from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
Put more money into NASA's human space flight program or forget about going anywhere new and interesting with astronauts, a blue-ribbon panel told the White House on Thursday.
In its final, 154-page report--"Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation"--the 10-person committee led by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine said NASA's current program "is at a tipping point where either additional funds must be provided or the exploration program first instituted by President Kennedy must be abandoned at least for the time being."
The committee had a jaundiced view of the Ares 1 rocket currently under development as a replacement for the space shuttle. But the report stopped short of calling for the Ares 1 to be killed outright.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Washington (Associated Press) -- The Obama administration said Thursday it is designating more than 200,000 square miles in Alaska and off its coast as "critical habitat" for polar bears, an action that could add restrictions to future offshore drilling for oil and gas.
Federal law prohibits agencies from taking actions that may adversely affect critical habitat and interfere with polar bear recovery.
Assistant Interior Secretary Tom Strickland called the habitat designation a step in the right direction to help polar bears stave off extinction, while recognizing that the greatest threat to the bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change.
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from National Geographic News
The apparent victim of a ship collision, a dead 70-foot (20-meter) blue whale (pictured) washed ashore in a forbidding northern California cove this week.
Though unable to move the blue whale, scientists and students are leaping at the research opportunity, scrambling down rock faces to take tissue samples and eventually one of the 11-foot-long (3.5-meter-long) flippers.
Though relatively infrequent off California until recent years, ship collisions are "the number one human threat to blue whales," according to marine biologist Joe Cordaro of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.
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from the Economist
Like conquistadors seeking El Dorado, physicists cannot leave the idea of fusion power alone. Some spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money on the huge machines they believe are the best way to generate the temperatures and pressures needed to persuade atomic nuclei to merge with one another. Others still think there is something to the idea of "cold" fusion, and tinker hopefully with desktop apparatus full of electrodes made from exotic metals and electrolytes containing obscure isotopes of hydrogen.
Eric Lerner, however, believes there is a third way. His experimental device does not quite fit on a desktop (its sides are a couple of metres long) but nor does it cost billions (a few hundred thousand is closer to the mark). Nor, in truth, does it do fusion yet. But on October 20th he announced it had reached what might be seen as base camp on the climb to that goal.
Mr. Lerner's machine is called a dense plasma focus fusion device. It works by storing charge in capacitors and then discharging the accumulated electricity rapidly through electrodes bathed in a gas held at low pressure. The electrodes are arranged as a central positively charged anode surrounded by smaller negatively charged cathodes.
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from Time
If any good has come of the global H1N1 flu pandemic, it may have started with a child like Nayeli Quispe, 7, a second-grader from the impoverished hillsides of La Paz, Bolivia.
Prompted by a massive campaign by the country's public-health officials to contain the spread of the new flu virus, Nayeli and millions of other Bolivian schoolchildren have been washing their hands a lot more than usual--after recess, before meals and every time the animated dancing hands pop up in public-service announcements on TV. "First you wet them really well, then you rub the soap all around and then you dry them with a clean towel," says Nayeli.
Public-health experts now say the increase in hand-washing across the country may have had some collateral benefits, not only in helping to reduce H1N1 infections, but also the spread of other common diseases in Bolivia. "We see a steady 10% to 15% drop in the rate of incidence of acute diarrheal diseases in all age groups, compared with last year's numbers at this time," says Dr. René Lenis, Bolivia's director of epidemiology, referring to data collected on the number of weekly cases of diarrheal disease reported in medical centers nationwide in 2008 and 2009.
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from BBC News Online
They look like huge abandoned volleyball nets facing west towards the Pacific Ocean on one of the many hillsides in the Peruvian capital, Lima.
They started as an experiment two years ago and now they are giving a lifeline to some of Lima's poorest residents.
The Peruvian capital gets an average of just over 40mm (1.5 inches) of rainfall a year but what it does not get in showers, it makes up for in fog. For nine months of the year, much of the coastal city is shrouded in sea mist and these nets are being used to trap it.
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from Time
On Oct. 19, the U.S. Justice Department announced that federal prosecutors would not pursue medical-marijuana users and distributors who comply with state laws, formalizing a policy at which the Obama Administration hinted earlier this year.
Currently, 13 states allow doctors to prescribe medical marijuana to patients suffering from ailments ranging from AIDS to glaucoma, and in Maryland a prescription can soften punishment if a user faces prosecution. But until now those laws didn't provide any protection from federal authorities.
Should Professors Cheech and Chong ever receive university tenure teaching the medical history of their favorite subject, the course pack would be surprisingly thick. As early as 2737 B.C., the mystical Emperor Shen Neng of China was prescribing marijuana tea for the treatment of gout, rheumatism, malaria and, oddly enough, poor memory. The drug's popularity as a medicine spread throughout Asia, the Middle East and down the eastern coast of Africa, and certain Hindu sects in India used marijuana for religious purposes and stress relief.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Red-eye flights, all-night study sessions, and extra-inning playoff games all deprive us of sleep and can leave us forgetful the next day. Now scientists have discovered that lost sleep disrupts a specific molecule in the brain's memory circuitry, possibly leading to treatments for tired brains.
Neuroscientists studying rodents and humans have found that sleep deprivation interrupts the storage of episodic memories: information about who, what, when, and where. To lay down these memories, neurons in our brains form new connections with other neurons or strengthen old ones. This rewiring process, which occurs over a period of hours, requires a rat's nest of intertwined molecular pathways within neurons that turn genes on and off and fine-tune how proteins behave.
Neuroscientist Ted Abel of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues wanted to untangle these molecular circuits and pinpoint which one sleep deprivation disrupts. The researchers started by studying electrical signals in slices of the hippocampus--the brain's memory center--from sleep-deprived mice.
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from National Geographic News
The tiniest dinosaur in North America weighed less than a teacup Chihuahua, a new study says.
Seen above as an artist's reconstruction in front of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California, the agile Fruitadens haagarorum was just 28 inches (70 centimeters) long and weighed less than two pounds (one kilogram).
The diminutive dinosaur likely darted among the legs of larger plant-eaters such as Brachiosaurus and predators such as Allosaurus about 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Reporting from Washington - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress on Wednesday that delays in the release of H1N1 flu shots show that the United States is too dependent on other countries for the manufacture of vaccines and that the technology to make them must be improved.
Four of the five manufacturers of H1N1 vaccines are foreign companies--a fact that alarmed lawmakers, who expressed concern about the ability of the federal government to secure enough vaccine to prevent the spread of the virus, known as swine flu.
Some expressed even greater concern that the lag in vaccine production could mean the H1N1 flu shots will arrive too late to do any good, citing a recent study that predicted that swine flu infections will reach their peak this week.
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from Wired
You don't need psychedelic drugs to start seeing colors and objects that aren't really there. Just 15 minutes of near-total sensory deprivation can bring on hallucinations in many otherwise sane individuals.
Psychologists stuck 19 healthy volunteers into a sensory-deprivation room, completely devoid of light and sound, for 15 minutes. Without the normal barrage of sensory information flooding their brains, many people reported experiencing visual hallucinations, paranoia and a depressed mood.
"This is a pretty robust finding," wrote psychiatrist Paul Fletcher of the University of Cambridge, who studies psychosis but was not involved in the study. "It appears that, when confronted by lack of sensory patterns in our environment, we have a natural tendency to superimpose our own patterns."
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from LiveScience
With the Fall marathon season in full swing, thousands of runners are gearing up for the big day. Just as important as their broken-in shoes and heart rate monitor is their source of motivation, inspiration and distraction: their tunes.
Running with music has become so common that the two biggest names in both industries, Nike and Apple, have been joined at the hip with the Nike + iPod combination. So, what is it about music and running, or any exercise, that feels so right?
Several recent studies try to chase down the connection between our ears and our feet.
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from Scientific American
Four hundred years ago this year, two events marked what scientists and historians today regard as the birth of modern astronomy. The first of them, the beginning of Galileo's telescopic observations, has been immortalized by playwrights and authors and widely publicized as the cornerstone anniversary for the International Year of Astronomy. Through his looking glass, the Italian astronomer saw the mountains and valleys of the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and sunspots--observations that would play a huge role in discrediting the prevailing, church-endorsed view of an Earth-centered cosmos.
The second event is not as well known, but is arguably equally important. It was the publication of Johannes Kepler's Astronomia Nova (The New Astronomy) in 1609, a treatise in which the German astronomer introduced the first two of his laws describing planetary motion.
The first law states that the planets travel in elliptical orbits around the sun and describes the sun's position as the focal point in that ellipse. The second law states that an imaginary line connecting a planet to the sun will sweep out a region of equal size in a given time period, wherever in the orbit that time period falls.
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from the Scientist
An analysis of 37 million year old primate fossils is fueling a debate over the existence of an evolutionary link between lemur-like and monkey-like primates--a link that could more fully explain human evolution. The study, published in this week's issue of Nature, challenges the claim that Darwinius--a rare, almost-complete skeleton whose unveiling caused a media firestorm last May--is the possible stem species to today's anthropoid primates, which include monkeys, apes, and humans.
"The paper is the first thorough, systematic treatment of the question" of whether there is an ancestral connection between the two primate subgroups, said Chris Beard, chair of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, who was not involved with the research.
The new Nature paper, by Erik Seiffert, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University in New York, and colleagues, presents a phylogenetic analysis of Afradapis longicristatus in which the fossilized specimen is classified as an adapiform--or "adapoid"--primate that left no known descendants.
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from the Guardian (U.K.)
Research to develop genetically modified crops must be stepped up as part of a £2bn "grand challenge" to avoid future food shortages, an influential panel of scientists said yesterday. In its report, the Royal Society said that GM techniques would be needed to boost yields and help crops survive harsher climates, as the global population rises and global warming worsens.
But the report said GM was not the only answer, and that measures to improve crop management, such as improved irrigation, were needed too.
Professor David Baulcombe, a plant scientist at the University of Cambridge who chaired the study, said: "We need to take action now to stave off food shortages. If we wait even five to 10 years, it may be too late. Biological science has progressed in leaps and bounds in the last decade and UK scientists have been at the head of the pack when it comes to topics related to food crops. In the UK we have the potential to come up with viable scientific solutions for feeding a growing population and we have a responsibility to realise this potential. There's a very clear need for policy action and publicly funded science to make sure this happens."
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Associated Press) -- NASA's lofty new rocket arrived at the launching pad Tuesday for a test flight next week that comes at a time when the future of the country's spaceflight program is up in the air.
It's the first time in 34 years that a rocket other than the space shuttle has stood at Launch Pad 39-B. NASA modified the pad for this rocket, which is supposed to eventually carry astronauts to the moon.
But the White House may scrap those plans. A panel of aerospace experts that provided President Barack Obama with a list of possible exploration options is issuing its final report later this week.
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from Science Insider
PARIS--The fog around the largest AIDS vaccine study ever conducted began to lift today, as Thai and U.S. researchers for the first time publicly presented a detailed analysis of their data to over 1000 scientists gathered here at an annual meeting.
The study results, also published online by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today, received widespread attention 3 weeks ago, when researchers touted them during press conferences in the United States and Thailand as the first success in a real-world test of an AIDS vaccine. But that pronouncement came under intense scrutiny because of concerns that it omitted negative analyses that challenged the upbeat conclusions.
After seeing a more thorough presentation of the data, even some scientists who were initially skeptical about the trial believe the vaccine does offer modest protection from infection with HIV.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
What's the difference between a man and a woman? The question seems too silly to be science: Its answer is so obvious that every stand-up comic has a different way of saying it. ...
But the difference is only obvious most of the time. In some unusual cases, resulting from sex-change operations or medical conditions, the usual indicators of male and female can contradict each other in the same body. The best-known recent example is South African runner Caster Semenya, who has been put through "gender verification" amid suspicion about her muscular physique and low voice.
But the same confusion has cropped up in legal battles over who can be married to whom, and when the "M" on a driver's license can be changed to "F." It can also intrude painfully into the lives of ordinary people, when medical diagnoses reveal that their hormones, chromosomes or anatomy don't sit entirely on one side of the line.
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from Science News
CHICAGO -- The Halle Berry fan club is expanding one brain cell at a time. By eavesdropping on the activity of single neurons in the human brain, scientists have figured out which brain cells go wild for superstars such as the popular actress. And the newest research shows that people can activate those cells selectively.
"This study is the first demonstration of humans' ability to control the activity of single neurons," the researchers wrote in a summary of their study. The results, presented October 19 at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting by Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, may help researchers understand how each cell in the brain sees and responds to the world.
"This type of work gives us some clues about what's going on in the brain," comments Christoph Weidemann of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies how the brain processes information. "It's quite an amazing feat for the brain to make sense of its input and reliably recognize people and objects."
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from the Wall Street Journal
Mother Nature has provided a rich source of raw materials for a host of important drugs: aspirin comes from willow tree bark; the blood pressure drug captopril from the venom of a pit viper; warfarin, the widely used blood thinner, was derived from moldy sweet clover.
Now researchers think that desperately ill heart failure patients may find relief with the help of the eastern green mamba snake.
That's the hope, at least, of John Burnett, a heart failure expert at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. He and his colleagues have fashioned an experimental drug based in part on the venom of the snake, a tree-dwelling relative of the cobra that is found in eastern Africa.
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from BBC News Online
[Chinese Car Maker] BYD says that its new E6 electric car due out before the end of the year will do 250 miles (400km) on a single charge.
This is a very big number. The Tesla electric sports car does almost as much, but has little room for anything else in the car but the battery. The E6 is roomy with space for five passengers and a good-sized boot. The battery tucks under the back seat.
It needs 7-8 hours with a domestic plug to charge the car but BYD--it stands for Build Your Dreams--says a specially developed fast charging point with a lead the diameter of a fire hose will fill up the car in just one hour.
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from Reuters
NEW YORK -- Electric cars will not be dramatically cleaner than autos powered by fossil fuels until they rely less on electricity produced from conventional coal-fired power plants, scientists said on Monday.
"For electric vehicles to become a major green alternative, the power fuel mix has to move away from coal, or cleaner coal technologies have to be developed," said Jared Cohon, the chair of a National Research Council report released on Monday called "Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use."
About half of U.S. power is generated by burning coal, which emits many times more of traditional pollutants, such as particulates and smog components, than natural gas, and about twice as much of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
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from the Huffington Post
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- A scientist credited with helping discover evidence of water on the moon was arrested Monday on charges of attempting to pass along classified information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer.
Stewart David Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Md., was charged in a criminal complaint with attempting to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information, the Justice Department said.
Nozette was arrested by FBI agents and is expected to make his initial appearance in federal court in Washington on Tuesday. Law enforcement officials said Nozette did not immediately have a lawyer.
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from Wired
Scientists have found the world's largest species of golden orb-weaver spider in the tropics of Africa and Madagascar. The discovery marks the first identification of a new Nephila spider since 1879.
Females of the new species, Nephila komaci, measure a whopping 4 to 5 inches in diameter, while the male spiders stay petite at less than a quarter of their mate's size. So far, only a handful of these enormous arachnids have been found in the world.
"We fear the species might be endangered, as its only definite habitat is a sand forest in Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu-Natal," ecologist Jonathan Coddington of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History said in a press release. "Our data suggest that the species is not abundant, its range is restricted, and all known localities lie within two endangered biodiversity hotspots: Maputaland and Madagascar."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
For today's mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children's magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.
Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared "activity features" and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner's was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.
At that point, Mr. Gardner was 37 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on "recreational mathematics," a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
European astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop.
Scientists using the European Southern Observatory telescope didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.
Six of the newly found planets are several times bigger than Earth, increasing the population of so-called super-Earths by more than 30 percent. Most planets discovered so far are far bigger, Jupiter-sized or even larger.
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from Time
The planet is in the middle of an extinction crisis, the sixth great wave in its history. But unlike major extinction events of the past--like the Permian-Triassic event 250 million years ago, in which 70% of all terrestrial species were wiped out, probably because of an asteroid impact or a similar natural disaster--this time human beings are the cause.
Hard numbers are difficult to find, but many scientists believe Earth's species are going extinct at a rate that is up to 1,000 times higher than before human beings came on the scene.
Meanwhile, human beings have also been working to counteract the effects of their development and growth as well as man-made climate change. Measures like the U.S. Endangered Species Act, habitat-protecting nature reserves and hunting prohibitions are all designed to slow the rate of extinction and preserve dwindling species. But a new paper in the journal Biological Conservation says we may not be trying hard enough.
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from the New Yorker
One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He'd ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year--headaches, nausea. ...
Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. ...
Turley said that he loved playing football so much that he would do it all again. Then he began talking about what he had gone through in the past year. The thing that scared him most about that night at the bar was that it felt exactly like the time he was knocked unconscious. "It was identical," he said. "It was my worst episode ever."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
A team of researchers has created conditions analogous to those found outside of a black hole by blasting a plastic pellet with high-energy laser beams. The advance should sharpen insights into the behavior of matter and energy in extreme conditions.
Astronomers can't observe black holes directly because their immense gravity won't let light escape. Instead, they have focused on what they can see, namely, the surrounding cloud of swirling matter, known as an accretion disk.
When crunched and heated by the black hole's gravitational energy, these disks glow in x-ray light. Analyzing the spectra of these x-rays gives researchers clues about the physics of the black hole.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
I have long suspected that fish are smarter than we give them credit for.
As a child, I had an aquarium with several pet goldfish. They certainly knew it was feeding time when my hand appeared over their tank, and they excitedly awaited their delicious fish flakes.
They also exhibited a darker, disturbing behavior. Evidently, a safe life with abundant food was not fulfilling. From time to time, either sheer ennui or the long gray Toledo winter got to one of the fish and it ended its torment with a leap to my bedroom floor. Maybe my anthropomorphizing is a bit over the top. But, really, just how smart are fish? Can they learn?
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