SCIENCE NEWSCLIPS

SCIENCE
NEWSCLIPS
to 1-1-04.

Dec 18, 03: Science magazine chose ten "Breakthroughs of the Year". Number one is: Proof that a mysterious force called "dark energy" is pushing the universe to expand endlessly at a faster and faster rate.
. . Others included studies of genes and mental disease; evidence of global warming effects; how RNA affects genes within cells; new advances in imaging individual molecules within cells; proof that gamma ray bursts --one of nature's most powerful explosions-- come from supernova eruptions; proof that mouse embryonic stem cells can transform into sperm and egg; esoteric materials that bend light in a new way; discovery that the Y chromosome in humans contains duplicate genes, and the first successful test of a new cancer treatment.

Dec 1, 03: Researchers suggest a "Little Ice Age" that gripped Europe from the mid-1400s until the mid-1800s slowed tree growth and yielded uncommonly dense Alpine spruce for Antonio Stradivari and other famous 17th century Italian violin-makers.

Dec 10, 03: Physicists say they have brought light to a complete halt for a fraction of a second and then sent it on its way, an achievement that could someday help scientists develop powerful new computers.
. . The research differs from work published in 2001 that was hailed at the time as having brought light to standstill. In that work, light pulses were technically "stored" briefly when individual particles of light, or photons, were taken up by atoms in a gas. Researchers have now topped that feat by truly holding light and its energy in its tracks —-if only for a few hundred-thousandths of a second.
. . Harnessing light particles to store and process data could aid the still distant goal of so-called quantum computers, as well as methods for communicating information over long distances without risk of eavesdropping.

Nov 21, 03: A new device called a "dog on a chip" may combine the benefits of technology and nature by not only detecting dangerous or illicit substances but by providing the electronic equivalent of a dog barking, researchers said.
. . The device is more accurate and faster than other electronic sensors and drug-sniffing dogs. One of the greatest attributes of the penny-sized electronic nose is that it will be on a constant lookout. It successfully identified the presence of cocaine 6 inches away.

Nov 21, 03: Japanese researchers unveiled a prototype of the world's first two-legged walking robot capable of carrying a human being, which many hope could prove a boon to wheelchair-bound people. It would take "at least two years" to develop the prototype robot into a working model.
. . WL-16's normal walking stride measures 30 centimeters (12 inches), although it can stretch its legs 1.36 meters apart. The prototype is currently radio-controlled but the research team plans to equip it with a joy stick-like controller for the user.

Nov 10, 03: The National Park Service has proposed a marked trail to commemorate Ice Age floods through four Western states that left canyons, valleys, lakes and ridges that still dominate the terrain today —-some so dramatic they can be seen from outer space.
. . Picture an ice dam 50 km wide, forming a lake 660 meters deep and 300 km long, stretching from the Idaho panhandle into western Montana, containing more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.
. . Now picture that dam giving way, the water thundering out in 48 hours, through four states, across Washington and into the Pacific.
. . These cataclysmic events, called the Missoula Floods, took place at the end of the last Ice Age, 14,000 years ago —-the biggest scientifically documented floods ever. Evidence of the floods are everywhere. They hit the Columbia River near present-day Wenatchee, Wash., probably swelling the river to 4,000 times its present-day flow and spilling over the Columbia River Gorge.
. . The gorge, 80 miles long and up to 4,000 feet deep, couldn't contain the water, which scoured the rock walls clean and spilled over, probably widening the gorge. Geologists compare the gorge to a nozzle that sent the floods pouring out in a wall of water perhaps 500 feet high at 80 mph, putting Oregon's Willamette Valley under 400 feet of water as far south as the Eugene area and present-day Portland. "Most of Portland is a big sand and debris bar deposited where the flood slowed down as it spread out over the Portland Basin."
. . Willamette Valley's fertile soil —-which attracted settlers from the Oregon Trail-— comes from deposits of flood silt that reach 100 feet deep in places. Boulders may have ridden the floods for 500 miles encased in icebergs. The Willamette Meteorite, at nearly 16 tons the largest ever found in the United States and the sixth-largest in the world, apparently also rode the flow.
. . In what is now eastern Washington, water flooded today's Spokane Valley to a depth of about 500 feet. The floods ripped away bedrock and formed deep canyons, or "coulees". which remain.
. . Scientists also believe that the Missoula Floods occurred repeatedly over the course of about 2,500 years, as new glacial ice dams plugged the river outlet, Glacial Lake Missoula refilled with water, and the dam then ruptured once again.
. . University of Montana geology professor David Alt, author of "Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods". says the lake broke through ice dams and refilled at least 36 times, probably averaging once every 50 years. U.S. Geological Survey experts have estimated the flow near the dam breach at 10 times more than the combined flow of all the rivers in the world.

Nov 5, 03: Scientists at the University of Sunderland in England are developing a nanoparticle dust that is attracted to the oil residue left by a fingertip and gives a better image of a finger's whorls and ridges than the fluorescent powder used by police. The nanoparticles should pick out even the faintest fingerprints because they stick to tiny traces of oil.

Oct 21, 03: Methane bubbles from the sea floor could, in theory, sink ships and may explain the odd disappearances of some vessels, Australian researchers reported. The huge bubbles can erupt from undersea deposits of solid methane, known as gas hydrates. An odorless gas found in swamps and mines, methane becomes solid under the enormous pressures found on deep sea floors. The ice-like methane deposits can break off and become gaseous as they rise, creating bubbles at the surface.

Oct 22, 03: A German research team has unravelled the mystery of how the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead, using sophisticated science to track the preservative to an extract of the cedar tree. Chemists from Tuebingen University and the Munich-based Doerner-Institut replicated an ancient treatment of cedar wood and found it contained a preservative chemical called guaiacol.

Oct 16, 03: French scientists using an innovative microscopic scanning technique say they have discovered that nerve cells almost buzz with molecular agitation when they communicate with each other. The work sheds light on how cells operate at the synapse --the minute gap between neurons, as nerve cells are called.
. . Until now, little was known about receptor movement, and it was thought that these vital "locks" that open to the heart of the cell were largely static. But nanotechnology, harnessed to a video camera by French researchers, shows the receptors to be extraordinarily active and that they even move around dynamically on the membrane surface.
. . The discovery is important, because it highlights the complex, highly mobile mechanism by which a receiving cell is able to detect just a single molecule.

Oct 13, 03: It could happen tomorrow, or it could happen a century from now. But scientists are accumulating more evidence that the Salt Lake City area will be hit by a powerful earthquake again, just as it has every 1,200 years or so for millennia. An expert put the odds that Salt Lake will suffer a large quake over the next 50 years at 1-in-3. The Wasatch fault here last slipped with a violent shudder about 1,283 years ago — and the intervals between each of the four most recent quakes ranged from 1,269 to 1,441 years.
. . The West Valley complex produced a powerful jolt every 1,700 to 2,000 years — most recently about 2,000 years ago.
. . Most of the Salt Lake metropolis sits on unconsolidated sediments washed down from the mountains. Those sediments will amplify instead of dampen the shock waves of a quake.
. . The Great Basin has been stretching westward for millions of years, an almost continuous creep measured at nearly a half-inch a year that is widening the continent Southern California has a different earthquake problem at the San Andreas fault, which is ripping the coastline along a horizontal plane, but in Utah the action is nearly vertical.

Aug 6, 03: Italian scientists said they had created the world's first cloned horse from an adult cell taken from the horse who gave birth to her. The newborn is the twin of the mother. Until now, it had been thought that a pregnancy would depend on the mother's immune system recognizing the fetus as something different from itself.

July 26, 03: In 2001, Harvard neuropsychologist Daniel Schacter found that an obscure part of the brain known as the parahippocampal gyrus does, in fact, light up for true but not false memories. The work remains preliminary, but it suggests that a false-memory detector remains at least theoretically possible.

July 9, 03: Microwave radar from satellites could be used to find buried archaeological treasures, underground buildings and even mass graves.
. . Scientists at Ben Gurion University in Israel have shown that such radar can see below the surface of dry ground and locate objects under tons of sand. They provided proof of the theory by burying squares of aluminum at varying depths in the Negev desert and using radar sensing from an aircraft to detect them. The researchers said their findings suggest that ancient river routes lie under centuries of sand in the Sahara desert, which could explain desert oases.

Five Molecules That Will Change The World.

July 2, 03: Filaments of carbon, 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, can conduct electricity with virtually no resistance. One nanotube can even produce enough light to be seen by the naked eye. One possibility: super-small transistors that could lead to faster computers. Nanotubes will also likely be deployed in telecommunications. IBM says the first products are less than a decade away. Small competitors like Carbon Nanotechnologies are not far behind.

June 24, 03: Over the past three years, the Dead Sea has decreased by three meters and the whole area is currently one third less than it used to be in the 1960s, due to the diversion of the Jordan River water for irrigation, experts said. It's now 415 meters (1,366 feet) below sea level. A goldmine for potash extractors and a magnet for tourists who come to bathe in its salty waters, the Dead Sea could disappear in 50 years.
. . Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian officials will submit a project to channel water through a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. "Building a canal will take seven to 10 years and by that time the level of the Dead Sea will have dropped by an additional eight meters which is catastrophic for the shorelines, the coastal areas, the groundwater resources and even for the humidity in the surrounding areas.

June 19, 03: Russian scientists say they have found the spot in Siberia where a giant meteorite came crashing to Earth last year. The researchers told Rossiya state television that they believe a burned-out tract of taiga about 700 miles north of the city of Irkutsk is the spot where one or more meteorites fell on Sept 25. The coordinator said the meteorite crash was "comparable to the force of a medium atomic bomb."

June 25, 03: One of the greatest prizes in modern physics - -the confirmation or otherwise of a theoreetical sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson-- is back up for grabs. For the Tevatron, the earliest date for concrete proof for finding or disproving a Higgs at the most-touted energy range will be 2009 at the earliest. That is a whole two years after Europe's fancy new Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, which should be able to generate smashes at awesome energy extremes, is scheduled to come onstream.
. . If it is proved that the Higgs does not exist, that would be a huge event. It would open the way for a whole range of alternative theories to replace the Standard Model -- that, for instance, there are overlapping "parallel" Universes or higher dimensions.
. . If the Higgs is not found at 115 GeV mass, Europe's LHC should be powerful enough to scan the rest of the possible masses up to 211 GeV to see whether this enigmatic particle exists or not.

June 25, 03: Scientists have discovered a startling secret in the sky: gigantic jets of lightning that shoot upward from cloud tops to about 95 km into the upper atmosphere. Unlike the familiar lightning bolts, these brilliant jets spread out in extremely thin air to form shapes resembling giant trees or carrots some 80 km tall, according to a study by researchers in Taiwan.
. . They used low-light cameras on the southern tip of Japan to capture images of five gigantic lightning jets streaming upward from thunder clouds over the South China Sea in July 2002. The enormous jets typically disappear in less than a second and are very difficult to see with the naked eye.
. . In the 1990s, Pasko documented another form of lightning, blue jets, that also stream upward but do not reach as high or spread out as far as the jets reported in the new study. Still another form of high-altitude lightning, called sprites, were discovered in 1989. Unlike the newly reported jets, sprites travel downward toward clouds and do not stretch as far, averaging about 25 to 30 miles before they dissipate far above the cloud tops. Unlike sprites, these lightning jets the Taiwan group observed are more intense and show a clear connectivity between thunder clouds and the far upper atmosphere", Inan said. Scientists had found plenty of evidence of sprites in the 1990s, but the larger, upward streaming lightning jets had escaped detection — possibly because they may only occur over oceans. Scientists suspect they may play a role in ozone formation.

This is the way the world might end: A genetically engineered pathogen is released, debris from an erupting "supervolcano" blocks the sun or scientists in the biggest "bioerror" of them all accidentally trigger a matter-squeezing "big bang."
. . The demise of civilization has been predicted since it began, but the odds of keeping Planet Earth alive and well are getting worse amid a breakneck pace of scientific advances, according to Martin Rees, Britain's honorary astronomer royal.
. . Rees calculates that the odds of an apocalyptic disaster striking Earth have risen to about 50% from 20% a hundred years ago.
. . The 60-year-old scientist, author of the recently published "Our Final Hour", says science is advancing in a far more unpredictable and potentially dangerous pattern than ever before. He lists as mankind's biggest threats: nuclear terrorism, deadly engineered viruses, rogue machines and genetic engineering that could alter human character. All of those could result from innocent error or the action of a single malevolent individual.
. . "For the first time ever, human nature itself isn't fixed. Biotech drugs and genetic engineering..."
. . He also suggested better efforts to "reduce the number of people who feel excluded or otherwise motivated to cause harm."

June 18, 03: Physicists say they had created a new form of matter strongly resembling the stuff of the universe one- thousandth of a second after its birth. This matter is called quark-gluon plasma and physicists believe it is key in understanding both the dawn of the universe and the interior of atomic nuclei. "The matter we have created has properties that have never before been observed."
. . The researchers described experiments in which gold atoms were accelerated nearly to the speed of light and then smashed together. These collisions were so violent that the debris they produced briefly reached temperatures of one trillion degrees C, the hottest and densest conditions ever created in a laboratory.

June 15, 03: A new world record at the U.S. Department of Energy lab: they were able to measure variations in the resonant frequency of tiny gold-coated silicon bars just two microns long and fifty nanometers thick by vibrating them with the heat of a solid-state laser at a speed of about two million times a second. Those variations reflected any extra weight that was loaded onto the bars -- in this case, masses as low as 5.5 femtograms could be detected. A femtogram is a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or roughly the mass of 122 gold atoms. They hope to be able to detect single molecules in the near future.

June 9, 03: A British Egyptologist announced that her team may have identified the mummy of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, the wife and co-ruler with Pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother to legendary boy King Tutankhamun.
. . Joann Fletcher, a mummification specialist from the University of York in England who led the expedition, said her team may have unearthed Nefertiti from a secret chamber in tomb KV35 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in Luxor.
. . Nefertiti, which means "the beautiful woman has come", has long been considered one of the most powerful women of ancient Egypt. Her tomb was found near that of King Tut, the teen-age king who ruled Egypt in the 14th century BC.
. . Two of the mummies were women and one a young boy. One of them, now believed to be Nefertiti, had a swan-like neck comparable to the queen, despite post-mortem blows to her face.

May 4, 03: A RAIL SLED set the land speed mark for rail vehicles early Wednesday at the Holloman High Speed Test Track, testing a 192-pound bullet-shaped payload being developed. Preliminary numbers put the sled’s speed at Mach 8.6 ——about 6,400 mph.

May 1, 03: IBM said it's used microscopic carbon molecules to emit light --a breakthrough some scientists say might one day make faster and smaller computers. By engineering the carbon nanotube, IBM said it was able to not only conduct current, but to create light that could someday be used to transfer data. Light is the foundation for high-speed communications.
. . In addition to carbon nanotubes, scientists are looking at spintronics --devices that rely on an electron's spin to perform their functions.

May 1, 03: Hundreds of worms from a science experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia have been found alive in the wreckage. They have a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, & were four or five generations removed from the original worms placed on Columbia in January.
. . C. elegans have two sexes: males and hermaphrodites, which are females that produce sperm. A hermaphrodite worm can self-fertilize for the first 300 or so eggs but later usually prefers to accept sperm from males to produce a larger number of offspring.

Apr 23, 03: Everyone should be DNA-fingerprinted to help tackle crime and enhance personal security, the British inventor of it suggested. (Scary?)

Apr 22, 03: Metalurgists have jettisoned the traditional art approach to alloy development --trial and error-- and turned to pure science, specifically quantum mechanics and high-powered computer computation, to create new mixtures of metal which, one outside scientist says, have spectacular properties of strength and flexibility. In the journal Science, Saito's team writes that their titanium-based alloys exhibit "super" properties, such as ultrahigh strength and super elasticity.

Quantum Entanglement: two particles that interact will maintain a connection even if separated by a vast distance. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Cal., have discovered that this entanglement is relative, depending on how fast an observer moves with respect to the particles, and that entanglement can be created or destroyed just by relative motion.

Apr 10, 03: Cloning humans, or any other primates, may be impossible with today's techniques because of a fundamental molecular obstacle, say scientists trying to understand why attempts to clone monkeys have failed. From the very first step, cloned primate cells don't divide properly, causing a helter-skelter mix of chromosomes too abnormal for pregnancy to even begin.

Apr 3, 03: Scientists have discovered that plants, like animals, have a 24-hour biological clock. Like the body clock that tells humans to wake up, plants have one that tells them to prepare for the sun. The plant clock is set so it goes off around the same time every morning, usually just a few hours before noon. The late morning alarm tells plants to prepare for intense sunlight, triggering processes that help the plants make food.

Feb 5, 03: A breakthrough in terahertz imaging opens up the possibility for a new generation of applications, not only related to space but also in many non-space fields, including medicine, pharmaceuticals, security and aeronautics.
. . Terahertz waves occupy a portion of the spectrum between infrared and microwaves, from 10¹¹ to 10¹³ Hertz. Until now, this has been an unexplored part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, terahertz waves are very interesting as they possess characteristics of both their neighbors: terahertz waves can pass easily through some solid materials, like walls and clothes, yet can be focused as light to create images of objects.
. . It does not emit any radiation; it's a passive camera capturing pictures of the natural terahertz rays emitted by almost everything, including people, rocks, water, trees and stars.
. . In space astronomy, observing terahertz frequencies could provide answers to some key questions on how galaxies were formed in the early universe, and how stars form, and have been forming, throughout the history of the universe. For environmental monitoring, a terahertz imager could be used to obtain data for studies on ozone depletion mechanisms. The frequencies can be selected to focus on exchanges between the troposphere and the stratosphere, adding information useful for studies on global climate changes.
. . The imager could have various uses in the medical, dermatology and cosmetic sectors. Terahertz imaging is rapidly becoming recognised as a totally new diagnostic technique. By observing these types of waves, it is possible to see through many optically opaque materials. Terahertz waves could provide an image that has X-ray-like properties without the use of potentially harmful radiation.
. . The early detection of skin cancers an interesting possibility. Skin cancer is usually curable if detected quickly enough. ...the detection of chemical and biological threats --As all materials emit terahertz waves, each having it own frequency pattern as a kind of ‘fingerprint’. It could be possible to identify not only the existence of powder in envelopes and postal parcels, but also which kind of material is enclosed.
. . It can penetrate fog. When the technology is more developed, it is conceivable to build a monitor that would give a pilot a clear view ahead.
. . Another potential application came to light when a zoo asked the StarTiger team if a terahertz imager could look behind fur from a distance to diagnose an animal’s health.
. . The StarTiger imager fits within a briefcase, is easy transportable. The core of the instruments is the size of a cigarette package. A human hand can be imaged through a 15 millimeter stack of paper.

Feb 27, 03; Electrons normally have one of two spin states. But quantum physics can be exploited to give an electron more than one spin state at the same time. Electrons can also be "entangled" so that interacting with one also affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. Exploiting such quantum weirdness, a quantum computer would be able to perform many computations at once, making it vastly more powerful than a conventional computer.
. . A new semiconductor-based technique for entangling multiple electrons could mark a significant step towards the development the first fully-functional quantum computer. Scientists used ultra-fast laser pulses to entangle three electrons in a quantum well made of semiconducting cadmium telluride. If individual excitons could be addressed using laser pulses, the entanglement could be extended to many more electrons.

Feb 28, 03: Turkish researchers have developed a super water-shedding plastic coating. Self-cleaning traffic signs, antennas and roofs that shed ice like water off a duck's back and even ship hulls that slice easily through the ocean could be potential uses for the coating.The ability of a surface to resist becoming wet can be increased by making it rougher, the team reported, citing as an example the leaves of the sacred lotus plant. At a very small scale —-millionths of a meter-— those leaves have a roughness that forms tiny air pockets, leaving water with little plant surface to stick to. Reducing the amount of plant, or plastic, that comes in contact with the water lessens the water's ability to stick. The lotus leaves have a waxy coating that the researchers studied for its self-cleaning ability to shed water and debris.

Feb 22, 03: Armageddon will be in 2060, by the calculations of Britain's most famous scientist, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported. Sir Isaac Newton, the 17th century scientist and theologian, wrote thousands of pages of notes in his attempt to decode the Bible and pin down the date of the apocalypse, said the article.
. . "But until now, it was not known that he ever wrote down a final figure. He spent something like 50 years and wrote 4,500 pages trying to predict when the end of the world was coming."
. . The handwritten manuscripts bearing Newton's calculations were discovered by researchers in a library in Jerusalem, following their sale in London to collector Abraham Yahuda in the 1930s.
. . Newton, who died in 1727, is best known for being the forefather of modern physics --but apparently wasn't too bright in other areas.

Feb 23, 03: Oil and water do not mix --the mantra is familiar to every schoolchild. You have to shake them to overcome the forces that hold the oil together. Now teachers may want to rewrite their lessons. If you first remove any gas that is dissolved in the water, it will mix spontaneously and even stay that way indefinitely, according to chemist Ric Pashley of the Australian National University.
. . The finding could provide clues to one of chemistry's most puzzling phenomena. This is the so-called long-range hydrophobic force, which causes oil surfaces to attract one another over what to chemists are remarkably long distances. Even more surprisingly, the mixture did not break up even when gas was put back into the water after the emulsion had formed.

Feb 24, 03: Melting snow could trigger earthquakes. An analysis of quake records from the mountains of Japan shows large earthquakes are three times as likely to occur in the spring.

Feb 18, 03: [Did you think fish-farming was an answer to depleted fishstocks?]
. . Fish farms are a mounting threat to depleted world stocks because more and more wild fish are being fed to their caged cousins, the WWF conservation group said. "Four kilos (8.8 pounds) of wild-caught fish are needed to produce one kilo of farmed fish", the Swiss-based WWF said in a report urging reform of fish farming ranging from species like salmon, trout, tuna and sea bream to crustaceans like prawns.
. . World farmed production roughly doubled in the past decade to 20 million tons a year, increasing demand for oil and fishmeal, made from species such blue whiting and pilchards, to feed the farmed fish, it said.
. . Without reform, it said the fast-growing industry could be consuming all the world's fish oil and half of its fishmeal by 2010, up from 70% of fish oil and 34% of fishmeal now.
. . The WWF said the Blue Whiting fishery was on the brink of collapse in the north-east Atlantic.

Jan 31, 03: Scientists fired rockets into raging Florida thunderstorms and learned that lightning produces not just bright flashes and a lot of noise, but also intense bursts of radiation believed to be X-rays. Each strike actually generates about 10 to 12 individual flickers that can be studied separately. Many theorists had long thought such emissions from lightning impossible.
. . The search for X-rays generated by lightning dates back to the 1920s. But lightning strikes in unpredictably specific locations. X-rays and gamma rays are absorbed by the atmosphere and don't travel far, so the search had come up mostly empty until now.

Jan 22, 03: Coastal deserts could turn green thanks to a new project that combines wind power and sea water to make rain. A research team led by Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh is developing mobile wind-driven turbines, 131 feet in diameter, that spray vaporized sea water into the air, increasing humidity and, in turn, the likelihood of rain. The turbines, which would be mounted on hundreds of catamaran-like barges, could be used to boost rainfall in some of the world's driest areas. Water vapor sprayed from slits in the turbine rotors will partially evaporate in the air from the turbine wake. Residual salt will fall back into the sea and humidified air be blown inland to produce rain as it hits high ground.
. . "If it works, the pay-off could be enormous, right from putting out bush fires to pushing back the desert", Salter said. "We need a computer model", he said. If the model is successful, Salter hopes to set up a trial run. "We would have to find somewhere with a narrow valley and high mountains." He said he had found possible locations in the Mediterranean island of Crete and on the Red Sea.
. . But not everyone is convinced by the project. Philip Eden, meteorologist and weather correspondent for The Telegraph newspaper, said: "Deserts are deserts because the air in those regions is descending, and descending air does not create rain clouds however much moisture you pump into it."

Jan 21, 03: Singapore said it may implant microchips in pet dogs and cats to make sure they are not abandoned by owners. The island republic has laws covering a long list of offences and it imposes fines for selling chewing gum and spitting in public. The rising numbers of stray animals on the island is now becoming a concern, the government said. Around 19,000 dogs and cats are abandoned there every year.
. . [JKH: This is a path to loss of privacy. Next step: you want to know if your child wanders off or is kidnapped, don't you? Then... at what age does the child remove it, when there will still be advantages to just leaving it in? The tech will become "part of the system".]

Jan 12, 03: Police in Virginia Beach, Va., a popular resort city, recently began operating video surveillance cameras with controversial face recognition technology that critics say brings the United States one step closer to becoming a society where "Big Brother is watching you."
. . Civil liberties groups fear an erosion of personal privacy and evoke the dark vision of British author George Orwell's novel "1984", in which he imagined a totalitarian society with a "Big Brother" who kept all its citizens under constant surveillance.
. . The average Londoner is estimated to have his or her picture recorded more than 300 times a day, but New York is not far behind.many are alarmed by concepts like the Pentagon's proposed Total Information Awareness system, which would collect individuals' financial, medical, communication and travel records in a massive database in the hope of uncovering patterns of potentially hostile activity.

Jan 12, 03: Scientists studying Africa's slow-motion split along the Rift Valley have launched an experiment in Ethiopia to find out exactly why it is happening and whether a new ocean will form where the valley is now. Seventy-two U.S., European and Ethiopian scientists fanned out across the Horn of Africa country this weekend to conduct what they called Africa's largest ever seismic survey.
. . The 2,200 mile valley --stretching from the Red Sea to Tanzania-- varies hugely in width --between 30 km and 2000 km.
. . The "volcanic Rift Valley... could eventually break off to form a [body of water] like the Red Sea", said a statement from the project, known as Operation EAGLE or the Ethiopia Afar Geo-Scientific Lithospheric Experiment (EAGLE). "If the separation does occur sometime in the future, the result would be enormously wide --very similar to the one that initially separated Africa from America."
. . "It is the only place on earth where molten rock bubbles to the surface and a continental split is actively taking place."

Jan 8, 03: The first accurate measurement ever taken of the speed with which gravity propagates shows that it is equal to the speed of light, agreeing nicely with the General Theory of Relativity. The very high-precision measurement was the first to check whether Einstein's assumption about gravity was correct.

The Japanese government will start a joint research project with industry in fiscal year 2003 to develop diamond-based semiconductors. Diamond chips can work at a temperature of up to 1000 degrees Celsius(!), while silicon chips stop working above 150 degrees.

Scientists this week dismissed popular myths about cloning, saying that images of an exact human replica or an army of identical marching soldiers are preposterous. They stressed whatever fears people may have, a clone would not be an exact replica of the person being cloned, saying it was more akin to an identical twin one or two generations removed.

Jan 2, 03: Some orangutan (NO 2nd G. -TAN!) parents teach their offspring to use leaves as napkins. Others say good night with a spluttering, juicy raspberry. And still others get water from a hole by dipping a branch and then licking the leaves. These are examples, researchers say, that prove the orangutan is a cultured ape, able to learn new living habits and to pass them along to the next generation.
. . The discovery, reported in a study appearing in the journal Science, suggests that early primates, which include the ancestors of humans, may have developed the ability to invent new behaviors, such as tool use, as early as 14 million years ago. That would be some 6 million years earlier than once believed.
. . Culture, in the scientific sense, is the ability to invent new behaviors that are adopted by the population group and are passed along to succeeding generations. While crude by human standards, it's culture nonetheless.
. . The researchers found 24 examples of behaviors that are routinely practiced by at least one of the groups and passed along to new generations. 90% of the ape population has disappeared in 50 years and there are only 15,000 to 20,000 of the animals left in the wild.

Dec 17, 02:

A new type of telescope using thousands of small, thin mirrors that are flexed hundreds of times each second is giving astronomers the clearest picture of the heavens yet from ground-based instruments.
Researchers found a new class of cells in the eye's retina that are not part of the vision system. Instead, these cells, called retinal ganglion cells, send signals to the brain to set the body's clock.
A fossil discovery in Africa pushed the date of the earliest known human ancestor back by more than 3 million years. Found in western Africa, a nearly complete skull dated between 6 million and 7 million years old has some ape-like features, but the shape of the teeth and lower face suggests it is a human ancestor.
Physicists, using laser light, now can take pictures in times measured in attoseconds — billionths of a billionth of a second. They are using this skill to study the inner workings of the atom.

Dec 3, 02: A team of Canadian geologists said they had found rocks dating back nearly 4 billion years. The scientists said the volcanic and sedimentary rocks were 3.825 billion years old and came from the Inukjuak area in the northern reaches of the province of Quebec, on Hudson Bay. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, according to current estimates.

Nov 28, 02: U.N. scientists promote bug-friendly farming in a global project to find natural methods to boost tropical crop yields. Experts are convinced that tens of thousands of obscure organisms which live just below ground could be the key to restoring damaged and degraded lands without the need for pesticides and fertilizers.
. . "The life forms living just below our feet are the most understudied organisms on the planet", said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations.
. . In India, scientists used worms to regenerate soils at degraded tea plantations where yields have stalled despite heavy use of fertilizers and plant growth hormones. "After the re-introduction of earthworms, including native species, harvests at some of the plantations are up as much as 282%."

20 billion soiled diapers are buried in U.S. landfills every year, representing about 3,175,000 tons of garbage! That's untreated human waste going into landfills!

Oct 25, 02: An environmental research organization predicts that by 2005, about 130 million cell phones weighing about 65,000 tons will be "retired" annually in the United States. More than 128 million people in the United States use cell phones, typically replacing them after 18 months. Atlanta-based Collective Good Inc. runs a cell phone collection program at http://www.collectivegood.com.

Tsunami are able to cross oceans and ravage countries on the other side of the world. Only recently have scientists realized that a mega-tsunami is likely to begin at the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, off North Africa, where a wall of water will one day be created which will race across the entire Atlantic ocean at the speed of a jet airliner to devastate the east coast of the United States.
. . The greatest danger comes from large volcanic islands, which are particularly prone to these massive landslides. Geologists began to look for evidence of past landslides on the sea bed, and what they saw astonished them. The sea floor around Hawaii, for instance, was covered with the remains of millions of years’ worth of ancient landslides, colossal in size.
. . Scientists believe the western flank of La Palma will give way completely during some future eruption on the summit of the volcano. Any time in the next few thousand years, a huge section of southern La Palma, weighing 500 Billion tons, will fall into the Atlantic ocean.

The world's oceans claim, on average, one ship a week. That fact has prompted the search for a maritime myth: the wall of water. Waves the height of an office block. Waves twice as large as any that ships are designed to ride over. Freak waves are the stuff of legend. They aren't just rare, according to traditional views of the sea, they shouldn't exist at all.
. . Finally, oceanographer Marten Grundlingh plotted the ship-strikes on thermal sea surface maps. All the ships had been at the edge of the Agulhas Current, the meeting point of two opposing flows, mixing warm Indian Ocean water with a colder Atlantic flow. Radar surveillance by satellite confirmed that wave height at the edge of this current could grow well beyond the computer model's predictions, especially if the wind direction opposed the current flow.
. . Unfortunately, ocean currents could not other wave strikes.
. . Quantum physics has at its heart a concept called the Schrodinger Equation, a way of expressing the probability of something happening that is far more complex than the simple linear model. The theory is based on the notion that in certain unstable conditions, waves can steal energy from their neighbors.
. . Currently, the biggest wave factored into most ship design is smooth, undulating and 15m high. A freak wave is not only far bigger, it is so steep it is almost breaking. This near-vertical wall of water is almost impossible to ride over --the wave breaks over the ship. Such a wave would exert a pressure of 100 tons per square meter on a ship, far greater than the 15 tons that ships are designed to withstand.

Nov 23, 02: An epidemic of tree-killing beetles is spreading rapidly through the forests in Canada's largest lumber exporting province, with the deadly insects now found in a area nearly three-quarters the size of Sweden, officials said.
. . The tiny pine beetles, which have been spreading almost unchecked through British Columbia for several years because of unusually warm winters, have seriously infested 3.6 million hectares (9 million acres) of forests and have now destroyed up 108 million cubic meters of lodgepole pine timber.
. . Provincial officials tracking the beetle infestation warned in a report that the amount of destroyed trees could reach 150 million cubic meters next year unless the weather turns cold enough to kill larvae before they hatch.

Arctic Ocean's volume. The ocean is almost 453,000 cubic km larger than earlier researchers had estimated. (2.59 cubic km = 1 cubic mile). It comprises about 1.4% of the total ocean area of the earth & 0.8% of its volume.
. . The volume of water in all the oceans: 1.37 billion cubic kilometers. The volume of the globe itself: 260 billion cubic miles.
. . Area of oceans: 361 million sq km.
. . The average depth of the oceans is 4 km. The deepest point lies in the Mariana Trench, 10.9 km down. The greatest depth of the ocean (11.2 km) is only a fraction of the thickness of the solid crust of the earth (110 km).

Pacific Ocean
Area: 165,760,000 sq.km
Average Depth: 4,028 Meters

Atlantic Ocean
82,400,000 (almost exactly half)
3,926

Indian Ocean
65,526,700
3,963

Arctic Ocean
14,090,000
1,205

All the gold suspended in the world's oceans and seas would give each person on earth 4.1 kg. (25 Billion kg. -- 25 Million tons)

Drops of liquid light -—an entirely new form of matter—- would have many of the properties of liquid water, including surface tension.

Oct 25, 02: Implanting electrodes into the brains of two patients has rid them of the symptoms of obsessive- compulsive disorder, researchers in France report. Surgically implanted electrodes are used to treat the tremors associated with Parkinson's disease, though the method is reserved for only the most severe cases. But this study suggests that such "deep brain stimulation" could also be useful for treating behavioral problems associated with psychiatric disorders too.

May 29, 02: The notion that a strict, possibly even God- fearing, upbringing may contribute to obsessive-compulsive disorder has been boosted by a survey which discovered that devout Catholics were more likely to show symptoms than less religious people.
. . The researchers compared people, such as nuns and priests who worked in the church, with committed lay Catholics and others with virtually no religious involvement. But the study cannot say for certain that religious devotion early in life causes OCD symptoms. It is equally likely that people with those character traits feel more drawn to a religious lifestyle and devote themselves to God.

Nov 5, 02: Tropical Brazil is the country most often struck by lightning in the world and it suffers the highest death toll and serious economic damage from electric thunderstorms, according to new research reported. The country is struck by 70 million lightning bolts a year --between two and three per second.

Nov 4, 02: A big earthquake that cracked roads and closed an oil pipeline in rural Alaska has spawned shudders thousands of miles south in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, researchers said. This "confirms what we are beginning to see worldwide --that earthquakes can be triggered by other earthquakes at great distances, more so than we had thought before."

Oct 17, 02: Two leading British scientists are calling for a switch of research effort towards some of the Earth's smallest creatures. The situation is so grave they believe we are approaching the Earth's sixth mass extinction. "Most conservation effort goes into birds and mammals --creatures like the panda, a dim, dead-end animal that was probably on the way out anyway. "Yet arguably it's the little things that run the world, things like soil microbes. They're the least-known species of all --scientists like something sexier to work on.
. . "Forget the charismatic mega-fauna. I'd like to see much more research going into things smaller than a millimeter."

Oct 1, 02: A seal epidemic which has killed at least 18,000 animals --about half the seal population of north- western Europe, is over for now, Swedish scientists said. The first victims of the phocine distemper virus (PDV), which weakens the seals' immune systems and causes pneumonia-like symptoms.

Sept 25, 02: The United States may have no streams left that are free from chemical contamination, and about one-fifth of animal species and one-sixth of plant types are at risk of extinction, says a private report on the nation's ecosystems. The findings are in an ambitious study commissioned five years ago by former President Clinton.

Oct 10, 02: A nonprofit group has snipped some cuttings to clone what is believed to be the world's oldest tree, a bristlecone pine they say has grown for 4,767 years on a wind-swept mountain in eastern California. But they noted the difficulty of accurately counting 4,767 rings in a core sample from a twisted bristlecone trunk. It stands about 55 feet tall, with a misshapen oval-shaped trunk measuring about 4 1/2 feet wide.

Sept 10, 02: The adoption of high-powered 42-volt battery technology over the present 12-volt standard is likely to double global demand for lead in vehicle batteries in the next 20 years, a senior industry figure said.
. . The majority of lead consumed today is used in lead acid batteries for vehicles. Nearly all lead acid batteries in the United States and Europe are recycled. "Battery recycling capacity must increase by 1.8 million tons by 2020 to accommodate the increased tonnage of scrap batteries."
. . Prengaman expected 42-volt lead acid batteries to be fairly common in the United States by around 2005 and to have taken over the U.S. vehicle market by 2020. Toyota introduced its Crown model in Japan last autumn using 42- volt lead acid battery technology.
. . Some top-end auto makers may opt for much costlier, higher-power and lighter nickel metal hydride, lithium or lithium ion batteries.

Sept 10, 02: Scientists are using high resolution, 3D seismic images to peer under the earth's skin, unlocking the secrets of the past, a leading geologist said. Cartwright said the high definition images of structures up to nine miles under the earth's surface --provided free of charge by oil exploration companies--had already revealed events long ago in the earth's past.
. . "It is a time machine, because it enables us to look far back into the past", he said. "We are able to see old landscapes in incredible detail." . "This technique allows us to have a greater understanding of geological fault lines. We are getting close to a level of physical understanding that brings some sort of prediction closer", he said when asked if it could predict earthquakes. . "We have seen ancient iceberg plow marks. We can even tell in which direction they were traveling", he added.

Head hair grows fastest, averaging about a third of a millimetre per day, or a centimeter per month. Of the 100,000 to 150,000 hairs on an average human head, 90% of them at any one time are growing. Hairs may stop growing for a while, and then begin again. Sometimes when a hair stops growing, part of the root dies, and the shaft breaks off. The hair may fall out, or be pushed out by the next hair growing from the follicle. Normally, up to 100 head hairs are shed each day --out of 150 hairs per square centimeter (1K sqs). Head hair will last a long time before it naturally dies and falls out ... sometimes up to 5 years. Eyebrow hairs, on the other hand, last only about 5 months before they are shed.

There are over 3000 different species of ladybug! All have two sets of wings (like all other insects except true flies, which have just one pair. If fireflies are caught in a spider web, they will flash a distress signal to warn others. They'll do the same thing if they are caught and put in a jar.
All spiders have venom glands.
More than 35,000 species of spiders occur in the world.
http://www.oocities.org/thesciencefiles/scibiology.html

Vesalius ... the physician who first used dissection to discover what the inside of a human body looks like. His publication 'Fabrica' was released in 1543.

Want to be more attractive? Make sure those around you are having a drink. British scientists have found even modest amounts of alcohol will make the opposite sex appear better- looking. "We have carried out experiments which show that what is known in the trade as the 'beer-goggle effect' does actually exist.

The world's largest roach, which lives in South America, is 6 inches long with a 1- foot wingspan.

Sept 4, 02: The Earth Summit ended with many controversial goals, but environmentalists say few may be as futile as plans to restore devastated fish stocks and curb the extinction of endangered species.
. . "A general pattern for fish stocks is that recovery 15 years after collapse is unlikely to occur for populations that have experienced collapses of as much as 70-90%." French explorers in the 16th century claimed they could throw baskets overboard and haul them up laden with fish. But commercial trawlers devastated the teeming schools of cod and a 10-year moratorium on fishing has changed little. "Once yielding as much as 810,000 tons annually, the stock today is 99% lower than it was in 1982. In fact, since collapsing in 1992, the stock has shown no recovery whatsoever." Scientists say when one species is removed from an ecosystem, others often rush in to fill the gap, making recovery difficult, if not impossible.
. . One problem is that no one knows how many species there are on the planet. Scientists have named 1.75 million species but many more are unknown. Estimates run as high as 14 million.
. . There is also a huge debate about the pace of extinction. Many scientists say the world faces the first mass extinction since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Some estimates see 50% of all species disappearing in the next century.

Sept 4, 02: Scientists confirmed that California's coastal redwoods, as well as Douglas firs, are among species susceptible to a disease that is devastating the state's oak trees. The discovery could spell trouble elsewhere in the nation if the fungus-like disease is able to spread.

Sept 3, 02: The jungle homes of the great apes will all but disappear in 30 years unless humans take drastic action to protect their closest relatives, the United Nations said. A U.N. report launched at the Earth Summit showed that logging, mining, human settlement and the trade in ape meat were wiping out gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos in Africa and the orangutans of Asia.
. . The future of the orangutans of southeast Asia looks even bleaker. In 28 years there will be almost no pristine habitat left, the report said. Some estimates put the current chimpanzee population at 200,000, against perhaps two million a century ago. There are a few thousand lowland gorillas left and only a few hundred mountain gorillas.

Aug 12, 02: Scientists working with a new network of seismic monitoring stations in Taiwan say it is now possible to give as much as 30 seconds warning before some major earthquakes --time to shut off gas lines, stop public transit and take other precautions to limit damage.
. . By allowing computers to isolate closely placed monitoring stations, they were able to identify the early stages of specific earthquakes, calculating estimates of epicenter and magnitude rapidly enough to alert communities further away that a shake-up is coming. During the test period, the system correctly detected and reported 54 earthquakes measuring between 3.5 and 6.3, and that further tests have shown it close to 100% accurate.

Overall, about 10% of the electricity consumed in North America goes to support information technology systems, according to a U.S. Energy Department study cited by Big Blue. [And how much more would be used WITHOUT it?!]

Aug 8, 02: German marine biologists and geologists believe they have shown life could have existed by processing methane without the presence of oxygen. Their findings could also prove useful in ridding the earth of excess methane, one of the greenhouse gases that essentially all scientists believe is responsible for global warming.

Sixty million transistors were manufactured last year for every man, woman, and child on Earth. By 2010, that figure will reach 1 billion transistors a year.
. . Electrons move through wire at about half the speed of light. Future chips will be mostly air, with delicate bridges of silicon and copper spanning chasms of empty space. Sapphire, diamond, and SON (silicon on nothing) buttress the structures.

April 16th, 2002: British oak trees could be facing a plague worse than Dutch elm disease, which killed 30 million trees in the 1960s, the English Independent Sunday reported. It said the first case of the fungus, known as Sudden Oak Death, an organism related to that which causes potato blight, was discovered in a shrub at a garden center in April. A north American strain of the fungus has affected forests in 12 areas of California and a town in Oregon, the paper reported.

The other side of "publish or perish" --publish crap & that's what you are... publicly: The supposedly landmark discovery of elements 118 and 116 was the result of scientific misconduct by one individual of a 15-member team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was suspended by the lab, & later fired.

There's an obscure yet ubiquitous form of radiation known as terahertz waves, also called T-rays. Low frequency versions of terahertz waves are known as millimeter waves, and they behave much like radio waves, Star Tiger engineers say. At higher frequencies, the terahertz waves straddle the border between radio and optical emissions. The technology --for which there is surprisingly little literature-- is sometimes referred to as quasi-optics. One camera, already built by a company called QinetiQ and working in so-called millimetric waves, has demonstrated the ability to eerily peer through clothes and reveal a concealed weapon --as well as much of a person's body. The image shows far more detail than an infrared camera, which detects heat.

May 28, 02: Australian scientists announced a breakthrough in efforts to clone the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, saying they had replicated some of the animal's genes using DNA extracted from preserved male and female pups.
. . The scientists from the said they hoped to clone a Tasmanian Tiger in 10 years. The "Tiger" (thylacine) was a dog-like carnivorous marsupial with stripes on its back that lived on the southern Australian island state of Tasmania. The creature originally roamed Australia and Papua New Guinea, but sometime between 2,000 and 200 years ago disappeared from the Australian mainland, only to be found in Tasmania.
. . It took man only some 70 years to make the Tasmanian Tiger extinct, as farmers in the 1800s began shooting, poisoning, gassing and trapping the animal, blaming it for attacking sheep.
. . The last known Tasmanian Tiger died in 1936 and it was officially declared extinct in 1986.

Fission is the fashion by which bacteria reproduce. But sometimes the wee bugs spice things up with a little sex, transferring DNA through a tube called a mating bridge.

March 28, 02: Cheap, plastic solar cells that can be painted onto just about any surface could provide power for a range of portable and even wearable electronic devices, scientists said. They can be made "quick and dirty" in a laboratory beaker without the need for clean rooms or vacuum chambers.

Antimatter atoms, among the most elusive matter in the Universe, may have been captured for the first time. Researchers at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, think they have made and stored thousands of anti-atoms in a particle trap.

New research shows that common Earth bacteria can survive pressures equivalent those found 50 kilometres beneath the Earth's crust or 160 kilometres under water. No organisms have ever been shown to be capable of withstanding such colossal pressure before. Even under that extreme pressure, the bacteria were found to continue consuming a provided food.

Canadian scientists have opened a powerful computing lab they said will help speed up research into diseases like cancer and diabetes by allowing researchers to view three- dimensional models of cells in a room similar to the holodeck in the Star Trek television series. Scientists, wearing 3D glasses in the 10 foot by 10 foot "cave", get a 270- degree, larger-than-life projection of the smallest parts of our biological makeup, to the point of being able to stand inside a strand of DNA.

A great quote: "There’s a big difference between five or six things being consistent with life and five or six things needing life to explain their existence." ~Ken Nealson, a geo-biologist.
. . "We have a CAT-scan device in the lab now that can see a colony of three or four bacteria inside a rock, without ever opening up the rock.

Microscopic tubes of carbon have been in laboratories for years --they look like the coiled shavings of chocolate. These are called multiwalled nanotubes, officially discovered in 1991.
. . It's usually called 100-times stronger than steel, at about one-sixth the weight.
. . Carbon nanotubes have an unsung cousin, boron- nitride nanotubes. These two elements can combine to mimic the carbon nanotube form, and can withstand much greater heat. It may prove our only fallback in this field. "After you've finished with carbon and boron-nitride, there's nothing else." Diamonds are brittle tetrahedron crystals and graphite sheets fray.
. . In addition to the *surfaces of nanotubes being conductors, they offer the strange prospect of ballistic conductions --firing electrons down the barrels of sawed off nanotubes. Rather than scattering chaotically --zigzagging in one vague current direction-- as happens in conventional wire, electrons are forced down a nanotube's single, perfect, narrow passage. That will make ultra-small and fast quantum level computing much easier, allowing electrons to be sent through wires as precisely as photons are sent down an optic fiber. This property could also revolutionize flat, bright display panels as individual electrons are fired at precise points.

Water from Black Smokers are still liquid at 390 F. Tube Worms & other animals live off bacteria which in turn live on the energy in sulphides.
. . A second community is also independent of sunshine energy. Seeping methane supports Mussels at the edge of what looks very like an underwater lake (of heavier brine) a mile down.

Using prints from a fossilized dinosaur track in a quarry from southern England, scientists have calculated that bipedal theropod dinosaurs such as T-Rex could run at speeds of up to 19 mph.

Humans have the largest brains for their body mass, roughly twice that of their nearest intellectual competitors, the chimps.

How many states of matter are there? Solid, liquid and gas, Plasma, Bose-Einstein condensate....
. . Atoms in Bose-Einstein condensates flow without friction, forming a so-called superfluid. In a sense, they act in such coordinated fashion they lose their individual identities and form one big superatom. Zapping the condensate with laser beams created a latticelike pattern. The resulting latticelike arrangement of atoms resembles that of a solid, but with the distances between atoms about 10,000-fold greater.

Gravitons are a type of theorized boson with a spin magnitude of 2. They are like the gravitational equivalent of photons. They have no mass or electric charge.

. . Five years in the building, LIGO in mid-January completed its most serious battery of tests in preparation for the first attempt at actual gravity-wave detection this summer.
. . But already there are plans to upgrade LIGO. Raab hopes a new generation of vibration isolation systems can be installed by 2007, improving sensitivity many times over.

Jan 8, 02: California's mighty redwoods can be thousands of years old and grow more than 100 meters tall, but may be susceptible to the same "sudden death" blight that has killed tens of thousands of coastal oak trees around the state since 1995, scientists said. The Phytophthora ramorum microbe, a contagious algae-like organism related to the species responsible for Ireland's potato famine of the mid-1800s.
. . Researchers have repeatedly revised and expanded the list of plants effected by the fungal spores as well as their geographic range.

Dec 28, 01: Five million tons of salt sprayed on Canadian roads each year can kill fish by seeping into water, birds and roadside plants. The "pucks" project hopes to reduce the amount of salt used on Toronto roads by between 10% to 25 per cent over the next few years. Toronto now uses between 130,000 and 150,000 tons of salt every year at a cost of about C$7.5 million.
. . Canada's largest city has turned to something that looks like hockey pucks for a solution. The "pucks" are sensors embedded into Toronto roads that send information on pavement temperature and moisture, air temperature and wind speed to road weather information stations, the Toronto Star said. Those data are then sent to a central computer monitored by city staff to help them determine when to deploy salting equipment.

Jan 1, 02: A U.S. company has produced one six-cell embryo, which is a long way from even a blastocyst: a cluster of 100-150 cells from which stem cells can be extracted.

Jan 1, 02: Shermer's Last Law: "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God."
. . Moore's Law --computer power doubling every 18 months or so-- is now approaching only twelve months. Ray Kurzweil, in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", calculates that there have been 32 doublings since World War II and that the singularity point --the point at which total computational power will rise to levels so far beyond anything that we can imagine, that it will appear nearly infinite and thus be indistinguishable from omniscience -- may be upon us as early as 2050.
. . In Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End, one character early in the story opines that "science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now."

In the Milky Way, competing feedback effects almost balance out, so that stars form at an unhurried pace --just 10 per year on average.

Jan 1, 02: The great white shark, immortalized as one of the world's most awesome predators in the movie "Jaws", has long been considered a relative homebody --hunting in a narrow band of coastal waters and rarely venturing far from shore.
. . Now, a new study shows that these massive sharks are actually world travelers, with some swimming thousands of miles into the open ocean on mysterious migrations that broadly expand the powerful carnivores' range across the globe. They're diving very deep at times. They can grow up to 21 feet in length and weigh as much as 4,800 pounds.

IBM said it has built a quantum computer based on seven atoms which, because of the physical properties of those atoms, are able to work together as both the computer's processor and memory. Previously, the largest quantum computer IBM had built was based on five atoms.
. . IBM scientists said that they were able to use the computer to show that Shor's algorithm works by correctly identifying 3 and 5 as the factors of 15.
. . A quantum computer is based on the spin of an electron or atomic nucleus.

Body heat can only be converted with 3% efficiency with current thermoelectric materials. Out of: 81 watts from a sleeping person, 128 from a soldier standing at ease, 163 from a walking person, 407 from a briskly walking person, 1,048 from a long-distance runner, and 1,630 from a sprinter.

Carbon dating, the gold standard of archaeological dating, is reliable only back to about 40,000 years ago.
======
At the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, something (likely another meteor) wreaked utter havoc on Earth's ecosystem. About 90% of marine species disappeared, and roughly 70% of terrestrial vertebrate families were wiped out.

Scientists at Britain's University of West England have developed the "SlugBot", a prototype robot capable of hunting down more than 100 slugs an hour. It operates after dark when slugs are most active, and uses their rotting bodies to generate the electricity it needs to power itself. The 2-foot-high machine uses an image sensor that beams out red light to pinpoint the slugs, which emit a different infra-red wavelength from worms and snails. It then uses a carbon fiber arm with a three-fingered claw grabber to pick up the slugs and store them in a tank, where they ferment into methane.
. . A critic fears the development of robots that "live on flesh"! A great sci-fi plot!

"Dreadful syncopation —-humans arrive, other animals disappear." It isn't a phenomenon restricted to the New World: it has occurred on nearly all habitable landmasses except Africa and Eurasia, where humans evolved alongside other animals.

November 12, 01; Criminals steal an estimated 38 million animals from Brazil's forests each year, the first full report on animal trafficking in the country showed. The report, produced by Brazil's National Network Against the Trafficking of Wild Animals (RENCTAS), estimated that local traffickers of endangered animals earn about $1 billion a year, causing untold losses to the country's natural habitat.
. . The report said that animal trafficking was the world's third biggest cross-border criminal activity after arms and drugs smuggling, with annual global sales of up to $20 billion. The report warned that the animal smugglers are often involved with other activities such as the drugs trade, indicating they are not just amateur criminals.

"We found that the stars in the galaxies and the hot gas together contribute only about 13% of the mass", said Steven Allen, a Cambridge researcher who led the study. "The rest must be in the form of dark matter."
. . Scientists assume dark matter is composed of some sort of tiny, invisible, elementary particle that exerts a gravitational force but otherwise interacts weakly with normal matter. However, these might also include brown dwarf stars and other "conventional" objects that are simply too small, or too dim, to be seen from great distances.

All life is made up of cells built and operated by proteins, which in turn are made from 20 building blocks called amino acids. No one knows why only 20 are used, but that is an unbroken rule in all of biology throughout the history of life on Earth.

Nov 7, 01: Ohio State University scientists said they had found the largest-ever complete fossil of a cockroach --9 cm long (3.5 inch). The 300 million-year-old fossil is so complete that you can make out the veins on its wings and the bumps on its body.

24 October 2001: The rise and fall of Great Britain can be measured by the centimeter. Some parts of Cornwall go up and down as much as 10 centimeters a day, in fact. The cause? Tides. High tide increases weight on the continental shelf around Britain's coast, and the whole country sinks a little, rebounding as the tide goes out. But the ups and downs are not uniform, making life difficult for engineers. Now U.S. satellites are helping to accurately measure this daily rise and fall to help improve the design of bridges, dams and other large construction projects.
. . The goal: Estimate the "bounce factor" in any part of Britain at any time of day. Results are expected in 2004 from a Newcastle University study. [California sinks too, but humans are to blame]

Scientists have developed a hybrid human/crocodile hemoglobin, which could potentially allow humans to hold their breath underwater for several hours.

Each year, about 1,200 tornadoes are reported in the United States, killing 55 people and causing billions of dollars worth of destroyed or damaged property. As the world warms, expect longer seasons.
. . "With just a little burst of microwave energy, we think we see a way to negate the trigger point in tornado creation." They'd beam microwave energy into the cold, rainy downdraft of a thunderstorm where a tornado could originate. That pulse of power would disrupt the convective flow needed to concentrate energy that forms a tornado.
. . We'd need an orbiting Doppler radar that could see tornado conditions forming. These data would be fed into a tornado-stopping satellite, perhaps positioned in geosynchronous orbit above the areas most affected by severe weather. By using a specially-tuned microwave pulse, rather than laser or infrared beams, that energy can be targeted within a storm's interior, not through it or reflected away.
. . "By heating the falling rain, we can turn off the downdraft that drives a tornado. Weather modification could be routine in the 21st century."

To destroy the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, much of the energy --calculated by a physicist to have been 2-5 percent that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima-- was supplied by Nature's most ubiquitous force: gravity.

Oct 31, 01; Tunguska Mystery May Be Solved.
. . Researchers say the event was likely caused by a low-density asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere, sending out a firestorm that burned trees and a shock wave that did more damage, according to a story on the BBC's web site. The explosion was equal to more than 10 million tons of TNT.
. . Asteroid Mathilde, photographed in 1997 by the NEAR-Shoemaker probe, is a loose "rubble pile" similar to the asteroid scientists believe exploded over Tunguska on June 30, 1908. The object seems to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second.
. . Mathilde is a rubble pile with a density very close to that of water. This would mean it could explode and fragment in the atmosphere with only the shock wave reaching the ground.

24 October 2001: The rise and fall of Great Britain can be measured by the centimeter. Some parts of Cornwall go up and down as much as 10 centimeters a day, in fact. The cause? Tides. High tide increases weight on the continental shelf around Britain's coast, and the whole country sinks a little, rebounding as the tide goes out. But the ups and downs are not uniform, making life difficult for engineers. Now U.S. satellites are helping to accurately measure this daily rise and fall to help improve the design of bridges, dams and other large construction projects. The goal: Estimate the "bounce factor" in any part of Britain at any time of day. Results are expected in 2004 from a Newcastle University study.

These people are actually sitting inside a new-found Geode!
It's still in the ground.

Oct 2, 01: Quantum Entanglement: a mysterious concept of entwining two or more particles without physical contact. What happens to one, happens to the other, instantly. Albert Einstein once described it as "spooky action at a distance."
. . Scientists have entangled states of a few atoms in earlier experiments, but Polzik and his team have done it with very large numbers and using laser light. Entangled states are needed for quantum computing and teleportation. "It is the first result where two macroscopic material objects have been entangled", Polzik explained.

Sept 29, 01: The remains of a plant-eating Titanosaur embryo skin were found inside fossilized eggs discovered in the south of Argentina, paleontologists said. "If the discovery of these eggs is a rarity, then finding skin is a bombshell because it's the first time that embryonic skin has been preserved in a fossil."

Sept 7, 01; the journal Science: The octopus, already considered among the smartest of all invertebrate animals, boasts complex nervous systems in each of its eight arms that act autonomously from the creature's brain and control the movements of the extremities, Israeli researchers have found. This is the first time that such a remarkable quality has been found anywhere in the animal kingdom.
. . The scientists said the well-developed brain of the octopus decides whether an arm should move --to grasp food, for example-- but leaves it up to these eight nervous systems to carry out the order as they see fit. The central control of the brain means that the arms are not acting in counter purpose --one arm not knowing what the other arm is doing.
. . Octopi range in size from about 2.5 cm up to 9 meters across, are among the most ancient animals on Earth and havethe most complex brain of any animal without a backbone. The ancestors of modern cephalopods diverged from a more primitive externally-shelled variety, perhaps 438 million years ago.

In research appearing Sept 30 in the journal Science, a group led by Bell Labs physicist Hendrik Schon inserted molecules of chloroform and bromoform among the carbon spheres, known as bucky balls, to achieve superconductivity that works above the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
. . The team also reported that they were able to manipulate the mixture's properties, from an insulator through to superconductivity, using an electric field, a property which bodes well for using the material in electronic circuits. It's potentially less expensive.
. . The Bell Labs team's bucky balls acted as superconductors below minus 249 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the previous Bell Labs temperature record of minus 366 F. set last year.

Sept 4, 01: Scientists working in southern China have added to previous research that supports the idea that an asteroid or comet smacked the Earth 251 million years ago, causing the planet's worst-ever mass extinction.
. . Scientists say the evidence pointed to a colossal whack from a comet or asteroid roughly 3.7 to 7.5 miles (6 to 12 kilometers) wide -- about the same size as the one that ultimately destroyed most dinosaurs 186 million years later.
. . Now, Kaiho and his colleagues have found evidence of a planetary release of types of sulfur and strontium at the end of the Permian, along with a coincident concentration of mineral grains that appear to have been remelted due to an impact.
. . His team's discoveries at Meishan (Mei Mountain) suggest that an asteroid or a comet hit the ocean at the end of the Permian, triggered a rapid and massive release of sulfur from the mantle to the ocean-atmosphere system, swooped up a significant amount of oxygen, precipitated acid rain, and possibly set off large-scale volcanism.
. . The extinction at the end of the Permian killed 95% of Earth's species, 53% of marine families and 70% of land species such as plants, insects and vertebrate animals.

Aug 1, 01: Tomatoes that grow in salty soil.
. . Researchers borrowed a gene from Arabidopsis, a relative of the cabbage, and inserted the gene into the tomato plant, so that it would produce higher levels of a "transport gene" that moves salt ions out of the way. The salt ions are stored in special cell compartments called vacuoles, where they can't interfere with the tomato's normal biochemical activity --or its taste.
. . The genetically modified plants are so effective, they can grow fruit in soil 50 times saltier than normal, Blumwald says. In fact, the eager plants may also help restore farmland by removing salt from the soil, he says.

Hmm; an energy source?!
. . A form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate, which first was created in a laboratory in 1995, has been tinkered with until it caused miniature explosions that resemble exploding stars called supernovae, according to a new study.
. . A group of physicists who created the Bose- Einstein condensate by cooling atoms of the rubiduim-87 isotope to near absolute zero say they have developed a new "flavor" of the matter that has delivered a series of surprises.
. . The group, led by Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Eric Cornell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says the material, a collection of atoms, behaves like a single "superatom."
. . The latest work involved tuning the interactions between the atoms to make them attractive or repulsive by exposing them to magnetic fields, Wieman said. The group cooled the matter to just 3 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the lowest temperature ever achieved.
. . By then fiddling with the magnetic fields, the researchers shrunk the condensate and forced a tiny explosion, which they say resembles a supernova, albeit in a microscopic level.
. . The team has dubbed the explosion a bosenova. (! Bosa Nova...) About half the original atoms mysteriously vanished.

July 13, 01: Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, developed a new type of atomic clock that produces about one quadrillion "ticks" per second and promises to be far more accurate than the current top standard in time measurement --cesium-based microwave atomic clocks.
. . "We've demonstrated for the first time the next generation of atomic clocks, which have the potential to be 100 to 1,000 times more accurate than the current cesium- based microwave clocks. Its intervals are 100,000 times shorter than those observed by the best current clocks.
. . Atomic clocks use an atom that responds to light or electromagnetic radiation at very specific frequencies in order to control the "pendulum." Cesium controls the tick. These clocks tick about 10 billion times per second.
. . The new ones do not use cesium atoms, but rather a single cooled ion of the liquid metal mercury (a mercury atom with one electron stripped off) linked to a laser oscillator functioning as a pendulum. The frequency of the mercury ion is 100,000 times higher than the frequency on the cesium atoms.

May 2, 01: Researchers have isolated and cultivated brain cells from human corpses in a scientific feat that could provide a new source of stem cells for research and developing medical treatments. Stem cells are master cells that can grow into virtually any type of cell in the body.
. . Professor Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute in California obtained the brain cells that can grow, divide and form specialized brain cells from tissue samples of people shortly after their deaths.
. . Their achievement, reported in the science journal Nature, could overcome the ethical obstacles of using stem cells derived from embryos.

April 11, 01: Researchers at UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh say they have isolated human stem cells from fat sucked out of patients during routine liposuctions.
. . Researchers found that a 0.24 kg (usta be about a half-pound) or so of fatty material could yield as much as 50 to 100 million stem-like cells, which appear to have the potential to grow into bone, fat, cartilage or muscle tissue.

7% of Americans are dyslexic --but only half that in Italy. Why? In English, there are 1,120 ways of representing 40 sounds using different letter combinations. As a result, linking letters to word sounds is difficult. This is illustrated by pairs of words such as mint/pint, cough/bough and clove/love.
. . In Italian, there is no such ambiguity. Some 33 letter combinations represent the 25 sounds. That means that the same letter groups in Italian virtually always represent the same unique sound.

At the same time as ancient Egyptians were building their pyramids, people along the Peruvian coast erected massive stone structures in the first major city in the Americas, 4,600 years ago (2627 BCE), archeologists said.
. . Caral is 120 miles north of Lima, & 14 miles inland.

4-25-01: A mutated form of the toxin in the anthrax bacterium could be used to make a fast-acting medicine for people exposed to biological weapons using the deadly germ, as well as a new form of vaccine, scientists said. A vaccine currently exists, but very few outside the military are immunized. The only current way to treat anthrax after exposure is with antibiotics before symptoms occur. Once an individual becomes symptomatic, it's too late.

4-24-01: "In effect, we have found that the solid earth is being churned by a four-piston heat engine with two immense sinking cold slabs and two equally large rising hot plumes", said Alessandro Forte, of the University of Western Ontario. [One rising-hot being under Hawaii. -?a cold under Japan?]

Inhabitants of the ancient coastal city of Herculaneum, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, died instantly, before they had time to panic or protect themselves. "They were killed before they had time to display a defensive reaction (in less than a fraction of a second)."

Asimov's three Laws of Robotics:

1: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3: A robot must protect its own existence, except where such protection would conflict with the First or Second Law.

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