science

Solar Impulse takes first step into aviation history The Solar Impulse solar-powered airplane is run with batteries, uses the Sun for power, and is only as heavy as a medium size car but as wide as a jet...
Post Date:12/04/2009 07:50:43
www.itwire.com

Japanese scientists: fatherless mice live longer The key to a long life might be having two mothers and no father, at least for mice. A team of researchers has found that the rodents live nearly 30% longer when they are genetically engineered to carry genes from two females but no males. The finding may be a step toward understanding why the [...]
Post Date:12/03/2009 03:03:47
edition.bintulu.org

Martian landscape What looks like a terrestrial landscape is in fact a recent photo from the Mars Global Surveyor. The "water" is darker sand. More details at Astronomy Photo of the Day. Click photo to enlarge.I love pix of Mars. Wish I could walk around down there.
Post Date:12/02/2009 21:24:00
tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com

Huge Explosion Reveals Massive Star
Post Date:12/02/2009 19:20:50
feeds.news.aol.com

? And Even More ClimateGate Fallout? CNN forced to ask: Has scientific community been honest about global warming? Reason’s Shikha Dalmia: “Climategate is fast shattering the global warming consensus, and so Obama won?t have even that to hide behind should he go ahead and sign up the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 at Copenhagen next week. There is zero chance right now that Congress will endorse these cuts, which will dwarf the trillion-dollar Iraq price tag.” (plus, see her article Emissions Cuts Would Cost India Dearly) Good luck, John: Sen. Kerry sees ‘definite Republican votes’ for climate change legislation Climate scientist in the Wall Street Journal: “One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and s
Post Date:12/02/2009 18:03:33
thechillingeffect.org

Collider weathers power cut Maximilien Brice / CERN A 3-D view shows how the Large Hadron Collider's magnet ring is structured to shoot two beams of protons at near the speed of light. Europe's Large Hadron Collider was knocked offline today due to a faulty electrical cable, just a couple of days after the accelerator broke the world record for proton-smashing power. Electrical power was restored within hours, with no major effect on LHC operations, according to the CERN particle-physics center....(read more)
Post Date:12/02/2009 13:20:00
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

USA Today: NASA is tied up in knots and maybe it?s that word ?exploration? that?s tangled it. Kudos to USA Today’s Dan Vergano and his dive into the mission architecture of NASA and the enshrinement there of the word Exploration. The story ran two days ago. It digs into the space agency’s essential culture. Many reporters have written about the divide there between its two primary functions: to put people in space, and to put machines up there to see what is happening far beyond the ability of people to see for themselves. But few have examined it in terms other than as a competition for dollars. His lede sets it up by asking what, if any, different cultural or intellectual roles were performed by the likes of Lewis and Clark west of the Mississippi, and of Spirit and Opportunity along the equator of Mars. Are both, neither, or which one of these sets the real explorers? The nub of the issue is that NASA calls its spacesuit cadre and its support staff its Exploration program, and the rest of the robotic nosing around the universe its Science Mission Directorate. Why
Post Date:12/02/2009 12:37:50
ksjtracker.mit.edu

Phil Jones: Tycoon Climatologist Investment Manager Bernie Madoff Phil Jones gets a FOIA request for information visit from the S.E.C. S.E.C. OFFICER: Mr. Jones, I'll need to look over your financial records. JONES: No Problem. I've got my set of books right here. Slightly altered, adjusted, fudged, and homogenized. S.E.C.: Well in that case we'll also need to see your raw data. JONES: What? You don't trust my books? S.E.C.: It's just tha- JONES: Look here, jerk, I'll have you know that I've shown my results to some of the most important and influencial people in the world and they absolutely love what I've done! They fly me all over the world to talk about my work… S.E.C.: Do your books include any tricks to hide the decline of your assets? JONES: Do I look like an amateur to you? Of COURSE they do. S.E.C. In that case I'll need to see your raw data. Cancelled checks, invoices, that sort of thing. JONES: Hah! Good luck with that! S.E.C.: What? JONES:
Post Date:12/02/2009 11:51:05
telicthoughts.com

Top 50 Science Trends in 2009 (COUNTDOWN) (TrendHunter.com) Mad Scientists, get out your idea book because this countdown of the top science trends is inspiring! Our science category, which has more than 1,000 articles, spans a range of the most interesting and?
Post Date:12/02/2009 07:40:01
feeds.feedburner.com

a big bushel of green news Is the Asian water supply in danger?
Post Date:12/02/2009 07:15:59
www.alternativeconsumer.com

CRU ClimateGate Scandal Continues, One Head Rolls Phil Jones is out at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia after a spate of leaked emails suggested his unit was “massaging” data to bolster the global warming alarmist case (or at least ensuring there wasn’t much dissent available). Of course, Jones was not the entirety of the problem. In fact, he’s really more of the symptom of a scientist-as-zealot willing to disregard scientific integrity if it could conceivably make their activism more difficult. CBSNews.com reports: The reverberations have extended beyond the campus of the University of East Anglia and the CRU. E-mail messages from Michael Mann, a professor in the meteorology department at Penn State University who has argued that mankind is threatening “entire ecosystems with extinction in the decades ahead if we continue to burn fossil fuels at current rates,” appeared in the leaked files. Now Penn State has opened an investigation into Mann’s work, and the U.K.&#
Post Date:12/02/2009 07:05:21
thechillingeffect.org

Space Shuttle Jr. After 2010, the only spaceplane in the U.S. inventory will be the Air Force's mysterious X-37.4 Vote(s)
Post Date:12/02/2009 06:57:59
solinkable.com

The Royal Society Puts Historic Papers Online From BBC News:One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.Read more ....
Post Date:12/02/2009 03:00:00
coolsciencenews.blogspot.com

Faces of Science #16 Milton Humason
Post Date:12/01/2009 14:27:00
tsutpen.blogspot.com

PhotoelasticTouch Combines 3D Shapes With Touchscreens Squeezing the rubber nose makes the face go cross-eyed. The average touchscreen leaves you petting or clawing at a flat surface, but the new PhotoelasticTouch system gives you something to squeeze. Produced by researchers at the University of Electro-communications and the Japan Science & Technology Agency, the photo-elastic system uses transparent rubber shapes that sit on a LCD screen to act as input devices. Touch a 3D face and the screen changes the eyes so look at what you’re doing. Pick up a rubber shape and twist it to pour virtual paint onto the surface. The developers presented their innovation at SIGGRAPH earlier this year and let attendees play with the new interface. It’s a pretty awesome concept and you can check it out in the videos from TheKeyIdea blog after the break. I’m not sure if squeezably soft 3D rubber screen-toppers count as haptics devices, but there’s certainly something rewarding about having any sort of tactile interaction with a
Post Date:12/01/2009 11:51:22
singularityhub.com

?Walky? Lets You Control Robot With Your iPhone (Video) Your fingers walk on the iPhone screen, and the robot walks in real life. Awesome! Take your middle and index finger and point them directly down on a surface in front of you. Now use them to “walk” around. Fun and easy, right? Yuta Sugiura (Keio University, JST, ERATO) and his colleagues working on design interfaces, have created a new way of controlling a robot. It’s called Walky and all it takes is two fingers and an iPhone. Using the same gestures you would normally use when “walking” with your fingers, Walky sends commands to a small humanoid bipedal robot to tell it to move forward and backwards, step side to side, jump, and even kick a ball. The system will be demonstrated next month at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, but you can watch it now in the video after the break. So the selling point of “intuitive” control systems like Walky is that they are easier to learn and use and than a standard game-pad controller approach. I have my doubts. Yes, i
Post Date:12/01/2009 10:24:31
singularityhub.com

?We may be born with an urge to help? A
Post Date:12/01/2009 08:31:23
feministphilosophers.wordpress.com

Soggy KAUST I find it interesting how this Arab News piece, highlighting the flooding problems at KAUST, reference only foreign bloggers talking about their experiences. I guess there were no Saudi bloggers at the university writing it up! In any event, construction of the university student housing seems to have been ‘less than optimal’. No word on what’s happened at laboratories and classrooms. Nor faculty or administration housing, for that matter… Bloggers shine spotlight on campus flood Hassna’a Mokhtar | Arab News JEDDAH: Students of the newly built King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) wrote in their blogs about floodwaters swamping the campus. Blogger Richard Denny, (richarddenny.tumblr.com), reported that Nadhmi Al-Nasr, interim executive vice president of KAUST Administration and Finance, had sent out a note on the day of the rains warning everyone to stay home. ?Please note that due to the severe weather and flooding that we?re curre
Post Date:12/01/2009 06:36:50
xrdarabia.org

A Conversation With Laurence Steinberg: Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different Laurence Steinberg at the Supreme Court building in Washington last month. He says adolescents are different from adults.A Temple University professor and leading expert in the United States on adolescents says they are different from adults, like in being responsible for criminal behavior.
Post Date:11/30/2009 22:51:56
www.nytimes.com

Coming to grips with unscientific forensic practices The Fort Worth Start Telegram yesterday published a lengthy, remarkable piece from Yamil Berard titled "Stakes are high as doubt is cast on forensic lab techniques." The article is one of the first published in the MSM in Texas to fully explore the implications of conclusions published earlier this year by the National Academies of Science (NAS) that many common forensic techniques had no scientific basis and their validity had never been tested - particularly comparative disciplines where individual technicians seek to match patterns in everything from fingerprints to tire tracks to ballistics to bite marks. Reports Berard:The Texas Forensic Science Commission had planned this month to begin a series of discussions about a national report that opened a Pandora?s box of questions about crime lab techniques. The National Academy of Sciences ? advisers to Congress and the president ? reported that conclusions about bullet matching are opinion, not fact. Most other identification methods
Post Date:11/30/2009 14:26:00
gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com