from National Geographic News
The ultraviolet flash that signals the explosion of a red supergiant star has been detected by astronomers for the first time.
"We have witnessed the violent death of a massive star in a galaxy almost a billion light-years away in unprecedented detail," said study team member Kevin Schawinski, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford in the U.K.
The discovery comes just weeks after an independent team reported the first sighting of x-ray light from a star just as it was beginning to explode. Seeing such "first light" from supernovae could help astronomers better understand what's happening inside massive stars in their final moments.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration required)
Vinyl shower curtains sold at major retailers across the country emit toxic chemicals that have been linked to serious health problems, according to a report released Thursday by a national environmental organization.
The curtains contained high concentrations of chemicals that are linked to liver damage as well as damage to the central nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems, said researchers for the Virginia-based Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
The organization commissioned the study about two years ago to determine what caused that "new shower curtain smell" familiar to many consumers.
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from the San Francisco Examiner
(Associated Press) - For about 20 years, Dr. Michael Klag has used a fertilizer made from Milwaukee municipal sludge on azaleas and yew shrubs at his suburban Baltimore home. And Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, says he's never had any question about its safety.
But in the past few weeks, he has found himself reassuring the public about a similar product .... Johns Hopkins researchers spread it on nine yards in poor black Baltimore neighborhoods in an experiment eight years ago.
That's become a cause for outrage among some politicians and others who have called for an investigation. The trigger was an Associated Press story in April that raised questions about the Baltimore experiment and whether there has been adequate testing to determine if sludge is safe.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON - Europe this month rolled out new restrictions on makers of chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems, changes that are forcing U.S. industries to find new ways to produce a wide range of everyday products.
The new laws in the European Union (EU) require companies to demonstrate that a chemical is safe before it enters commerce, the opposite of policies in the United States, where regulators must prove a chemical is harmful before it can be restricted or removed from the market. Manufacturers said complying with the European laws will add billions to their costs.
The changes come as consumers increasingly are worried about the long-term consequences of chemical exposure and are agitating for more aggressive regulation. In the United States, these pressures have spurred efforts in Congress and some state legislatures to pass laws that would circumvent the laborious federal regulatory process.
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from the Guardian(UK)
An ancient seed that germinated after being recovered from the rubble of King Herod's pleasure palace has been dated as 2,000 years old, smashing the record for the oldest seed ever grown.
The seed was among three recovered during excavations at Masada, an imposing 2,044-year-old clifftop fortress on the edge of the Judean desert overlooking the Dead Sea.
Researchers planted the seed three years ago after treating it with hormone-laced fertilisers. To their surprise, it germinated and began to grow. The plant, dubbed the "Methuselah tree" after the oldest character in the Bible, now stands 1.5m tall.
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from USA Today
U.S. life expectancy has reached 78 years, a record high driven by declines in all but one of the major causes of death, the government reported Wednesday.
Despite the good news, the USA ranks 29th in life expectancy among the United Nations' member nations. Tops is Andorra, which has an average life expectancy of 83, followed closely by Japan, Sweden, Australia and Switzerland.
"We're two to three years behind most Western countries at this point," says University of Pennsylvania demographer Samuel Preston, a member of a National Academy of Sciences panel that convened for the first time last week to try to explain the lag.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Kenneth Hudnut sees trouble out his window. He works in Pasadena, Calif., in a sunny valley of palm trees, historic bungalows, gourmet coffee shops and elite institutions of higher learning and space technology.
But Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, knows that it also is home to something called the Sierra Madre fault, which is adjacent to something called the Cucamonga fault.
That, in turn, is not far from the fabled San Andreas fault. What worries Hudnut is the possibility of the geological equivalent of dominos: What if an earthquake on one fault causes a chain reaction? That, he believes, is what happened in China last month in the earthquake that has so far been blamed for more than 69,000 deaths.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Some shark populations in the Mediterranean Sea have completely collapsed, according to a new study, with numbers of five species declining by more than 96 percent over the past two centuries.
"This loss of top predators could hold serious implications for the entire marine ecosystem, greatly affecting food webs throughout this region," said the lead author of the study, Francesco Ferretti, a doctoral student in marine biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
Particularly troubling, the researchers said, were patterns indicating a lack of females of breeding age, which are essential if populations are to recover even with new conservation measures.
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from Science News
Some people are loath to take a lopsided view of the universe, but cosmologist Sean Carroll and his colleagues are positively reveling in it.
Embracing a study that suggests the pattern of radiation left over from the Big Bang looks surprisingly different from one side of the sky to the other, Carroll and colleagues have come up with some mind-bending possibilities to explain the puzzle, described in a paper posted online June 3.
In one scenario, the universe existed before inflation - the short-lived but enormous growth spurt associated with the Big Bang. In the other scenario, the universe is but a tiny part of a primordial structure now grown so big it exceeds the horizon of the observable universe.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
You can now have your say about regulations on bringing stem cell therapies to the clinic.
A special task force set up to create guidelines for bringing stem cell therapies from bench to bedside will be accepting public commentary on the guidelines, continuing until this fall, the group announced [Thursday] at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) in Philadelphia.
The task force's primary goals are to create guidelines that will help basic researchers address the regulatory challenges of stem cell therapies. In particular, the task force of more than 30 members from 13 countries will address issues of standardizing stem cell populations ...
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from the Economist
Athletes in the ancient Olympics competed in the buff, on the grounds (among other things) that clothes were a hindrance to performance. Modern technology, however, has changed that. In some sports, notably swimming, the right attire can be an enormous boon. Take Speedo's LZR swimsuit, which was introduced in February.
Fully 38 of the 42 world swimming records that have been broken since then have fallen to swimmers wearing LZRs. Indeed, some of those records have been claimed by less-than-notable racers, suggesting that the difference lies in the apparel, not the athlete.
To make the LZR, four innovations had to come together. The first is the fabric. The new suit is cut from a densely woven nylon-elastane material that compresses the wearer's body into a hydrodynamic shape but is extremely light. Moreover, there are no sewn seams. Instead, the suit is bonded by ultrasonic welding.
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from the Scientific American
Stacey Gayle used to love music. Listening to it and performing it was a big part of her life. She had stacks of CDs in her car, went to concerts of artists like Sean Paul, and would go to parties where hot songs would blare. ... Then she started having seizures.
The first one happened while she slept in her bedroom in Rosedale, Queens in New York City on the night of March 3, 2005. ... Several brain scans and blood tests gave no clue as to why she seized. Soon after, she had another, this time at a friend's barbecue.
... At first, the seizures seemed to occur randomly. In the spring of 2006, however, she noticed a pattern. At the time, Sean Paul's "Temperature" was sitting at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, continually being played on urban radio stations. It was playing at nearly every barbecue and party she went to. That was a problem: "Every time it would go on, I would pass out and go into a seizure," she recalls.
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from the BBC News Online
"Plutoid" is the word of the moment for astronomers. It is the new classification that has been sanctioned for the object that was formerly known as the "ninth planet."
It is nearly two years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its former status as a "proper" planet. Now an IAU committee, meeting in Oslo, has suggested that small, nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune should carry the "plutoid" tag.
As astronomy's official nomenclature organisation, the IAU must approve all new names and classifications. Its decision at the 2006 General Assembly to demote Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet" caused an international furore.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Associated Press) - NASA launched a telescope Wednesday to scout out elusive, super high-energy gamma rays lurking in the universe. Glast - a NASA acronym standing for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope - began its five- to 10-year Earth-orbiting mission with a midday blastoff aboard a Delta rocket.
The $690 million telescope, supported by six countries, will pick up where NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory left off before its deliberate destruction in 2000, but in a bigger and better way.
With superior new technology and insight gained from Compton and other telescopes, Glast will be able to do in three hours, or two orbits of Earth - survey the entire sky - what Compton took 15 months to do. What's more, Glast and its particle detectors are much more sensitive and precise, and should provide an unprecedented view into the high-energy universe from a 345-mile-high orbit.
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from BBC News Online
One of the most prolific inventors in medicine has won the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize. Professor Robert Langer's biomaterials research has allowed for more accurate and controlled release of drugs into patients' bodies.
His work has had a significant impact on fighting cancer and heart disease, with more than 100 million people using medicines delivered via his designs. The 800,000 euros award is seen as an unofficial Nobel Prize for technology.
It is given every second year for a technology that "significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future." ... His work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology involved finding a way to gradually release drug molecules into a patient's body.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
About 50 countries, including Korea, Taiwan and Japan the last of which accounted for 36 percent of American beef exports closed their doors to American beef after the first confirmed case of mad cow disease was found in Moses Lake, Wash., in December 2003.
The circumstances of that first case, and the defensive reactions of the United States Department of Agriculture after its discovery, led to years of skepticism by American consumer groups and difficult negotiations with foreign countries over reopening their markets -- especially in Asia's wealthier countries, where consumers are used to demanding that their governments certify that imported food is safe.
Although the first infected cow was probably not a "downer" -- too diseased or crippled to walk -- it was part of a shipment of broken-down old dairy cows, and it became clear from press reports that some small slaughterhouses specialized in taking such borderline animals, which often had to be hoisted or winched out of their trucks on chains.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
For thousands of years, humans saw the seas as an infinite source of plenty. But the industrialized fishing fleets of the 20th century found the ocean's bounds. Today, fish stocks are disappearing and undersea ecosystems are changing in ways that raise alarm. How did this happen? And what must be done to reverse these trends and sustain life in the world's seas?
In Part 1 of a series, the Monitor looks at the factors that have conspired to cause the collpse of fish stocks.
In the past, sail-powered fishing boats were limited by wind and weather; today's factory ships, with sonar and GPS, can scour the sea for months. The sea was not so vast, once we deployed an industrial armada against it.
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from the New Scientist
A carbon nanotube that spins in a current of electrons, like a wind turbine in a breeze, could become the world's smallest printer or shrink computer memory, UK researchers say.
The design is simple. A carbon nanotube 10 nanometres long and 1 nm wide is suspended between two others, its ends nested inside them to form a rotating joint. When a direct current is passed along the tubes, the central one spins around.
That design has as yet only been tested using advanced computer simulations by Colin Lambert and colleagues at Lancaster University, Lancashire, UK. But Adrian Bachtold of the Catalan Institute for Nanotechnology, who was not involved in the work, intends to build the electron turbines and says it should be straightforward.
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The Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully filled its scientific oven with clumpy Martian soil, and scientists expect to close the door and begin their analysis within a few days.
The lander had trouble getting the oven to fill because the soil clods refused to sift through a screen over the oven's opening. After repeated attempts and a last try at vibrating the screen, they succeeded in coaxing soil through the screen and into the oven.
The tiny oven is one of eight aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander. The high-temperature ovens are part of a key scientific instrument that will analyze Martian ice and soil and determine whether organic compounds, the building blocks of life, are present.
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A rare fossil found in Australia suggests dinosaurs were able to trek north across a vast continent, scientists report.
The hundred-million-year-old fossil belonged to a two-legged meat-eater, or theropod, that is closely related to Megaraptor namunhuaiquii, a giant, big-clawed carnivore from Argentina, says a team led by Nathan Smith of the University of Chicago's Field Museum. The discovery could help redraw the world map during the dinosaur era, researchers add.
That's because the newfound Australian dinosaur shows that animals could travel across the prehistoric supercontinent of Gondwana during the Cretaceous period, about 145 to 65 million years ago. This in turn suggests that Gondwana's Southern Hemisphere landmasses broke up later than traditionally thought.
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from Science News
Our National Academy of Sciences and its counterparts in a dozen other nations issued a joint statement [Tuesday] calling on world leaders to "to limit the threat of climate change" by weaning themselves off of their dependence on fossil fuels.
They also called for a move to sustainable resource use - which, as we all know, would not include the continued full-throttle mining of finite, millions-of-years-old coal, oil, and natural gas.
The academies that issued the request for action are known as the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) plus 5 (the largest developing countries: China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa). These science academies represent some nations that do not yet work together on discussing, much less tackling, climate change.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON - According to the Congressional Research Service, there are only about 30 scientists among the 535 senators and representatives in the 110th Congress .... But physics is on a roll.
"Go back 15 years, and there weren't any physicists," said Vernon J. Ehlers, a Republican who taught the subject at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., until he was elected to Congress in 1993.
His was a lone voice until 1998, when Rush Holt, assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory, won election from New Jersey as a Democrat. And today there are three, adding Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab and another Democrat, who won a special election in March in Illinois. ... [A] Congress full of physicists might solve some worrisome problems, the three-member physics caucus argued one afternoon when they met for a joint interview in the Capitol.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- Africa produces a tiny fraction of the world's greenhouse gases but is particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming, U.N. environmental experts said Tuesday at a conference of African environment ministers here.
Some of those present had harsh words for the developed world, in particular the United States, the largest producer of greenhouse gases. They said industrialized nations are pressing Africans to reduce gas emissions while not doing enough themselves.
"Computer models project major changes in precipitation patterns on the continent, which could lead to food shortages and increased desertification," says a United Nations Environment Program report released at the conference. "Yet on the whole, African nations lack the resources and technology to address such changes."
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from Scientific American
Combining standard field biology techniques with a Web-accessible robotic camera positioned at the Welder Wildlife Refuge in Sinton, Tex., scientists and amateur ornithologists are trying to determine whether the sighting of subtropical birds well north of their natural habitat is proof of climate change and a profound shift in wildlife migration patterns.
Amateur observers have witnessed - via the CONE (Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments) Welder Web site - the green jay, great kiskadee and white-tipped dove cavorting north of their known breeding areas in Texas's Rio Grande Valley, about 160 miles from Sinton.
In fact, dozens of species of subtropical birds appear to have shifted to neighborhoods north of their normal stomping grounds.
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from New Scientist
Colossal structures larger than the visible universe - forged during the period of cosmic inflation nearly 14 billion years ago - may be responsible for a strange pattern seen in the big bang's afterglow, says a team of cosmologists. If confirmed, the structures could provide precious information about the universe's earliest moments.
In the first instant after its birth, the universe is thought to have experienced a rapid growth spurt called inflation. During this period, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
Inflation solves some cosmological puzzles, such as why relic radiation from the big bang, released when the universe was less than 400,000 years old, is relatively uniform.
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from National Geographic News
In just a month, an area nearly the size of New York City was cleared in the Amazon rain forest - an "alarming" and "worse-than-imagined" development, the Brazilian government said in a statement. At least 433 square miles were deforested in Brazil in April 2008.
That's eight times more than the 55 square miles destroyed the month before, according to data released last week by the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (INPE), which monitors the Amazon.
The results suggest that the deforestation rate has accelerated, INPE said. ... The numbers are based on satellite data from Deter, a system that uses low-resolution images to capture frequent snapshots of the region.
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from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)
WILLIAMS BAY, WIS. - Late one sunny afternoon in April, Kyle Cudworth, director of Yerkes Observatory complex, opened up the door leading into the main observatory.
Shuffling behind Cudworth, 86-year-old Rolf Riekher ... smiled with unalloyed delight. His eyes darted around the circular room, a vast space - and then they fixed on the massive, dark metal pier at the room's center. Looking up, he saw it: a slender, gracefully canted 63-foot-long white tube.
Built in 1897, at the apex of the Victorian age, this mighty telescope was the international space station of its time. It remains the world's biggest refracting telescope. ... What delayed the prominent telescope expert from seeing the important telescope was Riekher's unusual, isolated life and career in Germany under the Nazi and East German Communist regimes.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Kathleen Loa first began thinking about pursuing a green career while she was a student at Oberlin College. Now, armed with a degree in chemistry, she is taking the first step in that direction. She's serving as an intern at the nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy in Washington, D.C. After earning a master's in energy policy, she'll find a job.
"I want to keep working on environmental energy, either through a nonprofit role or a for-profit company," says Ms. Loa of Claremont, Calif.
That goal puts her in the vanguard of one group seeking eco-friendly jobs - students and recent graduates who hope to join the green boom at the beginning of their careers. A second group includes people in midcareer who want to parlay their current skills into green jobs. ... Yet defining just what constitutes a green job remains a challenge.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON - The Gallup Organization and a health-industry partner now offer a detailed daily measure of U.S. happiness and stress that you can look it up on the Internet. They hope that it will be as influential an indicator of national progress someday as the gross domestic product.
The index, which is based on 1,000 in-depth interviews nightly, is the first time that happiness and its many components have been measured regularly and precisely in other than dollar terms.
To come up with the daily index, Gallup asks a battery of questions about respondents' previous days, including state of health, economic comfort, job satisfaction, social life, restedness, optimism, worry and other factors in contentment.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Evolution's recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee's.
A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England.
Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons. But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience.
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