Scientific

When Will I Get My Death Ray?

Epileptic Attack
So an attack on Epilepsy patients is being pinned on Anonymous members.

Or people posing as them.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don't fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn't move and couldn't speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz's 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

"Everyone who logged on, it affected to some extent, whether by causing headaches or seizures," says Browen Mead, a 24-year-old epilepsy patient in Maine who says she suffered a daylong migraine after examining several of the offending posts. She'd lingered too long on the pages trying to determine who was responsible.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

When this Anonymous group started I said there'd be trouble with group discipline. How can you possibly keep people on topic, or avoid copycat groups posing as you, if you have no organizational structure? It's madness! Did they think the Scientologists wouldn't just pose as Anon people?

I don't know if this is the work of actual Anonymous people, posers, or people looking to slander them. It hardly matters at this point. When they set up their little internet conglom, they doomed themselves to precisely this kind of irrelevance, one way or another.

Source: Wired

Truly Epic Fail
Bush's moonbase to Mars plans continue to crash on the hard rocks of reality.

Cosmic rays are so dangerous and so poorly understood that people are unlikely to get to Mars or even back to the moon until better ways are found to protect astronauts, experts said on Monday.

And NASA is not properly funding the right experiments to find out how, the National Research Council committee said.

"One of the big issues is they have really cut funding for biology issues," retired space shuttle astronaut James van Hoften, who chaired the committee, said in a telephone interview.

"It is tough on them when they don't have any new money coming in. They are using old data," he added -- including research done on survivors of the nuclear bombings of Japan during World War Two.

"Given today's knowledge and today's understanding of radiation protection, to put someone out in that type of environment would violate the current requirements that NASA has."

The committee of experts agreed that NASA'S existing radiation safety standards can protect astronauts and they urged the U.S. space agency to keep them in place.

The Earth's bulk, atmosphere and magnetic field protect life from the solar radiation and the cosmic rays that travel through space. Astronauts have just a thin layer of shielding.

Van Hoften knows from personal experience.

"My introduction to space radiation came first-hand as a crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. 'What the heck was that?' I blurted out after seeing what looked like a white laser passing quickly through my eyes," van Hoften wrote in the introduction to the report.

"'Oh, that's just cosmic rays,' said Pinky Nelson, my spacewalking partner and space physicist. The thought of extremely high-energy particles originating from a distant cosmic event passing easily through the space shuttle and subsequently through my head made me think that this cannot be all that healthy. The truth of the matter is that it is not."

NOWHERE TO HIDE

The cosmic rays include galactic cosmic radiation or GCR and solar particles.

"You can put on very thick walls and they just won't protect you from that," van Hoften said. "The younger you are the worse it is," he added, because as with many types of radiation, it can take years for the damage to cause disease.

"It might be OK if you just send a bunch of old guys like me," he laughed.

Any mission to Mars using current technology would take three years, van Hoften said. That long in space would subject astronauts to too much radiation .

"It hasn't really gotten the airing that it needs. In the committee we stewed over this for a long time before we said anything," he added.

There is simply no way to shield people with current technology for a trip as long as the one to Mars. They would all end up dead. It's a suicide mission.

The moon of course you can do, because it's a couple days away. It's still a big risk; the wrong solar flare and everyone dies.

But if the only point of going back to the moon is to build a base (deep underground on the mooon to block radiation since the moon has no magnetic field) that will take you to Mars, and you can't go to Mars... what was the point again?

Source: ABC News

Opaque
A new technique has been created to scan insects trapped in opaque amber and create three dimensional scans, then models, of the creatures.

It is like a magic trick - at first there is nothing and then it appears: a tiny insect unseen by any eye for 100 million years.

We are with Paul Tafforeau who is scrolling through images on his computer.

His pictures have been produced by a colossal X-ray machine that can illuminate the insides of small lumps of clouded amber (fossil tree resin).

As he plays with the settings, what starts out as grey nothingness suddenly becomes the unmistakable outline of a "wee beastie".

Who knows? This little creature could once have buzzed a dinosaur. It's certainly the right age.

Tafforeau is a palaeontologist. But whilst others of his profession will be in the dirt with a rock hammer and trowel, you'll find him at the end of one of the most remarkable "cameras" in the world.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure.

...


"Micro-tomography is based on radiography but instead of a single picture, we are taking pictures during rotation of the sample," explains Dr Tafforeau.

"For a complete rotation, we will take more than 1,000 radiographs - and from all these radiographs, we can reconstruct virtual slices; and after using a 3D processing tool, we 'extract' the specimen from the amber."

...

But here's the really neat part. All that electronic information can be fed to a 3D plastic printer to make a physical model. A bug that in reality is less than a millimetre long and hidden inside a resin block then becomes a 30cm-long facsimile you can hold in your hand.

Instant prehistoric toys!

That is amazingly neat. I love 3D printers. Someday I shall own one, oh yes.

Source: BBC News

Smoke Gene
More promising genomic research.

Three independent studies released Wednesday have identified a tiny variation in the human genome that make some people more vulnerable to lung cancer than others.

While they all finger the same culprit, however, the studies disagree on whether the genetic glitch -- shared by 50 percent of the population -- increases the risk of cancer by itself, or only in people who smoke.

Basically all three studies agree this gene variant makes you much more likely to die of lung cancer, but they disagree as to why.

One suggests that it makes smokers heavier smokers; one suggests that it makes smokers more susceptible to cancer; one suggests that anyone with the disease is more likely to get lung cancer.

Regardless, not a good gene to have.

Source: Raw Story

Eww
Kind of gross.

Fifty rivers in the Philippines have been destroyed because people are using them to dump their rubbish, leaving some ecologically dead, an official said Wednesday.

Of the country's 421 major rivers and 20 large river basins, 50 are "highly degraded because of man's abuse and neglect," Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Joselito Atienza said in a statement.

"History tells us that rivers have played an important role in the country's economic growth. Yet, we have disregarded this and continue to dirty our rivers and lakes by turning them into giant septic tanks and trash bins," he added.

One of the ecologically dead rivers is the Pasig which bisects Manila. The government has been relocating thousands of squatters from its banks, but those who remain "continue to throw their domestic waste into the river," he said.

Atienza said 53 percent of the pollution in Philippine rivers is due to domestic waste.

Oh well, not like anyone needed those rivers.

Geez. I'm not trying to pick on the developing world here, but.. ewww.

Source: Raw Story

Sun-Nami
NASA has captured video of a solar tsunami, which is much like the ones on Earth only far, far more exciting.

In a solar tsunami, a huge explosion near the Sun, such as a coronal mass ejection or flare, causes a pressure pulse to propagate outwards in a circular pattern.

Last year's solar tsunami, which took place on 19 May 2007, lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds about 20 minutes after the initial blast.

Co-author David Long, from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, commented: "The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal; about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second.

...

Stereo's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instruments monitor the Sun at four wavelengths, which allowed astronomers to see how the wave moved through the different layers of the solar atmosphere.

"We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere," said Dr Gallagher.

The researchers even saw the pressure wave bouncing off irregular regions of the Sun’s atmosphere, generating reflections or diffraction patterns - exactly as tsunamis have been observed to do on Earth when they crash against land.

Nice special effects.

Source: BBC News

Tiny?
The smallest black hole known has been found.

NASA scientists have identified the smallest, lightest black hole yet found.


The new lightweight record-holder weighs in at about 3.8 times the mass of our sun and is only 15 miles (24 kilometers) in diameter.


"This black hole is really pushing the limits," said study team leader Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."

It's almost four times the mass of our sun, but for a Black Hole, it's tiny.

This is why that idiot who wants to block the Large Hadron Collider being turned on is so silly. Black holes have to be utterly huge to survive more than an exceedingly brief time. This is the smallest one ever found in nature. A black hole the size of an atom would be gone almost instantaneously. It's nothing to worry about.

Source: Space.com

Vidiots
I don't know what's with videogame bashing but it really is tiresome.

Kotaku has, first, some excerpts of an angry crank writing in the Times Online.

I hate video games, on or offline. I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them.

First of all, smack and teenage pregnancy?

Smack I can almost see, but how is 'teenage pregnancy' a recreational activity?

Secondly, I seem to recall some crank who thought that it was best to judge activities where possible from experience. I wonder who that was...

In the first two chapters, Mill aims to precisely define what utilitarianism claims — in terms of the general moral principles that it uses to judge concrete actions, and in terms of the sort of evidence that is supposed to be given for those principles. In so doing, he hopes to do away with some common misunderstandings of utilitarianism, as well as defend it against philosophical criticisms, most notably Kant. In the first chapter, Mill distinguishes two broad schools of ethical theory: those whose principles are defended by appeals to intuition and those whose principles are defended by appeals to experience; and he identifies utilitarianism as one of the empirical theories of ethics. In the second chapter, he then formulates a single ethical principle, from which he says all utilitarian ethical principles are derived:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

Most importantly, it is not the agent’s own greatest happiness that matters, “but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” (ch2) Utilitarianism therefore can only attain its goal of greater happiness by cultivating the nobleness of individuals so that all can benefit from the honor of others. In fact, notes Mill, Utilitarianism is actually a "standard of morality" which uses happiness of the greater number of people as its ultimate goal.

Knowledge and education are fundamental to Mill's concept of the Greater Happiness, and in his famous words, “it is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” (260) Mill touts the importance of being well brought up and knowledgeably curious about the world, and understanding higher pleasures such as art and music, than to be uneducated and complacent. One need not be personally satisfied with his or her life to be able to contribute to the "total sum happiness" of a society.

Oh, right. It was John Stuart Mill.

Silly me. Well, me and all of modern society, being based on Utilitarianism and all.

Seriously though, videogames are a medium, not a message. There are trash books, trash paintings, and Cthulhu knows, bad tv shows. There are also great books, paintings, tv, etc. Pushing aside an entire form of expression as broad as videogames showcases only one's own ignorance.

I mean, seriously. You have everything from Grand Theft Auto III (each of which is an interesting take on gangster culture and movies, from Goodfellas to the Sopranos to Training Day) to Spore and Second Life, which are about as cerebral and non-violent as a seminar on Expressionist Painting.

Only a lot more fun. Well, Spore probably is. Second Life... feh.

Then we have Barack Obama, who seems to buy into the idea that tv and videogames and, well, indoor activities are bad for you.

In a race for the Democratic nomination, Obama hasn't made any passionate speeches about video games with the fervor he has addressed health care, the war in Iraq or Hillary Clinton, but he has continued making jabs at games with little concern. In a recent speech at Wilkes Hall in Pennsylvania, he urged the public, "...turn off the television, turn off the video games..." in a similar rhetoric to just last February when he urged the public, "...parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instill a sense of excellence in our children..."

How about people teach their kids to think for themselves and find their own entertainment?

Honestly. This from a guy who hung out with slumlords. Maybe he'd have been better off staying inside and playing a round of Street Fighter.

Source: Kotaku (crank)
Kotaku (obama)
Wikipedia (Mill's Utilitarianism)

Science Post

Sciencey

Protein
New technologies might make blood tests far less routine.

US researchers have identified all the 1,166 proteins in human saliva in a breakthrough which could become a new tool for diagnosing killer diseases like cancer, a study showed Tuesday.

Patients may soon be able to spit in a cup for tests for such illnesses as cancer, heart disease and diabetes thanks to the work of three teams of researchers.

"Replacing blood draws with saliva tests promises to make disease diagnosis, as well as the tracking of treatment efficacy, less invasive and costly," said the study published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

Aside from being less... prickly, it's also likely to be cheaper and definitely less dangerous for the medical personnel.

Source: Raw Story

Sun Worship
Solar power is starting to take off.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Utility Southern California Edison said on Thursday it would spend $875 million to build a network of 250 megawatts of photovoltaic solar power generation, making it the biggest solar cell project in the nation.

SCE, a subsidiary of Edison International, said the photovoltaic cells on 65 million square feet of rooftops in southern California would generate enough power to serve 162,000 homes.

The project, which was submitted to state regulators for approval, is an effort to meet the state's mandate that 20 percent of California's electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2010.

Utilities and power companies are increasing their portfolios of renewable energy to meet ever-increasing state demands to help reduce their output of carbon, the greenhouse gas blamed for contributing to rising global temperatures.

At 250 megawatts, the installation would be about half the size of the newest coal or natural gas-fired power generation units.

...

On Wednesday, FPL Group Inc, the nation's largest generator of wind and solar power, announced it planned to build a 250-megawatt thermal solar plant in California's Mojave Desert.

SCE said its new photovoltaic project was possible because recent advances had cut in half the traditional cost of installed solar generation in California.

The utility plans to begin installing the solar arrays immediately on to the rooftops of commercial buildings in southern California's Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

"These new solar stations, which we will be installing at a rate of one megawatt a week, will provide a new source of clean energy directly in the fast-growing regions where we need it most," Edison International Chairman and Chief Executive John Bryson said in a statement.

So between both projects you're talking 500 megawatts of solar power.

That's a lot of juice.

But still a very long way to go.

Source: Reuters

Squidy
Learning the terrifying secrets of squid brings us closer to understanding the Horror that is the Doctor.

"For years the razor-sharp beak that squid use to eat their prey has posed a puzzle to scientists. Squid are soft and fragile, but have a beak as dense as rock and sharp enough to break through hard shells. Scientists have long wondered why the beak doesn't injure the squid itself as is uses it. New research has just been published in the the journal Science that explains the phenomenon. One of the researchers described the squid beak as 'like placing an X-Acto blade in a block of fairly firm Jell-O and then trying to use it to chop celery.' Careful examination shows that the beak is formed in a gradient of density, becoming harder towards the tip end. Understanding how to make such hardness gradients could revolutionize engineering anywhere that 'interfaces between soft and hard materials [are required].' One of the first applications researchers envision is prosthetic limbs."

I've never seen his horrifying beak, as it is hidden behind his tentacles. No one wants to see behind that.

A bit more detail on the beak.

That deadly beak may be a surprise to many people, and has long posed a puzzle for scientists. They wonder how a creature without any bones can operate it without hurting itself.

Now, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, report in Friday's edition of the journal Science that they have an explanation

The beak, made of hard chitin and other materials, changes density gradually from the hard tip to a softer, more flexible base where it attaches to the muscle around the squid's mouth, the researchers found.

That means the tough beak can chomp away at fish for dinner, but the hard material doesn't press or rub directly against the squid's softer tissues.

Oh, the horrors of Doctor Calimari.

Source: Slashdot
CBC News

Molybdenum
So apparently there may have been a 2 billion year delay in the rise of complex life because of a shortage of the metal molybdenum.

Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.

Apparently as the oxygen in the atmosphere rose, it leeched molybdenum out of the rocks, solving this problem. Today it seems the metal short in the oceans is iron instead.

Fascinating.

Source: Physorg

Legal Eagle
Well, there's a bit of a kerfluffle on about the Large Hadron Collider.

A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.

A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out.

Walter L Wagner and his fellow Hawaiian Luis Sancho, according to a report on MSNBC, filed suit in the Hawaii federal court last Friday. The men are worried about one of several planet-busting physicists' nightmares being unleashed in the LHC's bowels deep beneath the Franco-Swiss countryside. (According to Wagner's website, as of publication, the LHC is located "near Generva, Switzerland".)

Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.

Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. Summarising, it appears that the boffins at the LHC - should one of them clumsily spill his tea on the controls, for instance - could easily catapult the entire world through a rift in the very fabric of space-time, into another universe which could be entirely hostile to life as we know it. (Eg, essential processes such as fermentation of alcohol, TV, pizza delivery, gravity etc might simply not work; or there could be a parallel Earth ruled by an evil victorious Nazi empire with space battlecruisers and so forth.)

That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.

A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC's superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into "negatively-charged strangelets" which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.

A related worry is that overly vigorous particle-punishing tomfoolery at the LHC could produce "magnetic monopoles", which are dicey freaks of nature. Monopoles could trigger a runaway reaction not unlike the quark-strangelet scenario, in which everything gets changed into something else. This could lead to a turn-up for the books, in which the Moon remained made of moon but the Earth was abruptly converted into cheese.

...

The boffinry community, however, pooh-pooh Wagner's fears. They say that teeny black holes might be created but would vanish right away. They also say that the strangelet-custard conversion and monopole transmutation threats, if they were viable, should have occurred already due to cosmic-ray impacts in the upper atmosphere.

The man in question has a colorful history, and is currently facing serious legal trouble over, err, embezzling a lot of money.

Oops.

Wagner is, in fact, an expert in many fields. In his first degree at Berkeley he majored in biology and minored in physics. He then attended law school for three years, and later worked in nuclear medicine and health physics before becoming a grade-school teacher. He also founded the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, and is now embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the Gardens board. According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.

Wagner contends that the couple were owed the cash, having worked for free at the gardens for years. Having been let go, they then sued the company for back pay.

But the company says the pair failed to notify the directors of the action, with Wagner instead serving the papers on his wife as company treasurer - even though she no longer was. The board says that Wagner then appeared in court as a company officer. He was thus able to gain a default judgement in his own lawsuit's favour, all without the knowledge of the Gardens board. It is also alleged that phony promissory notes were drawn up in an attempt to obtain cash from the company.

So he sued himself in his role as a member of the company, then paid himself off.

Gutsy.

Source: The Register

Sodom
It seems that yet another biblical miracle may have a perfectly reasonable explanation from the real world.

A Cuneiform clay tablet which for over 150 years defied attempts at interpretation has now been revealed to describe an asteroid impact which in 3123 BC hit Köfels, Austria, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction which may acccount for the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The "Planisphere" tablet (see pic) - inscribed around 700 BC - was unearthed by Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh, close to modern-day Mosul, Iraq. It's a copy of the night diary of a Sumerian astronomer containing drawings of constellations and "known constellation names", but it required modern computer tech to finally unravel its exact meaning.

Alan Bond, Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd and Mark Hempsell, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics at Bristol University, subjected the Planisphere to a programme which "can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago". They discovered that it described "events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC", with half of it noting "planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night".

The other half, however, records an object "large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space" and tracks its trajectory relative to the stars, which "to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels".

That a large body had impacted at Köfels had long been suspected, the evidence being a giant landslide 500m thick and five kilometres in diameter. The site had no impact crater to back the theory, but the researchers now believe they have a plausible explanation for that.

The Bristol Uni press release explains: "The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit. This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels.

"The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point.

"As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater."

Mark Hempsell, hinting at the possible fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, adds: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Essentially what you're dealing with here is the space equivalent of the pyroclastic flow you get from a volcanic explosion. An asteroid came in at a very, very shallow angle, tore a chunk out of a mountain and threw up a big cloud of debris which came down across the Mediterranean.

Add this to the list of Bible stories that may be explained, along with Noah's Ark (stolen from Sumerian mythology, possibly a reference to the Black Sea's formation), the parting of the Red Sea (possible wind anomaly, not that Egypt ever lost an army there), the plague of locusts (this one's not even hard, they happened all the time in the old west -- it's a natural phenomenon), etc.

Science is awesome.

Source: The Register

Delivery Charges May Apply
So the Europeans have devised a new, automated delivery vehicle for the ISS. It hauls up food, water, supplies, what have you, without anyone on board, and is more or less completely automated.

The European Space Agency's "Jules Verne" Automated Transfer Vehicle is slowly but surely creeping up on the International Space Station prior to a docking scheduled for 3 April.

The ATV space truck will today strut its stuff on the second of two "demonstration days" designed to test the rendevous tech. On Saturday, a first demo proved the vessel can perform "navigation with the ISS using relative GPS to successfully and safely manoeuvre the spacecraft to a point located 3.5 km behind the ISS and at the same orbital altitude".

John Ellwood, ESA’s ATV Project Manager, explained: "Having tested very successfully on Saturday the first part of the rendezvous, in particular using the relative GPS between that on Jules Verne and on the Russian Service Module of the ISS, we now have the go-ahead to test the second part of the rendezvous which uses the [laser-based] optical sensors. This will be very interesting, but we have a lot of confidence based on the great performance of Jules Verne during the first demonstration day."

This is a key stopgap measure to help cover for the retirement of the Shuttle fleet, since we don't have anything to replace them. The Jules Verne can haul up the bulky stuff and the Soyuz from the Russkies will have to haul up the people.

Source: The Register

Mmm, Pickled Liver
A possible cure for severe liver damage caused by booze or hepatitus.

Japanese boffins believe they may have developed a means of reversing cirrhosis of the liver among rats and perhaps people, in a development with far-reaching consequences for professional cricketers, hellraising movie stars, layabout drunks, politicians, economists, Catholic priests, journalists and others whose jobs require them to drink heavily.

...

Rather, these rodents were subjected to normally-lethal doses of dimethylnitrosamine, a deadly liver-busting chemical which was commonly found in beer and bacon sandwiches until the 1970s. Nowadays 90 per cent of the stuff has been removed from human food. However, Sato and his colleagues were able to feed distilled essence of market-traders' breakfast to their furry subjects and cause their livers to pack up almost right away, thus sparing themselves an extended period of devastating miniature murine hellraiser Oliver Reed type antics in the lab.

The boffins were then able to save - or at least "prolong the survival" of - the cirrhotic rats by treating them with "vitamin A–coupled liposomes" which delivered "small interfering RNA (siRNA)" to "stellate cells" in the liver. It is these stellate cells, seemingly, which cause cirrhosis by producing collagen in response to booze or hepatitis. The collagen then hardens up the liver and wrecks it.

But when the small interfering RNA payloads get at the stellate cells, all this stops and the liver is recalled to duty - indeed, the Japanese scientists imply that already-existing collagen can be dissolved, effectively making the the organ as good as new. This is good news, as until now the only treatment for cirrhosis has been to get a new liver from someone who doesn't need theirs - hopefully due to having died peacefully in a car crash or something, rather than having been judicially murdered by an unscrupulous government and harvested for spare parts - and who hasn't put too many miles on it already.

W00t! This is great news for Basement Boy!

Source: The Register

What's Good for the Goose
Is hilarious for the gander.

A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.

In the most recent issue of Die Datenschleuder, the Chaos Computer Club printed the image on a plastic foil that leaves fingerprints when it is pressed against biometric readers.

...

"The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place," said Karsten Nohl, a colleague of an amateur researcher going by the moniker Starbug, who engineered the hack. "It's basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore."

...

Schauble's fingerprint was captured off a water glass he used last summer while participating in a discussion celebrating the opening of a religious studies department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin. The print came from an index finger, most likely the right one, Starbug believes, because Schauble is right-handed.

...

The print is included in more than 4,000 copies of the latest issue of the magazine, which is published by the CCC. The image is printed two ways: one using traditional ink on paper, and the other on a film of flexible rubber that contains partially dried glue. The latter medium can be covertly affixed to a person's finger and used to leave an individual's prints on doors, telephones or biometric readers.

Nohl said Starbug has used the same film to store his own fingerprints and has successfully fooled 20 different biometric readers, including those deployed in Germany's own passport offices. The machines, made by a company known as Cross Match Technologies, are in the process of being rolled out by German customs officials at border checkpoints, Nohl said.

Schauble is a big proponent of using fingerprints and other unique characteristics to identify individuals.

“Each individual’s fingerprints are unique," he is quoted as saying in this official interior department press release announcing a new electronic passport that stores individuals' fingerprints on an RFID chip. "This technology will help us keep one step ahead of criminals. With the new passport, it is possible to conduct biometric checks, which will also prevent authentic passports from being misused by unauthorized persons who happen to look like the person in the passport photo."

The magazine is calling on readers to collect the prints of other German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bavarian Prime Minister Guenther Beckstein and BKA President Joerg Ziercke.

This is one way to kill an invasive and pointless technology in its tracks.

Source: The Register

Balmy
Saturn's moon Enceladus is both warmer and more organic than previously thought.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft tasted and sampled a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn's moon Enceladus during a close flyby on March 12. Scientists are amazed that this tiny moon is so active, "hot" and brimming with water vapor and organic chemicals.

New heat maps of the surface show higher temperatures than previously known in the south polar region, with hot tracks running the length of giant fissures. Additionally, scientists say the organics "taste and smell" like some of those found in a comet. The jets themselves harmlessly peppered Cassini, exerting measurable torque on the spacecraft, and providing an indirect measure of the plume density.

"A completely unexpected surprise is that the chemistry of Enceladus, what's coming out from inside, resembles that of a comet," said Hunter Waite, principal investigator for the Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "To have primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on the formation of the Saturn system."

"Enceladus is by no means a comet. Comets have tails and orbit the sun, and Enceladus' activity is powered by internal heat while comet activity is powered by sunlight. Enceladus' brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas," said Waite.

The Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer saw a much higher density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected. This dramatic increase in density was evident as the spacecraft flew over the area of the plumes.

New high-resolution heat maps of the south pole by Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer show that the so-called tiger stripes, giant fissures that are the source of the geysers, are warm along almost their entire lengths, and reveal other warm fissures nearby. These more precise new measurements reveal temperatures of at least minus 93 degrees Celsius (minus 135 Fahrenheit.) That is 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously seen and 93 degrees Celsius (200 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than other regions of the moon. The warmest regions along the tiger stripes correspond to two of the jet locations seen in Cassini images.

Yeah, it's really hot down there, hehe.

Seriously though, yet more cool science being done by robots while people putter around a floating tin can in low earth orbit playing with (admittedly cool) giant killer robot arms.

Let's send the robots out further afield, I say, to do our work for us and avoid the whole 'hugs of death' thing.

Source: NASA

Talkie

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song -- the oldest-known audio recording -- made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

"It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied") -- part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.

It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.

Giovannoni said he learned on March 1 of its existence in an archive in Paris and traveled to the French capital a week later. Experts working with the First Sounds group then transformed the paper tracings into sound.

This Scott guy was trying to create, essentially, a really early oscilloscope. He didn't intend it to be played back. But the technology used to, in essence, scan early recordings like wax cylinders and so forth was used on this, to convert its record of sound waves back into audible sound. Mythbusters did the same thing with clay recordings to test a myth about ancient pottery.

Neat stuff.

Source: Reuters
Researchers
Actual Sound

DELICIOUS
Fish are being trained that will catch themselves to be turned into delicious fish nibblers.

BOSTON - Call them Pavlov's fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time.

If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.

What's next, teaching them to coat themselves in batter and hop inside a fryer?

"It sounds crazy, but it's real," said Simon Miner, a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Hole, which received a $270,000 grant for the project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Miner said the specially trained fish could someday be used to bolster the depleted black sea bass stock. Farmed fish might become better acclimated to the wild if they can be called back for food every few days.

...

Miner said the first objective was to see if the fish could truly be trained. He got his answer after keeping the fish in a circular tank, then sounding a tone before he dropped food in an enclosed "feeding zone" within the tank that the fish could enter only through a small opening.

Researchers played the tone for 20 seconds, three times a day, for about two weeks. Afterward, whenever the tone sounded, "you have remote-control fish," Miner said.

"You hit that button, and they go into that area, and they wait patiently," he said.

Miner is now trying to figure out how long the fish remember to associate the tone with food. He feeds the fish outside the feeding zone without a tone for a few days and then tests if they will still head for the feeding area when the tone sounds again.

Some fish forgot after five days. Others remembered as long as 10. Miner said the strength of memory seems tied to how long the fish are trained.

Remote controlled fish!

Source: AZ Central

Smelly
Whacky Mad Science.

Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

...

Could an emotionally charged situation make that initial cue be perceived more strongly in the first place?

The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults to find out.

Volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An "oily grassy" smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.

Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance and the third had a mirror image of it, meaning its odor normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.

Then Li gave the volunteers mild electric shocks while they smelled just the odd chemical. In later smell tests, they could correctly pick out the odd odor 70 percent of the time.

MRI scans showed the improvement was more than coincidence. There were changes in how the brain's main olfactory region stored the odor information, essentially better imprinting the shock-linked scent so it could be distinguished more quickly from a similar odor.

In other words, the brain seems to have a mechanism to sniff out threats.

ZZZERT

Ahh, to volunteer to be shocked for science. Noble.

Or more likely, they did it for beer money.

Source: Time Magazine

Gamma Ray Burst

Won't Turn You Into the Hulk

So the brightest object, more or less, ever observed gives even more hope that perhaps a giant hypernova will wipe out the human race.

"A gamma ray burst detected on March 19 by NASA's Swift satellite has set a new record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The burst had a measured redshift of 0.94, meaning the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago. The optical afterglow from heated gas was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The previous most distant object visible to the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light years from Earth."

Yeah! Take that, puny inhabited worlds in its path!

It gets even better.

The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.


The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.

The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

...

The 7.5 billion light years away far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles.

"This is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe," Burrows said.

Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.

Come on, Eta Carinae/Pinwheel Nebula star...

Finally, though there aren't any pictures of the explosion itself, NASA has some snaps of the afterglow.

Ahh, impending doom is so pretty.

Sources: Slashdot
Raw Story
NASA

Science

Mid-Week Update

Sting Operation
Three Panel Soul had a comic mentioning the scientific experiment that led to the confirmation of the cause of Irukandji syndrome, a really nasty reaction to the toxin of certain tiny jellyfish.

In 1964, Dr. Jack Barnes confirmed the cause of the syndrome to be due to a small box jelly, the Irukandji jellyfish (Carukia barnesi). In order to prove that the jellyfish was the cause of the syndrome, he captured one and deliberately stung himself, his son, and a local lifeguard, and observed the symptoms[3] It is suspected that other Cubozoa can cause Irukandji syndrome,[4] but only seven jellyfish have been positively identified (C. barnesi, Alatina cf. mordens, Carybdea alata, Malo maxima, Carybdea xaymacana, an as-yet unnamed ‘fire jelly’, and 1 other unnamed species).[5][1]

That's right. He used himself, his son, and a lifeguard as guinea pigs, hoping to induce a syndrome that had cropped up recently in a few coastal communities.

He had to know, however, that if he was successful...

Most stings occur during the summer wet season in December-January. The sting itself is often barely noticed, but the symptoms gradually become more intense in the following 5 to 120 minutes (30 minutes on average). Irukandji syndrome includes an array of systemic symptoms including severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, and pulmonary edema.[3][9] Symptoms generally abate in 4 to 30 hours, but may take up to a week to resolve completely.[4]

and

Similarly to other box jellyfish, first aid consists of flushing the area with vinegar to neutralize the tentacle stinging apparatus. There is no antivenom; treatment is largely supportive, with analgesia being the mainstay of management. Antihistamines may be of benefit for pain relief,[10] but most cases require intravenous opioid analgesia. Fentanyl or morphine are usually chosen. Pethidine (aka meperidine in U.S. (Demerol)) should be avoided, as large doses are often required for pain relief and in this situation significant adverse effects from the pethidine metabolite norpethidine may occur.[11]

That's right; it's so painful that opiates are necessary. He had to know this going in.

It gets better; it is, in fact, one of the most painful things you can suffer and LIVE.

The severity of the pain from an Irukandji jellyfish sting is apparent in the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary Killer Jellyfish on Carukia barnesi, when two Australian researchers (Jamie Seymour and Teresa Carrette) are stung. Even under the "maximum dose of morphine" Teresa remarked that she "wished she could rip her skin off", and is later seen writhing uncontrollably from the pain while lying on her hospital bed. In one scene, Teresa's feet are shown contorting and digging into the bed - when the camera moves back, we see Teresa rubbing her face, her body is contorting in agony, and her legs are rapidly sliding and kicking around on the bed. Jamie, at his worst, is also seen writhing in pain, curled up in a ball and barely able to speak. Jamie said he wished that he was stung by Chironex fleckeri instead since "the pain goes away in 20 minutes or you die".

Another recent program that aired on the Discovery Channel entitled Stings, Fangs and Spines featured a 20 minute spot on Irukandji Syndrome. In the segment, a young Australian woman was stung and developed a severe case of Irukandji syndrome. In a testament to the severity of pain involved, a re-enactment (featuring the actual victim portraying herself) shows her screaming and violently thrashing around on the hospital bed in an almost convulsive state, for the bulk of the segment. She later commented that this unbearable pain lasted for hours, and added that "I didn't think it was possible for anyone to endure that level of pain without turning into a vegetable".

Yet this Barnes guy subjected his son to it.

What a whacko.

Source: Wikipedia
Google Books
(detailed story of the experiment in question)
Three Panel Soul (hilarious comic)

Stubborn Robots
So Dextre has been behaving a bit badly.

Dextre is officially called the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator. It is supposed to be moved around the outside of the ISS on the end of a massive articulated arm, Canadarm2, which has already been fitted to the space station. The mighty tonne-and-a-half robot has two 11-foot arms of its own, video cams, lights, and "three robotic tools" with which it can "perform delicate human-scale tasks", it says here (pdf, p54).

This will allow maintenance and so on to be done without time-consuming, potentially dangerous spacewalking by human astronauts.

At present, unfortunately, Dextre doesn't work.

"Initial attempts to route power to Dextre were not successful Thursday," according to NASA, and the partly-assembled Dextre has been "temporarily parked on the station's truss".

The plan is to grapple the recalcitrant robot with the Canadarm2 later today. "With Dextre grappled to the arm, the cabling path that is believed to be causing communications interference will not be in the loop", apparently, and "it is expected that normal communications will then be established."

Spacegoing veterinarian Linnehan and his fellow shuttle specialist Michael Foreman will perform a further spacewalk tomorrow to fully sort Dextre out.

Oops.

Dextre didn't even want to get out of the shuttle at first.

Still, we always have engineering to get us out of our messes... with violence.

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Two spacewalking astronauts attached 11-foot arms to the international space station's huge new robot Sunday, preparing the giant machine for its handyman job on the orbital outpost.

The Canadian-built robot, named Dextre, will stand 12 feet and have a mass of 3,400 pounds when it's fully assembled. It is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and possibly someday take over some of the tougher chores, like lugging around big replacement parts.

The already challenging outing turned grueling as Richard Linnehan and fellow spacewalker Michael Foreman struggled to release one of the robot's arms from the transport bed where it had been latched down for launch.

Two of the bolts wouldn't budge, even when the astronauts banged on them and yanked as hard as they could. They had to use a pry bar to get it out.

The other arm came out much more smoothly and quickly, paving the way for Linnehan to pull up Dextre's body 60 degrees, like Frankenstein rising from his bed. That was the ideal position for plugging in Dextre's gangly arms to its shoulders.

Fortunately, it seems that things are under control.

Astronauts have assembled a massive robot handyman called Dextre that will carry out much of the maintenance work at the International Space Station.

Richard Linnehan and Robert Behnken succeeded in putting together the gangly humanoid robot with 11ft arms during a seven-hour spacewalk that finished earlier today - by chance, the 43rd anniversary of the first spacewalk.

Later, after they have slept, the astronauts will move Dextre by remote control to its new home on the side of an American space laboratory called Destiny.

Take that, stubborn, Canadian robot.

Mission Control praised Linnehan and Behnken for their work, though they hit a snag when a suitcase-sized science experiment refused to hook itself on to the side of Columbus, the newly arrived European space laboratory.

Is NASA buying their stuff from Best Buy now? Yeesh.

Source: The Register
CNN.com
The Times Online

Salmon
So the Chinook salmon run in California has been badly depleted. Nobody is quite sure why, but it's pretty serious.

Federal fisheries managers took the first step Friday toward imposing what could be the strictest limits ever on West Coast salmon fishing amid a collapse of the central California chinook salmon fishery.

...

The Sacramento River chinook run is usually one of the most plentiful on the West Coast, providing the bulk of the fish caught by commercial trollers off California and Oregon.

But this year's returns — even with no fishing allowed — are expected to reach less than half the council's goal for spawning a new generation. It marks the third straight year of declines, and the outlook for next year is no better.

After years of declining salmon runs, few fishermen rely solely on salmon for a living.

...

In most years, about 90 percent of wild chinook salmon caught off the California coast originate in the Sacramento River and its tributaries.

Only about 90,000 adult salmon returned to the Sacramento River and its tributaries to spawn last year, the second lowest number on record and well below the government's conservation goals, according to federal fishery regulators. That's down from 277,000 in 2006 and a record high of 804,000 in 2002.

Biologists predict this year's salmon returns could be even lower because the number of returning young male fish, known as "jacks," hit an all-time low last year. Only about 2,000 of them were recorded, which is far below the 40,000 counted in a typical year.

...

Marine scientists blame an unusual weather pattern that triggered a collapse of the marine food web in 2005, the year most of this year's returning adults were entering the ocean as juveniles.

Fishermen, environmental groups and American Indians largely blame the salmon's troubles on poor water quality and water diversions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

So who's right? Maybe all of them.

Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

...

So what happened? As Dave Bitts, a fisherman based in Eureka in Northern California, sees it, the variables are simple. “To survive, there are two things a salmon needs,” he said. “To eat. And not to be eaten.”

Fragmentary evidence about salmon mortality in the Sacramento River in recent years, as well as more robust but still inconclusive data about ocean conditions in 2005, indicates that the fall Chinook smolts, or baby fish, of 2005 may have lost out on both counts. But biologists, fishermen and fishery managers all emphasize that no one yet knows anything for sure.

Bill Petersen, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research center in Newport, Ore., said other stocks of anadromous Pacific fish — those that migrate from freshwater to saltwater and back — had been anemic this year, leading him to suspect ocean changes.

After studying changes in the once-predictable pattern of the Northern Pacific climate, Mr. Petersen found that in 2005 the currents that rise from the deeper ocean, bringing with them nutrients like phytoplankton and krill, were out of sync. “Upwelling usually starts in April and goes until September,” he said. “In 2005, it didn’t start until July.”

Mr. Petersen’s hypothesis about the salmon is that “the fish that went to sea in 2005 died a few weeks after getting to the ocean” because there was nothing to eat. A couple of years earlier, when the oceans were in a cold-weather cycle, the opposite happened — the upwelling was very rich. The smolts of that year were later part of the largest run of fall Chinook ever recorded.

But, Mr. Petersen added, many factors may have contributed to the loss of this season’s fish.

Bruce MacFarlane, another NOAA researcher who is based in Santa Cruz, has started a three-year experiment tagging young salmon — though not from the fall Chinook run — to determine how many of those released from the large Coleman hatchery, 335 miles from the Sacramento River’s mouth, make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. According to the first year’s data, only 4 of 200 reached the bridge.

Mr. MacFarlane said it was possible that a diversion dam on the upper part of the river, around Redding and Red Bluff, created calm and deep waters that are “a haven for predators,” particularly the pike minnow.

Farther downstream, he said, young salmon may fall prey to striped bass. There are also tens of thousands of pipes, large and small, attached to pumping stations that divert water.

The Feds claim that they're dealing with the diversions, but of course, we know how well water policy is handled out west, so it's a dubious claim to stake.

Hopefully they can bounce back next year.

Source: Raw Story
The New York Times

Borg Bugs, Bats
DARPA is up to their usual lightning-and-cackling no good.

DARPA (the Pentagon asylum for usefully-insane scientists) is apparently making progress with its plan to build cyborg infiltrator machines wearing living creatures like fleshy cloaks.

Lest anyone think that this is a story about California politics, however, one should note that thus far DARPA and its associated groups are working with moths rather than immense Austrian bodybuilders.

Flight International reports that engineering boffin Robert Michelson - perhaps most famous for his "Entomopter" synthimuscle-flapper insectoid Martian mini-bot plan - gave an update on the DARPA programme at a joint US-Indian miniflybot conference on Friday.

Encouragingly - for those who find the cyborg concept appealing, anyway - it seems DARPA has found that it is indeed possible to pull out the middle of a suitable creature, throw all the entrails in the bin, and slip a mechanoid core into the resulting freed-up space. The machine's fleshy cloak will even go on to show good tissue growth afterwards, at least in the case of Manduca moths.

Ewwwww. Spy moths.

It gets better; there's a rival project of SPY BATS. Robots, fortunately, not mutilated mammals.

The University of Michigan (UM) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded $10m by the US Army to carry out research leading to a "six-inch robotic spy plane modelled after a bat", which would "gather data from sights, sounds and" - worryingly - "smells".

The university has used the army cash to found a Centre for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, or COM-BAT - a clear case of Media Targeted Acronym Related Titling, or Media-TART syndrome.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Source: The Register
The Register

Golden Eggs
Some boffins in genetic engineering work have devised chickens that lay eggs containing vast quantities of valuable drugs without harm to the birds.

Nifty.

Forget about the elaborate creations of master chocolatiers. The genetically modified brown eggs produced by a flock of designer hens at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh are the biotechnological equivalent of a Fabergé.

Several generations of Isa Brown hens - a prolific egg-laying French cross between Rhode Island Red and Rhode Island White - have been bred from "founder birds" that were genetically altered by Dr Helen Sang and her team to contain human genes.

Each gene provides the recipe for the production of a corresponding human protein. In the Roslin Institute hens the human protein is found only in their eggs, reducing the risk of harm to the hens themselves.

The egg proteins are rich in expensive drugs that can fight cancer and other diseases, with each egg containing enough medicine to treat a handful of patients each year.

...

They used a virus called equine infectious anaemia lentivirus, which infects horses, to insert the human genes into chicken embryos in newly laid eggs, by creating a chimera - a blend of GM and normal cells.

Crucially, some of the sperm cells in the resulting chimeric cockerels carried the new gene for the human protein, and passed on the implanted gene to their daughters.

These hens also contain the human gene in every cell of their bodies. The team controls precisely where the gene is used for protein production in the birds, to ensure that the potent biotech drugs do not affect the birds themselves.

The gene is tagged on to part of the hen's gene for ovalbumin, the major protein in the white part of its eggs.

Because this gene is only used in egg white, the protein drug does not harm the birds.

...

The Roslin team has hatched several drugs this way: miR24, a monoclonal antibody with potential for treating malignant melanoma; the antiviral drug human interferon b-1a; and beta interferon, used to treat multiple sclerosis.

The institute is also about to publish research showing that it has around 20 birds that can make even higher levels of alpha interferon, about a gram per litre of egg white, to treat hepatitis C.

This is why I really hate all those anti-GM fanatics.

No, we don't have to trust Monsanto with our souls. But we shouldn't throw away a whole, and very promising, field of study just because 'Nature' didn't intend for something.

Nature sucks. Give me an army of drug chickens any day.

Source: The Telegraph

Science, Mostly Spacey

To Infinity, Beyond, Etc

Ring Around the Rhea
So it seems that one of Saturn's many moons has its own ring system.

Which, at this rate, probably hides a yet smaller moon.

With ITS own ring system.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of material orbiting Rhea, Saturn's second largest moon. This is the first time rings may have been found around a moon.

A broad debris disk and at least one ring appear to have been detected by a suite of six instruments on Cassini specifically designed to study the atmospheres and particles around Saturn and its moons.

Sadly, no pictures.

Evidence for a debris disk in addition to this tenuous dust cloud came from a gradual drop on either side of Rhea in the number of electrons detected by two of Cassini's instruments. Material near Rhea appeared to be shielding Cassini from the usual rain of electrons. Cassini's Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument detected sharp, brief drops in electrons on both sides of the moon, suggesting the presence of rings within the disk of debris. The rings of Uranus were found in a similar fashion, by NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory in 1977, when light from a star blinked on and off as it passed behind Uranus' rings.

...

These ring findings make Rhea a prime candidate for further study. Initial observations by the imaging team when Rhea was near the sun in the sky did not detect dust near the moon remotely. Additional observations are planned to look for the larger particles.

Stupid nearly invisible rings.

Grumble.

Source: Cassini-Huygens (NASA)

Cuts
So the UK is looking to cut its radio astronomy program after spending a bunch of money to upgrade it.

And here I thought heavy drinking was DOWN in Britain.

"MERLIN, the UK's only radio astronomy facility, is facing closure following the results of a Programmatic Review carried out by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the results of which were announced on Monday. The review placed MERLIN and the upgraded telescope e-MERLIN, due to go online later this year following an investment of £8M, in the low-priority category under serious threat of funding cuts. The upgraded array of telescopes, situated across the UK, will be 30 times more sensitive than the current array and will be a unique facility for observing distant objects and helping us understand the universe. If these cuts go ahead however, not only MERLIN but the entire Observatory including the iconic Lovell telescope, based at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, will be under threat of closure."

Just spend a bit less on football hooliganism and you'll be set!

Source: Slashdot

Grand Canyon
Though I dislike that name, I mean, Mars has a much more impressive canyon.

Anyway, turns out ours took a lot longer to make than previously thought.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Gazing into the majestic Grand Canyon, awe-struck visitors inevitably ask: "How old is it?" Far older than generally thought, says new evidence that scientists culled from caves lining the canyon's red limestone cliffs.

The Grand Canyon often is referred to as about 6 million years old — but its western half actually began to open at least 17 million years ago, a University of New Mexico team reports Friday in the journal Science.

Basically, the Grand Canyon is actually a series of canyons that merged over time, and one set is far older than the other. Appearances can be deceiving, and all that.

Source: The Associated Press

David Brin Is a Moron
Can there be any other explanation for a man who thinks the complete death of privacy is a good thing?

When I write and speak about privacy, I am regularly confronted with the mutual disclosure argument. Explained in books like David Brin's The Transparent Society, the argument goes something like this: In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you'll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we'll also be watching the government. This is different than before, but it's not automatically worse. And because I know your secrets, you can't use my secrets as a weapon against me.

This might not be everybody's idea of utopia -- and it certainly doesn't address the inherent value of privacy -- but this theory has a glossy appeal, and could easily be mistaken for a way out of the problem of technology's continuing erosion of privacy. Except it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power.

You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.

If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.

An example will make this clearer. You're stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer's ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

Thank you, Bruce Schneier, for giving even more evidence that techno-utopians like Brin are just as stupid as the regular kind.

Source: Wired

Verne Would Have Wanted It Shot Out Of a Cannon
So the ESA is covering for us a bit when we step down our shuttles (with no working replacement near readiness).

Crews have been manning the International Space Station continuously since late 2000, and in all that time there have really only been three ways to get supplies from Earth to orbit. They can go up in the space shuttle’s cargo hold, they can be packed into an unmanned Russian “Progress” re-supply ship, or they can be squeezed in with passengers on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

That is, until now. If all goes as planned, a new European supply ship called the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is set to launch on Saturday night atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Ariane Launch Complex Number 3 in Kourou, French Guiana.

Christened “Jules Verne,” this unmanned spacecraft will be the first of five ATV’s launched to the ISS at a rate of one every year and a half or so.

It is designed to deliver more than 8 tons of cargo to the ISS — everything from food and drinking water to air, propellants and scientific equipment.

Not people though. Looks like they still get to ride a Russian Soyuz up.

Source: CNN.com

T-Ray
Two articles on a new camera technology that sees in the so-called T-Ray spectrum, which is a section of the EM band between infrared and microwaves.

First, we have the abuse of privacy, courtesy of our Orwellian friends across the pond.

LONDON (Reuters) - A British company has developed a camera that can detect weapons, drugs or explosives hidden under people's clothes from up to 25 meters away in what could be a breakthrough for the security industry.


The T5000 camera, created by a company called ThruVision, uses what it calls "passive imaging technology" to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays -- known as Terahertz or T-rays -- that they emit.

The high-powered camera can detect hidden objects from up to 80 feet away and is effective even when people are moving. It does not reveal physical body details and the screening is harmless, the company says.

...



"The ability to see both metallic and non-metallic items on people out to 25 meters is certainly a key capability that will enhance any comprehensive security system."

...

The technology works on the basis that all people and objects emit low levels of electromagnetic radiation. Terahertz rays lie somewhere between infrared and microwaves on the electromagnetic spectrum and travel through clouds and walls.

Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.

I hope nobody in England ever likes to carry something embarassing on their person, or wear the 'wrong' kind of underwear.

Then we have the scientifically useful, non-evil application, which has apparently been puttering around unnoticed for half a decade.

The technique employs a little-studied but ubiquitous radiation. Detecting T-rays allows a camera to effectively see through smoke, walls and even clothing or bandages.

Low frequency versions of terahertz waves are known as millimeter waves, and they behave much like radio waves. At higher frequencies, the terahertz waves straddle the border between radio and optical emissions. The technology is sometimes referred to as quasi-optics.

Similar but less sensitive technology is already used to examine sea-surface temperatures from satellites. A future T-ray observatory might study the tails of comets, experts say, and the frequency could also shed new light on the early universe and how the first galaxies formed.

Source: Raw Story
and
Space.com

All Hail Our New Robot Overlord
Its name is Dextre, and it has two giant arms to kill, err, hug, you with.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a "monstrous" two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed.

Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight.

...

With 11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet, the Canadian Space Agency's Dextre - short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter - is more than a little intimidating, at least for astronaut Garrett Reisman.

"Now I wouldn't go as far to say that we're worried it's going to go run amok and take over the space station or turn evil or anything because we all know how it's operated and it doesn't have a lot of its own intelligence," Reisman told The Associated Press last week.

"But I'll tell you something ... He's enormous and to see him with his giant arms, it is a little scary. It's a little monstrous, it is."

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

Err, it's microgravity.

FLOAT! FLOAT SLOWLY AWAY FOR YOUR LIVES!

Source: Wired

Science Picatures
Apparently there's an award for the best ones, now.

Number 7 is my favorite, personally.

Source: The Guardian

Odd Stuff

Weeeeeeeeeeeird

Hell's Angels
A new BBC documentary is claiming that the Hell's Angels, angry about taking the blame for Altamont, planned to kill Mick Jagger.

Mangold said the men tried to reach Jagger by sea. "The boat was hit by a storm and all of the men were thrown overboard," he was quoted as saying. They all survived but made no other attempt on his life, Mangold said.

It was not clear whether Jagger was ever informed of the alleged plot against him.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Source: Detroit Free Press

Supplies
So apparently there's a pro-reading charity called 826 that has come up with an interesting way to raise money: theme stores.

In Brooklyn, they have the Superhero Supply Store.

In LA, a time-travel themed convenience store.

Neat.

Booze
So some Swedish MPs who don't drink are a bit miffed about the booze that flows freely at Swedish government functions.

A teetotal group of Swedish lawmakers said Wednesday alcohol-free drinks should be served at official parliamentary functions because alcohol prevents some MPs from fulfilling their duties.

"We want (official functions in parliament) to be alcohol-free by default," Egon Frid, a member of the opposition Left Party and the head of a group of 14 teetotal MPs, told AFP.

He said those who wanted an alcoholic drink could have one, but they should have to ask.

It seems like your government works pretty well when oiled up. Why rock the boat?

Source: Raw Story

One-Way
So there's a growing movement to make the first manned trip to Mars a one-way jobby, to save on all the fuel you'd have to bring to get back.

Yeah, this is going to go so well.

“When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle,” said McLane. And because of a small crew size, the spacecraft could be smaller and the need for consumables and supplies would be decreased, making the mission cheaper and less complicated.

While some might classify this as a suicide mission, McLane feels the concept is completely logical.

“There would be tremendous risk, yes,” said McLane, “but I don’t think that’s guaranteed any more than you would say climbing a mountain alone is a suicide mission. People do dangerous things all the time, and this would be something really unique, to go to Mars. I don’t think there would be any shortage of people willing to volunteer for the mission. Lindbergh was someone who was willing to risk everything because it was worth it. I don’t think it will be hard to find another Lindbergh to go to Mars. That will be the easiest part of this whole program.”

...



And the whole world would be watching, said McLane, so it wouldn’t be as if the lone astronaut would be completely by himself. “You would have constant communication,” he said. “The astronauts on the International Space Station have an army of people on earth keeping track of what they are doing. They really have no peace. Somebody is constantly planning and monitoring their activities. I don’t think being lonely will be much of a problem on a mission to Mars.”

Of course McLane’s hope is the solo astronaut would be joined by others shortly in the future. Orbital mechanics provides a desirable launch window from Earth to Mars every 26 months. “This person wouldn’t be there by himself for very long. It’s just returning home that would be impossible,” he said. Another option McLane has offered is a one-man and one-woman crew, possibly creating an Adam and Eve-type situation.

So many bad ideas in one place!

To begin with, when something goes wrong, and it inevitably will eventually, since the guy can't come back, he'll die out there, slowly, on tv. People will have to sit back and watch helplessly. No doctors, no nothing.

That'll kill manned space travel forever right there.

Plus, an Adam and Eve scenario? WTF? Is he nuts?

Do NOT base scientific work on the bible, man. It's like building your blast shelter out of flash paper.

Source: Universe Today

Snow
Science types have decided to try and ruin my fun by announcing new-fallen snow is still dirty.

PITTSBURGH - To the list of simple childhood pleasures whose safety has been questioned, add this: eating snow.

A recent study found that snow - even in relatively pristine spots like Montana and the Yukon - contains large amounts of bacteria.

Parents who warn their kids not to eat dirty snow (especially the yellow variety) are left wondering whether to stop them from tasting the new-fallen stuff, too, because of Pseudomonas syringae, bacteria that can cause diseases in bean and tomato plants.

But experts say there's no need to banish snow-eating along with dodgeball, unchaperoned trick-or-treating and riding a bike without a helmet.

"It's a very ubiquitous bacteria that's everywhere," says Dr. Penelope Dennehy, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on infectious diseases. "Basically, none of the food we eat is sterile. We eat bacteria all the time."

If I was a tomato plant, I'd be a lot more concerned.

Though if I was a tomato plant, I also wouldn't be typing. Or eating. Or what not.

(To be perfectly fair, the article states that the original science publication did not evaluate the risks to people in any way. This is more scaremongering on the part of the journamalism types)

Source: AZ Central

Sciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiience

Science Update

Waveboat
So there are boats that are powered solely by waves. Who knew?

I do wonder how it would work, steering wise, if you had to sail a boat against the prevailing wave currents. The article proposes wind sails to augment the waves, but since wind and waves are tied together I'm not sure how much that would help.

Still, a neat piece of concept engineering.

Source: TreeHugger

Avalanche!
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was watching routine climate changes and got an eyeful of a surprise event.

A robotic spacecraft circling Mars has snapped the first image of a series of active avalanches near the planet's north pole, scientists said Monday.

The image, taken last month, reveals at least four avalanches of fine ice and dust breaking off from a steep cliff and settling on the slope below. The cascade kicked up massive debris clouds, with some measuring more than 590 feet across.

Sources: Raw Story
NASA

Rise of the Hexapus
A London aquarium has acquired a six-legged octopus.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The unique sea creature, which has two limbs fewer than a normal octopus, is believed to be the result of a birth defect rather than an accident, say his keepers at the Blackpool Sea Life Centre in northwest England.

...

It was only when he attached himself to the inside of a glass tank that Sea Life staff noticed he was two limbs short of a full set. Octopuses are renowned for having three hearts and blue blood, but not usually six legs.

"He's a lovely little thing," said a spokeswoman, adding that he will go on display to the public later this month.

Source: Yahoo News

Tagged
So businesses are looking to get the right to embed RFID tags in your clothing and track what you do, where you go, etc. All in the name of 'serving' you.

They seem shocked that people aren't willing to go along.

"For us, consumers have to be protected," said Emilie Berrau, a legal officer for the BEUC, the European Consumers Organization in Brussels. "They haven't asked for the technology, so why should they have the burden of protecting themselves?"

...

"How can you make an assumption that consumers will want their tags deactivated at the point of sales?" she said. "How can we justify that? So far we haven't heard from consumers with day-to-day concerns. There is a distance there. This technology is developing very quickly. And if there is an opt-in approach, that will probably deter many retailers from adopting the technology."

Retailers have tended to use the chips for logistical purposes like tracking deliveries, but companies are starting to get more inventive. A British uniform supplier, Trutex, said it was developing clothing with chips to track schoolchildren, in part because of surveys that showed parents were favorable to the idea.

Oh no, won't somebody please think of the children!?

The children that we can spy on for money?!

Source: The International Herald Tribune

Rapid Fire

Various Items of Note

Stewart and the Oscars
Some of Jon Stewart's Oscar night jokes. For example:

"Normally when you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty."

"Tonight we look beyond the dark days to focus on happier fare - this year's slate of Oscar-nominated psychopathic killer movies. Does this town need a hug? No Country For Old Men, Sweeney Todd,There Will Be Blood. All I can say is: thank God for teen pregnancy."

Source: The Times Online

Pesky Pakistan
So Pakistan ordered YouTube taken off the interwebs for 'blasphemy' or some such, and their ISP complied. Only they did it badly, and due to a flaw in the way the interweb works, the block propagated worldwide, resulting in Youtube getting taken offline.

On Sunday, YouTube became unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. No "sorry we're down" or cutesy kitten-with-screwdriver page, nothing. What happened was that packets sent to YouTube were flowing to Pakistan. Which was curious, because the Pakistan government had just instituted a ban on the popular video sharing site. What apparently happened is that Pakistan Telecom routed the address block that YouTube's servers are into a "black hole" as a simple measure to filter access to the service. However, this routing information escaped from Pakistan Telecom to its ISP PCCW in Hong Kong, which propagated the route to the rest of the world. So any packets for YouTube would end up in Pakistan Telecom's black hole instead.

Is there anything religion in government can't ruin?

Source: Ars Technica

Photos
So a guy makes his living as a photographer and posts watermarked samples online. A magazine steals his work, crops out the watermarks, and uses them as stock photos. When questioned about it, they make up a nonexistent person, forge a receipt, and claim that person sold them the photos. They can not produce the person, the original files, or any evidence of any kind.

They chose... poorly.

Source: CGStock.com

Snoops
So the energy utility in Madison has a bit of a probably with nosy jerks in their employ.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A landlord snooped on tenants to find out information about their finances. A woman repeatedly accessed her ex-boyfriend's account after a difficult breakup. Another obtained her child's father's address so she could serve him court papers.

All worked for Wisconsin's largest utility, where employees routinely accessed confidential information about acquaintances, local celebrities and others from its massive customer database.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press in an employment case involving Milwaukee-based WE Energies shine a light on a common practice in the utilities, telecommunications and accounting industries, privacy experts say.

Vast computer databases give curious employees the ability to look up sensitive information on people with the click of a mouse. The WE Energies database includes credit and banking information, payment histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and energy usage. In some cases, it even includes income and medical information.

Experts say some companies do little to stop such abuses even though they could lead to identity theft, stalking and other privacy invasions. And companies that uncover violations can keep them quiet because in many cases it is not illegal to snoop, only to use the data for crimes.

Honestly, don't they realize how bad this makes them look? Put a stop to it. Fire the people responsible. It's not that hard.

Unless you really WANT some brutally draconian privacy laws passed, in which case, fine, make your bed. See if I care when you have to lay in it.

Source: The Associated Press

Milkshake
A discussion of the pop culture phrase 'I Drink Your Milkshake!' and its proper usage.

Source: New York Magazine

ID Thieves
So apparently an ID thief stole the identify of a seven-year old kid. They've been using it for six years for employment purposes, to duck paying taxes.

The IRS actually told the kid, or more likely his parents, that he owes 60,000 in back taxes. Apparently they're not too bright at the Revenue Service, failing to realize that, under US law, it would have been illegal for a 1 year old to be drawing such a paycheck to start with.

Yeesh. What the hell kind of background checks do these employers/IRS types run?

Source: Raw Story

They Have to Be Kidding
So it seems that the Director of National Intelligence's underlings are so happy with their performance eliminating terror from the real world using color coded charts that they're ready to move into the world of videogames.

Well, ok, to be a bit more fair, they think that you could use a social game environment to organize real world activities.

Or, you know, a chat room. Or email. Or web pages. Or pigeons with little paper messages tied to their legs.

Of course, if you really want to leave a billing trail and have all of your activities potentially monitored by the company running the game, by all means.

Source: Wired

Jack Thompson
So good old anti-videogame crusader and general nuisance Jack Thompson is in big legal trouble in Florida. It seems that the Florida Supreme Court is sick and tired of his 'frivolous and inappropriate filings' and is going ahead with a plan to essentially ban him from practicing law without another laqyer to vouch for him; sort of a set of legal training wheels.

This guy is non-stop hilarity. He actually thinks this is a good thing for him too.

Source: Daily Tech

Good Night, Ulysses
So NASA and the ESA have been operating a probe mission to study the sun's magnetic field for the last seventeen years. The probe is appropriately named Ulysses, after the Greek explorer.

WASHINGTON - The joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission to study the sun and its influence on surrounding space is likely to cease operations in the next few months. The venerable spacecraft, which has lasted more than 17 years or almost four times its expected mission lifetime, is succumbing to the harsh environment of space.

Ulysses was the first mission to survey the space environment above and below the poles of the sun. The reams of data Ulysses returned have forever changed the way scientists view our star and its effects.

"I remember when we got those first pictures of Ulysses floating out of the space shuttle Discovery's payload bay back in October of 1990 and thinking we had a great five years ahead of us," said Ed Massey, Ulysses project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "I never dared think that we would be receiving invaluable science data on a near continuous basis for more than 17 years. Ulysses has set the bar on solar science data collection quite high."

Science findings and discoveries from the mission were numerous and unprecedented. Examples include taking the first direct measurements of interstellar dust particles and interstellar helium atoms in the solar system and the discovery that the magnetic field leaving the sun is balanced across latitudes.

...

Since its Jupiter flyby in 1992, Ulysses has been in a six-year orbit around the sun. Its long path through space carries it out to Jupiter's orbit and back. The farther it ventures from the sun, the colder the spacecraft becomes. If it drops to 2 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit), the spacecraft's hydrazine fuel will freeze. This has not been a problem in the past because Ulysses carries heaters to maintain a workable onboard temperature.

The spacecraft is powered by the decay of a radioactive isotope. Over its 17-plus years, the power has been steadily dropping. The spacecraft no longer can run all of its communications, heating and scientific equipment simultaneously. "We expect certain parts of the spacecraft to reach 2 degrees Celsius pretty soon," said Richard Marsden, ESA project scientist and mission manager. This temperature drop will block the fuel pipes, making the spacecraft impossible to maneuver.

We'll see you around, little probe. Thanks for the hard work.

Source: NASA

P.S. Normally I'd make some sort of diatribe here against the luddites who don't want to use any probes in space that run off of radioactive decay, which would limit our scientific exploration to the inner solar system and so forth. Those people are complete morons, and Ulysses shows why; but this is not the place to mock their slope-foreheaded ignorance.

I'll save that for the next time.

Big Ideas, Little Foresight
So it seems that Haiti's deforestation problem is growing even worse, and may be completely beyond the point of no return.

GRAND COLLINE, Haiti (AP) - Far from the spreading slums of the Haitian capital, past barren dirt mountains and hillsides stripped to a chalky white core, two woodcutters bring down a towering oak tree in one of the few forested valleys left in the Caribbean country.

Fanel Cantave, 36, says he has little choice but to make his living in a way that is causing environmental disaster in Haiti. And these days, he and his 15-year-old son, Phillipe, must travel ever farther from their village to find trees to cut.

"There is no other way to get money," the father said, pushing his saw through splintering wood that will earn him as much as $12.50, depending on how many planks it produces.

Such raw economics explain the disappearance of Haiti's forests, a process that has led to erosion that has reduced scarce farm land and left the island vulnerable to deadly flooding.

Ahh, but surely the United States could intervene with a half-baked plan to save the natives from themselves, right?

U.N. experts say just 2 to 4 percent of forest cover remains in Haiti, down from 7 to 9 percent in 1981. And despite millions invested in reforestation, such efforts have mostly failed because of economic pressures and political turmoil.

For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development embarked on an ambitious $22.8 million project in the 1980s to plant some 30 million trees that could provide income for peasants. But the project focused on trees that can be made into charcoal for cooking, and nearly all were eventually cut down.

Oops. The Quiet Americans strike again.

Meanwhile, smaller groups try to hold back the ocean with buckets, but that's not working either.

Compared to the USAID's failed plan, smaller programs have had more luck by focusing on fruit trees, which farmers are more likely to preserve to sell the fruit. And smaller organizations are able to work with individual farmers and tailor planting to the needs of specific areas.

"People aren't excited about, 'Hey let's go plant trees.' They're excited about, 'How can I feed my family? How can I make ends meet?'" said Scott Sabin, executive director of Floresta.

But many who are dedicated to restoring Haiti's forests have grown pessimistic. Despite small successes, prospects are grim for implementing such programs on a grand scale.

"Everything has been studied and all the solutions are already known," said Mousson Finnigan, the head of the Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Environment. "But when it comes to implementation, it becomes a place where everybody's fighting for the money. They're not fighting for results."

So in the end, the tragedy of the commons plays out on a grand scale.

"In Haiti we destroy instead of produce," acknowledges LeClaire Bocage, 38, who sells 110-pound sacks for $6.25. "They're going to tell the poor to stop cutting down trees. But what will we do to make a living?"

Never fear, though, Haiti! We have another plan for you to help us out, err, help yourselves.

It may be too late to restore Haiti's lost forests, said John Horton, an environmental specialist who has overseen Haiti projects for the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank. He suggested planting crops that can stabilize the soil and be sold or used for bio-fuels. Others promote raising money through carbon credits from overseas firms emitting greenhouse gases elsewhere.

"They need cash crops, they need food, they need energy immediately," Horton said.

Yes, grow biofuels instead of food! Or plant trees to soak up our carbon (which other people will just burn down again).

Sigh. Man... I just... Yeah.

Source: My Way News

What to Do With Pesky Heathens
From the Skeptic's Annotated Bible:

2:8 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.
2:9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

That'll teach those heathens! Slavery and death!

Err, wait a second. That's not good...

Source: The Skeptic's Annotated Bible