from the Newsweek
The eyes of the world are on Geneva, where scientists are expected to throw the switch this week on what may be the biggest experiment ever conducted. It's certainly the most expensive.
... Probing more deeply than ever before into the stuff of the universe requires some big hardware. It also requires the political will to lavish money on a project that has no predictable practical return, other than prestige and leadership in the branch of science that delivered just about every major technology of the past hundred years.
... The Large Hadron Collider, as the Geneva machine is called, is a symptom of America's decline in particle physics and Europe's rise. Many scientists and educators fear that it also signals a broader decline in scientific leadership on the part of the United States.
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from National Geographic News
Sea levels will rise a bit higher—but not catastrophically high—in the coming century, according to a new study. The oceans will likely rise between 2.5 and 6.5 feet by 2100, researchers say.
This is not as high as the predictions from some scientists, who have warned that sea levels may rise as much as 16 feet by 2100.
Just because the amount of sea-level rise predicted in the new study is "not a Hollywood cataclysm, it doesn't mean it's not important," said study leader Tad Pfeffer of the University of Colorado in Boulder. ... In the new study, Pfeffer and colleagues examined estimates of 16 feet or more of sea level rise, which they thought seemed unrealistic.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
SAN FRANCISCO—With the California blackouts of 2001 still a painful memory, Chris Beaudoin wants to generate some of his own electricity. He marveled the other day at how close he is to that goal, gazing at two new wind turbines atop his garage roof. They will soon be hooked to the power grid.
“I don’t care about how much it costs,” said Mr. Beaudoin, a flight attendant with United Airlines. That would be $5,000 a turbine, an expense Mr. Beaudoin is unlikely to recoup in electricity savings anytime soon.
No matter. After shoring up the roof and installing the two 300-pound, steel-poled turbines in January, Mr. Beaudoin found himself at the leading edge of a trend in renewable energy.
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from the Telegraph (UK)
Scientists working on the world's biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.
The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, where particles will begin to circulate around its 17 mile circumference tunnel next week, will recreate energies not seen since the universe was very young, when particles smash together at near the speed of light.
Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University .... There have also been legal attempts to halt the start up.
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from New Scientist
Walking comes naturally to humans but is one of the greatest barriers facing roboticists. Legs with joints driven by motors struggle to recycle energy during walking in the way biological legs with springy tendons and muscles do.
A new design driven by steel cable tendons and with built-in springs could provide the answer. "The spring is important. That's something that is fundamental to being able to run in an efficient way," says Jonathan Hurst, a roboticist at Oregon State University, Oregon.
Studies of humans walking and running show that our tendons and muscles store and release up to 40% of the total energy expended. Other animals, for example kangaroos, recycle even more, says Hurst.
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from Science News
Genes alone don’t make the man—after all, humans and chimps share roughly 98 percent of their DNA. But where, when and how much genes are turned on may be essential in setting people apart from other primates.
A stretch of human DNA inserted into mice embryos revs the activity of genes in the developing thumb, toe, forelimb and hind limb. But the chimp and rhesus macaque version of this same stretch of DNA spurs only faint activity in the developing limbs, reports a new study in the Sept. 5 Science.
The research supports the notion that changes in the regulation of genes—rather than changes in the genes themselves—were crucial evolutionary steps in the human ability to use fire, invent wheels and ponder existential questions, like what distinguishes people from our primate cousins.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
In a time when practically any question can be answered through a Google search, brick-and-mortar libraries are evolving to remain relevant.
Rather than cede ground to search engines, e-book readers, and download services, more than 7,500 US libraries are adopting their competitor’s tricks and offering digital means to access books, music, and movies–free of charge. The embodiment of this effort parked outside Boston’s City Hall last week.
Inside the 75-foot-long, 18-wheel bookmobile are computer workstations, portable download devices, even a souped-up lounge replete with a “pleather” couch and a flat-screen TV–all designed to teach Bostonians how to use the newest in librarian tech: the digital lending library.
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from the BBC News Online
The Rosetta space probe has made a close pass of asteroid Steins. The European Space Agency mission flew past the 5km-wide rock at a distance of about 800km, taking pictures and recording other scientific data.
The information was sent back to Earth for processing late on Friday and released to the public on Saturday. The asteroid pass is a bonus for Rosetta. Its prime goal is to catch and orbit Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko out near Jupiter in 2014.
Friday's pass occurred about 360 million km from Earth, in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in the asteroid belt.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
CASTINCAL, PORTUGAL (Associated Press)—Manuel Coimbra watches in silence, his hands on his hips, as a lumberjack saws down one of his pine trees to stop a killer bug that experts say could wipe out large belts of European woodland.
The dense forests that blanket the hillsides of this rural area of west-central Portugal are the latest international conquest for the pest, which has caused ecological catastrophes in East Asia. Thousands of trees here are already dead, according to locals.
His land is on the front line of Europe's attempt to check pine wilt disease, which is spreading out of control in this southwestern corner of the continent and is a menace from Scandinavia to Italy and Greece.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The Food and Drug Administration will begin posting every three months a list of drugs whose safety is under investigation because of complaints brought to the agency's attention by drug companies, physicians and patients.
The FDA will name the drug and the nature of the "adverse events" but will not describe their seriousness or the number of complaints received, officials said [Friday]. Being on the list does not mean the drug is unsafe, only that the FDA is looking into that possibility.
FDA officials said they realize that the new policy, required by changes to federal law enacted last year, may unintentionally alarm some patients.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.
The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.
Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).
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from the BBC News Online
Scientists have discovered that the last Siberian woolly mammoths may have originated in North America. Their research in the journal Current Biology represents the largest study of ancient woolly mammoth DNA.
The scientists also question the direct role of climate change in the eventual demise of these large beasts.
They believe that woolly mammoths survived through the period when the ice sheets were at their maximum, while other Ice Age mammals "crashed out." The iconic Ice Age woolly mammoth-Mammuthus primigenius-roamed through mainland Eurasia and North America until about 10,000 years ago.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
A common vaccine given to children to protect them against measles, mumps and rubella is not linked to autism, a study published [Wednesday] concludes. The findings contradict earlier research that had fueled fears of a possible link between childhood vaccinations and a steep increase in autism diagnoses.
In February 1998, the Lancet journal published a study by British researcher Andrew Wakefield of 12 children with autism and other behavioral problems that suggested the onset of their behavioral abnormalities was linked to receiving the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.
The new study comes as the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington is in the midst of evaluating evidence on whether children's vaccines are implicated in causing autism.
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from Science News
New radio wave observations are giving astronomers their closest look yet at the supermassive black hole believed to be lurking at the center of our galaxy.
Reporting in the Sept. 4 Nature, a team has, for the first time, resolved features as small as the black hole’s event horizon—the gravitationally warped region from which nothing, not even light, can escape.
“We have now entered a new era, one in which we can directly image structure at the event horizon of a black hole,” asserts Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland in College Park in a commentary accompanying the Nature report.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON—Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have linked a chemical found in everyday plastics to problems with brain function and mood disorders in monkeys, the first time the chemical has been connected to health problems in primates.
The study is the latest in an accumulation of research that has raises concerns about bisphenol A, or BPA, a compound that gives a shatterproof quality to polycarbonate plastic and has been found to leach from plastic into food and water.
The Yale study results come as federal toxicologists Wednesday reaffirmed an earlier draft-report finding that there is "some concern" bisphenol A can cause developmental problems in the brain and hormonal systems of infants and children.
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from USA Today
A radioactive tracer that "lights up" cancer hiding inside dense breasts showed promise in its first big test against mammograms, revealing more tumors and giving fewer false alarms, doctors reported Wednesday.
The experimental method—molecular breast imaging, or MBI—would not replace mammograms for women at average risk of the disease.
But it might become an additional tool for higher risk women with a lot of dense tissue that makes tumors hard to spot on mammograms, and it could be done at less cost than an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
Attacked by Bacillus anthracis in its most virulent form, the human body is no match. White blood cells dispatched to kill the pathogen wind up transporting anthrax spores back to key organs, where the bacteria burst forth in multitudes, flooding the bloodstream with death-dealing toxins.
By the time many victims realize they're infected, they're already doomed. Anthrax is an old nemesis.
... Robert Koch, a pioneer in microbiology, finally isolated the bacterium in 1877, helping launch a scientific effort to understand and overcome the microbe. That effort continues around the world, including inside labs at San Diego State University and the University of California San Diego. A driving motivation is fear, of course.
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from the Scientific American
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile-circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.
Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history.
The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her laptop. The solution is a global computer network called the LHC Computing Grid, and with any luck, it may be giving us a glimpse of the Internet of the future.
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from the Economist
There is a branch of science fiction that looks at the Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, and asks how they might be made habitable. The answer is planetary engineering. ... So, fiddle with the atmospheres of these neighbours and you open new frontiers for human settlement and far-fetched story lines.
It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future.
Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—Scientists have mapped the cascade of genetic changes that turn normal cells in the brain and pancreas into two of the most lethal cancers. The result points to a new approach for fighting tumors and maybe even catching them sooner.
Genes blamed for one person's brain tumor were different from the culprits for the next patient, making the puzzle of cancer genetics even more complicated. But Friday's research also found that clusters of seemingly disparate genes all work along the same pathways.
So instead of today's hunt for drugs that target a single gene, the idea is to target entire pathways that most patients share. Think of delivering the mail to a single box at the end of the cul-de-sac instead of at every doorstep. The three studies, published in the journals Science and Nature, mark a milestone in cancer genetics.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Suicides among U.S. adolescents dropped in 2005 after a sharp rise the previous year, but the number still remained high compared with historical trends, researchers said Tuesday.
The youth suicide rate had been falling steadily for a decade, but shot upward by 18% in 2004, boosted, according to some experts, by a government warning about antidepressants that led patients to stop taking the drugs.
The latest study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that the reaction triggered by the warning has subsided and patients are being treated with antidepressants or other therapies.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and a half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warming has already made storms more destructive.
“I think we do see a climate signal here,” said James B. Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, being published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
The study, which also found that more typical, less powerful tropical storms had not become stronger over the 26-year period studied, is consistent with other researchers’ hurricane models, Dr. Elsner said.
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from the BBC News Online
The ice shelves in Canada's High Arctic have lost a colossal area this year, scientists report. The floating tongues of ice attached to Ellesmere Island, which have lasted for thousands of years, have seen almost a quarter of their cover break away.
One of them, the 50 sq km (20 sq miles) Markham shelf, has completely broken off to become floating sea-ice. Researchers say warm air temperatures and reduced sea-ice conditions in the region have assisted the break-up.
"These substantial calving events underscore the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Trent University's Dr Derek Mueller. "These changes are irreversible under the present climate."
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from the Guardian (UK)
Sixty thousand years ago, a small group of African men and women took to the Red Sea in tiny boats and crossed the Mandab Strait to Asia. Their journey-of less than 20 miles-marked the moment Homo sapiens left its home continent.
The motive for our ancestors' African exodus is not known, though scientists suspect food shortages, triggered by climate change, were involved. However, its impact cannot be overestimated. Two thousand generations later, descendants of these African emigres have settled our entire planet, wiped out all other hominids including the Neanderthals and have reached a population of 6.5 billion.
Now scientists are completing a massive study of DNA samples from a quarter of a million volunteers in different continents in order to create the most precise map yet of mankind's great diaspora. Last week, in Tallinn, Estonia, they outlined their most recent results.
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from Science News
If two physicists are right, a single electron might know more about numbers than all of the world’s mathematicians. In an upcoming Physical Review Letters, the researchers hint that the dynamics of an electron can embody the solution to the nearly 150-year-old Riemann hypothesis, a crucial unsolved problem that has wide and deep consequences for number theory.
Germán Sierra of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and Paul Townsend of the University of Cambridge in England have proposed that when an electron is confined to moving in two dimensions, its possible energy level values might encode the key to the Riemann hypothesis.
“They have gone a step forward toward giving a physical description of the Riemann hypothesis,” comments Jonathan Keating of the University of Bristol in England. He warns, though, that the problem may not have gotten any easier as a result.
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