Ker Than | Mar 11

National Geographic - Proof of dark matter and dark energy, study says

The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study.

The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists' imaginations.

For centuries Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.

Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See "Einstein and Beyond" in National Geographic magazine.)

This notion has been used to successfully explain phenomena in our solar system, such as the slight alterations in Mercury's orbit around the sun, which Newton's gravity couldn't account for.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein's gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.

Based on general relativity, for example, scientists think dark matter exists because some cosmic objects behave as if they have more mass than we can see.

But until now, tests of general relativity on galactic scales have been inconclusive.

Understanding Toyota Sudden Acceleration

Joel S. Hirschhorn

As a materials and manufacturing engineer with decades of experience with failure analysis of manufactured products, and as an owner of a Toyota vehicle, I am saddened by the lack of expertise and insight shared with Congress and the public about the sudden acceleration problem.

When products fail due to a systemic design, materials or manufacturing flaw, large and statistically significant levels of problems emerge fairly rapidly. This is definitely not the case with the Toyota problem. With many millions of Toyota models on which even more millions of miles have been driven, if there had been an inherent materials or manufacturing design defect, then we would have seen untold thousands of cases of sudden acceleration. It literally would have been virtually a daily event happening all over the country in many Toyota models. But, in fact, little more than 1,000 Toyota and Lexus owners have reported since 2001 that their vehicles suddenly accelerated on their own. This is a tiny, minuscule percentage of Toyotas.

Steve Connor | Mar 5

The Independent - Some say they died out from general stupidity, others argue that they drowned in their own dung or suffered slipped discs and chronically bad backs. But the real reason why the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago has now been identified – a collision with a gigantic asteroid that blocked out the sun and caused an extended global winter.

Arguments about the sudden demise of the dinosaurs – the largest-ever land creatures – have raged for decades with no conclusion. Now, an extensive investigation by 41 leading experts from around the world has found that the asteroid explanation is the only one that stands up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.

The scientists reviewed more than 20 years of evidence from various scientific disciplines and found that the only serious contender to the asteroid theory – a series of massive volcanic eruptions – could still not account for the sudden disappearance of not only the dinosaurs but about half of all species that lived at the same time in prehistory.

Martin Hickman & Genevieve Roberts | Mar 4

The Independent - Critics claim plant could spread antibiotic-resistant diseases to humans

German chemical giant BASF this week won approval from the European Commission for commercial growing of a starchy potato with a gene that could resist antibiotics – useful in the fight against illnesses such as tuberculosis.

Farms in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic may plant the potato for industrial use, with part of the tuber fed to cattle, according to BASF, which fought a 13-year battle to win approval for Amflora. But other EU member states, including Italy and Austria and anti-GM campaigners angrily attacked the move, claiming it could result in a health disaster.

Paul Rincon | Mar 3

BBC - A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.

The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.

Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.

The event would have been similar to the Tunguska event, which flattened a large area of Siberian forest in 1908.

It is thought to have been a so-called "airburst" in which a space rock does not reach the ground, but rather explodes in the atmosphere.

Megan K. Stack | Moscow | Mar 2

LA Times - The bones and tusks of the ancient creatures are becoming more prevalent as permafrost thaws. Now entire villages are surviving on the trade in mammoth bones.

The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ.

Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet.

The once-obscure scientists who specialize in the wastelands of Siberia have opened lucrative sidelines as bone hunters, spending the summer months trawling the northern river banks and working networks of locals to gather stockpiles of bones. They speak of their work proudly, and a little mystically.

Victoria Gill | San Diego | Febraury 19

BBC - A study in dolphins has revealed genetic clues that could help medical researchers to treat type 2 diabetes.

Scientists from the US National Marine Mammal Foundation said that bottlenose dolphins are resistant to insulin - just like people with diabetes.

Victoria Gill | San Diego | February 19

BBC - A preview of the Census of Marine Life has revealed that the project has discovered over 5,000 new species.

These include bizarre and colourful creatures, as well as many organisms that produce therapeutic chemicals.

Clifton, Bristol, England | February 17

CNN - Nearly half the world's primate species are in danger of extinction, according to a report released Wednesday by a major conservation group.

The main threat facing primates -- including apes, monkeys, and lemurs -- is tropical forest destruction, with the illegal wildlife trade and commercial bush meat hunting also playing roles.

Sharon Begley | Brookhaven National Lab, Long Island, NY | February 16

Newsweek - While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup—quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.

The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot—4 trillion degrees Celsius—that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today. Right there on Long Island. (For anyone wondering what kind of thermometer is used to measure a 4-trillion-degree soup, it is color: by analyzing the energy distribution (color) of light emitted from the soup, scientists can infer its temperature much as they infer the temperatures of stars or even of a glowing andiron.) In one of the truly helpful advances since the golden age of particle physics, several cool simulations of the RHIC collisions and resulting quark soup are on YouTube.

The last time such a quark-gluon plasma existed was 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe burst into existence in the big bang. By creating it in a lab for the first time, the RHIC teams have given scientists a chance to study how the cosmos came to evolve into the riot of galaxies and nebulae that we see today. And although the quark soup created at RHIC lasts not even 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second, there are already surprises. The quarks and gluons in the soup were expected to behave independently, for instance, but instead they behave cooperatively, almost like synchronized swimmers—or, in the spirit of the moment, like Olympic pairs skaters.

Salynn Boyles | New York | February 7

WebMD - Study Shows Experimental Drug May Build New Bone by Decreasing Serotonin Levels in the Gut

The hormone serotonin may hold the key to new treatments for reversing osteoporosis-related bone loss, new research finds.

When investigators at Columbia University Medical Center treated mice and rats with an experimental drug that stopped the gut from synthesizing serotonin, they were able to reverse severe bone loss and essentially cure osteoporosis in the animals.

Joab Jackson | Yorktown Heights, NY | February 5

IDG News Service - Thanks to a change in recipe, IBM has created a graphene-based processor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second (100GHz), almost four times the speed of previous experimental graphene chips.

With this research, IBM has also shown that graphene-based transistors can be produced by the wafer, which could pave the way for commercial-scale production of graphene chips, said Yu–Ming Lin, the IBM researcher who led the work.

February 4

BBC World Service - British scientists said they could communicate with a patient who has not shown any sign of outward consciousness for five years.

They used a new brain scanning technique to 'talk' to the 29 year old Belgian man who damaged his brain in a car accident and has been classified as being in a vegetative state. The patient was able to communicate "yes" and "no" using just his thoughts during a research conducted by a team from Cambridge University. Dr Adrian Owen, who led the team, said this is a rare case.

The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine [full article at link]. The research raises many ethical issues including whether or not to allow patients in a permanent vegetative state to die by withdrawing all treatment.

Dr Ranaan Gillon is professor of medical ethics at Imperial College in London. The World Service has a short radio discussion with Dr Gillon.

February 5

BBC -
NASA scientists say that dwarf planet Pluto, on the edge of our solar system, is becoming increasingly red.

Images taken by the Hubble space telescope show that the planet is some 20% redder than it used to be.Experts say they believe this is because of changes in Pluto's surface ice as it enters a new phase of its 248-year-long rotation. The new images are said to show frozen nitrogen brightening in the north and becoming darker in the south.

"These changes are most likely consequences of surface ice melting on the sunlit pole and then re-freezing on the other pole," Nasa's Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement.
"It's a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast," said Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute. "This is unprecedented".

Sendai, Japan | February 3

Technology Review - First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics.

In 1993, Charlie Bennett at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York State and a few pals showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space.

The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart. Bennett and company worked out how to exploit this to send information. (The influence between the particles may be immediate, but the process does not violate relativity because some informatiom has to be sent classically at the speed of light.) They called the technique teleportation.

Steve Connor | Feb 3

The Independent - With terrorist threats, dire transport links and overspent budgets you'd be forgiven for thinking that the 2012 London Olympics had enough problems to worry about. But another nightmare scenario has just been added to the Olympic dream – a communications blackout caused by solar storms.

After a period of unprecedented calm within the massive nuclear furnace that powers the Sun, scientists have detected the signs of a fresh cycle of sunspots that could peak in 2012, just in time for the arrival of the Olympic torch in London.

Over the past two years, fewer sunspots have been recorded than at any time since 1913. But now scientists have detected signs that the next cycle has begun and it could peak in two or three years.

They believe that this peak in the next solar cycle could generate the eruption of vast solar explosions that could fling billions of tonnes of charged particles towards the Earth, causing intense solar storms that could jam the telecommunications satellites and internet links transmitting live Olympic coverage from London.

"The Sun is now waking up. The first significant active regions of a new solar activity cycle are forming. In the last two weeks, we have seen the first major flares of a new cycle," said Professor Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

Jason Palmer | Livermore, CA | January 28

BBC - A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show.

The controlled fusion of atoms - creating conditions like those in our Sun - has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

Joanne Allen | Washington | Jan 27

Reuters - Researchers have genetically engineered one of the most common bacteria on the planet -- E. coli -- to digest simple sugars from plant waste and turn it into valuable biofuel.

They said their study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is the first demonstration of a one-step conversion of a renewable nonfood plant to fuel.

The technology could lead to low-cost, low-carbon, high-performance renewable fuels, researcher Stephen del Cardayre said in a telephone interview.

"We looked at the ideal feedstock, which is biomass, and then looked at the product we wanted to make, which is diesel, then we engineered this E.coli to contain the genes that catalyzed all of the chemical reactions required to convert that feedstock into that fuel," del Cardayre said.

"It's a one-step process, so there's no need to have to do two or three buckets of chemistry," he said. "You put in your feedstock, the bug converts it to fuel, which is an oil that you can just scrape off the top."

Washington | January 27

Reuters - Runners who eschew shoes may be less likely to do serious injury to their feet, because they hold their feet differently, Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and colleagues found.

Writing in the journal Nature, they said runners who wear shoes tend to hit the ground with their heels first, whereas barefoot runners put the balls of the feet down first.

"People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," Lieberman said in a statement.

Data:

So, let's take Scotjen's data here about China vs. US R&D spending in 2009 and add to it the following information:

US year-on-year (yoy) R&D increases (source (.pdf warning))
China yoy R&D increases and recent annual expenditure (source 1, source 2.)

Now we'll construct low, medium, and high scenarios for each country. In the data below, the numbers represent low/medium/high estimates for each parameter:

US yoy increase: 1%/3%/5%
US investment (2009, billions): 400/400/400

China yoy increase: 10%/17%/24%
China investment (2008 or 2009, billions): 30/50/67

Model:

Now we apply a basic calculation used to figure out annual interest to see what a X% year-on-year increase in investment will do in all the scenarios above. The formula applied is I(t) = I(0) * (1 + yoy)^t. I(t) is the annual investment in year t, I(0) is the investment in 2009, yoy is the year-on-year % increase rate, and t is the number of years I'm projecting out. In this case, I am projecting out to 2020 and, since my starting numbers are from 2009, t = 11. As an example, US investment in 2020 in the medium scenario is calculated as I(11) = 400 * (1 + 0.03)^11 = 554.

Results (billions $):

US investment in 2020: 446/554/684
China investment in 2020: 86/281/714

Only the most optimistic assumptions place China ahead of the US in 2020, and I doubt that China can sustain annual increases of 24% in R&D for 11 years. However, the medium scenario is based on more realistic data. My source above for the Chinese "medium" yoy growth rate states that it has been 17% since 1995, so this may be a safe number going forward. This means that, by 2020, China will be investing about half as much in R&D as the US. The two numbers will only come close if the US seriously under-invests and China is able to sustain a long period of enormous growth in R&D investment. And note that this is all barring any major economic disruptions or breakthroughs in either country, though I would guess that a big change in one country (say, a huge crash in the US) would heavily affect the other.

Peter N. Spotts | Pasadena, CA | January 21

CSM - The interval between major earthquakes along a key stretch of California's San Andreas fault appears to be shorter than current assessments indicate, according to two related studies published Thursday.

If these results – in the journal Science – hold up under additional scrutiny, they suggest that this section in southern California, which was responsible for the 1857 Fort Tejon quake, may be relatively close to another rupture.

Yet buried within that estimate may be some good news.

Leigh Dayton | Jan 14

The Australian - PEOPLE who are chronically sleep deprived but manage a good night of shut-eye still do not function at their best, according to researchers.

Even a long sleep-in cannot compensate for the brain drain of too many nights of too little sleep, US and British researchers report in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

That is because the catch-up sleep may "hide" the effects of chronic sleep loss, says the team leader, physician and neurologist Daniel Cohen of Boston's Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre.

"They may falsely feel they have quickly recovered," he said. "However, they are vulnerable to a more rapid deterioration in performance when wakefulness is extended into the late night when they pull the next all-nighter."

I am so screwed! The upside is I have an excuse now...:D

Carl Zimmer | January 11

NYT - The borna virus is at once obscure and grotesque. It can infect mammals and birds, but scientists know little about its effects on its victims. In some species it seems to be harmless, but it can drive horses into wild fits. The horses sometimes kill themselves by smashing in their skulls. In other cases, they starve themselves to death. Some scientists have even claimed that borna viruses alter human behavior, playing a role in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, although others say there is no solid evidence of a link.

The virus now turns out to have an intimate bond with every person on Earth. In the latest issue of Nature, a team of Japanese and American scientists report that the human genome contains borna virus genes. The virus infected our monkey-like ancestors 40 million years ago, and its genes have been passed down ever since.

Huffington - In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto's GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

According to the study, which was summarized by Adam Shake at Twilight Earth, "Three varieties of Monsanto's GM corn - Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 - were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities."

Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.

In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:

more with links at Huffington

Henry Fountain | Bristol, England | January 8

NYT - Neanderthals were different from you and me, the thinking goes, because they were cognitively inferior. For one thing, they appeared to be incapable of symbolic thinking, of using something to represent something else.

Some humans in Africa, for example, adorned their bodies with stained seashells more than 100,000 years ago. To them, a shell wasn’t just a shell, but a way to signify individuality. But evidence of similar behavior by Neanderthals has been discounted.