science

Right-Front Wheel Rotations Spirit's right-front wheel, which had stopped operating in March 2006, revolved with apparently normal motion during the first three of four driving segments on Sol 2117 (Wednesday, Dec. 16) but stopped early in the fourth segment of the drive.
Post Date:12/17/2009 13:12:00
www.jpl.nasa.gov

Return of the prodigal Tory Historian has been a tad busy but has now returned with a few interesting dates to be celebrated or, at least, remembered this week. (Tory Historian also vows to keep this blog up to scratch in the coming year and, indeed, to introduce a few novel ideas, painful though that might be.)December 16 is an important date in the history of the Anglosphere. The Americans mostly remember a certain event in 1773 when a number of colonists improbably disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships, opened the chests of tea and threw the contents into Boston harbour. Their main complaint was that tax raised on the tea trade and taxation in general. Sad to say, by the time the American War of Independence, or the Third English Rebellion was over, those who remained, the loyalists having made their way to Canada or back to England, found themselves paying more in tax than ever before. Here are some eyewitness accounts, probably somewhat over-excited by the events and here is Walter Russell M
Post Date:12/17/2009 12:47:00
conservativehistory.blogspot.com

Thermocouple space power Has anyone explored the efficiency of replacing solar cells with a thermopile?I understand thermocouples have been developed which can approach the Carnot efficiency limit.Carnot efficiency is highly dependent on the temperature of the cold sink.A t...
Post Date:12/17/2009 11:00:59
www.liftport.com

Mercury Fillings Seem Safer over Time The element mercury has been shown to damage the human nervous system. Yet, since 1856, mercury amalgam is “the” filling dentists have used to repair our teeth. Now a study in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology indicates that mercury fillings actually lose their toxic potential over time. [More]
Post Date:12/16/2009 08:22:08
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Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear? Bacteria, viruses and fungi have been primarily cast as the villains in the battle for better human health. But a growing community of researchers is sounding the warning that many of these microscopic guests are really ancient allies. [More]
Post Date:12/16/2009 07:15:00
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Does Inflammation Trigger Insulin Resistance and Diabetes? Nearly 21 million Americans suffer from type 2 diabetes, and every year 800,000 more are diagnosed. Considering the growing numbers, scientists are trying to fit together the disease’s disparate puzzle pieces. People who acquire it are typically obese, suffer from chronic inflammation and are resistant to insulin, the hormone that removes sugar from the blood and stores it as energy. For years no one has known exactly how the three characteristics are related, if at all. But a handful of recent studies suggest that they are inextricably linked through the actions of specific inflammatory immune cells and a master genetic switch--and the hope is that an understanding of the relations could open the door to new therapeutic opportunities.Several decades ago scientists noticed that people with type 2 diabetes have overly active immune responses, leaving their bodies rife with inflammatory chemicals. In the early 1990s researchers at Harvard University pinpointed one major immune play
Post Date:12/16/2009 07:00:00
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Latest Temperature and Sea Ice Comparisons The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released their annual, global temperature anomaly data for the December to November time period. GISS is one of several sources for global temperature data. Records go back to 1880. For comparison and some fun, I am going to post the past three annual periods of their temperature anomaly data. Reds and oranges are warmer compared to normal, while the blues are colder. As you can see, GISS is clearly showing that the bulk of the warming has been taking place around the Arctic region recently. Dec 2006 to Nov 2007 Dec 2007 to Nov 2008 Dec 2008 to Nov 2009 -------------- What's the latest on the global sea ice extent? The image below, courtesy of the Polar Research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shows the status and trend of global sea ice area (combined Arctic and Antarctic). As you can see, global sea ice area is currently running a little over 1 million sq. kilometers below normal. Here is the
Post Date:12/16/2009 06:45:53
global-warming.accuweather.com

Conditional Consciousness: Predicting Recovery from the Vegetative State Editor's note: The original online version of this story was posted on September 20, 2009. In patients who have survived severe brain damage, judging the level of actual awareness has proved a difficult process. And the prognosis can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. New research suggests that some vegetative patients are capable of simple learning--a sign of consciousness in many who had failed other traditional cognitive tests. [More]
Post Date:12/16/2009 06:00:00
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How Many Scientists Fabricate And Falsify Research? From The Article: "A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86?4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once ?a serious form of misconduct by any standard? and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. " "…up to one third admitted a variety of other questionable research practices including ?dropping data points based on a gut feeling?, and ?changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source?." "In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91?19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices." "Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct." (Emphasis mine)
Post Date:12/15/2009 11:47:26
telicthoughts.com

Green Architecture: What Makes a Structure a "Living Building"? Dear EarthTalk: I recently heard the term "living building". Can you explain? --Rebecca Gordon, Seattle, WA [More]
Post Date:12/15/2009 11:00:00
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Unusual Invertebrate Behavior Aussie scientists find coconut-carrying octopus is the title of the linked USA Today article having a video to boot. Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter ? unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.
Post Date:12/15/2009 10:41:41
telicthoughts.com

How to Make Plastic with Less Petroleum--Just Add CO2 Plastic may be fantastic, but it takes an awful lot of petroleum to make it. As such, efforts to cut oil use in the U.S. have produced, among other results, a budding bioplastics industry specializing in plastic manufacturing that relies less on oil for its raw material and more on biomass , carbon dioxide or even microorganisms such as Escherichia coli . Such efforts got a boost Monday when Ithaca, N.Y.–based Novomer, Inc. , announced an $800,000 effort co-funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to begin commercializing the company's polypropylene carbonate (PPC) materials, made using a combination of CO2 and petroleum . [More]
Post Date:12/15/2009 09:00:00
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If Time Flew, You Had Fun As we all know, time flies when you’re having fun. But according to a study in the journal Psychological Science , the reverse is just as true: we enjoy ourselves more when we think time passes quickly. [More]
Post Date:12/15/2009 08:03:08
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Crack Research: Good news about knuckle cracking. The latest physical anthropology research indicates that the human evolutionary line never went through a knuckle-walking phase. Be that as it may, we definitely entered, and have yet to exit, a knuckle-cracking phase. I would run out of knuckles (including those on my feet) trying to count how many musicians wouldn’t dream of playing a simple scale without throwing off a xylophonelike riff on their knuckles first. But despite the popularity of this practice, most known knuckle crackers have probably been told by some expert--whose advice very likely began, “I’m not a doctor, but ...”--that the behavior would lead to arthritis.One M.D. convincingly put that amateur argument to rest with a study published back in 1998 in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism entitled “Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?” The work of sole author Donald Unger was back in the news in early October when he was honored as the recipient of this year&r
Post Date:12/15/2009 06:00:00
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China's E-bikes face uphill struggle A recently resurrected 10-year-old rule by China threatens to bring down e-bike sales.
Post Date:12/15/2009 05:31:00
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Mimicking red blood cells to improve drug delivery Biomedical breakthroughs rarely outdo nature itself--despite our ever-increasing knowledge of new materials and processes. So that's why one group working on drug dispersal is looking, not to novel delivery systems, but rather to replicate the natural dynamics of blood cells. [More]
Post Date:12/14/2009 16:20:00
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Crowd Forcing: Random Movement of Bacteria Drives Gears The collective random motion of tiny bacteria can be harnessed to turn much larger mechanical gears in a preestablished direction, a new study demonstrates. The research, set to be published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , presents a new spin on the concept of the so-called Brownian ratchet, in which arbitrary fluctuations generate directed motion to power tiny mechanical systems. [More]
Post Date:12/14/2009 13:01:00
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Lost Giants: Did Mammoths Vanish Before, During and After Humans Arrived? Before humans arrived, the Americas were home to woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other behemoths, an array of megafauna more impressive than even Africa boasts today. Researchers have advanced several theories to explain what did them in and when the event occurred. A series of discoveries announced in the past four weeks, at first glance apparently contradictory, adds fresh details to the mystery of this mass extinction.
Post Date:12/14/2009 13:00:00
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WISE, NASA's infrared surveyor, launches successfully After a series of delays, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) began its mission Monday morning, rocketing toward orbit at 9:09 A.M. (Eastern Standard Time). WISE's launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was initially delayed because of a scheduling conflict with a satellite launch on the east coast, then twice pushed back due to an anomaly in a steering engine on its booster rocket. [More]
Post Date:12/14/2009 12:10:00
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The Guardian?s Editorial The following editorial was published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like The Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.
Post Date:12/08/2009 14:56:27
www.realclimate.org