Weekly Science Headlines

[Kai]

And, some random articles/links:

Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still cannot be read

Rising sea levels: Survival tips from 5000 BC

Why people believe invisible agents control the world

Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

[fomenter]

And, some random articles/links:


Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

loved this one

[Kai]

June 15, 2009



Oceans Charge Up New Theory of Magnetism
from the Times (London)

Earth's magnetic field, long thought to be generated by molten metals swirling around its core, may instead be produced by ocean currents, according to controversial new research published this week.

It suggests that the movements of such volumes of salt water around the world have been seriously underestimated by scientists as a source of magnetism.

If proven, the research would revolutionise geophysics, the study of the Earth's physical properties and behaviour, in which the idea that magnetism originates in a molten core is a central tenet.

http://snipr.com/k5oo5



Agencies Target Mountaintop Mining
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The Obama administration yesterday announced steps to reduce the environmental destruction caused in six states by mountaintop coal mining.

The government will seek to eliminate the expedited reviews that have made it easier for mining companies to blast off Appalachian mountaintops and discard the rubble into valleys where streams flow.

The agreement among three federal agencies also includes changes to tighten federal oversight and environmental screening of mountaintop coal mining in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

http://snipr.com/k5oso



Humans Intrude on an Indonesian Park
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

KUTAI NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia -- Countless houses and shops built by squatters flank the 40-mile, two-lane road slicing through this national park that, once rich with orangutans and lowland rain forest, now symbolizes Indonesia's struggle to protect its rare wildlife.

As construction has intensified along the road here on the island of Borneo, it has also brought a sometimes surprising diversity of businesses to the park, including a brothel, the Dika karaoke bar and the Mitra Hotel, which was marking its recent opening with discounts of 40 percent. A new bus terminal and gas station, nearly complete, will perhaps be greeting customers soon.

At one spot by the road, Mursidin, a farmer in his 50s, was one of many people building a home from the park's trees. Using a sander and a saw hooked to a red generator, he was polishing and laying sheets of wood on the house's frame as his wife, Nuramanah, looked on.

http://snipr.com/k5ovm



Better Sleep, Better Living
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Sleep isn't just a chunk of time carved out to recharge for the following day. Increasingly, scientific evidence shows life and sleep are woven together like 800-thread-count sheets. How people fare during their waking hours has a lot to do with how they sleep -- and vice versa.

Income, employment status, relationship satisfaction and hobbies all affect sleep, according to research presented last week in Seattle at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. And sleep affects health, relationships and decision-making.

"Sleep is related to everything," said Michael Grandner, a fellow at the Center for Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

http://snipr.com/k5ox3



Hydrogen Leak Sets Shuttle Launch Back 4 Days
from the San Francisco Chronicle

CAPE CANAVERAL (Associated Press) -- The potentially dangerous hydrogen gas leak that cropped up during the fueling of space shuttle Endeavour on Saturday has forced NASA to postpone the launch by at least four days.

NASA halted the countdown shortly after midnight, less than seven hours before Endeavour was due to blast off Saturday. The seven astronauts had yet to suit up.

Launch director Mike Leinbach said the leak, located at a vent line hookup on the fuel tank, was significant. Hydrogen gas is extremely volatile. "There's no way we could have continued," Leinbach said. "It's a commodity you just don't mess with."

http://snipr.com/k5p0c



Birth Control to Combat Malaria
from BBC News Online

Mosquito bites can be deadly. Anopheles mosquitoes carry the parasite that causes malaria, a disease which kills around a million people every year.

Traditionally mosquito populations have been controlled by pesticides. But scientists at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are working on another method - using radiation to sterilize male mosquitoes.

The sterile insect technique (SIT) has worked well in reducing tsetse flies and some other insect pests, such as fruit flies. The IAEA scientists are now trying to adapt the technique to the Anopheles mosquito.

http://snipr.com/k5p1x



Gray Hair Signals Battered DNA
from ScienceNOW Daily News

If you've ever blamed your gray hair on stress, you weren't far from the truth. Genotoxic stress--the kind that can damage a cell's DNA--causes hair to whiten over time, according to a new study.

The results challenge accepted ideas about how stem cells age and may eventually lead to new ways to prevent graying and treat the more serious conditions caused by genotoxic stress, such as cancer.

For hair, life is simple. A strand grows for several years, then rests for 2 to 3 months before eventually dying and falling out. In 2004, Emi Nishimura, a dermatologist now with the Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan, linked this process to the hair follicle's melanocyte stem cells.

http://snipr.com/k5p3y



Editors Quit After Fake Paper Flap
from the Scientist (Registration Required)

The editor-in-chief of an open access journal has stepped down from his post after learning that the journal accepted a fake, computer-generated article for publication. So has an editorial advisory board member of a second journal published by the same company, Bentham Science Publishers.

Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website [on June 10] that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at the journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."

"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ.

http://snipr.com/k5p6h



Flu Pandemic Spurs Queries About Vaccine
from the Wall Street Journal

Governments and drug companies ramping up production of a vaccine against the swine-flu virus are facing a tough question: Who really needs it?

The world's biggest drug companies have started producing vaccines against the H1N1 virus and expect the first doses to be available by the fall. Many Western countries have ordered millions of doses, at a cost of more than $1 billion. But they have yet to figure out who should be first in line to get the shots, or to what extent they are even needed, given that the virus has so far proved less deadly than feared.

"We hope that clarity will come from this fog in the next two to three months," said John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary, University of London.

http://snipr.com/k5p8w



EPA Chemical Database Rules a Political Hazard, Critics Say
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Reporting from Washington -- The Obama administration promised to end political meddling in scientific decisions, but some critics say the White House botched an early test on a key question of public health: how to assess the danger of industrial chemicals.

At issue is a government catalog of toxic substances that guides regulators, industries and the public on the dangers posed by certain chemicals. Environmentalists think the hazards should be assessed solely by scientists free from political influence.

But guidelines issued by the Environmental Protection Agency last month carve out a role for "White House officials" -- which could give presidential aides the ability to influence scientific deliberations.

http://snipr.com/k5oz3

[Kai]

June 16, 2009



A 'Time Bomb' for World Wheat Crop
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes. Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse ... government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants.

After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99. Nearly all the plants were goners.

Crop scientists fear the Ug99 fungus could wipe out more than 80% of worldwide wheat crops as it spreads from eastern Africa. It has already jumped the Red Sea and traveled as far as Iran. Experts say it is poised to enter the breadbasket of northern India and Pakistan, and the wind will inevitably carry it to Russia, China and even North America -- if it doesn't hitch a ride with people first.

http://snipr.com/k87p5



Study Shows Possible Link Between Deaths and ADHD Drugs
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Children taking stimulant drugs such as Ritalin to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are several times as likely to suffer sudden, unexplained death as children who are not taking such drugs, according to a study published yesterday that was funded by the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health.

While the numbers involved in the study were very small and researchers stopped short of suggesting a cause and effect, the study is the first to rigorously demonstrate a rare but worrisome connection between ADHD drugs and sudden death among children.

In doing so, the research adds to the evolving puzzle parents and doctors face in deciding whether to treat children with medication.

http://snipr.com/k88dx



Huge Pre-Stonehenge Complex Found Via "Crop Circles"
from National Geographic News

Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise.

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

For such a site to have lain hidden for so long is "completely amazing," said Wickstead, of Kingston University in London.

http://snipr.com/k88qe



Alcohol's Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

By now, it is a familiar litany. Study after study suggests that alcohol in moderation may promote heart health and even ward off diabetes and dementia. The evidence is so plentiful that some experts consider moderate drinking -- about one drink a day for women, about two for men -- a central component of a healthy lifestyle.

But what if it's all a big mistake? For some scientists, the question will not go away.

No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death -- only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

http://snipr.com/k88se



Solar-Powered Manned Flight: Flying Forever
from the Economist

When an airliner takes off for a transatlantic flight it needs to carry some 80 tonnes of fuel, which accounts for around one-fifth of its weight. On really long flights, fuel can account for 40% of a plane's take-off weight, so that around 20% of the fuel is used to carry the rest of the fuel.

Each tonne of fuel burned also produces 3.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Yet inside a hanger at a Swiss airfield is the prototype of an aircraft that does not use any fuel at all. The wings of this aircraft are almost as big as those of an airliner, but they are covered in a film of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity to drive its engines.

Solar-powered aircraft have flown before. ... But nothing like HB-SIA, as the Swiss aircraft is known, has ever taken to the air. If it works as expected, another version will be built and this will take off, climb to 10,000 metres and, by storing some of the electricity generated during the day, continue flying through the night.

http://snipr.com/k88u1



Herschel Telescope 'Opens Eyes'
from BBC News Online

Europe's new billion-euro Herschel space observatory, launched in May, has achieved a critical milestone. The telescope has opened the hatch that has been protecting its sensitive instruments from contamination.

The procedure allowed light collected by Herschel's giant 3.5m mirror to flood its supercold instrument chamber, or cryostat, for the first time. The observatory's quest is to study how stars and galaxies form, and how they evolve through cosmic time.

The command sent on Sunday to fire two pyrotechnic bolts holding down the hatch was arguably the key moment in the European Space Agency (Esa) mission since the 14 May launch from Earth.

http://snipr.com/k88wk



Getting Up to Speed
from the New York Times Magazine

... Since it was established in 1996, the California High Speed Rail Authority ... had been working out of offices in the capital to explore how the state could build a rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco for $33 billion, with two additional branches -- costing billions more -- eventually extending to Sacramento in the north and San Diego in the south.

It would not be an Amtrak operation but one owned by the state of California. Last November, state voters approved a $10 billion bond measure to get the project moving. Earlier this year, President Obama, who on a trip to France in April conceded he was "jealous" of European high-speed trains, submitted budget and stimulus plans that together allocated approximately $13 billion for high-speed rail over the next five years.

It seems almost certain that at least some of that money, and perhaps a significant percentage of it, will go this fall to California's project, which is the most developed of any U.S. high-speed-rail plan.

http://snipr.com/k88z3



Read This Before You Sell or Recycle Your Computer!
from the Christian Science Monitor

Last month, researchers in Britain decided to find out if people left anything behind when they sold or donated their old computer. They bought 300 used machines in several countries and from a number of sources, including eBay.

What did they find? About one-third still contained personal data on the hard drives, data that was located with just a little digging. Among the items rooted out: the test-launch information for THAAD ground-to-air defense missiles; medical records from hospitals; Social Security numbers; and proprietary commercial documents, such as business plans.

The disturbing conclusion: Even large organizations, which have legal obligations to protect their data, are sometimes lax about removing them thoroughly from discarded computers.

http://snipr.com/k8917



Charge on Single Atoms Measured
from BBC News Online

The amount of electric charge on single atoms has been measured by researchers reporting in Science. While individual atoms' charges have been measured before, the prior method required that the atoms be on the surface of a conducting material.

The new approach used a tiny tuning fork-like device that was deflected minuscule amounts by the attraction or repulsion of the atoms. The approach will aid in the design of devices such as solar cells.

... The new work hinges on the use of a research tool called an atomic force microscope, or AFM, which as its name implies can measure forces at the atomic level.

http://snipr.com/k893v



Straight Outta Michigan: The Return of Physics Rap
from New Scientist

It's nine months since the Large Hadron Collider lurched into life, sent a beam of protons whizzing through its 27-kilometer-long tunnel for just over a week - and then broke down.

Although the episode was a setback for the physics facility, it didn't stand in the way of the successful Large Hadron Rap, which appeared on virtually every news and science site at the time.

So when Michigan State University announced late last year that it would be building a new particle accelerator in East Lansing, Michigan, the physicists there asked Kate McAlpine, aka Alpinekat, to mark the occasion with a rap. Clink on headline link to watch the new Rare Isotope Rap.

http://snipr.com/k894u

[Kai]

June 17, 2009



Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry -- that a single gene helps determine one's risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal -- has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday.

The original finding, published in 2003, created a sensation among scientists and the public because it offered the first specific, plausible explanation of why some people bounce back after a stressful life event while others plunge into lasting despair.

The new report, by several of the most prominent researchers in the field, does not imply that interactions between genes and life experience are trivial; they are almost certainly fundamental, experts agree. But it does suggest that nailing down those factors in a precise way is far more difficult than scientists believed even a few years ago, and that the original finding could have been due to chance.

http://snipr.com/kaq54



New US Climate Report Dire, but Offers Hope
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Rising sea levels, sweltering temperatures, deeper droughts, and heavier downpours -- global warming's serious effects are already here and getting worse, the Obama administration warned on Tuesday in the grimmest, most urgent language on climate change ever to come out of any White House.

But amid the warnings, scientists and government officials seemed to go out of their way to soften the message. It is still not too late to prevent some of the worst consequences, they said, by acting aggressively to reduce world emissions of heat-trapping gases, primarily carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The new report differs from a similar draft issued with little fanfare or context by George W. Bush's administration last year. It is paradoxically more dire about what's happening and more optimistic about what can be done.

http://snipr.com/kaq74



Barcodes Could Reveal Your Food's Credentials
from New Scientist

Where does your food come from? A few years ago, most consumers were satisfied with a sticker showing the country of origin. But concerns about fair trade and the environment, as well as food safety, are now driving a wave of projects aimed at tracking food from farm to shopping basket.

Though price is still the main factor determining the food that people buy, many are demanding to know more about its source. This is partly due to a series of recent food safety scandals, from major outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli to melamine showing up in baby formula and pet food.

... Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and Internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food.

http://snipr.com/kaq9k



US Expands Laws Protecting Atlantic Salmon
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

The federal government dramatically extended protection yesterday for the imperiled wild Atlantic salmon in Maine, declaring that the few remaining sportfish in the Penobscot, Kennebec, and Androscoggin rivers and their tributaries are endangered.

The move comes nine years after the federal government declared the fish - once such a part of American legend that one was delivered to the US president each year - endangered in eight Down East Maine rivers.

And, like then, the listing is promising to spark a political war, with state officials saying the decision will unnecessarily harm industries along the rivers that will have to undergo arduous environmental reviews.

http://snipr.com/kaqby



Skin Cancer Cream to Bust Wrinkles? 9 Double-Duty Drugs
from ABC News

Would you use a skin cancer cream to smooth out your facial wrinkles? Take a baldness drug to protect against prostate cancer? Or use Viagra to help avoid an amputation?

While most people think of medicines as single-role actors, there are a growing number of drugs that hold the potential for dual uses. Not all of these drugs are available for these hidden uses. But the so-called "off-label" use of medicines accounts for about one-fifth of all prescriptions, according to a study released last April in the New England Journal of Medicine.

... In the case of Viagra, which was administered to at least one patient to stimulate blood flow and help prevent amputation, no conclusive studies yet exist that confirm a definite benefit when used in patients at risk of amputation. But in many other cases, the alternative uses are well-known in the medical community ... and are regularly exploited.

http://snipr.com/kaqfk



Space Geology: From the Moon to Mars
from Scientific American

Forty years ago this month the lunar surface reverberated with life for the first time. Forty years from now will Mars, too, come alive?

... For now, policy makers are worried less about Mars than about the downtime between the last shuttle launch and first Ares flight, during which the U.S. will depend on Russia or private companies to launch its astronauts into orbit.

... Although Mars is still far off, at least NASA is designing spacecraft with an eye toward an eventual interplanetary flight. Planners are guided by the experiences that Harrison H. Schmitt relates in a Scientific American article.

http://snipr.com/kaqhx



Robot on a Tether Targets The Mysteries of the Deep
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Skimming past otherworldly tube worms and bizarre crustaceans as they traversed primordial sediments in inky darkness seven miles below the surface, an unmanned yellow robot two weeks ago became the world's deepest-diving unmanned submersible.

The craft, called Nereus, gave scientists on the surface their first long look at a portion of the Challenger Deep 35,768 feet down in the Mariana Trench.

... Nereus, developed and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Mass., is an engineering breakthrough because it can act as an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), controlled by onboard computers, or as a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) tethered to a mother ship by a fiber-optic cable. Named after a Greek god who was half man and half fish, Nereus is outfitted with a mechanical arm for collecting physical samples when it is under remote control.

http://snipr.com/kaqjl



Smart Car? This One Knows When You've Had a Stroke
from Wired

BMW is building the ultimate nanny machine -- a car that will safely guide itself to a stop and notify the authorities if the driver suffers a heart attack, stroke or other medical emergency and can no longer drive. Call it the 328Mi.

The German automaker launched the project with the country's Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which wants to improve senior citizens' quality of life. BMW claims the Emergency Stop Assistant system utilizes a lot of technology already available on its cars and says it will allow seniors to feel more secure on the road.

"Our primary aim is to avoid accidents caused by health-related loss of control - or at least to reduce the severity of such accidents," Ralf Decke, project manager for Senior Smart at BMW, said in a statement.

http://snipr.com/kaqux



Oysters in Deep Trouble
from the Seattle Times

WILLAPA BAY, Pacific County -- The collapse began rather unspectacularly. In 2005, when most of the millions of Pacific oysters in this tree-lined estuary failed to reproduce, Washington's shellfish growers largely shrugged it off.

In a region that provides one-sixth of the nation's oysters -- the epicenter of the West Coast's $111 million oyster industry -- everyone knows nature can be fickle. But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery's oyster larvae died, too.

Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean -- icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries -- may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.

http://snipr.com/kaqxh



AcceleGlove: The Future of Motion at Your Fingertips
from the Christian Science Monitor

... A new product called the AcceleGlove, which went on sale in May, capitalizes on the shrinking cost of accelerometers and rapid processing power. The glove is studded with accelerometers, which can track the movement of a hand and individual fingers. Altogether, they allow the wearer to control other devices, from robots to video games.

AnthroTronix Inc. of Silver Springs, Md., a research and development company, hopes to adapt its AcceleGlove for law enforcement, firefighting, controlling robots in space or in dangerous industrial settings, rehabilitation, hand-motion studies, telemedicine, and as a computer interface with video games and virtual reality.

... The glove could be a teaching tool for anything from learning American Sign Language to practicing a sensitive surgical procedure. Baseball players might use the glove to study their grip and throwing motion.

http://snipr.com/kaqzs

[Kai]

June 18, 2009



Homeopathic Drugs May Harm
from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Associated Press) -- The unsettling little secret of Zicam Cold Remedy finally spilled out this week. Though widely sold for years as a drug for colds, it was never tested by federal regulators for safety like other drugs. And that was perfectly legal -- until scores of consumers lost their sense of smell.

One little word on Zicam's label explains all this: "homeopathic."

Zicam and hundreds of other homeopathic remedies -- highly diluted drugs made from natural ingredients -- are legally sold as treatments with explicit claims of medical benefit. Yet they don't require federal checks for safety, effectiveness or even the right ingredients.

http://snipr.com/kd8jl



New Glimpses of Life's Puzzling Origins
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun's outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon's face, heated Earth's surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.

Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond?

If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?

http://snipr.com/kd8t8



The Sound of Passion
from Scientific American

Imagine a quiet night like any other. Suddenly, your infant's cries break the silence. Fully loaded with emotion, the sound triggers an urge to stand up and run to your infant's room.

But, considering that your spouse is a musician and you are not, who will be the first to reach the crib? According to Dana L. Strait and a team of researchers at the University of Northwestern in Chicago, the musician should win the race.

Their latest study showed that years of musical training leave the brains of musicians better attuned to the emotional content, like anger, of vocal sounds. Ten years of cello, say, can make a person more emotionally intelligent, in some sense. So the alarm carried in a baby's cry makes a deeper impression; your spouse wins the race.

http://snipr.com/kd8uu



Dinosaur's Digits Show How Birds Got Wings
from Nature News

Birds are generally considered to be the living descendants of dinosaurs, yet differences between bird wings and dinosaur hands have long left palaeontologists struggling to explain how birds would have evolved from their dinosaur ancestors.

Birds' wings are thought to form from the fusion of the second, third and fourth digits on their hands as the embryo develops. Theropods, the predominantly carnivorous dinosaurs that included tyrannosaurids such as Tyrannosaurus rex and dromaeosaurids such as Velociraptor mongoliensis, also only had three long fingers.

... Now, a team led by Xing Xu from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and James Clark from The George Washington University in Washington, DC, is proposing a simpler answer based on a new dinosaur species found in Jurassic rocks formed 156 million to 161 million years ago in the Junggar Basin in western China.

http://snipr.com/kd8wl



Review Panel Hears Rival Plans for New Spaceflights
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- NASA's goal is to return to space after the retirement of the shuttles next year, but a panel reviewing the agency's human spaceflight program heard very different ideas Wednesday on how to get there.

In dueling PowerPoint presentations before the 10-member panel, appointed by the Obama administration in April, NASA officials defended their progress in developing the next generation of rockets, while challengers said that they could do the job more quickly and less expensively.

NASA officials said the Ares I, the first rocket being developed in the agency's Constellation program, was on course for launching astronauts to the International Space Station in March 2015, despite technical hurdles and lower-than-expected budgets.

http://snipr.com/kd8zc



'FDA Has a Lot on Its Plate' as New Chief Takes Over
from USA Today

WASHINGTON -- Margaret Hamburg figured she'd follow her parents' example and pursue a career in academic medicine, perhaps as an endocrinologist.

"I'd never planned a career as a public health official," Hamburg, who was recently confirmed as the second woman to helm the Food and Drug Administration, said Tuesday in an interview with USA TODAY in the agency's Capitol Hill office.

But she changed her mind when, as an internal medicine resident in New York in the early 1980s, she began caring for patients with the condition that would come to be called AIDS. She wanted to understand how to translate medical discoveries into patient care. A quarter-century later, Hamburg, 53, leads the federal agency that arguably has the biggest impact on the public's health.

http://snipr.com/kd95y



Mobiles Boost Africa Climate Data
from BBC News Online

Gaping gaps in weather and climate data across Africa may be filled by a partnership between humanitarian groups and mobile phone companies.

The project aims to deploy 5,000 automatic weather stations across the continent mounted on phone masts.

They will gather data on aspects of weather such as rainfall and wind, and send it to national weather agencies. Former UN chief Kofi Annan says the project could help save lives of people on "the frontlines of climate change."

http://snipr.com/kd98g



People Sickened by Asbestos From Montana Mine
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday declared its first-ever "public health emergency," saying the federal government will funnel $6 million to provide medical care for people sickened by asbestos from a mine in northwest Montana.

The declaration applies to the towns of Libby and Troy, where for decades workers dug for vermiculite, a mineral used in insulation. They were unknowingly poisoning themselves: The vermiculite was contaminated with a toxic form of asbestos, which workers carried home on their clothes.

The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that there are 500 people with asbestos-related illnesses such as lung cancer and asbestosis in the two towns, whose populations total about 3,900.

http://snipr.com/kd99n



Ultrasmall Microbes Revived After 120,000 Years On Ice
from National Geographic News

Ultrasmall microbes trapped in glacial ice for 120,000 years have been coaxed back to life, a new study says. The feat adds to evidence that long-dormant alien life on other, frozen worlds could be resurrected.

Called Herminiimonas glaciei, the purplish-brown bacteria were discovered beneath nearly two miles of Greenland ice. Researchers incubated the ancient sample in increasingly warmer water for nearly a year before the bacteria colonies grew on a petri dish.

While H. glaciei is not the oldest bacteria to be resurrected--one sample collected in Tibet was brought back to life after 750,000 years--it is the first ancient "ultramicrobacteria" to be revived and characterized in detail, said study leader Jennifer Loveland-Curtze of Pennsylvania State University.

http://snipr.com/kd9av



Could the Orang-Utan Be Our Closest Relative?
from New Scientist

These days, we tend to accept without question that humans are "the third chimpanzee." The term, coined by author Jared Diamond, refers to the notion that our closest relatives are the two chimpanzee species - the common chimp and the bonobo. But could we actually be "the second orang" - more closely related to orang-utans than chimps?

That is the controversial claim made this week by Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and John Grehan of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York (Journal of Biogeography, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02141.x, in press.)

The idea flies in the face of mainstream scientific opinion, not least a wealth of DNA evidence pointing to our close relationship to chimps. Schwartz and Grehan do not deny the similarity between human and chimp genomes, but argue that the DNA evidence is problematic and that traditional taxonomy unequivocally tells us that our closest living relatives are orang-utans.

http://snipr.com/kd9kc

[Kai]

June 19, 2009



More Are Searching the Web for Medical Advice
from USA Today

The number of adults who turn to the Internet for health information has nearly doubled in the past two years, from 31% to 60%, according to a study. That puts the Internet in a tie for third place (with books and print materials) as the source adults most often turn to for health information.

At the top, 86% of those surveyed say they most often consult a health care professional, and 68% say they consult their family or friends first.

The increase is partly because there are more Internet users than there were when the survey was last taken in 2006, says Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit research organization.

http://snipr.com/kfusy



Lift Off for NASA's Lunar Probes
from BBC News Online

Nasa has successfully launched two spacecraft to the Moon on missions that will pave the way for a return to the lunar surface by US astronauts. LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) and a crater observation mission blasted off from Florida on an Atlas V rocket.

Data gathered by LRO will help mission planners select future landing sites and scout locations for lunar outposts. The second mission will send a rocket crashing into the Moon to scour the debris plume for evidence of water ice.

... LRO will enter a low polar orbit around the Moon at an altitude of around 31 miles - the closest any spacecraft has continually orbited Earth's natural satellite.

http://snipr.com/kfv3l



81 U.S. Healthcare Workers Found to Have H1N1 Virus
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

At least 81 U.S. healthcare workers have contracted laboratory-confirmed cases of the novel H1N1 influenza virus and about half caught the bug on the job, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday.

The finding is worrisome because it suggests that hospitals and workers are not taking sufficient preventive measures to limit spread of the virus.

If a large-scale outbreak of the virus recurs this fall, a similar infection rate could cause significant problems -- not only because it would limit the number of workers available to care for the sick, but also because the infected nurses, doctors and others could transmit the virus to debilitated patients before their own symptoms become apparent. Already-ill patients would be more likely to develop life-threatening side effects from the flu.

http://snipr.com/kfv4r



Early "Human" Is Ape After All, Discoverer Decides
from National Geographic News

Nearly 15 years ago Russell Ciochon shook our family tree when he announced that a fossil found in a Chinese cave was evidence of a new form of early human. But that was then.

Today the anthropologist announced that the fossil, a partial jaw, is from an ape after all--a "mystery ape." And as controversial as the original theory was, Ciochon's reversal is also meeting with some criticism.

The fossil was found in the 1980s in south-central China's Longgupo cave. According to Ciochon, "the jaw was very perplexing. It didn't fit in any category of hominin [early human ancestor] that we knew of in Asia, and it also didn't fit into any ape category."

http://snipr.com/kfv7s



Is Life Its Own Worst Enemy?
from New Scientist

The twin Viking landers that defied the odds to land on Mars in 1976 and 1977 had one primary goal: to find life. To the disappointment of nearly all concerned, the data they sent back was a sharp dash of cold water. The Martian surface was harsh and antibiotic and there was no sign of life.

To two NASA scientists, James Lovelock and Dian Hitchcock, this came as no surprise - in fact, they would have been amazed to see any evidence of life on Mars. A decade before Viking, Lovelock and Hitchcock, both atmospheric scientists, had used observations of the Martian atmosphere to deduce that there could be no life on the planet.

From their research arose one of the most influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, a nurturing "mother" of life. But is it correct? New scientific findings suggest that the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia.

http://snipr.com/kfva6



Mammoths Survived in Britain Longer than Thought
from the Guardian (UK)

Woolly mammoths were roaming the British Isles for thousands of years longer than previously thought, a new study shows.

By analysing mammoth remains found in Condover, Shropshire, scientists concluded that the animals were probably wiped out by rapidly changing climate at the end of the last ice age rather than hunted to extinction by humans.

"Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in north-western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the last glacial maximum," said Adrian Lister, of the Natural History Museum, in London, who led the study. "Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago."

http://snipr.com/kfvmk



The Future of Military Aviation Is Unmanned
from the Seattle Times

PARIS -- On the edge of the airfield at Le Bourget, a Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet jet fighter looms with imposing menace. In front of it sits a dinky Boeing ScanEagle -- just 4 feet long with a 10-foot wingspan -- with model-airplane looks, a little rotor turned by a two-stroke engine, and a flimsy plastic airframe.

It's the little unmanned surveillance craft, not the high-performance fighter, that is part of the new wave in military aviation at this year's Paris Air Show.

The ScanEagle -- designed and built by Boeing-owned Insitu, of the Columbia River Gorge town of Bingen, Klickitat County -- has been battle-tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and played a key role in the April rescue of U.S. containership captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates.

http://snipr.com/kfvoa



Maternal Screening Campaign Has False Test Results
from the Baltimore Sun

ATLANTA (Associated Press) -- A massive effort to test pregnant women for a deadly germ they can spread to their babies has yielded a bad surprise -- a high rate of wrong test results that led some infants to miss out on treatment.

A study found the test missed more of the infections than would normally be expected. If the mothers had tested positive for the Group B strep bacteria, they would have been given antibiotics during labor to cut the chances of infecting their infants.

Group B strep is a common bacteria carried in the intestines or lower genital tract, and can be spread to babies during delivery. It's harmless to most adults but in newborns can lead to blood infections, pneumonia, meningitis, mental retardation or hearing and vision loss, and death.

http://snipr.com/kfvqf



Proposed Quantum Motor Runs With a Kick
from Science News

Physicists have proposed a way to get their quantum motor running. An electric motor could be built from just two atoms held in a ring by lasers, a theoretical study published online June 8 in Physical Review Letters contends.

The new motor proposal "might be hard to implement, but it has the core of a good idea," comments Ian Spielman, a physicist at the Joint Quantum Institute in College Park, Md.

Electrical motors, like the ones in fans, convert electric current into mechanical motion, such as spinning blades. "The idea of a quantum motor is exactly the same as a mechanical motor," says study coauthor Alexey Ponomarev of the University of Augsburg in Germany. "You have an electromagnetic force that launches it."

http://snipr.com/kfvsk



Robot Babies
from Smithsonian Magazine

Einstein the robot has enchanting eyes, the color of honey in sunlight. They are fringed with drugstore-variety false eyelashes and framed by matted gray brows made from real human hair.

... David Hanson, Einstein's creator, is visiting from Texas to help scientists here at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) prepare the robot for an upcoming conference. Hanson switches the robot on--really just a head and neck--and runs it through some of its dozens of expressions.

Its lips purse. Its brow furrows. Its eyes widen as though in horror, then scrunch mirthfully as it flashes a grin. ... Still, the effect is so lifelike that even jaded graduate students have stopped by to stroke the robot's wrinkled cheek ...

http://snipr.com/kfvts

[Kai]

Shit, some of these articles some days sound like something straight out of National Enquirer.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

http://www.starchild.co.za/what.html

[Thurnez Isa]

roger you missed the best one

http://www.starchildascension.org/starchild/dnachanges.html

[The Good Reverend Roger]

roger you missed the best one

http://www.starchildascension.org/starchild/dnachanges.html

Hahahahahawe'retotallyfuckingdoomedhahahahahaaaaaiiiiiiiieeeeee!

[Kai]

roger you missed the best one

http://www.starchildascension.org/starchild/dnachanges.html

[The Good Reverend Roger]

DNA and the Fairy Energy

There's a whole chapter on that. 

TOO MUCH HORROR!  TOO MUCH MIRTH!

[Kai]

June 26, 2009



Human History Written in Stone and Blood
from American Scientist

Even by archaeological standards, Blombos Cave is a modestly sized shelter. Yet artifacts recovered from just 13 cubic meters of deposit inside transformed our understanding of when our species developed behavioral attributes we associate with "modern" humans.

From this cramped hole in a sandstone cliff on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa, Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues unearthed evidence of symbolic expression, in the form of abstract designs (carved ochre bars) and personal ornaments (shell beads) at least 70,000 years old. That is more than 35,000 years before anything comparable emerged in Europe.

... Our modern anatomical features can be traced back almost 200,000 years, based on fossilized remains found in Ethiopia, but the making of the modern mind apparently lagged behind by more than 100,000 years. The remarkable finds at Blombos raised several intriguing questions.

http://snipr.com/kx6ka



H1N1 'Swine' Flu Has Infected 1 Million in U.S.
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

At least 1 million Americans have now contracted the novel H1N1 influenza, according to mathematical models prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while data from the field indicates that the virus is continuing to spread even though the normal flu season is over and that an increasing proportion of victims are being hospitalized.

Meanwhile, the virus is continuing its rapid spread through the Southern Hemisphere, infecting increasing numbers of people and at least one pig.

Nearly 28,000 laboratory-confirmed U.S. cases of the virus, also known as swine flu, have been reported to the CDC, almost half of the more than 56,000 cases globally reported to the World Health Organization.

http://snipr.com/kx6m6



Giant Glowing Blobs Yield Clues to Galaxy Formation
from ScienceNOW Daily News

A decade ago, astronomers surveying the distant universe discovered giant blobs of shining hydrogen gas bigger than anything ever seen in the cosmos. Since then, researchers have wondered what makes these structures--known as Lyman-alpha blobs (LABs)--glow.

Now, a team of astronomers claims to have found evidence that the blobs are illuminated by radiation and heat from supermassive black holes at their center. The finding supports an emerging idea of how a growing black hole ultimately limits a galaxy's size.

Researchers led by James Geach, an astronomer at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, used NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory to look at 29 blobs in a patch of sky known as SSA 22. A few hundred thousand light-years across in size, the blobs date back to when the universe was less than a sixth of its current age, or about 2 billion years old.

http://snipr.com/kx6sn



Huge Underground Chamber Found--Early Christian Refuge?
from National Geographic News

A 2,000-year-old underground chamber has been discovered in Israel's Jordan Valley.

The largest human-made cave in Israel, the 1-acre space is thought to have begun as a quarry. In subsequent centuries it may have served as a monastery, hideout for persecuted Christians, or Roman army base, experts say.

Archaeologists working in the valley found the cave this past March when they came across a hole in a rock face. ... The archaeologists peered into a huge hall lined with 22 thick pillars--giving the "impression of a palace," said Adam Zertal, of the University of Haifa in Israel.

http://snipr.com/kx6vh



Evolutionary Origins of Your Right and Left Brain
from Scientific American

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space.

Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone. Other animals, it was thought, have no hemispheric specializations of any kind.

... In the past few decades, however, studies of many other animals have shown that their two brain hemispheres also have distinctive roles. Despite those findings, prevailing wisdom continues to hold that people are different.

http://snipr.com/kx6x8



Conformists May Kill Civilizations
from Nature News

The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.

Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments.

They found that conformist social learning -- imitating and emulating what the majority are doing -- may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic.

http://snipr.com/kx6z5



Legless Frogs Mystery Solved
from BBC News Online

Scientists think they have resolved one of the most controversial environmental issues of the past decade: the curious case of the missing frogs' legs.

Around the world, frogs are found with missing or misshaped limbs, a striking deformity that many researchers believe is caused by chemical pollution.

However, tests on frogs and toads have revealed a more natural, benign cause. The deformed frogs are actually victims of the predatory habits of dragonfly nymphs, which eat the legs of tadpoles.

http://snipr.com/kx70t



Royal Society Announces Contenders for Science Book Prize
from the Guardian (UK)

The Royal Society has announced the shortlist for its science book prize. It's a strong field of contenders for the £10,000 prize money.

Regular readers of the Guardian and fans of our Science Weekly podcast will already be familiar with the finalists. One of the shortlisted books was recently picked over by our Science Book Club, one of the authors writes a popular weekly column for the Guardian, and two have been guests on the podcast.

Sir Tim Hunt, who chairs the panel of judges, said: "There's clearly a large audience for books that explain science clearly and gracefully, and no shortage of authors. Choosing a final list of six books from the big boxes of books that arrived on our doorsteps - over 120 books were submitted - was a challenging pleasure."

http://snipr.com/kx71s



Famed Montana Dinosaur Hunter Gets Probation
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (Associated Press) -- Renowned dinosaur hunter Nathan Murphy was sentenced Wednesday to four months in a halfway house and three years probation after pleading guilty to stealing fossils.

Murphy was accused of stealing 13 dinosaur bones from central Montana's Hell Creek badlands in 2006. He pleaded guilty in April to theft of government property.

... The case provided a rare glimpse into the black-market fossil trade while sinking the reputation of the 51-year-old, self-taught paleontologist who rose to fame on his discovery in 2000 of Leonardo, a mummified, 77-million-year-old duck-billed hadrosaur considered the world's best preserved dinosaur.

http://snipr.com/kx73k



Fish in Acidic Waters Grow Bigger Ears
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Listen up! Carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans is having a puzzling effect on fish - their ears get bigger. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to reel in the Mr. Spock of the sea.

Fish ears are inside their bodies. But, as in humans, their ears perform a major role in sensing movement and whether the animal is upright - abilities that are important for survival. "It was a surprise," biological oceanographer David M. Checkley of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said of the discovery.

The ear structure in fish is known as an otolith and is made up of minerals. Checkley and colleagues knew that increasing carbon dioxide in the oceans - absorbed from the atmosphere - is making the sea more acidic, which can dissolve and weaken shells. They wondered if it also would reduce the size of the otoliths.

http://snipr.com/kx74x

[Kai]

June 25, 2009



'Misty Caverns' on Enceladus Moon
from BBC News Online

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has obtained strong evidence that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus retains liquid water. The probe has detected sodium salts in the vicinity of the satellite, which appear to spew from its south pole.

Liquid water that is in prolonged contact with rock will leach out sodium - in exactly the same way as Earth's oceans have become salty over time. Scientists tell Nature magazine that the liquid water may reside in caverns just below the surface of the moon.

If confirmed, it is a stunning result. It means the Saturnian satellite may be one of the most promising places in the Solar System to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

http://snipr.com/kulg3



Combination Device Reduces Heart Failure Deaths
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A combination defibrillator and cardiac resynchronization device reduced deaths by nearly one-third in patients with mild heart failure in a study that was terminated early on Monday because of its success, the device's manufacturer said Tuesday.

The combination device, called a CRT-D, had previously been shown effective in patients with severe heart failure, but this is the first study to investigate its use in those with milder forms of disease, who account for about 70% of the 5.5 million U.S. heart failure patients.

"This is a breakthrough finding," said Dr. Albert Waldo, a cardiologist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland who was not involved in the study.

http://snipr.com/kulhn



Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

BASEL, Switzerland -- Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth's bedrock.

All seemed to be going well -- until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

http://snipr.com/kulju



Reverse-Engineering the Quantum Compass of Birds
from Wired

Scientists are coming ever closer to understanding the cellular navigation tools that guide birds in their unerring, globe-spanning migrations.

The latest piece of the puzzle is superoxide, an oxygen molecule that may combine with light-sensitive proteins to form an in-eye compass, allowing birds to see Earth's magnetic field.

... The superoxide theory is proposed by Biophysicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of the study and a pioneer in avian magnetoreception. Schulten first hypothesized in 1978 that some sort of biochemical reaction took place in birds' eyes, most likely producing electrons whose spin was affected by subtle magnetic gradients.

http://snipr.com/kulm4



Prehistoric Flute in Germany Is Oldest Known
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

BERLIN (Associated Press) -- A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.

Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch instrument with five holes and a notched end. The findings were published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

http://snipr.com/kuloq



Study: Bad Test Results Often Don't Reach Patients
from the Baltimore Sun

CHICAGO (Associated Press) -- No news isn't necessarily good news for patients waiting for the results of medical tests. The first study of its kind finds doctors failed to inform patients of abnormal cancer screenings and other test results 1 out of 14 times.

The failure rate was higher at some doctors' offices, as high as 26 percent at one office. Few medical practices had explicit methods for how to tell patients, leaving each doctor to come up with a system.

In some offices, patients were told if they didn't hear anything, they could assume their test results were normal. ... The findings are published in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.

http://snipr.com/kulqk



Report: New Radiation Detection Machines Not Worth the Money
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The government shouldn't buy more of the new radiation detection machines it's been developing to look for smuggled nuclear materials at ports, a report from the National Research Council says.

The new machines are only marginally better at detecting hidden nuclear material than monitors already at U.S. ports, but would cost more than twice as much, says the report released Wednesday.

It echoes concerns raised by Congress and the Government Accountability Office about the government's next generation radiation detectors.

http://snipr.com/kulsc



Iron-ic Twist Deepens Cosmic Ray Puzzle
from Science News

BLOIS, France -- In the genteel surroundings of the Blois chateau ... a controversial finding about the highest-energy cosmic rays has landed with a thud. If confirmed, a new report could spark a revolution in the way astronomers think about these speedy but rare charged particles, which carry as much oomph as a big league pitcher's fastball.

Scientists have generally assumed that the most energetic cosmic rays are primarily protons. That's true even though heavier nuclei such as iron are more easily accelerated to high energies because of their greater electric charge.

... "Ask anybody what are the highest-energy [cosmic ray] particles, and they'd say 'protons,'" says physics Nobel laureate James W. Cronin of the University of Chicago. But, as he announced June 22 at the Windows on the Universe meeting, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Malargüe, Argentina, has identified an abundance of iron nuclei at some of the highest energies its cosmic ray detectors can record.

http://snipr.com/kulto



Newly Uncovered Enzymes Turn Corn Plant Waste into Biofuel
from Scientific American

"Visualize three tons of moldy bread." It's not the most appealing image, perhaps, but it's a description of the moist mound of growth media tended by bioscientist Cliff Bradley and his partner, chemical engineer Bob Kearns at their biofuel facility in Butte, Mont., that could help cut ethanol costs at the fuel pump.

Selected soil fungi that eat cellulose--the hard-to-digest, structural component of woody plants--thrive on the big pile of putrefaction from which Bradley and Kearns harvest certain powerful enzymes.

The special enzymes allow standard biofuel plants to produce ethanol at lower cost by replacing some of the high-priced corn (starch) they process with cheaper corn stover "waste"--the leaves, stalks, husks and cobs of the maize plant itself.

http://snipr.com/kulw1



Ancient Waves of (Wild) Grain
from ScienceNOW Daily News

We should all give thanks to the first farmers. Had they not begun domesticating plants and animals more than 10,000 years ago, we might still be hunting and gathering and missing out on all the blessings and curses of civilization.

Yet before the agricultural revolution could really take off, people had to find a way to store their produce in between harvests. Archaeologists working in Jordan now claim to have found the remains of several granaries possibly used to store wild barley, the oldest known, and dated nearly 1000 years before the first domesticated cereals.

The earliest definitive traces of domesticated grains, wheat, barley, and oats have been found in the Near East and date back about 10,500 years. Yet much recent research suggests that plant domestication was preceded by a long period--perhaps thousands of years--during which prehistoric peoples cultivated wild plants without visibly changing their appearance or altering their genetic makeup.

http://snipr.com/kum4f