The Agonist - Science

Apes get legal rights in Spain, to surprise of bullfight critics

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:57:06 -0700

Thomas Catan | Madrid | June 28

Times Online - Spain is to become the first country to extend legal rights to apes, wrongfooting animal rights activists who have long campaigned against bullfighting in the country.

In what is thought to be the first time a national legislature has granted such rights to animals, the Spanish parliament’s environmental committee voted to approve resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project, designed by scientists and philosophers who say that humans’ closest biological relatives also deserve rights.

The resolution, adopted with crossparty support, calls on the Government to promote the Great Apes Project internationally and ensure the protection of apes from “abuse, torture and death”. “This is a historic moment in the struggle for animal rights,” Pedro Pozas, the Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, told The Times. “It will doubtless be remembered as a key moment in the defence of our evolutionary comrades.”

Men like casual sex more than women – scientific fact

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:12:07 -0700

Steve Connor | The Guardian

It is now a truth acknowledged even by science: men like casual sex more than women do.

One of the first academic studies to investigate positive and negative emotions felt after casual sex has revealed that evolution has not adapted women to having casual sex. Otherwise, they conclude, women would feel better about a one-night sexual partner, instead of feeling "used" and regretful.

Men are biologically capable of reproduction with many women, which may explain their apparent happiness with casual relationships. But for women it is quality, not quantity that is important, said Professor Campbell.

"Recently, biologists have suggested that females could benefit from mating with many men – it would increase the genetic diversity of their children and, if a high-quality man would not stay with them, they might at least get his excellent genes for that child," she said

Well alrighty then, be a slut and have smart kids

NASA reveals plans for lunar base, asks industry for ideas

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:05:53 -0700

Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

NASA is asking private industry to come up with creative ideas for a lunar outpost that can house four astronauts for one to four weeks on the moon starting about 2024.

The moon base must be equipped to send out crews for hundreds of miles in pressurized rovers, bring back scientific samples and return them safely to Earth, NASA officials said. click pic to enlarge

Despite solid appearance, glass is actually in a "jammed" state of matter

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:50:10 -0700

Robin Lloyd | June 24

MSNBC - Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman's plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is. It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a "jammed" state of matter — somewhere between liquid and solid — that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors. So even though glass is a hard substance, it never quite becomes a proper solid, according to chemists and materials scientists.

The deceptively liquid-like behavior of glass can be seen when you look at glass in the windows of an old building. The glass begins to sag and distort internally over the centuries, due to the effect of gravity.

Microbes eating away at pieces of history

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:29:23 -0700

Bina Venkataraman | June 24

IHT - The palatial 12th-century Hindu temple, shrouded in the jungles of Cambodia, has played host to a thriving community of cyanobacteria ever since unsightly lichens were cleaned off its walls nearly 20 years ago. The microbes have not been good guests.

These bacteria (Gloeocapsa) not only stain the stone black, they also increase the water absorbed by the shale in morning monsoon rains and the heat absorbed when the sun comes out. The result, says Thomas Warscheid, a geomicrobiologist based in Germany, is a daily expansion and contraction cycle that cracks the temple's facade and its internal structure. Warscheid, who has studied Angkor Wat for more than a decade, said in an interview that these pendulum swings had broken away parts of celestial dancer sculptures on the temple walls.

"It is getting worse — up to 60 or 70 percent of the temple is black," he added.

Once chalked up to weathering, the damage at Angkor Wat is now seen as the result of a much more complex dynamic: the interaction of micro-organisms with the chemical and physical properties of the temple.

Evaporation proves ice on Mars, scientists say

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:52:12 -0700

David Perlman | June 21

SF Gate - A month after the remarkable spacecraft named Phoenix landed on Mars, elated earthbound scientists reported Friday that their robot digging tool has uncovered chunks of real ice there - the first hard evidence that water exists on the Red Planet.

And although it's ice that evaporates swiftly in the dry, frigid Martian climate, the evidence shows that a vast ocean of liquid water must have once covered the low-lying northern plains where Phoenix now probes the planet's surface, the scientists said.

But the Phoenix scientists will never know whether anything living exists or once existed in that ocean because their spacecraft isn't equipped to seek life itself.

Yet as they melt the ice, bake it in their instruments and take its microscopic picture, they will be sniffing for the very organic chemicals that may have once formed the building blocks of living organisms and provided the energy such organisms needed to stay alive.

The Phoenix discovery story is arguably the fastest-developing interplanetary science tale on record.

Earlier thread: NASA Probe Lands on Mars to Search for Signs of Life

Gay men and straight women have similar brains, study says

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:54:59 -0700

Denise Gellene | June 17

LA Times - The brains of gay men resemble those of straight women, according to research published today that provides more evidence of the role of biology in sexual orientation.

Using brain-scanning equipment, researchers said they discovered similarities in the brain circuits that deal with language, perhaps explaining why homosexual men tend to outperform straight men on verbal skills tests -- as do heterosexual women.

The area of the brain that processes emotions also looked much the same in gay men and straight women -- and both groups have higher rates of depressive disorders than heterosexual men, researchers said.

The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, found that the brain similarities were not as close in the case of gay women and straight men.

The latest study, led by Dr. Ivanka Savic of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was significant in that it looked at areas of the brain that have nothing to do with sexual behavior, suggesting that there was a basic biological link between sexual orientation and a range of brain functions.

** What does gay look like? Science keeps trying to figure that out

Experts unveil 'cloak of silence'

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:43:22 -0700

Valencia, Spain | June 12

BBC - Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbours blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past.

Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an "acoustic cloak", which could make objects impervious to sound waves.

Scientists witness birth of supernova

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:26:20 -0700

Michael Kahn | London | June 13

Reuters - Scientists have for the first time witnessed the flash of light produced inside a dying star just before it explodes, according to a study published yesterday that provides a unique glimpse into how a supernova forms.

The red super giant, more than 500 times more massive than the Earth's sun, was destroyed after its core collapsed and a shock wave of energy blew it up, the astronomers said.

MIT professor wins world's largest award for tech innovation

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:43:05 -0700

Jonnelle Marte | Helsinki | June 12

Boston Globe - Work advanced disease treatments

Robert Langer, an MIT professor and a leader in the development of controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering, has won the world's largest award for technology innovation.

Langer received the Millennium Technology Prize yesterday from Technology Academy Finland for his research, which advanced the treatment of cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. Winners receive 800,000 euros, or about $1.2 million.

'Unicorn' found in Tuscany wildlife park

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:09:45 -0700

Tom Kington | Rome | June 12

The Guardian -

An animal expert in Italy is claiming to have found proof of the existence of unicorns after he stumbled upon a young roe deer with a single horn growing from the centre of its forehead.

The 10-month old animal is part of a herd of deer that are otherwise equipped with two antlers at the Prato natural science centre in Tuscany.

''It's proof that the mythical unicorn celebrated in iconography and legends was probably not just a fantastic creature but a real animal: a deer or other species with an anomaly similar to that of our deer,'' said the centre's director Gilberto Tozzi.

'time' before the big bang

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:23:25 -0700

Apart from global news and matters spiritual I also maintain an interest in the science of theorising where the universe began. Perhaps it was a big bang, when a hugely dense, hugely hot, hugely long ago microscopic speck exploded, or perhaps it was the big splat as two other universes side swiped...Now data from Nasa's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), is indicating a variation on the splat theory...BBC report here.
_{" Every time you break an egg or spill a glass of water you're learning about the Big Bang" Prof}

Is ADHD An Advantage For Nomadic Tribesmen?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:01:31 -0700

Evanston, IL | June 10

Science Daily - A propensity for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be beneficial to a group of Kenyan nomads, according to new research. Scientists have shown that an ADHD-associated version of the gene DRD4 is associated with better health in nomadic tribesmen, and yet may cause malnourishment in their settled cousins.

A study led by Dan Eisenberg, an anthropology graduate student from Northwestern University in the US, analyzed the correlates of body mass index (BMI) and height with two genetic polymorphisms in dopamine receptor genes, in particular the 48 base pair (bp) repeat polymorphism in the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene.

Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:03:59 -0700

Nicholas Wade | Cambridge, England | June 10

NYT - 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.

Study secretly tracks cell phone users outside US

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:08:00 -0700

Seth Borenstein | June 4

Raw Story - Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives. Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.