Nov 7

BBC - The researchers studied the cries of 60 healthy babies born to families speaking French and German.

The French newborns cried with a rising "accent" while the German babies' cries had a falling inflection.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, they say the babies are probably trying to form a bond with their mothers by imitating them.

The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb.

_{Listen to babies crying from German and French speaking backgrounds at article link}

Juliet Eilperin | Palo Alto, CA | November 4

WaPo - For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore.

We were wrong.

Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February foraging among elephant seals, sea lions and other prey, according to a new study published online Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The team of 10 California-based researchers determined that these sharks probably pass close to populated beaches and have been spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Jonathan Sherwood | Rochester, NY | November 3

Futurity - In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

Edward Rothstein | Paris | November 3

NYT - Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

Observer.UK

It is a vast device the size of London's Circle Line but is engineered to a billionth of a metre accuracy. Ensuring that no flaws arise at scales and dimensions like these pushes engineering to its absolute limits.

Cern almost succeeded last year. Now it is convinced that it has got it right this time. "All I can say is that the LHC is a much safer, much better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Myers.

Most physicists believe he is right. "If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history," said one. "If not, we will have assembled the world's most expensive piece of modern art."

One of the more odious tricks conservative thinkers use is equating a consensus based on the scientific method with a herd mentality. For example, take this quote from the WSJ reviewing the hullabaloo over SuperFreakonomics:

More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors.

I wish I knew what the solution to this most post-modern ways of arguing things is--it's also anti-scientific and pre-Enlightenment--but I don't.

Apparently the recent discovery of Ardi, a female primate skeleton predating Lucy by 1.2 million years, proves that humans did not have a common ancestor with the apes. Or so says Al Jezeera. I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of monkeys in my life. I've had several crawl all over me. Every time I look into one's eyes I cannot help but to say, "wassup cuz?" I mean, who can't see the resemblance? And really, what's so insulting about having a common ancestor with the apes, anyway?

Regardless, the Christianists in America have more than a little in common with their fundamentalist brethren in the Muslim world. They should have a party. Maybe someone can bring some monkeys for entertainment?

New York Times, By Tara Parker-Pope, October 26

Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?

The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.

Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish line, an increase of 20 percent from the beginning of the decade, Running USA says. Next week about 40,000 people will take part in the New York City Marathon. Injury rates have also climbed, with some studies reporting that 90 percent of those who train for the 26.2-mile race sustain injuries in the process.

Park Si-soo | Oct 26

Korea Times - Disgraced stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk was convicted Monday of embezzling state and private funds and illegally buying human eggs for his research, but was cleared of fraud charges.

The Seoul Central District Court gave the 56-year-old scientist a two-year prison sentence suspended for three years, ending a three-year, four-month saga that dates back to his indictment in 2006.

His lawyer said Hwang was unlikely to lodge an appeal. But the prosecutors are said to be planning to file an appeal, which means that a legal battle over Hwang's case will likely drag out.

Hwang reported false breakthroughs in human stem cell research and had them published in the journal Science and other global research magazines in 2004 and 2005.

However, when it was revealed by a Korean research team that he had fabricated the experimental results, Korea's reputation as a leading scientific country in stem cell research was literally "devastated."

The journal, Science, retracted his papers following the finding and still remains cautious of publishing papers by Korean scientists.

Prosecutors didn't try to penalize Hwang for his test fabrications, leaving that to the discretion of the science community.

The prosecution sought a four-year jail term, but Presiding Judge Bae Ki-ryul reduced it, citing Hwang's dedication to the development of Korea's biotechnology, his lack of a criminal record and deep remorse.

Les Blumenthal | Washington | Oct 26

McClatchy -
A vast pool of molten rock in the continental crust that underlies southwestern Washington state could supply magma to three active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains -- Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier and Mount Adams -- according to a new study that's causing a stir among scientists.

The study, published Sunday(PDF) in the magazine Nature Geoscience, concluded that the magma pool among the three mountains could be the "most widespread magma-bearing area of continental crust discovered so far."

Other scientists dismiss the existence of an underground vat of magma covering potentially hundreds of square miles as "farfetched" and "highly unlikely." Rather than magma heated to 1,300 to 1,400 degrees, some think it could be water.

They also discount speculation that a so-called "super volcano" such as the one under the Yellowstone National Park area might be beneath the region. They say there's no credible evidence to suggest a need to overhaul the volcanic hazard assessments for the three mountains.

Even so, the study is another piece of the puzzle as scientists try to understand the deep plumbing of volcanoes and, perhaps eventually, learn how to predict their eruptions better.

In the late 1980s, scientists discovered a massive underground electromagnetic anomaly known as the Southern Washington Cascades Conductor. However, the two-year study published Sunday is the first to suggest that it may be the source of magma for Mounts St. Helens, Rainier and Adams.

James Glanz | Maisoncelle, France | Oct 25

NYT - The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.

No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.

But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.

The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.

Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.

“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.

John Mehaffey | Oct 23

reuters -

Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled "Manthropology" and provocatively sub-titled "The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male."

McAllister sets out his stall in the opening sentence of the prologue.

"If you're reading this then you -- or the male you have bought it for -- are the worst man in history.

"No ifs, no buts -- the worst man, period...As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet."

Delving into a wide range of source material McAllister finds evidence he believes proves that modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.

His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.

Michelle Roberts | Oct 20

BBC - Half of babies now born in the UK will reach 100, thanks to higher living standards, but our bodies are wearing out at the same rate.

To achieve "50 active years after 50", experts at Leeds University are spending £50m over five years looking at innovative solutions.

They plan to provide pensioners with own-grown tissues and durable implants.

New hips, knees and heart valves are the starting points, but eventually they envisage most of the body parts that flounder with age could be upgraded.

The university's Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering has already made a hip transplant that should last for life, rather than the 20 years maximum expected from current artificial hips.

The combination of a durable cobalt-chrome metal alloy socket and a ceramic ball or "head" means the joint should easily withstand the 100 million steps that a 50-year-old can be expected to take by their 100th birthday, says investigator Professor John Fisher.

Jason Palmer | Oxford, England | October 14

BBC - Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity: single magnetic charges that can behave and interact like electrical ones.

The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.

Writing in Nature journal, a team showed that monopoles gather to form a "magnetic current" like electricity.

Helena Smith | Athens | Oct 17

The Guardian -

The secrets of a lost city that may have inspired one of the world's most enduring myths – the fable of Atlantis – have been brought to light from beneath the waters off southern Greece.

Explored by an Anglo-Greek team of archaeologists and marine geologists and known as Pavlopetri, the sunken settlement dates back some 5,000 years to the time of Homer's heroes and in terms of size and wealth of detail is unprecedented, experts say.

"There is now no doubt that this is the oldest submerged town in the world," said Dr Jon Henderson, associate professor of underwater archaeology at the University of Nottingham. "It has remains dating from 2800 to 1200 BC, long before the glory days of classical Greece. There are older sunken sites in the world but none can be considered to be planned towns such as this, which is why it is unique."

The site, which straddles 30,000 square meters of ocean floor off the southern Peloponnese, is believed to have been consumed by the sea around 1000 BC. Although discovered by a British oceanographer some 40 years ago, it was only this year that marine archaeologists, aided by digital technology, were able to properly survey the ruins.

Paul Rincon | Geneva | October 16

BBC - The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

Ian Traynor | Oct 15

The Guardian - For a man standing alone between Europe and its future, Vaclav Klaus is playing hard to get. Last week a trip to Albania, this week Russia; the Czech president has performed a vanishing act just when he has the rest of Europe dancing to his tune.

He relishes being at the centre of a showdown. But it appears he is currently more interested in selling copies of his tract on global warming denial.

Last week, as a panicky campaign was launched in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, and Prague to try to force Europe's biggest renegade into line, Klaus was dining by the Adriatic.

For five days he refused to return phone calls from Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister and current EU president saddled with the Klaus emergency. Jan Fischer, the Czech Republic's caretaker prime minister, has an even less enviable task, as mediator between Klaus and the rest of Europe's leaders. But Klaus won't give him the time of day. Fischer admitted he had managed to get him briefly on the phone, but not to arrange a meeting.

Klaus was in Albania to promote Blue Planet in Green Shackles, his book arguing that the only thing man-made about climate change is that it is a myth. Today he decamped to Moscow, promoting a Russian edition of the book.

Dan Murphy | Waltham, MA | November 13

CSM - Spiders are the quintessential predators.

Their nearly 40,000 discovered species include eight-legged giants that feed on birds or hunt fish and tiny little demons like North America’s Brown Recluse that are barely larger than a penny but have potent venom. There are the solitary ground-dwelling hunters like the Tarantula and others that look and smell just like ants - the better to safely move among them and eat them.

But all of them, until now, were believed to live only by taking life. That was before Bagheera kiplingi (aptly named for the friendly panther in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book) crept into view.

Amber Bellaire | Stockholm | October 8

The Globe and Mail - It’s proving to be a banner year for women and the Nobel Prize, marking the first time four women have been named Nobel laureates in a single year.

Today's announcement of Herta Mueller, a little-known Romanian-born German author, as winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature set the record. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is set to be announced tomorrow and the economics prize on Monday, leaving the door open for another female win.

Thomas H. Maugh II | October 8

LAT - Traces of a retrovirus similar to HIV are found in most patients with the mysterious disorder. It could be an opportunistic virus, but researchers want further testing to see if it causes the disease.

In what may prove to be the first major breakthrough in the fight against the mysterious and controversial disorder known as chronic fatigue syndrome, researchers reported today that they have found traces of a virus in the vast majority of patients with the disease, commonly known as CFS.

The same virus has previously been identified in at least a quarter of prostate tumors, particularly those that are very aggressive, and has also been linked to certain types of cancers of the blood.

New York Times, By Benedict Carey, October 5

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

Philip Pullella | Rome | Oct 5

Reuters - An archive negative image of the Shroud of Turin (L) is shown next to one recreated by an Italian scientist and released in Pavia October 5, 2009.

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake.

The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.

"We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy, said on Monday.

A professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, Garlaschelli made available to Reuters the paper he will deliver and the accompanying comparative photographs.

The Shroud of Turin shows the back and front of a bearded man with long hair, his arms crossed on his chest, while the entire cloth is marked by what appears to be rivulets of blood from wounds in the wrists, feet and side.

Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Sceptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business.

But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.

Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages.

Stockholm | October 5

BBC - This year's Nobel prize for medicine goes to the three US researchers who discovered how the body protects the chromosomes housing vital genetic code.

Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak jointly share the award.

Their work revealed how the chromosomes can be copied and has helped further our understanding on human ageing, cancer and stem cells.

The answer lies at the ends of the chromosomes - the telomeres - and in an enzyme that forms them - telomerase.

[...]

The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, which awarded the prize, said: "The discoveries ... have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies."

Jonathan Amos | Oct 2

BBC -

A remarkable view of our Galaxy has been obtained by Europe's billion-euro Herschel Space Observatory.

The telescope was put in a special scanning mode to map a patch of sky.

The images reveal in exquisite detail the dense, contorted clouds of cold gas that are collapsing in on themselves to form new stars.

Herschel, which has the largest mirror ever put on an orbiting telescope, was launched in May as a flagship mission of the European Space Agency.

It is tuned to see far-infrared wavelengths of light and is expected to give astronomers significant insights into some of the fundamental processes that shape the cosmos.

Herschel's great advantage is that its sensitivity allows it to see things that are beyond the vision of other space telescopes, such as Hubble.

A prime goal is to understand the mechanisms that control the earliest phases of stellar evolution.

Oct 2

BBC -

Designers of a bra that turns into gas masks and a team who found that named cows produce more milk were among the winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel prizes.