Science Update

I Have Nothing Interesting To Say Here

Ancient Swede
So there's a new World's Oldest Tree, which has taken the throne from those uppity Bristlecone Pines in America.

The world's oldest living tree on record is a nearly 10,000 year-old spruce that has been discovered in central Sweden, Umeaa University said on Thursday.

Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.

That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.

"It was a big surprise because we thought until (now) that this kind of spruce grew much later in those regions," he said.

That is oooooooooooooold.

Don't expect intelligent commentary here. I just got up from a nap.

Apparently this tree is way older than they thought they had arrived here, and the article mentions something about them being climate change bellwethers, so I'm guessing what they mean is that the last ice age in Sweden ended earlier than they thought, or something. It's sparse on the details. Ancient history seems to be impacted by this lonely survivor, regardless.

Source: Raw Story

Cold
The coldest star ever found has been located. It's only 660 degrees at the surface -- cooler than Venus.

April 11, 2008 -- A dim, lonely, weakling star with the lowest stellar temperature yet recorded has been found just 40 light-years from Earth.

The brown dwarf star is between 15 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter and has a surface temperature of a mild 660 degrees Fahrenheit (350 Celsius) -- about the surface temperature of the planet Mercury at the equator and much cooler than the surface of Venus.

The spectacularly unspectacular object is of special interest because it falls right smack in the middle of the final frontier that divides mega-planets from the puniest stars. Stars in that realm theoretically qualify as an entirely new stellar type -- what's called a Y class dwarf.

The article mentions the possibility of even colder stars, stars perhaps cool enough to have liquid water in their atmospheres.

It's likely, says Burgasser, that as more of these even cooler dwarfs are found, there likely will be some that are a couple of hundred degrees cooler than CFBDS0059. That means any water in there atmospheres will condense into droplets of water vapor, which would make these dwarfs dramatically different than their L and T dwarf brothers.

In brown dwarf atmospheres, water is generally in gaseous state, while in giant planets it condenses into water ice. So an even cooler dwarf would truly be on the verge of being more of a hot, giant Jupiter than a star.

That's amazingly odd. Imagine if there is a star out there somewhere just warm enough to keep water liquid. You could have life as we know it living on a *star*.

Wacky.

Source: Discovery Channel News

RFI-Death
So an engineer who suffered through radiation therapy thought he had a better way to do it -- and it seems like he was on to something.

A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials.

Kanzius RF therapy attaches microscopic nanoparticles to cancer cells and then "cooks" tumors inside the body with harmless radio waves.

Based on technology developed by Pennsylvania inventor John Kanzius, a retired radio and TV engineer, the treatment has proven 100 percent effective at killing cancer cells while leaving neighboring healthy cells unharmed. It is currently being tested at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“I don’t want to give people false hope,” said Dr. Steve Curley, the professor leading the tests, “but this has the potential to treat a wide variety of cancers.”

Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

Kanzius RF therapy is noninvasive, and uses nontoxic radio waves combined with gold or carbon nanoparticles, which have a long history of medical use.

Essentially, you take nano-particles of gold, coat them in a chemical that only cancer cells absorb, then inject it. The cancer takes up the chemically coated gold. Then you blast the area of the body with a radio source.. the gold absorbs the radio waves, heats up, and kills whatever cells it's in. But if you had the right chemical, it's only inside cancer. Voila! Perfectly targeted radiation therapy.

Very nice.

Source: Wired

Chimeratech
I'd heard about a technique like this to create genetically modified animals but I guess this is the first time someone's thought about using it as a backdoor to cloning without Dolly-esque age symptoms.

The mice were made by inserting skin cells of an adult animal into early embryos produced by in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Some of the resulting offspring were partial clones but some were full clones – just like Dolly.

Unlike the Dolly technique, however, the procedure is so simple and efficient that it has raised fears that it will be seized on by IVF doctors to help infertile couples who are eager to have their own biological children.

...

The experiments on mice demonstrated that it is now possible in principle to take a human skin cell, reprogramme it back to its embryonic state and then insert it into an early human embryo. The resulting child would share some of the genes of the person who supplied the skin tissue, as well as the genes of the embryo's two parents.

These offspring are chimeras – a genetic mix of two or more individuals – because some of their cells derive from the embryo and some from the skin cell. Technically, such a child would have three biological parents. Human chimeras occur naturally when two embryos fuse in the womb and such people are often normal and healthy. Dr Lanza says there is no reason to believe that a human chimera created by the new technique would be unhealthy.

Furthermore, studies on mice have shown that it is possible to produce fully cloned offspring that are 100 per cent genetically identical to the adult. This was achieved by using a type of defective mouse embryo with four sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two.

This "tetraploid" embryo only developed into the placenta of the foetus and when it was injected with a reprogrammed skin cell, the rest of the foetus developed from this single cell to become a full clone of the adult animal whose skin was used.

I fail to see the horror here. The clone would be genetically identical to their parent, or whoever donated the cells. So... what, exactly? Granted, you'll probably get some creepy Jim Jones/Koresh type making his own little Clone Army, but is that really substantially worse than the current situation, where they just marry a couple dozen 10-14 year old girls?

From a safety perspective I oppose using a technique like this on people until we have all the bugs worked out, of course. But I can't find any ethical reason per se to hate *the clones*. They'll just be additional people. Despite what sci-fi movies might say, they won't be any more soulless or murderous than the rest of us, or at least, their donor-parent.

Source: The Independent

Bollocks
Apparently the new CEO of Virgin Media doesn't understand either the law, or the proper method to do business.

Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media (my ISP at home in London, along with BT) has announced that he considers Net Neutrality to be "a load of bollocks" and he's promised to put any website or service that won't pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the "Internet bus lane."

Cory Doctorow has started a campaign to switch from Verizon in response. Normally I think he's had a bit too much dandelion tea, but he's right on this issue. I'm just not sure it goes far enough.

See, telecoms are protected from being sued for what they host/serve on the basis of what's known as the Common Carrier provision. Essentially, the Supreme Court decided back in the days of big railroad that you were protected from lawsuits and a lot of regulation as to what you carried, as long as you carried cargo more or less impartially to all who asked and paid. This concept of an undiscerning, very low-barrier to entry transportation entity has been carried over to the telecoms, who can't be sued for, say, a mobster ordering a hit via cell phone, or a hacker using the net to breach a hospital's mainframe, just because they provide the service over which it was done.

Truthfully, until very recently, it was impossible to track that volume of information, so without common carrier it would have been legally impossible to run a telecom.

But here we have the big telcos who want to have it both ways; they want to be legally protected from their customers' actions, and they want to be able to regulate them too. That's just not kosher; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're in the business of regulating your customers and what they can access, then you should be liable for their crimes, infringement, what have you. Every mp3 downloaded, every stolen program or game, all of it, your liability.

I think the EFF or ACLU should sue any telco that steps over the line for any and all illegal activity on their network. If we bloody their noses, maybe they'll realize that the old way really is the best.

Sources: Boing Boing
Wikipedia

Upas
Another plant I want to own someday: the Upas tree.

Antiaris toxicaria (Upas or Ipoh) is an evergreen tree in the family Moraceae, native to southeastern Asia, from India and Sri Lanka east to southern China, the Philippines and Fiji; closely related species also occur in eastern Africa. It produces a highly poisonous latex, known in Java as "Upas", from the Javanese word for "poison".

...

The name of the upas tree became legendary from the mendacious account (professedly by one Foersch, who was a surgeon at Semarang in 1773) published in the London Magazine, December 1783, and popularized by Erasmus Darwin in Loves of the Plants (The Botanic Garden, pt. ii.). The tree was said to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 miles or more.

Sadly it's apparently a large tree, so this will have to wait until my compound is complete.

Source: Wikipedia

Slither
This story's been going around, it even made it into Atomic Age humor last night.

EUGENE, Ore. -- A 12-foot snake attacked a female employee of a pet store, prompting assistance from police, firefighters and emergency personnel Thursday.

Sergeant Ryan Nelson had never tangled with a snake larger than a garter snake before Thursday.

All that changed, however, when he responded to a 911 call at 3:41 p.m. to find a woman in a Eugene pet store completely wrapped by a 12-foot Burmese python that was slowly constricting around her, police said.

Nelson saw the woman was in grave danger and feared for her life. But as he pulled out his knife in
preparation to save the woman, matters got more difficult.

She pleaded with Nelson not to injure the snake.

Long story short, everybody lives, though the snake loses a few teeth when they had to pry it off. This is very odd behavior for a constrictor -- they generally are very docile sorts, and don't even consider attacking anything too big to consume. The only way they have to attack something is to grapple with it, as seen here, and if that something is too big, it could easily, say, rip them to shreds. The woman could have killed the snake herself, no problem, but didn't want to. Evolutionarily, hyperaggressive constrictor snakes are a bad move. So I sort of wonder what happened to get this poor snake so angry.

Source: Fox 12 Oregon

London Smells
Apparently all of London smells like crap.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A foul smell permeating London and parts of England over the past two days is due to farmers on the European continent spreading manure in their fields, forecasters and British farmers said Saturday.

The agricultural odor is inescapable in central London and smells vaguely of farmland or even garbage.

Forecasters said a stiff breeze from the east is carrying the smell across the North Sea from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. They said the smell is likely to hang around through the weekend as the easterly wind continues.

"You can't say it's going to smell for two days, but the wind is coming in from the same direction," said Chris Almond, a forecaster with the Met Office, Britain's weather service.

"It's not really until Monday, Tuesday that we'll see a change in the wind direction, with a more marked improvement in air quality."

He said the smell had probably been stagnating in those countries for a few days, resulting in a more pungent aroma once the winds brought it to England.

There's even a monstrously boring political sideline to this story, but I can't bring myself to care, beyond the hilarity that an entire city reeks of cow crap.

Well, it's hilarious because I don't have to live there.

Source: CNN.com

Cold Storage
Another one of those stories about how people can survive long durations without oxygen if you get them really, really cold.

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A gust of wind blew a 2-year-old in a stroller into Lake Michigan, where the boy remained submerged for at least 15 minutes before being pulled out unconscious but alive.

The child's grandfather, who had been pushing the stroller on the lakeside Friday afternoon, jumped into the harbor to try to save the boy, the Chicago Fire Department said.

...

The toddler was strapped in the three-wheeled jogging stroller about 10 feet below the surface of the 42-degree water before rescue divers pulled him out.

They should be thankful it was so cold. If the water had been warm and he'd been without O2 for that long he'd be a corpse.

But thanks to the miracles of hypothermia, his brain may well have survived, on ice so to speak, without the lack of oxygen killing all his neurons. That sort of thing happens with these exposure cases sometimes. Hopefully it will here too.

Man strollers are windy death traps though. Mythbusters had the same thing come up in a test of whether trains could blow/suck people on to the tracks. The stroller + dummy combo just went sailing down the rails after the train.

Source: CNN.com

Pre-Dinner Science

Soon I Shall Explore the Science of Tacos

Emo Tree
What terrible force can lead a tree to such depths of depression?

We may never know.

Source: The Daily Telepgraph

Similar Features
Not an Etheridge song, but a solar system very similar to our own, if a bit small.

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.

They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.

...

"It's a kind of scaled-down version of our Solar System. The star the planets are orbiting is half as massive as the Sun and they orbit half as distant to their host star as Jupiter and Saturn orbit around the Sun," said Dr Dominik.

Pint-sized.

The researchers hope to find Earth-like worlds soon using these techniques, which would be great. The more stuff like this we find, the further the religious fundies have to bury their heads to ignore it, and eventually they'll just wander off into their own little dreamworlds. I hope.

Source: BBC News

Creepy
A NASA office building apparently may have an astonishing rate of cancer.

CLEVELAND -- There are 40 cases of cancer among people who work in the same building at NASA Glenn Research Center.

Dozens of the employees fear that their cancer was triggered by years of working in the developmental engineering building, NewsChannel5 reported.

The union that represents hundreds of scientists and other workers said nearly half of the 100 employees on the third floor of the building have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer in the past three to four years.

"What we've seen in the way of cancer here has just been astronomical on this third floor alone and we're just a little scared," said Dennis Pehotsky, of the Lewis Engineers and Scientists Association.

In a written statement, the head of safety at NASA Glenn said an employee survey shows cancer rates among workers are within the normal range, saying "Glenn management has no evidence of the number of cases that the union is reporting."

Union officials said they believe many employees feared reprisal for answering the survey honestly.

Wow. If this is right, there has to be something off about that building. I wonder what could have changed recently to make it so toxic. A chemical spill? Exposed insulation?

Source: WEWS Cleveland News

Stem Cells Again
Yet another possible cure for a heinous disease derived from stem cells or their artificial equivalents.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Skin cells re-programmed to act like embryonic stem cells eased symptoms of Parkinson's disease in rats, researchers reported on Monday in a first step toward tailored treatments for people that bypass concerns about using human embryos.

The experiment suggests it may be possible to take a small sample of skin and turn it into a transplant perfectly matched to patients with Parkinson's and other diseases, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It also supports the usefulness of newly created cells that resemble powerful embryonic stem cells. The stem cell experts used so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are skin cells reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells.

...

Stem cells taken from very early embryos appear to be the most malleable and the most powerful. But many people object to their use because the embryo usually must be destroyed to extract them.

Several teams have reported a way to re-program ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells by adding several genes. Jaenisch's team tested some of these cells in rats and mice. They first got such cells to take up residence in the brains of unborn mice.

...

Then they damaged the brains of rats to resemble Parkinson's, which is caused by the destruction of certain brain cells that produce a message-carrying chemical called dopamine. Patients lose abilities associated with movement, and progress from a type of shakiness to paralysis and death.

There is no cure. Transplants of cells from fetuses have offered some relief from symptoms in a few people.

In the rats, the cell transplants improved symptoms markedly, the researchers said.

...

Viruses are used to carry the new genes into the skin cells and transform them, an approach that could cause cancer.

But the researchers said their approach is equivalent to so-called therapeutic cloning, which uses cloning technology to create perfectly matched cell transplants. Last month a team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York said they used the cloning approach to treat Parkinson's in mice.

It's a big breakthrough, but wouldn't it be simpler to just create real embryos to fix people, from their own DNA/cellular material?

Oh wait, we can't do that, because God in his infinite wisdom wants us to suffer and die. So sayeth the religious right.

At least until they get sick.

Source: Raw Story

Watery
Our water infrastructure is as badly off as our roads, trains, bridges, power, energy production and agriculture, it seems.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

This isn't entirely the fault of the GOP, but their constant 'lower taxes, fewer services' mantra has hurt a lot.

On the brighter side, check out the amusing anecdote they start the story with.

Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

People are so stupid they will drive out of their way to drink MYSTERIOUS WATER.

Man, where's dysentery when you need it?

Source: Raw Story

Lies
So the Pentagon is issuing a new 'lie detector' to troops in Iraq, whose results will be used to help make life and death decisions.

Pity it doesn't work worth a damn and the whole thing is a con.

planning to give US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "hand-held lie detectors" aimed at rooting out potential insurgents and terrorists. But polygraph experts doubt the system's accuracy and Defense Department memos show results of the few tests that were run were manipulated to demonstrate more success with them than was achieved, according to an MSNBC investigative reporter.

"The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing," MSNBC's Bill Dedman reports. "The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well."

The Pentagon argues the portable polygraphs have accuracy rates up to 90 percent, but Dedman reports the military arrived at those figures by omitting some results from the tests. The Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, or PCASS, uses a hand-held computer that analyzes readings from censors attached to an interviewees hand and wrist. The computer displays "Green" if it believes the person is honest, "Red" if they are being deceptive and "Yellow" if it is unsure.

The Pentagon, in a PowerPoint presentation released to msnbc.com through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the PCASS is 82 to 90 percent accurate. Those are the only accuracy numbers that were sent up the chain of command at the Pentagon before the device was approved.

But Pentagon studies obtained by msnbc.com show a more complicated picture: In calculating its accuracy, the scientists conducting the tests discarded the yellow screens, or inconclusive readings.

That practice was criticized in the 2003 National Academy study, which said the "inconclusives" have to be included to measure accuracy. If you take into account the yellow screens, the PCASS accuracy rate in the three Pentagon-funded tests drops to the level of 63 to 79 percent.

63 percent. That's the best they can manage?

People are going to DIE because of this device. Our guys and Iraqi civilians. We're going to see actual bombers let go and innocent people shot, all because the Pentagon wanted to roll out a shiny toy.

Shameful.

Source: Raw Story

More Hep
Basically, 'Made in China' means 'DO NOT CONSUME' these days.

More than 100 people have died from taking the blood thinner heparin, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday, after imports of the drug were halted due to contamination linked to production in China.

The 103 deaths reported to the FDA of patients who had been using heparin occurred between January 2007 and February 2008, the agency said on its website. Sixty-two of those deaths were reported to have involved allergic reactions.

The FDA on March 5 said it had detected an unidentified contaminant in heparin injections sold by Baxter International pharmaceuticals.

It was determined that most of the active ingredients in the drug came from a plant in Changzou, China working with Wisconsin-based Scientific Protein Laboratories, which supplies Baxter.

Nice job, FDA. Nice job screening our medicine supply.

Source: Raw Story

Quasars
An article about quasars, which apparently dwarfed hypernovae in terms of raw power. I apologize to quasars for not paying them enough attention.

On the other hand, they apparently no longer exist, so hypernovae are still the current champs.

Source: The Independent

Polar Bear Madness
So apparently the Germans have a polar bear war on their hands.

You might not think it, to look at these cuddly pictures, but the prospect of a polar bear "war" was looming large over Germany yesterday.

Flocke, a recently born cub who caught the public imagination by being rejected by parents and raised by humans, was making a long-awaited public debut – accompanied by her keepers, including Horst Maussner (right), before a 350-strong crowd of excited press photographers, TV camera crews and cheering fans. The four month-old female, whose name translates as "snowflake", has been described by the local media as the arch rival, in the battle for Germany's public affection, to Knut – another polar bear cub, who was born at Berlin Zoo in 2006 and also raised entirely by humans.

At present, Knut can still claim the title of world's most famous polar bear (after all, a Hollywood film has been made about him), but Flocke is catching up fast. Her backers spent yesterday plastering Nuremberg with hundreds of pink posters bearing a suitably cuddly image of Flocke and the barbed message, "Knut was yesterday".

Honestly Germans, is there nothing you can't fight about?

Meanwhile it seems there's a campaign against raising these bears with human keepers.

While some insist that bears born in zoos have a right to human intervention to save and secure their lives, others such as the German animal rights activist, Frank Albrecht argue that they become so dependent on man that they end up divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks.

"Knut is a problem bear who has become addicted to human beings," he said.

The German zoologist Peter Arras has described Knut as a "psychopath".

The debate has grown following the birth of three polar bear cubs at Nuremberg Zoo to two different female bears. A team of highly experienced zoologists initially argued that nature must be allowed to take its course. They allowed one of the females, which had rejected its two cubs, to kill and eat her offspring because they were too weak to survive.

But the zoo's "bear infanticide" policy coincided with television pictures designed to melt the heart of anybody who cannot help assuming that polar bears are just like human beings. They showed the zoo's other female polar bear, Vera, carrying her female cub, called Flocke or Snowflake, by the scruff of its neck through her enclosure.

Within hours of the images being broadcast, Nuremberg Zoo had performed a complete policy U-turn: a keeper was sent into Vera's enclosure and Flocke was removed "for its own safety". Amid growing fears that the last remaining cub might also be eaten the zoo promptly announced that the cub would be fed from a bottle.

"I don't think anyone could have stood it, if we had allowed our last bear cub to be eaten by its mum," said Nuremberg's deputy mayor.

I'm not sure a dead bear is inherently better than a live one. It's entirely possible that in the wild the mother bear would have been less stressed and not eaten them.

In any case, Knut's mother was a disturbed circus reject. There's nothing 'natural' about that. You might as well save him as not, given the circumstances.

Finally, the article repeats the old canard that polar bears aren't in trouble.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's Environment Minister, has adopted the bear, claiming him as a symbol of the world's endangered species. Yet evidence suggests that polar bears are not facing extinction, even if the ice caps are melting. Alaska. home to a fifth of the world's 25,000 polar bears, currently has its largest bear population in 40 years.

Sigh. From my post about Glen Beck:

There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”

Those flakes at the USGS! You know they're just a bunch of dirty hippies.

Source: The Independent
The Independent

H Plane
So Boeing has developed a hydrogen powered plane. Sort of.

The first aircraft to use only a hydrogen battery for power in the air has successfully completed a test flight. The US company Boeing said that the flight, in Ocaña, central Spain, was “a historical technological success for Boeing [and] full of promises for a greener future”.

The aircraft, which is capable of carrying two people and has a wingspan of 16 metres (52ft), flew at 100km/h (62mph) for 20 minutes. Hydrogen power involves fuel cells using the energy produced from the transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. According to Boeing, it provides a cleaner and renewable energy resource because it produces only water vapour as waste.

The director of the Boeing research centre at Ocaña, Francisco EscartÍ, said that hydrogen batteries could become the main source of energy for small aircraft, but that they were unlikely to power larger passenger aircraft.

In other words, it's a nice PR stunt. Nothing more.

Meanwhile of course you get the hydrogen propaganda about 'only water vapor as waste'. Nevermind that you make hydrogen by splitting water with huge amounts of electricity. Which you get from power plants.

Most of which burn fossil fuels.

Which aren't exactly clean.

Idiots.

Source: The Times Online

Advancing the Frontiers of Retroactive Cartography
It's a new field, but as with so many dubious things, the South leads the way.

Lawmakers in drought-parched Georgia voted Friday to ask mapmakers to redraw their state's northern boundary in hopes of tapping the Tennessee River, in a vote that potentially escalates a conflict with their neighbor.

If negotiations fail, the bill would authorize Georgia's top attorney to file a lawsuit to try forcing a boundary change.

The House and Senate both approved the measure on the legislative session's final day. It now goes to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who has not said whether he supports it.

Congress in 1796 designated that Tennessee's southern borders stretch along the 35th parallel, but surveyors in 1818 were a bit off the mark. They now know that the border was placed about 1.1 miles south of where it should be.

The resolution asserts that the flawed survey mistakenly placed Georgia's northern line just short of the Tennessee River, which has about 15 times greater flow than the one burgeoning Atlanta depends on for water.

Tennessee hasn't taken kindly to Georgia's drought-inspired bid; lawmakers there have reacted with a mix of scorn and humor.

This instead of facing their lack of infrastructure like adults, building reservoirs and the like.

If Georgia can't solve a problem by cheating, they might have to work hard! That sucks! It would take time away from their banjo practice and moonshine distillation!

Source: Raw Story

Dimwit Analysis
So a misanthropic jerk at The Reg thinks that Al Gore's green initiatives will be bad for the public because they'll create high paying jobs.

What?

Al Gore is unleashing the climate campaign you can't ignore, in the shape of www.wecansolveit.org, which will spend $300 million to sign up some millions of people who will march, write letters and like, agitate. In the face of this government and business will be forced - the plan goes - to take climate change seriously.

Clearly it's all being done for the very best of reasons: no man could need more than a Nobel and an Oscar to assure him of his status. But all that money being spent to get governments to do as Al Gore thinks they should ought to give us pause for thought.

And unfortunately, there's a flaw at the heart of the plan - a failure of economic logic which rather undermines the justification for the whole campaign:

"Thousands of new companies, millions of new jobs, and billions in revenue generated by solutions to the climate crisis - this is the clean energy economy we can adopt with today's technologies, resources, know-how, and leadership from our elected officials."

Leave aside the absurdity of our (or anyone elses') elected officials being able to create jobs, companies or revenues: if they could they wouldn't be elected representatives, would they? They'd be off getting rich. Look rather at those claims that the plan will create all those jobs, all those revenues: they clearly think that this is a good idea, a benefit of the plan. But it isn't a benefit, it's a cost.

Because everyone wants to be a rich businessman! Nobody ever does anything for altruistic reasons, or base power, ambition and advancement!

But all three of them are making the same error, what Bastiat in 1850 (clearly, 158 years isn't long enough for such a simple point to sink into politicians' brains) called the Broken Window Fallacy, or as it is sometimes known, the make work fallacy. For, as I say, all those jobs, all those revenues, are properly counted as a cost of such schemes, not a benefit.

When we come to evaluate a plan we need to know how wonderfully fabulous the results are going to be. I'm certainly not going to try and argue that a richer world without the threat of climate change would be less than wonderfully fabulous. But as well as that elysian future, we have to work out what it is going to cost us to get from here to there. That means being very careful in how we work out what are the costs. It might still be a good idea, just as it might not be, but this is exactly what our cost benefit analysis is designed to tell us: will it all be worth it?

Al's actual campaign will certainly be worth it: the dweebs that populate the green movement need opportunities to congregate and repopulate just as much as any other unfortunate section of society: otherwise who will the next generation buy their burgers from? But will the actions we are being urged to take be worth it?

HAHA dirty hippies always end up working at McDonalds HA HA HA my 150 year old economics will shatter their dirty dreams!

So consider what happens when we 'create' millions of jobs. Yes, certainly, millions of people then have jobs. That's wonderful for them of course, although quite why everyone insists that it is a good idea that these are 'high paying”' jobs rather escapes: that rather means that whoever is buying their products (i.e., us) is paying more than if they were low paying jobs. But much more important is what is unseen here. What would those people be doing if they weren't doing these newly created jobs? Something else, certainly, we've not just sown dragon's teeth to create these new workers now, have we? And what was it that they were doing previously?

Yes, it's better that people (other than the author of course) work cheap, so he can afford lots of cheap swag to line his apartment!

Everyone else can go fuck themselves!

Things are a little different if all those who take these jobs were previously in involuntary unemployment, but mass unemployment isn't something that's all that prevalent in either the US or the UK.

Check the latest figures for the US there, Kreskin. Unemployment is up SHARPLY. A huge number of people aren't even counted on the rolls as they've GIVEN UP HOPE ENTIRELY. Meanwhile, job creation has been consistently below new job seekers for about two years.

But other than being factually wrong, please, continue.

Certainly not amongst the skilled workers who would be needed to design, build and install the new glorious renewable energy systems, at least. So all of our new found workforce would have in fact come from doing something else. It doesn't really matter what else either, not to make the basic point. For we lose whatever else it was that they were doing at the same time as we gain our bright shiny new energy system. They might have been wiping babies' bottoms, stacking shelves at Albertson's or working to cure cancer. Whatever it was, that they are now not doing those things is a cost to us: smelly babies, the Great Famine that would follow Albertson's running out of food, the cancer that will get about a third of us, these are all costs.

See? You should give up your hope of gainful, meaningful employment so you can stock his shelves and wipe his baby's ass!

Or cure cancer. It's not like doctors are already a highly skilled and paid profession... oh wait. So they already DO contribute to higher costs and job defection from stocking grocery shelves!

The fiends!

They might indeed be bearable costs, they might even be worthwhile costs, it might make perfect sense for us to incur them to stop Manhattan from sinking under the waves: but costs they are and as costs we have to account for them.

Which is what makes all the willy waving so silly: what we actually want is someone to come up with a plan that doesn't create new jobs, one that doesn't cause us losses elsewhere. We actually want people to be boasting about how their plan destroys jobs, want what no man has yet done, people to boast of their micro-dicks. As, say, supermarkets themselves have:

"The New Economics Foundation has calculated that every £50,000 spent in small local shops creates one job. You must spend £250,000 in superstores for the same result."

How excellent, eh? Supermarkets use fewer resources (for the labour of a human being is most certainly a resource) but get the same job done. Our retail requirements are catered for and instead of five people working to do so, only one is. The other four are able to go off and wipe bottoms and/or cure cancer. We thus get both our groceries and fresh smelling babies (and perhaps that cancer cure will come before my Marlboros kick in). Excellent, we're richer, all of us as a society, by using less labour to complete a task.

That is why these claims of job creation should be treated as costs, not benefits, when we try to evaluate these schemes and, similarly, why the boosters of these plans are guilty of economic illogic.

Yes, it's great that people get trapped in dead end, low paying supermarket jobs forever, rather than own their own stores and contribute to their local communities in the form of taxes.

We should be on our knees THANKING Wal-Mart et all for their grotesque concentration of wealth at the top! It keeps productivity up by turning our towns and cities into wastelands of misery and poverty!

This is very closely related to the concept of opportunity cost: you can only use a resource, the labour of a person for example, to do one thing at one time. Which means that there is indeed a huge benefit to Al running this WE thing: if he's doing that he can't run for President again. Lucky, eh?

Oh yes, it's much better that we have a moron Texas-transplant oil man who has plunged the Middle East into a hellstorm of violence and death. What's a million Iraqi corpses as long as we don't have some DIRTY HIPPY running the country into the ground with his high paying jobs and clean energy programs?

THANK GOD WE AVOIDED THAT TRAGEDY

This is one of the stupidest, most selfish, narcissistic loads of crap I have ever read in my life. It stands as some of the rankest hypocrisy on record. What does the author do for a living, you might ask? How does he contribute to the lowering of wages and rise of efficiency?

Tim Worstall knows more about rare metals than most might think wise, and writes for himself at timworstall.com, and for The Business, among others. He is a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute.

Oh, he's a web columnist, psuedo economist and writer!

For shame, Tim! You could be wiping baby ass!

Idiot. Colossally elitist idiot.

Source: The Register

Pinch
I need to get one of these.

Many high-voltage electronics enthusiasts make their own devices using pulsed power techniques to produce a theta pinch capable of crushing an aluminium soft drink can by pressure of strong magnetic field. (Warning! High-voltage electric shocks may be lethal).

An electromagnetic aluminium can crusher consists of four main components (1) A high voltage DC power supply which provides a source of electrical energy (2) A large energy discharge capacitor to accumulate the electrical energy (3) A high voltage switch or spark gap and (4) A robust coil (capable of surviving high magnetic pressure) through which the stored electrical energy can be quickly discharged in order to generate a correspondingly strong pinching magnetic field (see diagram below).

Of course, I'd want to use the magnetic field for evil, not can crushing.

Source: Wikipedia

Venus
Results out of the ESA's Venus Express probe suggest that Venus lost its water too quickly to become Earthlike.

In the early stages of the Solar System, Venus seems to have evolved very rapidly compared to the Earth. Data from Venus Express supports the theory that the Earth’s twin once had significant volume of water covering the surface but it appears that these oceans were lost in a very short geological timescale.

As a result of the loss of water, the geological evolution of the surface of Venus slowed right down because it was unable to develop plate tectonics like the Earth. Biological evolution was prevented altogether. Thus, in terms of Venus being another Earth in climate and habitability terms, it evolved too quickly at first, then too slowly.

'They may have started out looking very much the same,' said Professor Taylor, 'but increasingly we have evidence that Venus lost most of its water and Earth lost most of its atmospheric carbon dioxide.'

Bummer.

From what I';ve read the Earth, if it lived long enough, would die the same way, as plate tectonics constantly sips at our water supply where ocean plates plunge into the earth. Some water gets sucked down and locked up too where it lubricates the plate movement, and thus, eventually, there's no more water to be sucked, which would lock up the plates like Venus.

Of course we'll probably have been burnt to a cinder by then, so who cares much.

Source: Science Daily

First Korean Astronaut
The article focuses on fluff, but the event is worth noting. South Korea's first astronaut will be going up to the ISS soon.

South Korea's first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow crew.

"We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it's a secret what is the song," Yi So-Yeon, 29, said at a press conference at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she is set to blast off on Tuesday.

Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: "Wow!"

She also told reporters that she hoped people in North Korea would share in the "triumph" of her mission, which starts Tuesday when she blasts up into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

A South Korean space official said that Yi's 12-day mission would cost South Korea around 20 million dollars (12.8 million euros) and that he hoped the flight would help further his country's manned space flight ambitions.

An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they are being held in quarantine for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.

Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961. Yi, Volkov and Kononenko will be blasting off from the same launch pad as Gagarin.

Good for South Korea, I suppose. Manned space flight doesn't accomplish much in the way of science, but there are worse ways to spend that much money.

Abstinence education, creationist museums, paying Karl Rove...

Source: Raw Story

Terror
The Japanese have come up with a bank that has a face, eats your money, and looks like The Book of the Dead from Evil Dead.

Seriously, someone should reskin and reprogram it to spout lines from the movies. It'd be sweet.

An earlier entry in this article mentions an 'AI' that learns how to control your devices and respond to voice commands.

Which could be handy for my future evil lair.

Source: PC World

Uwe Promise?
Uwe Boll, one of the worst directors alive, and sometimes called the Ed Wood of our day, has stated that he will retire from moviemaking if a million people petition him to do so.

WE MUST DO THIS FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.

Source: /Film

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)

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

This Blog is a Vampire

Sent to Draaaaaaain, Also, Avoid Mirrors

Saturn Watch
Yet more science from Saturn and its many moons. This time, it's Tethys, which may have had a liquid ocean once.

Tethys is a mid-sized satellite with a density close to that of pure ice.

But a large valley system visible today must have formed when the crust was being heated and under great strain.

The team thinks that tidal heating, followed by cooling which froze Tethys' ocean, could have formed the giant Ithaca Chasma rift.

Basically, I guess Tethys is a big snowball now, but once, it was a snowball with a yummy liquid center.

Source: The BBC

Our Own Giant Chasm
Also known as the Grand Canyon, is under threat from mining interests.

Flagstaff, Arizona - One of the great natural wonders of the world - the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River - is threatened by uranium exploration. Three conservation groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the approval of up to 39 new uranium drilling sites within a few miles of Grand Canyon National Park.

In December, the Kaibab National Forest granted British firm Vane Minerals approval to conduct exploratory uranium drilling on national forest lands along the park's southern boundary with no public hearing and no environmental review. It is the first of five such projects slated for the area.

"Grand Canyon simply isn't the place for uranium development," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiff groups. "Our national treasures deserve better than the calamity of an adjacent industrial zone."

Filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Trust, the lawsuit claims that the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and two other laws when it approved the uranium exploration using a "categorical exclusion," the least rigorous analysis available to the agency.

The lawsuit claims that the Forest Service failed to consider the controversy surrounding uranium development, the significance of its proximity to the Grand Canyon, the overall cumulative impacts of four other future uranium exploration projects and the potential opening of Denison Corporation's Canyon Mine - all located in the same area.

Seriously folks. We only have one Grand Canyon. Can't you guys mine somewhere else?

Jerks.

Source: Truthout

Speaking of Nukes...
We seem to have a bit of a corporate betrayal of national security on our hands.

A US company and the Indian head of an international firm have admitted to violating laws on export of weapons technology and nuclear power testing equipment to India, the US Justice Department said Thursday.

Decade-long US sanctions over illegal Indian nuclear tests prohibit US-based companies from exporting certain goods and services to India.

Parthasarathy Sudarshan, the Indian CEO of Cirrus Electronics with offices in the United States, Singapore and India, pleaded guilty in Washington Thursday to a charge of shipping restricted weapons technology to the Indian government.

He admitted exporting controlled microprocessors and electronic components to Indian state entities involved in developing ballistic missiles, space launch vehicles and fighter jets.

...

In the second case, Minnesota company MTS Systems Corp. was fined 400,000 dollars after it pleaded guilty Wednesday in connection with submitting false US export license applications over proposed shipments to India, the Justice Department said.

The company admitted to two misdemeanor counts of "false certification or writing" by omitting critical information linked to test equipment for nuclear-power plants.

"In this case, the omission clearly was an attempt to disguise the end-use of testing structural components of nuclear-power plants," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Darryl Jackson.

The CEO in the first case faces probation and a fine; the second company gets just a fine.

Amazing how seriously the Bush administration takes this issue, isn't it?

Source: Raw Story

Back to Space
ABC has some trivia about life in space and how, err, disgusting it really is.

Laundry: Astronauts never worry about doing laundry -- there is simply no way to wash clothes in space; water and resources are too scarce. So for 12 days, or however long the mission runs, they wear the same clothes over and over. Their T-shirts, socks and underwear have a special silver thread lining that absorbs odor and keeps items wearable longer. NASA recycles the astronauts' clothes for other missions, including the underwear.

There's other stuff too, seriously. Not just underwear triva.

Source: ABC News

Beery Science
So a Czech scientist crunched the numbers and it seems that the more beer you drink the less successful a scientist you are.

What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?

After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

This is a tragic discovery indeed. Though there is an alternative explanation.

More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

Take that, lousy, depressed scientists.

Source: The New York Times

Virtual H2O
No, it's not in a videogame.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A scientist who developed a way to calculate how much water is used in the production of anything from a cup of coffee to a hamburger was awarded the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize on Wednesday.


Professor John Anthony Allan of the University of London in Britain won the award for introducing the concept of "virtual water," a calculation method that has changed the nature of trade policy and research.

...

"Behind that morning cup of coffee, there are 140 liters of water that was consumed to grow, produce, package and ship the beans."

That is about as much water as a person in England uses on average for all daily drinking and household needs.

"For a single hamburger, an estimated 2,400 liters of water are needed. In the USA, the average person consumes nearly 7,000 liters of virtual water every day." It said that was more than three times the average consumption of a Chinese person.

It makes me thirsty just to read that.

Source: Raw Story

Plasma Cooling
You can cool stuff with superheated plasma. Huh.

Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer..

The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size.

The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

RSD5 is the culmination of six years of research by Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies when they were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

...

He explained that RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity).

The wires lie within uncharged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shapes to partially envelop the wires.

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

Even more surprising, something useful came out of Purdue.

Hehe.

Source: iTnews Australia

Project West Ford
From Tom Morris, mad scientist, came a link or two about a mad science project from the early space age.

Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States military in 1961 and 1963 to create a ring of copper dipole antennas (2cm long needles) in orbit which would allow global radio communication. After a failed first attempt in 1961 (the needles failed to disperse), the project was eventually successful with the 1963 launch, with radio transmissions carried by the man-made ring. However, the technology was ultimately shelved, partially due to the development of the modern communications satellite and partially due to protests from other scientists.[1] The needles were placed in orbits between 3500 and 3800 km high at 96 and 87 degree inclinations and contributed to Earth's orbital debris.[2] British radio astronomers, together with optical astronomers and the Royal Astronomical Society, protested this action.[3][4] The international protest resulted in a consultation provision included in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.[3] As of 2006 several clumps of the needles are still in orbit,[5][6] and occasionally re-entering.[7]

Yeah, throw a huge number of needles into orbit. That couldn't possibly cause a problem.

The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.

...

Because of the great distance between the tiny needles, the West Ford belt was visible only in the first few days after launch when the spacing was much smaller. A denser belt intended for permanent communications would probably not have been visible except by very powerful optical telescopes. But, at radio and microwave frequencies, the final dipole clouds may have become scars on the night sky, forever obscuring the universe beyond.


...

Most of the West Ford dipoles re-entered Earth's atmosphere sometime around 1970, according to theoretical and observational evidence. The needles slowly drifted down to the Earth's surface, unscathed by re-entry because of their size. Some consideration was given to recovering one or more of the dipoles in order to learn more about the space environment. Calculations showed that as many as five dipoles would have landed per square kilometer in the high Arctic. But the exceptional cost of recovering these tiny needles from the haystack of billions of tons of Arctic snow killed off any practical attempts at recovery. Back in space, the failed 1971 1961 spacecraft and some larger clumps of the 1973 1963 dipoles remain in orbit like so many other pieces of space junk, silently carrying the long-dead hopes of this nearly forgotten experiment.

It's truly amazing the stupid things people can come up with. A ring of trash around the earth? Yeah, let's do that!

Source: Wikipedia
Damn Interesting

Evil of the Morning
Some truly evil people are working on a way to use blue LEDs to generate a color of light that resets your biological clock to think it's morning, and then put them inside cars.

The idea is to make people less sleepy while driving.

Those of us who are naturally sleepy in the morning, or who just don't want bright blue light in their eyes, are boned, I guess.

Source: Slashdot

More Water News
Good thing that guy came up with virtual water, so we can find out just how doomed we are.

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge.

Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

...

"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.

But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.

Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

...

Experts and policy makers point to three broad categories of initiatives to ease the shortage of clean, drinkable water, especially in the world's poorest regions: sanitation, purification, and water management.

"Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month.

"Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally," he said in launching the International Year of Sanitation.

Less than half the households in major Asian cities are connected to sewers, which means that tonnes of raw sewage runs into rivers and oceans, according to the UN.

In Latin America and Africa that figure drops to 40 and 20 percent, respectively.

While governments attempt to improve sanitation infrastructure, scientists are developing new technology to purify the water available, said Mark Shannon, a professor at the University of Illinois and Director of the US government funded Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems.

"Desalination with reverse osmosis is already the largest single growth area in terms of new water supplies," he told AFP in an interview.

New techniques of reverse osmosis use membranes with nanometer-size pores to filter out salt and other contaminants from water, and could for the first time pave the way for industrial-scale use.

Micro-filters are also used to decontaminate bodies of water increasingly laced with pesticides, arsenic, heavy metals, nitrates and pharmaceutical derivatives.

...

With worldwide food production set to expand 50 percent by 2030, scientists are also developing genetically modified grain plants that consume less water and can withstand harsh conditions.

Researchers in the US, for example, have developed genetically engineered rice with a higher tolerance for drought, salt and low temperatures, the three main causes of crop failure.

Expect a lot of resistance to the GM crop ideas from whackos, naturally. Though drought resistance is one of the things you have to be careful of in GM plants, to be fair. It provides a serious evolutionary advantage over plants that don't have it, so if you have a GM crop that can interbreed with a wild relative, you might end up with drought resistant superweeds via transgene escape.

The most obvious solution to that is to avoid planting GM crops near their wild relatives, of course.

Most food plants are not that great as evolutionary products, spending so much energy producing huge, and often sterile or semi-sterile fruits, so there's less risk of wild GM foods themselves running amok by far.

Source: Raw Story

Methane AND Water News
This time from far away.

An organic chemical that could be an indicator of extraterrestrial life has been identified on a distant planet.

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the atmosphere of a planet called HD 189733b contains methane, which can be a precursor of life or generated by living organisms.

HD 189733b is too hot to be anything but barren, and its methane must therefore come from a nonliving source, but the successful identification of the “marker” chemical gives scientists confidence that they may make similar discoveries on planets that are capable of supporting life.

...

The Hubble observations of HD 189733b have also confirmed that the planet, which lies 63 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula (“the little fox”), has water vapour in its atmosphere.

The chemical signature of water was first picked up last year by the same team, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infra-red spectrum. “With this latest observation there is no question whether there is water or not,” Dr Swain said. “Water is present.”

Ahh, science. Lovely.

Source: The Times Online

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