Engage The Fusion Drive Scotty

This is very cool.

Better Big Blue Marble

NASA has a new earth image available. It is very high definition and was created from multiple earth passes on January 4th of this year. It's a very cool picture.

You might also note the lack of snow cover over the U.S. for a January day. Just sayin'.

Need Fast Ship

It's very exciting to hear that scientists have found a new planet that appears to be very earth like and it is only 600 light years away.  We should be putting every spare penny into the FTL (faster than light) spaceship research because we are going to need to get the hell out of here real soon.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery.

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

China Syndrome

Just how close did we come to a "china syndrome" at Japan's Fukushima plant?
With each report, it just gets worse. Early on they reported the possibility of some meltdown but now we find that we came damn close to a complete melt through. Or at least that is the story so far. I won't be surprised to learn that we did, in fact, melt down completely once more of the truth comes out. So far TEPCO has been rather timid about telling the whole truth about what they know.

Molten nuclear fuel at Japan's Fukushima plant might have eaten two thirds of the way through a concrete containment base, its operator said, citing a new simulation of the extent of the March disaster. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said their latest calculations showed the fuel inside the No. 1 reactor at the tsunami-hit plant could have melted entirely, dropping through its inner casing and eroding a concrete base. [...]
Until now, TEPCO had said some fuel melted through the inner pressure vessel and dropped to the containment vessel, without saying how much and what it did to the concrete, citing a lack of data.
"Almost no fuel remains at its original position," TEPCO said in the report.

Not LGM's But Very Interesting Just The Same

via Gizmodo

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

Large Amounts of Bacon and Sausage are Bad For You...Duh!

Well knock me over with a feather!

Eating two rashers of bacon or a sausage every day can increase your risk of heart disease by nearly half, scientists claim. Their study found meat that has been cured, salted or processed in another way can also push up the likelihood of developing diabetes. It linked the salts and chemical preservatives used on processed meat to ill health if the products are eaten regularly.

I'm just dumbfounded to learn that consuming large quantities of fatty meats that are full of sodium and nitrates are bad for me.The good news is I don't eat this crap every day. Maybe once a week for bacon or sausage. Yeah, yeah but I am a Southern boy and too long without pig meat and we die.

Not A Joking Matter

It is really hard not to make some crack about sudden impulses to buy a purse or adding more color to your wardrobe but the matter is really serious. Unless you pay attention to the farm/garden organic food world you probably never heard of atrazine. It's a herbicide that has been banned in Europe but is still used widely in the American Midwest, primarily for corn. Some 60 MILLION pounds of it 2008. New research shows that it is having a big affect on amphibians, most notably frogs. Researchers found that long-term exposure to low levels of atrazine -- 2.5 parts per billion of water -- emasculated three-quarters of laboratory frogs and turned one in 10 into females. Scientists believe the pesticide interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone.  If the two hormones in question look familiar then you may know why spraying so much of this crap on a good portion of the Midwest might be a problem for us humans as well. A 2006 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found atrazine in approximately 75 percent of stream water and about 40 percent of all groundwater samples from agricultural areas tested between 1992 and 2001.

(CNN) -- Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the Midwestern United States and other agricultural areas of the world, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females, according to a new study.
New research suggests the herbicide may be a cause of amphibian declines around the globe, said biologists at the University of California-Berkeley, who conducted the study. The findings are being published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers found that long-term exposure to low levels of atrazine -- 2.5 parts per billion of water -- emasculated three-quarters of laboratory frogs and turned one in 10 into females. Scientists believe the pesticide interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone.
"The effects of atrazine in the long term have been shown to demasculinize or chemically castrate [frogs], combined with complete feminization of some animals," said lead researcher Tyrone B. Hayes, a biologist and herpetologist at the University of Berkeley.

If Climate Change Isn't Enough

Seems the earthquake in Chile, besides being a disaster for Chileans, has directly affected the rest of us as well.

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

Lighting Up the Sky

I won't even attempt to explain or even theorize on what the meaning is of the strange lights over Chile  preceeding the whopper earthquake. Just strange, very strange. There is at least one eyewitness account of strange sky colors seconds before the quake.

A video has emerged of strange lights in the Chilean sky on the day before the massive 8.8 earthquake, causing speculation about whether the apparition was a HAARP projection or UFO warning related to the impending disaster.  Others point to similar videos taken in China and Haiti prior to the recent earthquakes in those countries, and the possibility that shifts in the earth's crust have a dramatic effect on the atmosphere.

Synthetic Nitrogen Will Destroy Your Garden's Health

Organic garderners have known for a long, long time that they grow better gardens when they stick to proper organic practices and don't use synthetic fertilizers.  For the synthetic advocates one of the major arguments for using synthetic nitrogen has been that it increases soil carbon and hence sequesters more damaging CO2 in the soil and reduces green house gases in the atmosphere. New research out of the University of Illinois has now torn that argument to shreds and shows that using synthetic nitrogen has exactly the opposite effect.

The testing was done using the Morrow plots which have been cultivated since 1876 and carefully studied with respect to soil chemistry ever since so this is no slap-dash study. This is really not new to us organic types and as far back as 1947 Sir Albert Howard the great British agronomist who advocated organic practices stated unequivocally in his landmark book The Soil and Health  that:

The use of artificial manure, particularly [synthetic nitrogen] ... does untold harm. The presence of additional combined nitrogen in an easily assimilable form stimulates the growth of fungi and other organisms which, in the search for organic matter needed for energy and for building up microbial tissue, use up first the reserve of soil hummus and then the more resistant organic matter which cements soil particles.

or , in other words, synthetic nitrogen degrades the soil. While I and my fellow organic gardeners and farmers have known it from direct experience it is nice to see the scientific community come up with hard science to back us up.

Non Human Persons

Ever since I read the work of Dr. Lilly and Leo Szilard I have felt that we were doing dolphins and whales a great disservice by considering them just animals or just smart animals. Scientists are coming to realize this as well...

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

Vegetarian Spiders?

This is interesting...

A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists.

It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought to be mainly carnivorous.

Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, bucks the meat-eating trend by feasting on acacia plants.

The research is published in the journal Current Biology.

Yogurt and Probiotics

I like yogurt and I try and eat a half cup a day of low fat plain organic of the stuff. You are seeing more and more claims everyday about the health benefits of yogurt and other foods with "probiotics" but there is some doubt about whether these “friendly” bacteria in yogurt and other foods actually do anything for you healthwise. We know they help yogurt taste good but what else? Tara Parker-Pope has a summary of the state of the research on probiotics in today’s New York Times.

If you follow the link you'll find that the short answer is kind of wishy-washy. In a nutshell it is probably yes for infant diarrhea and, maybe, irritable bowel syndrome, and maybe or no for just about everything else. Personally, I think yogurt helps keep your system in better tune and I know I seem to have less trouble with my digestion if I keep to my regular yogurt habit. This is especially true if I do bad things like eat too much raw veges or too many beans. Though I must admit that since I have been eating more veges(including beans) and a lot less meat I seem more able to handle the digestion side of the equation, yogurt or not.

According to the article consumers just won a large class-action settlement – $35 million – against Dannon for claiming that Activia yogurt promotes immunity. According to one news account, Dannon spent $100 million marketing the immunity-promoting effects of Activia ignoring the results of its own company-sponsored research which inconveniently showed few benefits.

Regardless of the pros or cons I'll stick with my daily yogurt because I like it and I think it helps this old body keep on clicking. Besides the breakfast angle I use yogurt a lot in cooking and for salad dressings and I use it instead of sour cream on my jacket potato. It may or may not infer any benefits other than adding to a well balanced diet but a well balanced diet is bound to better for you than an unbalanced one.

h/t marion

Evolution, What Evolution?

A British film about the life of Charles Darwin cannot find a distributor in the United States.

US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

In another example of the lack of evolution...The 9/12 march organizers are saying that there were over a million of 'em in DC this weekend to protest Obama's policies and pretty much everything else since the 19th century...other, more official, estimates have it at about 60,000 tops.

Maybe this wording on one of the signs seen over the weekend in DC helps explain some of it?

"Obama, we have waken up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist unamerican Acorn groups and arrogant wife back to your own country and strip their rights away!"

Just makes you proud to be an American doesn't it?

Eat Your Broccoli!

Here is another reason to eat your broccoli and your other cruciferous veges.

Researchers at Imperial College London have found evidence a chemical in broccoli and other green leafy vegetables could boost a natural defense mechanism that protects arteries from the clogging that can cause heart attacks.

In a study funded by the British Heart Foundation charity and conducted on mice, the researchers found that sulforaphane -- a compound occurring naturally in broccoli and other brassicas -- could "switch on" a protective protein which is inactive in parts of the arteries vulnerable to clogging.

"We know that vegetables are clearly good for you, but surprisingly the molecular mechanisms of why they are good for you have remained unknown for many years," said Paul Evans of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College.

Granted this study comes out of the UK so it is tainted with socialism but look on the bright side...maybe the wingnuts will pooh pooh it and we will get some Darwinian edge out of it.

Endeavour Is Safely Back

Another successful space mission. Welcome back guys.

Space shuttle Endeavour and its seven astronauts returned to Earth on today, completing a long but successful construction job that boosted the size and power of the international space station.

The shuttle mission lasted 16 days and spanned 6.5 million miles, one of NASA's longest. The shuttle astronauts carried out five spacewalks – tying a record for a single flight – and helped their station colleagues when a toilet flooded and an air purifier overheated. The commode, one of three on the linked shuttle and station, was fixed in a day. But the air-cleansing system remained out of order Friday.

There are now seven shuttle flights remaining to finish the space station, now 83 percent complete with nearly 700,000 pounds of mass. The next launch, by Discovery, is targeted for the end of August.

Great job NASA!

Robotic Nightmare

I think the Pentagon has seriously lost it. I knew they were a little crazy and we have seen many cases of bad ideas going even worse but I think we have reached a new low. According to this story at HuffPo ...

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find -- grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot -- that's right, "EATR" -- "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material -- animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

It may be just me, with my long history of Science Fiction, but there are all kinds of bad scenarios imaginable with this kind of device. First of all, I don't see any mention of Asimov's Three Laws which scares me spit less and then there is the whole fuel gathering and selection nightmare. This is a very strange thing indeed.

Oh! and if you really want to be irritated by web "technology" the follow this link to the original story on Fox.com and note the embedded ads in the article. If your cursor crosses over the double underlined words like 'mobile' and 'technology' you get a splash ad for Verizon which you have to manually close. Talk about pushy!

Shrinking the Kids

This is pretty cool. I really love it when science finds something completely new, especially when it upsets the traditional applecart. Not only have the 'hobbits' been shown to be a completely new human species but this confirms the idea of 'island dwarfism'. Much to the chagrin of the creationists it also shows that a species, like humans, when faced with a marginal environment can evolve by downsizing to match the available resources, given time. Talk about a classic example of selective adaptation.

A miniature species of extinct humans, nicknamed "hobbits", possessed unusual anatomical features explained by their complete isolation from the rest of humanity for thousands of years on their remote island home in Indonesia, studies have found.

The tiny people, who grew to an adult height of no more than three feet, astounded scientists in 2004 when a skull and partial skeletons were unearthed from a cave on the island of Flores. Radiocarbon dating suggested that the species, Homo floresiensis, had lived in and around the cave for tens of thousand of years before dying out about 17,000 years ago.

The latest research into H. floresiensis has found that they were flat-footed, long-toed creatures who could walk easily on two legs but would have found it difficult to run at speed. A separate study suggests that their very small heads, which were perfectly in proportion to their bodies, were the evolutionary outcome of living on such a remote island for so long.

Is H.A.L. Here?

This is pretty cool...and I have been waiting for someone to take "teh Google" down notch. Let's just hope that one of the monsters like Google or Microsoft let it live. This sounds like one of those large increments that changes the way things are.

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.

Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Giga Storage on the Cheap

If this pans out this is pretty cool. GE has announced the technology to store 500 Gig on a disc...that's 10x over an HD BluRay disk. We are looking at somewhere around 10 cents a gig for storage. Remember back when paying a couple of hundred bucks to add a couple of meg to your PC was the rule?
They laughed at us science fiction readers and our wild ideas!