they are:
. . planets orbit on elliptical paths with the Sun at one focus;
. . the period of a planet’s orbit is proportional to it’s distance from the Sun; and
. . a planet’s speed in orbit is proportional to its distance from the Sun (equal areas are swept out in equal time).Kepler didn’t know why the planets orbited as they did, but he could describe their orbits and make accurate predictions about future positions. The next big step came with Isaac Newton who explained that why planets orbit the Sun: gravity. Only Mercury didn’t behave as predicted by Newton’s physics. Einstein remodeled physics once again with special and general relativity, and was able to explain Mercury’s motion.
. . ~Edna DeVore, Director of Education and Public Outreach
Mar 4, 05: "When bubbles in a liquid get compressed, the insides get hot –-very hot", said Ken Suslick of the University of Illinois. "The temperature we measured –-about 20,000 degrees Kelvin [35,540 F]–- is four times hotter than the surface of our Sun."
. . The bubbles are driven to form and collapse in a process called sonoluminescence, in which a liquid is blasted with high-frequency sound waves between 20 and 40 kilohertz (the highest pitch that humans can hear is about 20 kilohertz).
. . Inside a collapsing bubble, the temperature rises precipitously. Atoms and molecules collide with high-energy particles to create a fourth state of matter, called plasma. The process emits light. But the heating is so brief and localized that it cannot be measured directly with a thermometer.
. . Some have predicted that in these extreme conditions, nuclear fusion might occur, but no conclusive evidence has yet been found.
Mar 1, 05: Carbon dating can provide an answer --maybe. Scientists have only been able to use the technology to go back about 21,000 years. Before that, the accuracy of the dating technique gets hazy. Not anymore. Late last month, scientists armed with tree rings, coral and microfossils reset the carbon-dating clock, allowing researchers to confidently date materials from as long as 26,000 years ago.
. . At first, scientists could only date materials to about 5,600 years ago, the half-life of carbon-14. After a while, newer technology expanded the reliability, but only so far because tree rings don't go back more than 12,400 years ago.
. . Enter the ocean. Using one approach, scientists date foraminifera shells -- microfossils -- by measuring the layers of sediment that give away their ages as tree rings do. Then the scientists check to see that the carbon dating matches the true age of the shells. In a similar strategy, scientists examine "cores" of ancient ice removed from the ground in places like Greenland. Like trees, the cores have their own rings. Ancient bits of coral, analyzed with a technique known as uranium-thorium dating, also help fine-tune carbon dating.
Feb 28, 05: In 1889, a cylinder of a platinum-iridium alloy was declared the international standard of measurement for the kilogram. The kilogram has long been understood to equal the mass of its prototype. If several scientists get their way, the 2.205-pound hunk of metal --the international prototype of the kilogram-- may soon be out of style. Like its six basic-units-of-measurement siblings before it --including the meter-- the kilogram may be moving toward a new definition based on a universal constant.
. . Work has been underway for about 25 years to switch the kilogram from being defined by a physical model to corresponding instead to a constant. A paper today proposes redefining the unit via fixing the values of one of two well-known universal constants. The choices offered up are Avogadro's constant or Planck's constant; the former measures the amount of carbon-12 atoms in 0.012 kg of that element, while the latter is used to explain the sizes of quanta, which are tiny electromagnetic energy packets.
Feb 22, 05: Some 5,300 years after his violent death, a Stone Age man found frozen in the Alps is slowly revealing his secrets to a global team of scientists. In the latest project, genetic researchers in Oxford and Bolzano are testing his DNA for clues about ethnicity. Scientists expect the first results within months. The outcome could stir controversy in a region controversially claimed by Italians, German-speakers and members of the ancient Ladin culture.
. . In 2001, with the help of digital X-ray images, doctors detected an arrowhead in the iceman's shoulder blade. DNA tests also revealed traces of blood from four different people on Oetzi's clothes, and a deep cut between his index finger and thumb, possibly from a fight.
Feb 17, 05: A robot designed by Russ Tedrake of MIT is equipped with sensors that help the machine learn to walk in a way similar to humans' gait. Appropriately, the machine is called "Toddler." The robot's sensors measure the machine's motion, tilt and rate of movement and then direct small motors to adjust and compensate for changes. "It can learn to walk in 20 minutes", Tedrake said. "Once it learns to walk, then it adapts its gait to new terrain." The walking robot looks more like a moving Erector set than a human being, but the machine has the unmistakable gait of a person strolling along. The robot uses its curved feet and motorized ankles to spring its legs forward, its arms swinging at every step to help with balance.
. . The machines use what the researchers called a "passive-dynamic design" that closely mimics the way humans walk. Earlier robots required powerful machines to stroll, with each leg, knee and ankle requiring motorized assistance. The effort requires a lot of energy.
. . The passive dynamic design uses gravity, along with muscle-like springs and motors. The energy required is just a fraction of that needed by other walking robots.
The sensors take measurements at the rate of 200 times a second and constantly send new instructions to the motors that control the tilt and motion. The sensors also direct actuators that control the tension on springs in the robot ankles. This helps the machine push forward with each stride. "Every time it takes a step, it changes the parameters a little bit, based on its experience", Tedrake said. "It will walk on any surface and adjust the way it walks. This is only one-tenth of the energy needed to make Asimo walk.
Feb 20, 05: The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush administration, with fewer scientists heard in policy discussions and money for research and advanced training being cut, according to panelists at a national science meeting. Speakers at the national meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science expressed concern that some scientists in key federal agencies are being ignored or even pressured to change study conclusions that don't support policy positions. The speakers also said that Bush's proposed 2005 federal budget is slashing spending for basic research and reducing investments in education designed to produce the nation's future scientists.
Feb 20, 05: Animals have been getting a real work-out in science lately. Methuselah mice are helping humanity with aging, pigs are trying artificial corneas and monkeys get gene manipulations that force them to work hard with no thought of reward.
. . Now, Stanford University has given famed researcher Irving Weissman permission to create a mouse-human hybrid. The intent is to inject human brain cells into the brains of developing mice to see what happens. The National Academy of Sciences will unveil guidelines on chimera and stem cell research this spring.
. . Professor Henry T. Greely: "We concluded that if we see any signs of human brain structures . . . or if the mouse shows human-like behaviors, like improved memory or problem-solving, it's time to stop."
. . This is a good idea; all students of science fiction and 1990's Saturday morning cartoons know full well what happens when mice start getting ideas!
Feb 14, 05: SmartWater is a clear liquid containing microscopic particles encoded with a unique forensic signature that, when found coated on stolen property, provides a precise trace back to the owner and, when detected on a suspect, can conclusively implicate a felon.
. . It's likened to giving household items and vehicles a DNA of their own. In spray form, the fluid marks intruders with a similarly unique code that, when viewed under UV in a police cell, makes a red-faced burglar glow with fluorescent green and yellow blotches. It's practically impossible for a criminal to remove; it stays on skin and clothing for months.
Gang members in Chicago who fire off a few rounds at their rivals are likely to find cops on the scene in minutes, thanks to new gunshot-detection devices being installed in 80 locations around the city. The system is similar to those being used to decrease gunshot-related injuries and deaths in a half dozen other cities in the United States.
No newfangled lie-detection machines appear ready for prime time. Skeptics, meanwhile, doubt that any technology will improve much on the mixed record of polygraph machines.
. . "When you tell a lie, it's a cognitive behavior like any other, like doing an interesting math problem. You have to engage in a certain number of cognitive activities --you have to pull the truthful information from your memory, inhibit that information, create a deceptive response and make a decision to deliver that response. You have to engage in these steps to tell a lie, a complicated process involving different parts of the brain."
. . The problem with lie detectors is that "all you get from measuring any of the responses is that a subject is emotionally aroused, disturbed or surprised by this question, but you don't know what that means." [Sure, I'll take a lie-detector test... as soon as one is invented.]
NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts director Bob Cassanova counsels his grantees, "Don't let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination."
Dec 4, 04: Tricked human eggs divide. The new technique could supply embryonic stem cells for research while avoiding ethical issues, as embryos are not required. A trick that persuades human eggs to divide as if they have been fertilised could provide a source of embryonic stem cells that sidesteps ethical objections to existing techniques. It could also be deployed to improve the success rate of IVF.
. . "Embryos" created by the procedure do not contain any paternal chromosomes --just two sets of chromosomes from the mother-- and so cannot develop into babies. This should remove the ethical objections that some people have to harvesting from donated human embryos. There are high hopes that stem cells, which can develop into many different cell types, could be used to treat a range of diseases.
. . The tricked eggs divide for four or five days until they reach 50 to 100 cells --the blastocyst stage. These blastocysts should, in theory, yield stem cells.
Feb 10, 05: The tsunami shaved 2.68 microseconds, or millionths of a second, from the length of a day. They calculated it shifted Earth's mean north pole about 1 inch and made the planet slightly less oblate, or flattened at the poles. Its analogous to a spinning skater drawing arms closer to the body, resulting in a faster spin. They said these changes are based on calculations rather than measurements, the changes are so small.
. . Scientists say any movement of land mass can be measured in cm rather than tens of meters. A seismologist said he found movement along the fault line of about 11 meters laterally and 4-5 vertically. Reports that the entire island of Sumatra -- 1,060 miles long and 250 miles wide -- 35 meters or more are wildly inaccurate.
Feb 9, 05: Seismologists said today that the Sumatra earthquake had a magnitude of 9.3. Earlier measurements had estimated the temblor at 9.0. Because the magnitude scale is logarithmic, a change of 0.3 units corresponds to a three-fold increase in intensity. This would make it the second largest earthquake ever instrumentally recorded. The only earthquake with a greater recorded magnitude – 9.5 – occurred in Chile in May 22, 1960.
. . "The 53-minute waves are the slowest free oscillations of the Earth. They are the hardest to excite." It takes a very large earthquake – magnitude 9 or higher – to generate detectable waves at these long period oscillations. Most of the energy in the tsunami-causing earthquake was in these slow-moving waves.
. . Scientists estimate that the Indian plate slipped 33-50 feet (10 to 15 meters) under the Burma microplate. "The segments to the south could break anytime, even tomorrow."
Feb 7, 05: Worms squirming on a fishhook feel no pain --nor do lobsters and crabs cooked in boiling water, a scientific study funded by the Norwegian government has found. Norway might have considered banning the use of live worms as fish bait if the study had found they felt pain, but Farstad said "It seems to be only reflex curling when put on the hook ... They might sense something, but it is not painful and does not compromise their well-being." Farstad said most invertebrates, including lobsters and crabs boiled alive, do not feel pain because, unlike mammals, they do not have a big brain to read the signals.
Feb 4, 05: When the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is turned on in the latter half of 2007, physicists will scour this crash wreckage for signs of the Higgs boson. The Higgs is nicknamed the God particle because of its importance to the Standard Model, the theory devised to explain how sub-atomic particles interact with each other.
. . The 16 particles that make up this model (12 matter particles and 4 force carrier particles) would have no mass if considered alone. So another particle --the Higgs boson-- is postulated to exist to account for this omission.
. . The LHC could lead physicists towards a unified theory. The energies achieved by the experiment are 70 times greater than those of the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) which previously occupied the tunnels at Cern. Only by raising the bar will scientists be able to expand our current understanding of the Universe.
Feb 2, 05: They studied the sleep patterns of 60 people aged between 60 and 83 who had difficulty sleeping. Half were given relaxing music to listen to for 45 minutes at bedtime and half were given no help to sleep. The team found that those who listened to a selection of soft, slow music experienced physical changes that aided restful sleep, such as lower heart and respiratory rates. The music group reported a 26 per cent overall improvement in the first week and this figure continued to rise as they mastered the technique of relaxing to the sedative music.
Feb 1, 05: Hewlett-Packard Co. said that its researchers have proven that a technology they invented could eventually replace the transistor, a fundamental building block of computers. HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch", which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.
. . HP said that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today. "The crossbar latch provides a key element needed for building a computer using nanometer-sized devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to build. This could someday replace transistors in computers, just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes and vacuum tubes replaced electromagnetic relays before them."
. . A platinum wire crossed by two other platinum wires with steric acid molecules flowing in between. Like a transistor, the structure can manipulate an electrical signal that passes through the crossbar latch. It can be shrunk to measure only about 2 to 3 nanometers. They can be built on the same silicon chip that contains traditional transistors.
. . The smallest feature on a chip today measures about 90 nanometers, and scientists believe the traditional transistor can't get smaller than approximately 15 nanometers. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers.
Jan 22, 05: Scientists have discovered that clusters of aluminum atoms impersonate different elements, depending on how many atoms make up the group. Findings published today in the journal Science suggest that the clusters could be tailored to achieve desirable properties, such as conductivity.
. . Shiv N. Khanna of Virginia Commonwealth University and his colleagues analyzed the geometry, electronic structure and chemical properties of bunches of 13 and 14 aluminum atoms. They also tested the groupings experimentally by reacting them with iodine atoms. The results show that a cluster of 13 behaves much like a single atom of iodine does, whereas a cluster of 14 exhibited different behavior, acting more like an alkaline earth atom, such as beryllium. Further reactivity studies indicate that the new class of so-called polyiodides can be highly stable in nature because of their electronic properties, which include bonds that are different than those found in individual atoms. "The discovery of these new iodine compounds, which include aluminum clusters, is critical because it reveals a new form of 'superatom' chemistry", Khanna remarks. "In the future, we may apply this chemistry, building on our previous knowledge, to create new materials for energy applications and even medical devices."
. . Indeed, the new aluminum assemblages could add a new dimension to the periodic table and provide chemists with novel potential building blocks.
Jan 20, 05: Could people and vehicles that have mysteriously vanished in the desert have been swallowed up by shifting sands? Dutch scientists believe their research, showing how very fine, aerated sand can turn into dry quicksand capable of sucking in objects, could offer a possible explanation for puzzling disappearances in the desert.
. . "The simple fact that we can create a state of sand which does not support weight at all in the laboratory ... means that it could also exist in the real world. Indeed, reports that travelers and whole vehicles have been swallowed instantly may even turn out to be credible in the light of our results."
. . They blew an air stream through very fine sand and allowed it to settle into a unpacked state in the laboratory. When they placed a bowl on top of the sand it was engulfed. The same condition, a type of dry quicksand, could evolve in nature from the sedimentation of very fine sand after it has been blown into the air. If it was large enough it could be dangerous to humans.
Jan 20, 05: The Sun, shining on only one side of boulders, could create a strain due to the temperature differences. Previous research had failed to take into account the rock’s shadow. "The largest surface temperature gradients will occur in the morning", McFadden said, when the shaded half of the rock is still cool from the night.
. . Therefore, if McFadden was right, the cracks should line up along the line between morning Sun and shade. On a relatively round rock, this line should point North-South. To test this hypothesis, McFadden and his colleagues went to a half dozen desert pavements in New Mexico, Arizona and California. They found that a majority of the cracks on round, uniform boulders lined up in a North-South direction.
Jan 20, 05: If it wasn’t enough that the upper atmosphere is full of sprites and elves, now there may be tigers as well. Researchers reviewing data from the fateful Space Shuttle Columbia mission have identified a strange flash over the Indian Ocean that they have called a Transient Ionospheric Glow Emission in Red, or TIGER, event.
. . Sprites are jellyfish-shaped emissions that occur above thunderstorms. These and other lightning-related phenomena – like blue jets and elves – are called transient luminous events (TLEs). Sprites tend to occur about 30 milliseconds after cloud-to-ground lightning, at an average distance of 40 km from the strike.
. . Although the flash could have been caused by a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, the research team said that no trail of light –-as would be expected-– can be seen in the video images.
. . One hypothesis is that a possible thunderstorm in Cyprus around the same time may have caused an electron beam to travel along the Earth’s magnetic field to create a purple glow over Madagascar. The authors do not believe the storm in Cyprus was strong enough to accomplish this, however.
Jan 19, 05: Scientists hope to soon be able to spin spider silk without the aid of spiders—achieving an age-old human quest to harness one of nature's most remarkable materials. A team of researchers has successfully sequenced genes related to spider-silk production—uncovering the formula that spiders use to make silk from proteins. In the process the team acquired a better understanding of how the silk's structure is related to its amazing strength and elastic properties. Their next task will be using what they've learned to spin spider silk themselves. "Hopefully, in the next month we'll start spinning fibers."
. . With their spinnerets, spiders somehow apply physical force to rearrange the proteins' molecular structure to turn the proteins into silk. Understanding how spiders do this could someday result in new stronger and lighter materials that could replace plastics -—and ease the cost to the environment that results from conventional plastic production.
. . "We're really trying to control elasticity, so you if come to me and ask for a certain tensile strength and elasticity, I can make a gene that will produce a fiber that does that for you. For uses like banknotes, silk could be a perfect material."
. . Over hundreds of millions of years, the 37,000 known species of spiders (and others unknown) have evolved and diversified many silks for their unique purposes. Spider silk has incredible tensile strength and is often touted as being several times stronger than steel of the same thickness. Kevlar has higher tensile strength, but it's not very stretchy."
. . These properties suggest a potential for many applications for spider silk: extremely thin sutures for eye or nerve surgery, plasters and other wound covers, artificial ligaments and tendons, textiles for parachutes, protective clothing and body armor, ropes, fishing nets, and so on.
. . Quebec-based Nexia Biotechnologies created a stir in 2000 when it bred two "spidergoats" altered with spider genes so that they could produce silk proteins in their milk. Bacteria produce enough proteins for research work, but their long-term commercial production potential is unproven. Other efforts have focused on silk-producing plants such as tobacco or alfalfa and have met with some success.
Some fear that making the latest methods of genetic modification public will provide terrorists with the know-how to concoct new bioweapons in the comfort of their own garage. "Biological knowledge can be used for good or ill and unfortunately it's easier to make a biological weapon than it is defenses", said David Seagrest, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who focuses on biology and terrorism. With free instructions on how to cook up new, improved toxins, open-source biology could pose a threat.
. . The techniques for biohacking are already public --they can be found in IP contracts-- it's just not legal to apply them. "The people who have malice are going to do it irrespective of whether or not it's legal", said Jefferson.
. . Brent and Drew Endy, assistant professor of biology at MIT, who first coined the phrase "open source biology" at Berkeley's MSI, echoed this distinction. "Right now anybody who wants can re-synthesize the SARS virus", explained Brent.
. . By broadening the base of people who could hack DNA, scientists like Brent, Endy and Jefferson believe the hacker culture values like elegant design, creativity and sharing beneficial works of engineering for all, will spread to biology. "I think those are virtues which the existing world of science and engineering could gain a lot from", Brent said.
Jan 14, 05: Can there be a predisposition for fundamentalism? Do the faithful cope more easily with pain? Are they faster to recover from illness? Such are the questions scientists and theologians will attempt to answer at a new study center which starts experiments into human consciousness in the next few months. "Saying you're interested in the brain but not in consciousness is now like saying you're interested in the stomach but not in digestion."
. . She highlighted the rise of fundamentalist beliefs as a concern. "We are very mindful as to the state of the world as to the strength of beliefs and what that can do for world peace and well-being", she said.
. . "What is it in the brain that, in the presence of evidence, refutes that evidence?" Beliefs can be remarkably resilient, even against logic, added Oxford theologian, professor John Brooke, and this merits study.
. . Scientists will use chili pepper to burn volunteers' skin. Then, religious icons or other symbolic artifacts will be shown to them to see if they make a difference in pain perception. "What we'll [do] is exploring consciousness and particularly how consciousness is shaped and substantiated in the brain, how a belief can trigger or change your consciousness, and how one can affect the other."
. . Although scientists won't be looking to isolate a propensity for religious fundamentalism, Greenfield said they would be looking for what happens in the brain when people have strong beliefs. "What we'll be looking for is the brain organization --not the genetics."
Jan 12, 05: MAMMALS ATE DINOSAURS!! [tastes like chicken...] In China, scientists have identified the fossilized remains of a tiny dinosaur in the stomach of a mammal. Scientists say the animal's last meal probably is the first proof that mammals hunted small dinosaurs some 130 million years ago. It contradicts conventional evolutionary theory that early mammals couldn't possibly attack and eat a dinosaur because they were timid, chipmunk-sized creatures that scurried in the looming shadow of the giant reptiles. Only after dinosaurs went extinct by 65 million years ago did surviving mammals begin to grow larger, they reasoned. Originally, scientists believed that mammals remained small because larger dinosaurs were hunting them. In this case, the mammal was about the size of a large cat, and the victim was a very young "parrot dinosaur" that measured about 5 inches long.
. . A second mammal fossil found at the same site claims the distinction of being the largest early mammal ever found. It's about the size of a modern dog, a breathtaking 20 times larger than most mammals living in the early Cretaceous Period.
. . The remains still are recognizable, indicating that R. robustus ripped its prey like a crocodile, but probably had not developed the ability to chew food like more advanced mammals. "It must have swallowed food in large hunks."
. . "Maybe small dinosaurs got larger —-or got off the ground-— to avoid rapacious mammals", wonders Duke University paleontologist Anne Weil.
. . The Repenomamus (mammal) had jaw muscles, and large, pointy teeth useful for catching and ripping prey, suggesting that these primitive mammals ate meat as well as plants and were aggressive predators, rather than scavengers.
. . The baby dinosaur or psittacosaur found in this mammal fossil was only five inches long, one-third the size of the animal that ate it. This kind of dinosaur, however, grew to be nearly six feet tall and had four-fingered grasping hands.
. . The bones of this baby dinosaur were limbs, fingers, and teeth, which indicate it was not an embryo, while some of the bones were still connected to one another, showing that the mammal had swallowed the dinosaur in chunks.
Jan 13, 05: The Dec. 26 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia was the fourth largest in one hundred years. Scientists have determined that this major shift in the Earth’s plates changed the planet’s shape – enough to shorten the day by fractions of a second and to shift the North Pole by an inch.
. . The general shape of the Earth is slightly oblate – that is, it is not a perfect sphere but is slightly squished down, making it about 26 miles wider at the equator than between the poles. This shape, however, is not rigid, with climate being a major distorting force.
. . But the magnitude nine earthquake last month almost certainly altered the shape as well. Recent calculations have estimated that this catastrophic land displacement caused a small reduction in the bulge, making the planet more round. "The waistline was reduced by not quite a millimeter because of the earthquake."
. . This slimming down sped up the rotation of the Earth, much like when a spinning ice skater pulls in her arms to increase her speed. The length of the day correspondingly decreased by 2.68 millionths of a second.
Jan 8, 05: The South Asian earthquake that spawned deadly tsunami waves also shifted water levels by about a meter in a geologically sensitive Virginia well some 9,600 miles away from the epicenter, researchers say. The well near Christiansburg, which started oscillating about an hour after the magnitude 9 quake near Sumatra on Dec. 26, is particularly sensitive to movements in the Earth and is monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey. "It just shot up and then it went down below where it originally was", Nelms told the Richmond Times-Dispatch for Saturday's editions, adding that it took about five hours for the water to stop fluctuating.
. . The USGS tracks water levels around the country, and has monitors at 21 wells across Virginia, primarily for drought. The Christiansburg well, in the western part of the state, also shows regular, but small, changes caused by tides.
In the more distant future, synthetic biologists envision building more complex organisms, like supercoral that sucks carbon out of the biosphere and puts it into building materials, or an acorn programmed to grow into an oak tree --complete with a nifty tree house. And there's the opportunity to add new chromosomes to the human genome, ushering in a panoply of human augmentations and enhancements.
Jan 10, 05: The tsunami that killed thousands around the Indian Ocean was caught by a series of radar satellites, allowing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists to develop measurements of the wave in mid-ocean.
In this case, scientists found that two hours after the undersea quake that launched the tsunami, the wave was about two feet. An hour and 15 minutes later, it was down to about 16 inches. After eight hours, the main wave was down to about two to four inches, though a portion in the Bay of Bengal was still at about 10 inches. Arriving at shore, such waves can grow suddenly by dozens of feet.
Jan 7, 05: The so-called Storegga slide is one of the biggest movements of land in the history of the world. A mass of unstable seabed the size of Iceland slid 800 km down a slope northwest of the Norwegian coast. It unleashed a tsunami ranging from 10 to 20 meters high that not only struck the Norwegian coast but the eastern Scottish coast. The smart money is that the slides occur where there are large, unstable deposits of mud and sand, lying on steep slopes where a continental shelf meets the deep ocean.
. . Another kind if event is an underwater slump, when thin sedimentary seabed collapses after an underlying pocket of gas erupts. A Pennsylvania State University study, published in 2000, suggests that bizarre submarine canyons, located about 150 km east of New Jersey, were carved out by blowouts of this kind.
. . In most known cases, says Masson, slides and slumps are triggered by earthquakes. "The tremor causes the movement, which creates a hole and water then flows back into it. It creates a different wave from an earthquake-generated tsunami, which is a shock wave and is propagated more efficiently and strikes a wider area."
. . In November 1975, two people were killed in Hawaii when a seabed slump, triggered by a 7.2-magnitude quake, unleashed a wave 15 meters high that added to a classic tsunami.
. . In November 1929, 27 people were killed when a giant wave struck Newfoundland, eastern Canada, after a 7.2 quake occurred off the Grand Banks, 250 km to the south.
. . A vast mass of liquid sediment, loosened by the temblor, poured down the slope at 95 kph and eventually travelled some 500 kms into the Atlantic.
Jan 4, 05: In early October, scientific and political bigwigs from around the world gathered in Waterloo, Ontario, to celebrate the opening of the new headquarters of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Made largely of patterned glass, the 65,000-square-foot complex has a soaring atrium, multiple fireplaces, a bistro, a squash court, and a 205-seat auditorium for lectures and string quartet performances. It looks more like a resort than a think tank where some of the smartest people in the world are contemplating the foundations of quantum physics.
. . The elegant structure answers the question (as the architect put it), How do you design a place in which to think?
. . It's not just science that sets Perimeter apart, but organization. Most controversially, Perimeter does not offer tenure, even to the most accomplished scientists. It offers five-year, renewable contracts. So Perimeter attracts an adventurous group, most of whom came precisely because the place doesn't operate like a university. They can, in short, simply think.
. . Perimeter stands out because of a $66 million endowment from Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion; $13 million more from two of his colleagues; and $43 million from the local, provincial, and federal governments. That kind of cash can set a group of physicists free from the distractions that get in the way of scientific progress, like teaching and grading papers. Add to that a management philosophy that rejects the bureaucracy of a big university, and you're sending ripples through the fabric of research space-time.
. . Perimeter is among the handful of places that, over the coming decade or two, have the best chance of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics, one of the biggest goals in physics. The list goes on, totaling 39 appointees, postdocs, and grad students. The only scientist at Perimeter over 50, John Moffat, was a starving artist in Copenhagen when he wrote Einstein a letter in 1953, questioning the assumptions of unified field theory.
. . The unification of electricity and magnetism led to everything from the phonograph to cell phones. Einstein's unification of energy and matter began the atomic age and brought a deeper understanding of nature. And his earlier work on the unification of particles and waves led to quantum mechanics.
. . Much of the physics community is chasing superstring theory: the idea that the fundamental particles in the universe are actually multidimensional strings vibrating at different frequencies. But Smolin and Markopoulou Kalamara are specialists in loop quantum gravity, which holds that space-time is a foamy network of intersecting loops known as spin networks.
. . The institute's decision to seemingly "favor" loop quantum gravity researchers over superstring theoreticians continues to draw fire from the scientific community, though Perimeter has roughly equal numbers of both, and they all seem to get along. "String theorists usually come from particle physics, while LQG people are more from the gravity and general relativity side of things", says Jaume Gomis, a Perimeter theorist. "My hope is that we'll learn from them and they'll learn from us."
. . Lazaridis hopes that we'll soon see a quantum theory of gravity that unites the physics of the vanishingly small (quantum mechanics) and the unimaginably vast (general relativity). "What will happen then?" Lazaridis asks. "Who knows? But it will be something big."
Jan 4, 05: A wall of water up to 50 meters high crashing into the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, flattening everything in its path --not a Hollywood movie but a dire prophecy by some British and U.S. academics. An eruption of a volcano in Spain's Canary Islands could unleash a "mega-tsunami" larger than any in recorded history.
. . According to their controversial study, an explosion of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma could send a chunk of rock twice the size of the Isle of Wight sliding into the Atlantic at up to 220 miles an hour. "It may occur in the next eruption, which could be next year, or ... it may be 10 eruptions down the line." Cumbre Vieja, which last exploded in 1971, typically erupts at intervals of between 20 and 200 years.
. . "We need to get people out in advance of the collapse itself. Once the collapse has happened, the Caribbean would have 9 hours, the U.S. 6 to 12 hours to evacuate tens of millions of people."
. . The Tsunami Society, an international association of experts, dismisses such theories as "scaremongering." It argues Cumbre Vieja would not collapse in a single block and the wave generated would be much smaller. They predict that even in the event of a massive landslide on La Palma, the tsunami reaching North America would be no more than 1 meter high.
. . A warning system in the Indian Ocean could have completely prevented loss of life in Sri Lanka and India from south Asian tsunami, as in most cases, people would only have had to travel 1 kilometer inland to avoid the waves.
Dec 30, 04: India's last active volcano, in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, has erupted in the aftermath of the huge earthquake that set off tsunamis killing thousands of people. Lava was flowing out of the rim of the crater which towers above the Indian Ocean some 500 meters away. A second volcano, called Narcondam, and considered dormant, lies close to Barren Island, which also erupted in 1991 after more than a century of inactivity.
Dec 28, 04: In 1999, scientists at University College London reported that if a volcano in the Canary Islands erupted with sufficient force, it could cause a massive landslide on the island of La Palma and trigger tsunami waves in the Atlantic Ocean.
. . They speculated such a landslide would generate a "mega-tsunami" that would inundate the east coast of the United States and the Caribbean with a wall of water more than 164 feet high.
. . But other researchers in Britain discounted the prediction as the product of a speculative computer model. They said that over the last 200,000 years there had been only two huge landslides on the flanks of the Canary Islands and that there was geologic evidence indicating the slides broke up and fell into the sea in bits instead of one big whoosh.
The lure of carbon nanotubes is that they are 40 to 60 times stronger than industrial steel. "That’s a world-changing technology. Every age has been defined by the material building blocks available … such as stone, bronze, iron. The next age might be defined as the carbon age."
Dec 15, 04: Argon is a gas that rarely interacts chemically with anything. The 25-year-old measurement assumed that argon was 0.917% of the air's total composition. The new measurement puts the value at 0.9332%.
. . The other contents of Earth’s atmosphere are nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), water vapor (typically about 1%), and carbon dioxide (0.04%). Stuff coming in at below 0.01% include neon, helium, methane, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, and ozone.
. . The new argon results imply that the air is denser by 0.01%. Although such a small change would seem to be insignificant, it does affect precision measurements of mass.
. . Consider a pound of feathers on a balance scale, opposite a pound of lead. In a vacuum, the scale is balanced, but this is not true when air is present. It will push up on the feathers, just as water pushes up on a floating object. Because the feathers are more "buoyant" in air than lead, the scale will tip towards the metal.
Dec 8, 04: A lone whale, with a voice unlike any other, has been wandering the Pacific for the past 12 years, American marine biologists said. They traced the movement of whales in the Northern Pacific and found that a lone whale singing at a frequency of around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean since 1992. Its calls, despite being clearly those of a baleen, do not match those of any known species of whale, which usually call at frequencies of between 15 and 20 hertz. The mammal does not follow the migration patterns of any other species, either.
Dec 8, 04: Dutch scientists believe their research, showing how very fine, aerated sand can turn into dry quicksand capable of sucking in objects, could offer a possible explanation for puzzling disappearances in the desert. "The simple fact that we can create a state of sand which does not support weight at all in the laboratory ... means that it could also exist in the real world."
. . They blew an air stream through very fine sand and allowed it to settle into a unpacked state in the laboratory. When they placed a bowl on top of the sand, it was engulfed. The same condition, a type of dry quicksand, could evolve in nature from the sedimentation of very fine sand after it has been blown into the air. If it was large enough it could be dangerous to humans. "Indeed, reports that travelers and whole vehicles have been swallowed instantly may even turn out to be credible in the light of our results."
Dec 5, 04: Scientists have devised a way to make human eggs behave as if they have been fertilized --without using sperm. The team at Cardiff University say this could provide a more ethically acceptable way of creating 'embryonic' stem cells. The 'embryos' do not contain any paternal chromosomes, so could not develop into a baby. The process uses an enzyme --PLC-zeta-- found in sperm, to prompt the egg to divide. Human eggs treated with continued to divide for four to five days. This is the stage at which stem cells can be extracted.
Dec 1, 04: The U.S. Department of Energy is enlisting partners to develop a microscope that can capture images of particles measuring a half an angstrom, or half the size of a hydrogen atom, a necessary step in the nanotechnology evolution. The $100 million project--known as TEAM, or Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope--is being conducted at five national laboratories.
. . "You can also use it to deposit metals or insulators."
. . At this level, polished samples of carbon atoms look like rows of ball bearings, while the different layers of atoms that make up silicon nanowires resemble the stratified geological layers of a canyon.
. . Earlier this year, FEI announced that it captured images with a resolution just below an angstrom (i.e., particles or features measuring a little less than an angstrom could still be identified). The company's machines were also used to create the first pictures of the SARS virus.
. . Electron microscopes create images by shooting electrons at a specimen and then capturing the pattern created by the electrons after encountering the specimen through a series of magnetic or electric lenses. Technically, these aren't lenses in the conventional sense, but fields that focus or control electron behavior and ultimately the resulting image.
. . But, like glass optical lenses, it is the quality of the lens that determines the resolution of the image and, in the end, all lenses are defective. Aberration correction essentially tries to overcome these defects by using multiple lenses.
. . By contrast, a Scanning Electron Microscope captures images by measuring the deflection of electrons. It can capture images in the best circumstances down to a nanometer.
Nov 29, 04: Brain scans might one day replace polygraphs as the best lie detectors, new research suggests. Different parts of the brain are activated by lying versus honest statements, two studies have found, and lies create activity in more locations. The differences can be measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. "There may be unique areas in the brain involved in deception that can be measured with fMRI", said Temple University researcher Scott Faro, who led a study. Faro said his new study suggests there is a consistency in brain patterns, detectable by fMRI, that might go beyond conscious control.
. . Polygraphs can be fooled, scientists say, because they measure arousal, not necessarily deception. A polygraph records respiration, blood pressure and the skin's ability to conduct electricity, something that increases when you perspire.
. . Polygraph tests are based on "on weak scientific underpinnings", the Academies report stated. [If they ask you to take a llie detector test, say "Sure; just as soon as they invent one!"]
Nov 30, 04: Learning new behaviors and information may sometimes seem to push old thoughts out of the brain, but it is the early memories and behaviors that stick, new research shows.
Studies found people who have been blind since birth dream as imaginatively as other people, but lack visual images. Instead, their dreams are filled with taste, smell and touch sensations.
Nov 19, 04: British physicists are pushing back the boundaries of super-precise timing with a clock technology that promises, theoretically, billion-year accuracy, based on the vibrations of a super-cooled strontium ion. Current atomic clocks count time based on the way cesium atoms jump back and forth between different energy levels. This occurs at microwave frequencies with 9.2 billion jumps making up the moment of time we know as the second. The very best of these clocks neither lose nor gain the equivalent of one second every 30 million years.
. . A more accurate definition of the second will improve satellite navigation services, such as GPS and the soon to be launched Galileo system. "Also, if you want to send spacecraft to distant parts of the galaxy, you need very accurate clocks to do the navigation", she said.
. . A new time standard may also provide a vastly more powerful tool to test the laws of physics and help solve a recent scientific fascination --are the physical constants really constant or do they change over time?
Computer chip fabrication techniques were used to make a clock mechanism that will neither lose nor gain a second in 300 years. Researchers believe final development should see a battery-operated system that is about the size of a sugar lump.
Nov 17, 04: The world's strongest acid, H(CHB11Cl11), at least a million times more potent than concentrated sulphuric acid, has been made in a lab in California. Perhaps confusingly, it is also one of the least corrosive. The compound, called a carborane acid, is the first 'superacid' that can be stored in a bottle, say its creators. The previous record-holder, fluorosulphuric acid, is so corrosive that it would eat straight through the glass.
. . The new acid's gentleness is down to its remarkable chemical stability, say Christopher Reed of the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues. Like all acids, it reacts with other compounds, donating a charged hydrogen atom to them. But what is left behind, although negatively charged, is so stable that it refuses to react further.
Nov 15, 04: French biologists have just mapped out the genetic sequence of the largest known virus, and the complexity of the thing has them questioning what it is. The genetic code of the mimivirus, as it is called, is three times longer than that of other viruses and contains elements that blur the lines between life and non-life.
. . Whether viruses are alive has been a matter of debate for more than half a century. They are often thought of as merely complex "biomolecules" – lifeless capsules of genetic information that must invade a living cell and hijack its machinery to reproduce.
. . The typical virus is 200 nanometers, & writes its genetic code in either of two molecules: DNA or RNA, but not both. Mimivirus, however, is more than 400 nanometers wide and has both DNA and RNA. It is so large and complex that researchers had trouble recognizing it as a virus. "We considered it a bacteria for a year and a half."
. . They named it mimivirus for the fact that it "mimics" bacteria. Mimivirus is, however, like other viruses in that it is not able to convert energy or replicate on its own.
. . Mimivirus was found to have 1.2 million base pairs –-the ones and zeros of the genetic code. In this long data sequence, there are more than 1,200 genes, or "mini-programs" that give instructions for making proteins. Many bacteria do not have that many genes.
Nov 12, 04: Would Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance or Debussy's Clair de Lune have sounded the same if the composers had been born in different countries? Probably not, according to researchers who have found that the melodies composers write are influenced by the language they speak.
. . The team's analysis shows that fluctuations in pitch in music written by classic French composers vary much less than in British music. The difference mirrors the patterns of pitch found in the corresponding languages. The intervals in French speech and music turned out to be considerably less variable than their English counterparts. In other words, classical concerts and café chatter may sound rather smoother in Paris than in London.
Nov 8, 04: NASA scientists are studying autistic savant Kim Peek, hoping that technology used to study the effects of space travel on the brain will help explain his mental capabilities. The 53-year-old Peek is called a "mega-savant" because he is a genius in about 15 different subjects. But he also is severely limited in other ways, like not being able to find the silverware drawer at home or dressing himself.
When Kim Peek was born, doctors found a water blister on the right side of his skull, similar to hydrocephalus. Later tests showed his brain hemispheres are not separated, forming a single, large "data storage" area. It is likely that is why Peek has been able to memorize more than 9,000 books.
Oct 20, 04: There's a new manufacturing process for producing small, stable metallic particles that consist of only a few atoms. With regular bulk materials, only the top layer of atoms participates in a reaction. With nanomaterials separated into independent granules, almost every atom reacts, because almost every atom is exposed.
. . With aluminum, that means more powerful explosions. Nanoaluminum, in fact, will explode on mere contact with air. Munitions makers will likely be able to create aerial bombs that are smaller and lighter, but more powerful than current weapons. A rocket with nanoaluminum-enhanced fuel will reach a target velocity faster.
. . Nano-particle nickel could be used to replace platinum and other fairly expensive elements in catalytic converters and fuel cells. This shift could lead to cheaper hydrogen fuel cells for homes and cars in the growing alternative-energy market.
. . QuantumSphere's nanoparticles are made by vaporizing a wire inside a vacuum. Individual atoms then coalesce into spheres.
. . A gallon of the nanoaluminum costs $1,200 and comes in a paint can. Nanonickel, meanwhile, costs about $2,250 a pound --but that's still about 75 times cheaper than platinum, one of the crucial elements in catalytic converters. Prices are expected to fall over time. Five years ago, nanoaluminum was $10,000 a pound.
. . Socks with silver nanoparticles aim to prevent foot odor by killing bacteria.
Oct 18, 04: A 17-mile accelerator, or particle-smasher, is being assembled outside Geneva. Starting in 2007, it will be firing particles at speeds nearing that of light, before smashing them together to re-create the conditions scientists believe existed less than one billionth of a second after the Big Bang -- the birth of the cosmos some 14 billion years ago. The temperatures created in the particle collisions will be around one billion times that of the center of the Sun.
. . The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), replaces another, the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), which was the world's largest and Europe's biggest civil engineering undertaking until the Channel Tunnel was built.
. . Among the particles they hope will be scattered in the colossal explosions will be the sought-after Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, which according to the Standard Model of particle physics is responsible for generating mass.
. . Other questions the LHC may help answer include . the nature of "dark matter", which scientists say makes up some 95% of the universe but which has not yet been detected.
Sept 22, 04: A string, developed at Cornell University, US, is only 10 atoms across, a million times smaller than a normal guitar string. It is made from a carbon nanotube, formed from a sheet of carbon one atom thick and rolled into a cylinder.
. . "As a scientist, the possibility that intrigues me the most is to be able to use it to, in essence, weigh things", explained Professor Paul McEwen, who helped pioneer the string. "If you imagine that you had a guitar string and you glued a little weight on to it. It would lower the frequency at which the guitar string vibrated, because the extra mass slows it down."
. . The pitch is beyond human hearing, around 1,000 times higher than the frequencies human beings can hear. It is possible to use the frequency vibrations to find the mass of individual molecules attached to the string --in effect weighing them.
Sept 21, 04: A team questioned a total of 1,692 Japanese students aged nine to 13 in three different surveys from June 2001 to June 2004. In one survey of 720 pupils, 27% did not know that the Sun sets in the west, while 2% explained the Moon's waxing and waning by choosing the explanation "the Moon has many shapes". Only 39% correctly answered that the Moon orbits the Earth in the same way as man-made satellites.
Sept 21, 04: Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are peering into the atomic world with record clarity, developing an electron microscope image that can distinguish the individual, dumbbell-shaped atoms of a silicon crystal.
. . They achieved an image resolution at 0.6 angstrom, breaking the previous record of 0.7 angstrom which the lab set earlier this year. An angstrom, the smallest wavelength of light, is about 500,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.
. . "We are crossing that threshold where we can really see atoms clearly for the first time ever." Researchers said the next frontier will be seeing atoms in three dimensions.
Sept 17, 04: Researchers said they have invented an antenna that captures visible light in much the same way that radio antennas capture radio waves. They say the device, using tiny carbon nanotubes, might serve as the basis for an optical television or for converting solar energy into electricity once properly developed. They used carbon nanotubes, which are microscopic structures built out of carbon atoms.
Sept 16, 04: The end result -—in perhaps 25 years-- might be a new type of computer that replaces traditional binary bits (1’s and 0’s) with quantum bits, or qubits, which would transmit and process data using entanglement instead of circuits. A mere 80 entangled qubits will pack an impossible 151 trillion gigabytes of processing power -—roughly correlated, 2.3 trillion times more than today’s best 64-bit architecture.
Sept 8, 04: IBM scientists have measured a fundamental magnetic property of a single atom --the energy required to flip its magnetic orientation. This is the first result by a promising new technique they developed to study the properties of nanometer-scale magnetic structures that are expected to revolutionize future information technologies.
. . From spintronics to quantum computing, a large number of dramatically new ideas for electronic, computing and data storage devices are emerging to exploit the remarkable properties resulting from the magnetic orientations of electrons and atoms.
. . Spintronics is an emerging class of new electronic circuits that exploit the magnetic orientation of electrons and atoms --a quantum property called "spin." An electron's spin has two possible conditions, either "up" or "down." Aligning spins in a material creates magnetism. Most materials are non-magnetic because they have equal numbers of up and down electron spins, which cancel each other. But materials such as iron, or cobalt have an unequal numbers of up and down electron spins and are magnetic.
Sept 6, 04: Anthropologists stepped into a hornets' nest today, revealing research that suggests the original inhabitants of America may in fact have come from what is now known as Australia. The claim will be extremely unwelcome to today's native Americans who came overland from Siberia and say they were there first.
. . Skulls of a people with distinctively long and narrow heads discovered in Mexico and California predated by several thousand years the more rounded features of the skulls of native Americans.
. . One particularly well preserved skull of a long-face woman had been carbon dated to 12,700 years ago, whereas the oldest accurately dated native American skull was only about 9,000 years old. "We have extracted her DNA. It is going to be a bomb", she said, declining to give details but adding that the tests carried out so far were being replicated to make sure they were accurate.
. . She said there were tales from Spanish missionaries of an isolated coastal community of long-face people in Baja California of a completely different race and rituals from other communities in America at the time. These last survivors were wiped out by diseases imported by the Spanish conquerors, Gonzalez said.
. . The research is one of 11 different projects in America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East being funded over a four-year period by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council. The projects, focusing on diet, dating and dispersal of people down the millennia in the face of climate change, aim to rewrite anthropology. "We want to make headlines from heads", said Professor Clive Gamble of Southampton university. "DNA will give us a completely new map of the world and how we peopled it."
Sept 6, 04: A reclusive Russian may have solved one of the world's toughest mathematics problems and stands to win $1 million -- but he doesn't appear to care.
. . Grigori Perelman from St. Petersburg claims to have solved the horrendously complicated Poincare Conjecture that tries to explain the behavior of multi-dimensional shapes in space, thereby making himself eligible for the prize offered by the Massachusetts-based Clay Mathematics Institute.
Sept, 04: Better make room for an extra crewmember aboard any spaceship heading outward. This person won't require food, oxygen or water, nor even need to buckle up for safety.. . The virtual astronaut.
. . If dispatching virtual humans from Earth doesn't turn on your thrusters, think about this. It's likely that extraterrestrial civilizations might send surrogate entities our way instead of propelling their delicate, soft-shell selves across interstellar mileage.
. . Peter Plantec, a consultant in virtual human design and animation, initiated the "Sylvie" project --the first commercially available virtual human interface. "The future of space exploration has to do with filtering the input to the humans, so they dont get overloaded. And a virtual human is a great way to do it", Plantec said.
. . "HAL was a vision of artificial intelligence. What we really need is to fake conscious behavior so that we humans can have the emotional relationship with machines. You can't do that with AI. ... In a sense, our space probes are a kind of virtual human. They have to make decisions on their own...not many, but some. Its a very primitive stage of virtual human technology."
. . At some point, there will be a merging of AI and the faking of consciousness, Plantec added, leading to AI beings that are self-programming entities and able to emulate human consciousness behavior.
. . "We humans, I think, are hungry to bond with machines...and I dont understand that at all", Plantec said. "Wouldnt it be interesting if it was a natural instinct that was the next part of our evolution? I really believe that, eventually, these things will evolve into a quasi-life form and we will form symbiotic relationships with them."
Aug 24, 04: Researchers have developed a new technique for producing a high-quality semiconductor that's much more resistant to extreme conditions than silicon. Silicon carbide can be made with fewer flaws than ever before, more reliable and more complex electronics can be built with it. Silicon carbide is a semiconductor like silicon. It's also nearly as hard as diamonds. Practical uses are at least six years away.
. . Because it doesn't become liquid under high heat, it can't undergo the traditional process that silicon undergoes to form ingots that are turned into nearly flaw-free wafers. Instead, single silicon carbide crystals are formed by the condensation of supersaturated vapor. The process, which has been around since the 1970s, leaves many tiny structural defects.
. . SiC --also known as carborundum. With a melting point of 2,700 degrees Celsius --twice that of silicon-- and a hardness close to that of diamond, it has proved almost impossible to work with.
. . The Japanese researchers discovered that they can build silicon carbide wafers by using a multiple step process in which the crystal is grown in several stages. As a result, defects are minimized.
Aug 24, 04: Microscopic analysis revealed a 3-inch-thick layer of "shocked quartz" —-a form of the mineral produced only under intense pressure like that of an impact-— that dated to 35.5 million years ago, when a space rock slammed into the Earth about 190 kms southeast of present-day Washington.
. . The rock, believed to be about 3km wide, was traveling at tens of thousands of kph when it struck on what is now the Chesapeake's Eastern Shore. It left a 72-km-wide crater, the sixth-largest in the world. Scientists estimate that the debris from the blast rose more than 55 km into the air, spreading melted bits of sand and sediment —-including Georgia's tektites and the newly discovered layer of shocked quartz-— for thousands of km.
Aug 22, 04: Indonesia is home to 581 of the world's 793 known coral reef-building species, and most thrive in Pemuteran Bay. The area has long been a favorite among scuba divers, who will go elsewhere, affecting tourism, if the reef dies.
. . On the sandy ocean floor 9 to 21 feet down are dozens of grids made from welded construction bars. Seen from above, they look like some underwater playground. Wires carrying the electrical current are secured to the bars and are plugged into onshore charging stations. Brown estimates the amount of electricity used in a week is equal to burning a single 60-watt bulb for a month.
. . The wires are part of highly original and ambitious underwater experiment: the use of low-voltage electrical current to stimulate regrowth in a badly damaged coral reef. Brown hopes the technique will spread to countries that lack the money for more expensive methods to regenerate or improve their coral reefs.
Aug 18, 04: Scientists drilling ice cores in Greenland have recovered what appear to be plant remains from nearly 3km below the surface. Scientists think the material could be several million years old. They said reddish clumps of material, found in the muddy ice in the cores, contain what appear to be pine needles or blades of grass. If confirmed, it will be the first organic material to be recovered from a deep ice core drilling project.
. . After reaching the bedrock, reddish water flooded the lowest 45m of the bore hole. At this site, the ice sheet is melting at the bottom due to high geothermal heat. The water is running in channels in and under the ice, and is part of a sub-glacial system that may have been isolated from the surface for several million years.
. . Trapped gas in the cores could help researchers determine how the area's climate varied year on year over the past 123,000 years.
Aug 11, 04: A team at Purdue University said they had used ribonucleic acid, or RNA, to build microscopic structures such as spirals, triangles, rods and hairpins, that could serve as components of nanotechnology devices. Such "nanoscale" devices might be used in medicine, or as computers woven into everyday materials such as clothing.
. . "Biology builds beautiful nanoscale structures, and we'd like to borrow some of them for nanotechnology. Self-assembly means cost-effective", he said.
Aug 9, 04: Cave explorers discovered a pit inside a mountain range in central Croatia believed to have the world's deepest subterranean vertical drop, a scientific institute reported. The cave, in Croatia's mountainous Velebit region, has a steady, weaving descent of 62 meters before it takes a direct vertical plunge of 516 meters through the ground, said a researcher at the Velebit Speleological Society. The cave's widest stretch is about 30 meters.
. . The Voronya Cave in Georgia's West Caucasus has the world's deepest cavern, measuring 1,710 meters.
Aug 9, 04: Scientist Bill McGuire told a news conference on natural disasters that some time in the next few thousand years, the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma will collapse, sending walls of water 100 meters high racing across the Atlantic.
. . A chunk of the volcano the size of a small island began to slide into the ocean in 1949. There is almost no monitoring of the volcano, giving virtually no chance of any advance warning of another eruption which could trigger the catastrophe. Between seven and 10 hours later, waves still several tens of meters tall and traveling at the speed of a jet plane would be swamping the Caribbean and crashing into the eastern seaboards of South and North America.
. . McGuire urged the governments of Spain and the United States to fund monitoring of the volcanically active La Palma -- a project he said could be achieved relatively cheaply. He said the slow collapse -- started by an eruption in 1949 -- would almost certainly be turned catastrophic by another eruption of the volcano which erupts every 25 to 200 years.
"The U.S. government must be aware of the threat. I am sure they are not taking it seriously." "A future president of the United States must make a call on what to do when La Palma collapses", he said.
Aug 6, 04: Alvin, the 40-year-old submarine that let scientists explore the Titanic, find a lost Hydrogen bomb and discover more than 300 new animal species, will be replaced by a newer version in 2008.
. . The new vessel --as yet unnamed-- will go deeper, move faster and stay down longer --up to seven hours instead of five. It will also boast more space, greater storage capacity and advanced lighting, navigational and data collecting equipment.
. . Some of its abilities have already been surpassed by vessels from Russia, France and Japan. China is building its first vehicle. Like Japan's submarine, Alvin's replacement will be able to dive as deep as 21,000 feet, and it will be able to carry more observers. It will also have another advantage -- a 7.5-mile fiber-optic cable as thin as a fishing line that will let it send real-time data and video to the host ship and classrooms around the world. With its two mechanical arms, the vehicle will be able to prod under rocks and collect specimens in front and side storage baskets. The submarine will be able to access 99% of the ocean floor, so scientists can comb through deep sea trenches.
Aug 5, 04: The University of Texas and Texas A&M University are planning to construct what they call the world's largest telescope. Scientists say that the proposed $400 million Giant Magellan Telescope would collect 70 times more light than NASA's successful Hubble Space Telescope and could produce images that are 10 times sharper. The new scope could be placed atop the Andes Mountains in Chile as early as 2015. The telescope's six large mirrors would surround a seventh central mirror, all on a single mounting, to be constructed in Chile. The telescope's light-collecting area would be twice the diameter of the largest current telescopes.
Aug 5, 04: Japanese scientists have created trout whose fathers were salmon in an experiment that they say may help preserve endangered species and boost the world's fish supplies. They transferred primordial germ cells, which can develop into either sperm or eggs, from newly hatched rainbow trout embryos to masu salmon embryos. Thirty days after the transplant, the specially marked donated cells were present in the ovaries and sperm of some of the salmon.
. . Trout sperm from the salmon was later used to fertilize trout eggs which produced healthy fish whose DNA fingerprints were similar to the donor trout. He added that if primordial germ cells of a big, slow-developing fish like bluefin tuna could be transplanted into smaller fish like mackerel, the surrogate mackerel could produce mature tuna eggs and sperm in a shorter time than tuna parents.
. . Rainbow trout and masu salmon come from different areas of the world and the two species diverged at least 8 million years ago. They also have different breeding patterns. Rainbow trout spawn several times during their lifetime but masu salmon die after their first spawning.
Aug 5, 04: Swedish geologists may have found a way to predict earthquakes weeks before they happen by monitoring the amount of metals like zinc and copper in subsoil water near earthquake sites. Water samples taken 1.5 km beneath the ground in northern Iceland show the content of several metals increased dramatically a few weeks before a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck. Levels of manganese, zinc and copper all increased by up to 1,000% before quakes.
Aug 2, 04: Conserving tropical forests may benefit nearby coffee plantations, researchers reported. Bees can cross over from the jungle to pollinate the coffee trees, resulting in greater yields and healthier coffee beans. Pollination by wild bees increased coffee yields by 20% when tropical forest existed within about half a mile of the forest, they found. And coffee trees visited by wild bees from the jungle were 27% less likely to produce "peaberries" -- small, misshapen seeds that result from inadequate pollination.
July 30, 04: Researchers say they finally have found a potent repellent to drive away sharks. If proven effective, the repellent one day might protect divers, surfers and swimmers. But researchers say that would require much more study. First they hope it can protect sharks — in decline worldwide due to overfishing — by reducing the numbers caught needlessly by long-line commercial fishermen.
. . The repellent, called A-2 because it was the second recipe tried, is derived from extracts of dead sharks. The repellent seems to carry a chemical messenger that triggers a flight reaction. He said more studies are needed to pinpoint the active molecule among a dozen or so.
July 29, 04: Physics researchers at Indiana's Purdue University have been doing some puddle linking --tying together pools of a few dozen electrons sandwiched inside a semiconductor. The electron pools --known as "quantum dots"-- promise a new type of ultra-small transistor that could outperform conventional transistors while occupying far less space.
. . Quantum-scale computer bits --qubits-- can use the up and down spin states of electrons as substitutes for the zeroes and ones of the binary code. These electron spin states --tantamount to right- and left-handed rotations about a central axis-- have strange properties unique to their extremely small size. Instead of being either zero or one, a quantum binary code would allow an unusual third state --a superposition of both zero and one.
. . "An electron, for example, can behave like a particle or a wave, at times, and it has the odd ability to seemingly be in two different states at once", said Duke University physics professor Albert Chang. "Physicists need a different set of words and concepts to describe the behavior of objects that can do such counterintuitive things." This added state means added computer power --a quantum leap above what is currently available. Linked quantum dots may make that leap one step closer.
July 21, 04: European satellites have given confirmation to terrified mariners who describe seeing freak waves as tall as 10-story buildings, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. Evidence to support this has been sketchy, and many marine scientists have clung to statistical models that say monstrous deviations from the normal sea state only occur once every thousand years.
. . Testing this promise, ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the oceans with their radar. Even though the research period was brief, the satellites identified more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe that measured more than 25 meters (81.25 feet) in height. The waves exist "in higher numbers than anyone expected. The next step is to analyze if they can be forecasted."
In 1995, the British cruise liner Queen Elizabeth II (QE2) encountered a 29-meter (94.25-feet) wall of water during a hurricane in the North Atlantic. Its captain, Ronald Warwick, likened it to "the White Cliffs of Dover."
. . The goal is to find out how these strange, cataclysmic phenomena may be generated by ocean eddies and currents or by the collision of weather fronts, and which regions of the seas may be most at risk.
July 14, 04: Magnetic resonance imaging has been used to pinpoint the position of a single, unpaired electron for the first time. The achievement, by a team at IBM's Almaden Research Laboratory in San Jose, California, paves the way for scientists to map the shape of molecules and peer inside transistors to examine atomic-scale features.
July 12, 04: Dark matter and dark energy are two of the most vexing problems in science today. Together they dominate the universe, comprising some 96% of all mass and energy. But nobody knows what either is. It's tempting to consider them products of the same unknown phenomenon, something theorist Robert Scherrer suggests. The professor of physics at Vanderbilt University says "k-essence" is behind it all. (short for kinetic-energy-driven quintessence.)
. . Scherrer agrees two explanations might be necessary, but he's also bothered by that complexity. To explain it all in one fell swoop, Scherrer invokes an exotic form of energy called a scalar field. It's a bit like an electric or magnetic field, with energy and pressure and a magnitude. But a scalar field has no direction. A scalar field is thought to have been behind inflation, the less-than-a-second period after the Big Bang when the universe expanded many billions of times before settling into a more reasonable rate of growth.
. . K-essence changes behavior over time in Scherrer's model, clumping early on to help form galaxies, and now forcing the universe apart. Right now, dark matter has a density that decreases as the universe expands, he explained, while dark energy has a density that stays constant as the universe expands. "That means that at very early times, the dark matter 'piece' of the k-essence is the dominant one", Scherrer said. "As the universe expands and the density of the dark matter 'piece' of the k-essence decreases, it eventually falls below the density of the dark energy 'piece,' and the k- essence behaves more like dark energy."
. . There is one glaring problem with the idea, which Scherrer admits to. It implies that we live at a very special moment in time when the energy densities of dark matter and dark energy are roughly equal.
. . Scientists hate coincidences.
. . One example, he said, is to confine all the forces of our universe to a four-dimensional plane known as a membrane, or "brane", which is sandwiched between other branes. Then let gravity escape to a fifth dimension that's perpendicular to the plane, Livio explains. The effects of dark matter are then the gravitational influence of other branes on ours.
. . Widely popular "string theories" of the universe explain dark matter as "supersymmetric particles" that bear no relationship to dark energy, Livio points out. Serious light might be shed on dark matter around 2007, when a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider will reach the necessary energies to produce supersymmetric particles, if they exist.
. . Dark energy, which many experts say is likely to remain mysterious for decades, might involve an outside "vacuum energy" that acts upon our universe, which many theorists suspect is just one amid many.
July 7, 04: Soviet dictator Stalin was a madman who could have benefited from a psychiatrist's attention and millions of lives could have been saved, a British researcher claimed. Stalin, who ruled Russia from 1924 until his death in 1953, suffered from dementia caused by heart attacks, according to Dr George El-Nimr. "This (Stalin's dementia) might be an explanation for the florid paranoia, dimming of his superior intellect and the unleashing of his most sadistic personality traits."
July 7, 04: Lake Vostok, deep beneath the Antarctic ice, appears to be divided into two deep basins, according to researchers who profiled the lake with an array of complex instruments. Hidden beneath some 3 km of ice, Lake Vostok is a liquid body of water roughly the size of Lake Ontario. It is thought to have existed undisturbed for thousands of years and researchers hope to sample the lake for signs of microbes.
. . They found two distinct sub-basins separated by a narrow ridge. The water over that ridge is about 650 feet deep, compared to roughly 1,300 feet deep in the northern basin and 2,600 feet deep in the southern. "The chemical and biological composition of these two ecosystems is likely to be different."
July 4, 04: Scientists used DNA testing to match the stump of a stolen black walnut tree with two logs sold to a lumber mill 60 miles away. The case began in November when an incensed landowner in western Indiana contacted the state Department of Natural Resources after finding the stumps and chainsawed branches of a black walnut tree and a black cherry tree on his property. The wood from the 55-foot-tall black walnut was worth at least $2,500.
. . Conservation officer Don Dyson said a timber-cutting crew had been working in the area when the trees were cut, and a timber mill the harvester routinely sells to had two large black walnut logs that appeared to match the missing tree.
. . A tree-poaching conviction could have cost the timber-cutter his state license, but he paid the landowner $9,000 — about three times the value of the trees — to avoid going to court.
June 18, 04: Data could move rapidly through teleportation
from one zone in a hypothetical quantum computer to
another. In NIST's teleportation experiment, there is no
physical movement. Instead, data is transmitted. Such a
transfer could speed up calculations in a futuristic
computer. "It is quicker than moving the atoms" in such a
computer. By studying the relative properties of the atoms,
the characteristics of one can be said to have transferred--
thus, the atom in question has, for all purposes, been teleported.
June 18, 04: A Japanese-Chilean research firm, BioSigma
S.A., reported on Friday its first major breakthrough in
developing new technology that uses bacteria to extract
copper from poor quality mineral at a low cost. The technology is the first of its kind and could be applied on a commercial scale by 2009.
June 16, 04: It is not quite the "beam me up Scotty" teleportation of Star Trek, but
teams of scientists said they had made properties
jump from one atom to another without using any physical link. Each atom's "quantum state", a complex combination of traits, was transmitted to its counterpart.
. . Physicists in the United States and Austria for the first time have
teleported "quantum states" between separate atoms. It could help lead to "quantum
computing" technology that would make superfast computers.
Quantum computers are probably at least a decade away.
. . Quantum states include physical properties such as energy, motion and
magnetic field. Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in
the quantum states of the atoms. The research involved quantum entanglement --in
which the quantum states of two or more particles are linked without physical
contact. It's a phenomenon so bizarre that even Albert Einstein called it spooky.
. . Researchers can use lab techniques to create a weird relationship between pairs of tiny particles. After that, the fate of one particle instantly affects the other; if one particle is made to take on a certain set of properties, the other immediately takes on identical or opposite properties, no matter how far away it is and without any apparent physical connection to the first particle.
June 11, 04: The system works. A German university said it
has revoked the doctoral title of a former star researcher
accused of faking data while working at a renowned U.S. electronics lab.
. . Jan Hendrik Schoen, once considered a potential
Nobel prize candidate, caused "the biggest data fabrication
scandal in physics in the last 50 years", University of
Constance professor Wolfgang Dieterich said in announcing the decision.
. . Schoen, now 34, was fired by Bell Laboratories in
New Jersey in September 2002 after an outside review
committee concluded that he made up or altered data 16
times while working in the hot fields of superconductivity and molecular electronics.
Findings he helped research were published in prominent
journals such as Science, Nature and Applied Physics Letters.
. . A committee of 12 professors at his alma mater in
southern Germany decided after its own review to strip Schoen of the doctorate in physics he earned in 1998 and asked him to return his diploma.
June 14, 04: The European Union's Institute for Reference
Materials and Measurements. The technology for measuring
differences between atoms has proved important to help improve the kilogram, the last remaining of the seven basic measures not defined abstractly.
. . The kilogram is measured against a hunk of metal
sitting in Paris, while length, time, electric current,
thermodynamic temperature, luminous intensity and the
number of molecules in a mole are defined through other measures. For example, the meter is defined by how far light travels in a fraction of a second.
. . The object of the search for a more accurate kilo
is to more accurately count the number of molecules in a
mole, which is known as Avogadro's number. In this search,
the labs rely on purified silicon --Silicon 28, with the
isotopes Silicon 29 and Silicon 30 removed. The goal is for
a tenfold increase in the accuracy of Avogadro's number,
about 6.022 times 10 to the 23rd power. Russians and others
purify the silicon, and the Belgian lab measures the purity of the Silicon 28.
. . If the purity is sufficient --it must be reduced
from an uncertainty of 10 to the minus-seventh power to 10 to the minus-eighth power-- scientists can make the physical kilogram sitting in Paris obsolete.
May 29, 04: A powerful earthquake that shook Alaska in
2002 affected geysers and hot springs at Yellowstone
National Park nearly 2,000 miles away in Wyoming,
scientists reported. The magnitude 7.9 Denali fault
earthquake in November 2002 was known to have triggered
smaller quakes across much of the U.S. West, but its effect
on geysers was previously unknown. "Several small hot
springs, not known to have geysered before, suddenly surged
into a heavy boil with eruptions as high as 1 meter. The
temperature at one of these springs increased rapidly from
about 42 to 93 degrees Celsius. It also became much less acidic than usual.
. . "Could large earthquakes closer to Yellowstone
trigger hydrothermal explosions?" they asked. Thousands of
years ago a steam and hot water explosion blasted out a
hole that now is Mary's Bay on Yellowstone Lake.
May 24, 04: Scientists are eagerly awaiting the return of
a "slow earthquake" that could give them clues to when and
where the next major quake will strike Pacific Coast of
North America. The area gets hit with a devastating shake
of magnitude 9 about every 500 years.
. . The recently discovered phenomenon is believed to
occur about every 14 months, which would put the next event
anytime now, but people are unlikely to feel anything
because it will occur 12 to 25 miles below the earth's
surface. "Instead of this slip happening over a few seconds, it happens over a few weeks, so it is, in some sense, like a slow earthquake."
. . The discovery made scientists rethink theories
about how the pressure caused by the colliding plates is
built up to the point that it results in a large
earthquake. "It's not a straight line at 45 degrees, it's
like a staircase.... We have no idea where we are on the
staircase, but eventually we get to the top and have a big earthquake."
Theorized by Einstein for almost a century, physicists have found evidence to support the theory that the force of gravity moves at the speed of light.
May 10, 04: Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd said on
Monday it would soon start mass production of cost-
competitive, superconductive wire capable of transmitting
130 times the electricity deliverable by a normal copper
wire. They successfully produced 3,000-foot sections of
ceramic superconductive wire, with a width less than that
of a pencil. It can be cooled by liquid nitrogen, a cheap
industrial refrigerant. It's two to five times the price of conventional copper.
. . The company expects the applications to expand to
use in motors and transformers used in ships and trains. The devices using the material will weigh less, helping cut energy costs in factories and on ships.
May, 04: Liquids under high pressure deep beneath the Earth's surface allow some faults to move in a slow, gradual way, potentially delaying earthquakes in some areas but increasing the threat elsewhere, according to a study. A "silent slip" is caused by a pocket of high-pressure fluid in the deepest part of a fault where two rock masses grind together.
. . While silent slip movement is gradual enough not to be felt, Kodaira said it may not ease the threat of a a major temblor. That's because, while the movement may ease stress where it occurs, it could increase pressure on adjacent rocks that are locked together and don't have fluids to ease their movement.
May 5, 04: US chemists have designed the world's first two-footed molecular robot and taken it for a stroll in a lab dish. The robot's legs, which measure just 10 billionths of a meter, are the first nanoscale device to be capable of
bipedal movement. The robot is able to "walk" because it is made out of scraps of DNA.
Apr 29, 04: Army scientists are working on a liquid body
armor for clothing that stays flexible during normal use
but can harden to stop a projectile when hit suddenly.
Researchers hope the liquid could be used in sleeves and
pants, areas not protected by ballistic vests because they must stay flexible.
. . The liquid, hard particles suspended in a fluid,
is soaked into layers of Kevlar, which holds it in place.
Scientists recently had an archer shoot arrows at it to see
how well the liquid boosted the strength of a Kevlar vest.
"Instead of the arrow going through the Kevlar, it is
completely stopped ... and sometimes just bounces right
off." Vests treated with the liquid have also blocked stabs
from an ice pick, and researchers are doing more tests to
see if it can stop bullets or shrapnel, too.
. . A "shear thickening fluid" is a key component of
the liquid armor. Hard particles are suspended in the
liquid, polyethylene glycol. At low strain rates, the
particles flow with the fluid, enabling clothing to stay
flexible. But when heavily strained, the particles become
rigid. The transition happens very quickly, a millisecond or quicker.
. . They're optimistic the liquid body armor will be
useful to local police and prison guards —-and perhaps it
could one day protect people in automobile and airplane crashes.
Apr 29, 04: Two physicists have discovered a way to
digitally map old, archived audio recordings and
reconstruct the sound. They have found a way to digitally
map the grooves in warped or damaged shellac records and
wax cylinders —-and play them back using a sort of virtual
needle. To do so, they use the same optical scanning method
—-with microscope and computer technology-— that physicists
employ for measuring the journeys of subatomic particles.
The technique detects and filters any scratches, as well as
clicks and pops from dust, & even if there are cracks in the cylinder.
. . Roughly 2.5 million music and spoken-word
recordings are stored in the Library of Congress —-the
project's sponsor-— but some are more than a century old
and very delicate. Archivists risk further damage if they
use a real stylus to play and re-record them.
. . [I immediately think of the clay pots that are
thot to have recordings of a dog bark. The pots were formed
by a method accidentally very like the first wax cylinder
recordings --soft clay for wax, a stick for the stylus, &
both on a turning table. It would certainly be the oldest
sounds ever recorded --even thousands of years! ~JKH]
Apr 26, 04: Why is it so annoying to watch someone else
make a mistake? Maybe because it affects the same areas of
the brain as when a person makes his or her own mistake,
Dutch researchers said. Experiments in which volunteers
tried a computer task and then watched each other do the
same thing showed the brain reacted in a similar way
whether the observer made the mistake, or watched someone else make it.
. . When people realized they had made an error, a
distinctive electrical signal arose from a brain region
called the anterior cingulate cortex. The same thing
happened when the volunteers watched other volunteers try
the experiment and make the occasional mistake. "These data
suggest that similar neural mechanisms are involved in
monitoring one's own actions and the actions of others."
Apr 7, 04: Next time Earth's magnetic field flips, compass
needles will point South instead of North. But scientists
can't say when it will occur, and until now, they've
disagreed on how long the transitions take.
. . A new study pins down how long it took for the
last four reversals to play out. It also finds that the
dramatic turnarounds occur more quickly nearer the equator
than at higher latitudes closer to the poles. That means
folks living during the next reversal --which some
scientists speculate might be underway-- will see compasses
change and behave differently in different locations. But
the field is shifty, periodically growing stronger and
weaker, moving around, and even flipping its polarity entirely.
. . In the past 15 million years, there have been
about one shift each 250,000 years. The last one, however,
was 790,000 years ago. That might suggest we're overdue for
a big change. Not necessarily so, Clement says. The flips
are not periodic, meaning they don't adhere to a schedule
of even intervals. Yet the intensity of the magnetic field
has been dropping for the last 2,000 years, and "it has
dropped significantly" during the past two decades, Clement
said. One recent study shows the decline in strength
amounts to 10% over the last 150 years.
. . Researchers also have not known how long it takes
for the magnetic field to make a transition. Studies have
suggested anywhere from 1,000 to 28,000 years are required
to initiate and complete a reversal. For the past four
flips, he found that each took about 7,000 years.
. .
The magnetic field lines extend out beyond Earth's
atmosphere and provide the first line of defense against strong solar storms.
Apr 1, 04: Intel is hoping for a two-tiered payout. If
sensor networks take off, that will create a need for more
silicon. But the networks will also generate a huge amount
of data, driving demand for more high-end PCs to process it
all. The company now foresees networks consisting of
thousands of motes, located wherever there's a need for
data collection, streaming real-time data to one another
and to central servers. Intel imagines the day when every
assembly line, soybean field, and nursing home on the
planet will be peppered with motes, prodding factory
foremen to replace faulty machines, farmers to water
fields, and nurses to check on something unusual in room E214.
. . The Golden Gate bridge actually sways a few feet
in high winds", he says. "The motes will measure how far it
moves to either side." By June '04, a stretch of the bridge
will be lined with about 200 motes. Each will contain chips
running at 8 megahertz and accelerometers designed to
measure movement caused by strong gusts. Those readings
will be radioed to nearby supermotes --data way stations
that are 25 times more powerful than a regular mote--
before being relayed to the central server. If one reading
seems out of whack, it could be a sign of a structural
weakness that needs addressing before the next big earthquake.
. . There's talk among researchers of using solar
cells, or even MEMS devices that harvest imperceptible
vibrations in the environment.
. . Right now, the motes are a lot closer in size to
golf balls. The goal is to halve the size and price of a
mote every 18 months, which would have each unit about the
size of a grain of rice and selling for around $5 by 2011.
. . They'll sell 10-cent Band-Aids that are also
interactive heart monitors. We'll get to a price point
where everything starts to have sensors. Once sensor nets
liberate humans from the burden of computer interaction,
there's no limit to how much silicon Intel can push. "I'm
not going to have 10 computers per person", Gelsinger
froths. "I'm going to have thousands of computers per person."
Mar 27, 04: A revolutionary jet engine flew faster than
seven times the speed of sound in a high altitude test over
the Pacific on Saturday, marking what NASA scientists
hailed as a milestone in developing the "Holy Grail" of space travel.
. . NASA's 12-foot-long X-43A research vehicle --
resembling a winged surfboard-- hit slightly over Mach 7,
about 5,000 mph, during 11 seconds of powered flight. It
marked the first time that a "scramjet", or supersonic-
combustion ramjet, has powered a vehicle at such high
speed. Rather than carrying both the fuel and oxygen needed
to provide acceleration, like a conventional rocket engine
does, scramjet engines carry only hydrogen fuel and pull
the oxygen needed to burn that fuel from the atmosphere.
. . The test had set a world speed record for a craft
powered by an air-breathing engine. "Efficient access to
space opens up a whole new world for industry in the
future, to be able to get to space and get back, quickly,
and do it several times a month." Later this year, NASA
researchers hope to test the engine at Mach 10, or about 7,000 mph.
The International Mineralogical Association was formed in
1959 to bring order to the chaotic and confused field of
mineralogy. The IMA has identified nearly 4,000 species of
minerals, including 65 species approved in 2003.
Mar 18, 04: Half of all Bulgarians believe in black magic,
telepathy and the ability to read the future in dreams,
according to the results of a survey by the Gallup institute.
20% believe that ghosts exist, that black cats are unlucky
and that it is possible to make contact with the dead. 33%
said they believed in horoscopes, that the number 13 has
special powers, and that a broken mirror brings bad luck.
. . Respondents in their 30s and 40s, who experienced
the switch to a market economy, are among the most psychologically vulnerable and therefore most likely to hold superstitious beliefs, she added.
Mar 14, 04: Research showing that bald mice can grow hair
after being implanted with a type of stem cell could lead
to a cure for baldness, a group of scientists says. "You
can envision a process of isolating existing stem cells and
re-implanting them in the areas where guys are bald."
. . The study confirms what scientists suspected for
years: hair follicles contain "blank slate" stem cells that
give most humans a full head of hair for life. Although
they are called stem cells, they differ from embryonic stem cells.
. . They cautioned that a baldness cure is still some
years away. It's estimated that more than $1 billion is spent each year in the United States combatting baldness, mostly through hair transplants.
Mar 12, 04: Years of work remains, but the researchers are
hard at work building biological time machines that reverse
aging in some cells. Some are trying to reset biological
clocks by mimicking "magic factors" in human eggs —-the
only cells in a woman's body not programmed to die. Others
are identifying molecules that enable salamanders to re-grow limbs.
. . Chemists in San Diego have created a chemical
compound they call "reversine", which resets muscle cells
in mice much the same way newts restart limb cell growth after injury.
. . Ultimately, these discoveries could usher in
regenerative medicine. The idea is to turn a patients' skin
cells into embryo-like cells that could be coaxed into
growing into replacement tissue for failing organs.
. . Scottish and Japanese researchers last year
isolated an "immortality gene" in mice that allowed stem
cells to grow indefinitely in the laboratory. They dubbed
it Nanog, from the Celtic mythical land called Tir nan Og,
where everyone stays young. The discovery hastened the race
to find a similar human gene and prompted serious scientists to publicly discuss for the first time what they've been quietly pursuing for years.
Malaysia said it will begin commercial production of the world's smallest microchip by the end of '04. The revolutionary chip is so small it can be embedded in
everything from money to human bodies to prevent banknote
and document forgery, or for keeping track of goods and people. It's one of very few chips with a built-in antenna. The chips cost about 10 US cents each, but "we are aiming to reduce the price." Production could run into "billions of chips".
Feb 25, 04: Artificial diamonds made from gas turned out
surprisingly hard --harder even than natural diamonds, U.S.
researchers said. "Not only were the diamonds so hard that they broke the measuring equipment, we were able to grow gem-sized crystals in about a day."
. . They said they grew the crystals using a process
called high-growth rate chemical vapor deposition, in which
hydrogen gas and methane are bombarded with charged
particles, or plasma, in a chamber. They subjected the
crystals to high-pressure, high-temperature treatment to
harden them further. The diamonds were heated to 2,000
Celsius (3,632 F) and put under pressures between 50,000
and 70,000 times sea-level atmospheric pressure for 10 minutes. The ultra-hard diamonds were at least 50% harder than natural diamonds.
Jan 30, 04: Two new superheavy elements have been
fleetingly created in a Russian lab. Each has many more
protons and neutrons in their nuclei than any naturally
occurring elements found on Earth. The discovery will
encourage researchers hoping to fill apparent gaps in the
periodic table with "islands" of stable, massive atoms that
may exhibit new chemical properties and atomic shapes. The
nuclei of the two new elements are crammed with 113 and 115 protons.
. . The new, unstable superheavies were forged by
smashing calcium atoms (atomic number 20) into americium (atomic number 95).
. . Other laboratories will have to vet the findings
before the elements can be officially added to the periodic
table. Until then, they will go by names indicating their
atomic numbers: Ununtrium (113) and Ununpentium (115).
Thorough independent confirmation may take months or even
years. Claims for elements with 111, 112 and 116 protons are also being investigated.
Jan 30, 04: Hypernuclei are atomic nuclei combining not
just the usual protons and neutrons but also rare particles
called hyperons. About 100,000 have been created in an
experiment called FINUDA, on the Dafne accelerator at the
National Laboratory of Frascati. Hypernuclei are incredibly
short-lived, surviving for less than a billionth of a
second. But by studying them, scientists hope to learn more
about the weak force, one of nature's four fundamental
forces, as well as the first moments of the Universe's existence.
Jan 28, 04: Scientists said they had created a new form of
matter and predicted it could help lead to the next
generation of superconductors for use in electricity
generation, more efficient trains and countless other applications.
. . The new matter form is called a fermionic
condensate and it is the sixth known form of matter --after
gases, solids, liquids, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995.
. . The cloud of supercooled potassium atoms is one
step closer to an everyday, usable superconductor. "It is
related to a Bose-Einstein condensate", Jin said. "It's not
a superconductor but it is really something in between
these two that may help us in science link these two interesting behaviors."
. . Bose-Einstein condensates are collections of
thousands of ultracold particles that occupy a single
quantum state --they all essentially behave like a single,
huge superatom. But Jin says these Bose-Einstein
condensates are made with bosons, which like to act in unison.
. . Her team's new form of matter uses fermions --the
everyday building blocks of matter that include protons,
electrons and neutrons. "They are not copycats." But Jin's
team coaxed them into doing just that.
. . They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a
degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F --which
is the point at which matter stops moving. They confined
the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and
laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing
up. "This is very similar to what happens to electrons in a superconductor."
. . The way the potassium atoms acted suggested there
should be a way to translate the behavior into a room-temperature solid.
Jan 14, 04: Researchers in the United States believe they
have created a new phase of matter -- a "supersolid" that
flows like a liquid. Pennsylvania State U physicists Eun-
Seong Kim and Moses Chan say they compressed liquid helium-
4 into a sponge-like glass disc riddled with atom-sized
pores, while chilling it to a fraction of a degree above
almost absolute zero (-273 Celsius).
. . The porous glass was held inside a leak-tight
capsule, whose pressure was gradually increased. When it
reached 40 times atmospheric pressure, the helium became a
solid but appeared to move with the remarkable frictionless
flow of the substances known as superfluids.
. . In superfluids, all the atoms are in the same
quantum state, which means that they all have the same
momentum -- if one moves, they all move. That enables
superfluids to crawl, friction-free, through tiny cracks.
Indeed, superfluid helium will even flow up the sides of a jar and over its lip.
. . Superfluidity occurs as a result of a phenomenon
called Bose-Einstein condensation, when all the particles
have been chilled to temperatures so extreme that they
enter the same quantum-mechanical state. Gases, too, have
also responded in this way to Bose-Einstein condensate, but this is the first proof that solids, too, can also enter a superstate, the authors maintain.
Jan 12, 04: The "glue" that saltwater mussels use to cling
to rocks is made up of proteins cured with iron filtered
from ocean water, a discovery potentially useful to
adhesives makers, shippers and dentists, a U.S. chemist
said. "These animals appear to use iron in a way that has never been seen before."
. . The sticky filaments, or "beard", that a mussel
excretes through its "foot" affix it to surfaces as
slippery as Teflon. The foot dabs bits of glue until it is
anchored, securing it against waves, tides and predators.
The bio-adhesive is based on proteins, which resemble
gelatin prior to hardening with iron. Mussels filter the
iron from surrounding seawater, the same way they collect food.
. . The researchers will be examining barnacles,
oysters and kelp to see if a common glue emerges. "Research
based on materials like this one could open up new branches
of adhesives research, helping us to do things such as
develop new surgical procedures and prevent barnacles from sticking to ships."
. . An understanding of bivalve glue could create
alternatives to the copper-based paints used to coat ship
hulls to kill the larvae of barnacles and mussels. Many
harbors are polluted with copper as a result.
. . Mussel glue also holds potential as natural rustproofing.
Aerogel -- 'Frozen Smoke'-- is made from the same
material as glass --only 1,000 times less dense.
. . Flexible Aerogel Superinsulation provides at
least 39 times more efficient insulation than the best fiberglass insulation.
. . Scientist Samual Kistler invented the original
Aerogel in 1932. Monsanto later bought the rights to the
material and used it as an insulator in picnic coolers.
. . JPL's newest version of Aerogel is 99.8%
air and is a stiff foam made from silicon dioxide. Its
density is just 3 milligrams per cubic centimeter. Its
melting point is 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F).
Jan 9, 04: Oil and water can and do mix, an Australian
scientist has established in a discovery which contradicts
the age-old proverb, but first you have to take the gases
out of the water, mainly oxygen and nitrogen. The oil and
water then mix spontaneously and stayed that way for a long time.
. . Injectable drugs are now dissolved in water with
detergents added that sometimes cause side effects. A US
perfume manufacturer found some customers were allergic to the detergents it used to dissolve its fragrance agents in water... is also interested.
Jan 1, 04: Gravity Probe project: There are two key
observations that scientists want to evaluate with GP-B:
. . 1: Frame Dragging -- A rotating massive body
drags space and time around with it. A gyroscope orbiting
Earth tends to tilt away from the plane of its orbit
because the Earth is dragging it. GP-B is designed to sense
the frame-dragging effect and will measure it to one-percent precision.
. . 2: Geodetic Effect --According to Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity, space and time in the
vicinity of a massive body is distorted. For a gyroscope orbiting near the Earth, this distortion leads to a tilting of the gyroscope's spin axis in the plane of the orbit. This effect is predicted by general relativity theory to be 150 times larger than the frame dragging. GP-B will measure this effect to a part in 10,000.
May 10, 01: Many elementary particles splinter into shards, but not the electron. At least scientists *hadn't thought so. According to *new theoretical research,
however, there are extreme conditions under which even
electrons divide. Loose electrons in ultracold liquid helium might split into fragments when exposed to light. This begins to solve a mystery noticed years ago.
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